My position is that for most people, "religious fervor," as you put it, is their mechanism of belief, whether or not their specific beliefs are what would generally be described as religious. Belief in dinosaurs is merely a good example of this. The typical person has no evidence for the existence of dinosaurs for which there is not a typical religious belief equivalent. ("A teacher told me"/"A priest told me") ("I read about dinosaurs in a book"/"I read about god in a book.") ("There are dinosaur museums, why would they lie?"/"There are religious museums, why would they lie?")
I'm not sure where the proper entry point for this conversation is, but it seems to me that you're paying attention to the principle but throwing out all the numbers. Having faith that one's shoes are still where one left them and having faith that Klingons are real, on Mars, and secretly controlling Hollywood are both expressions of faith, but on nowhere near the same scale or involving the same issues. The fact that any shoe-confirming or Marhollygon-disparaging evidence is ultimately subject to the same problems doesn't mean they're both equally valid and likely notions, it just means reality is a dick and there's this weird universal complication around, usually only showing up with fairly advanced concepts or as pyschological issues.
Similarly, asking "and how do you know that?" repeatedly tends to result in earlier, more numerous, and more serious problems along the priest chain than the scientist chain. "Everyone assures me there are fossils" is not ironclad proof by itself, but it's still arguably better than "Everyone assures me there's a God," and tends to hold up a lot deeper. Believing scientists and believing priests is not (or at least doesn't have to be) the same thing, because the former's web of assumptions is much more firmly anchored.
If you raise a child to believe X, it's generally unlikely that they'll go seeking verification, and even if they do, the burden of proof they require will tend to much less for confirmation of things they already believe. It doesn't matter what the X is.
Yes, sometimes it happens that people seek to verify and sometimes change their beliefs. It does happen sometimes. Most of the time it doesn't. At least not without significant emotional incentive. Logic and evidence are generally ineffective means of inducing belief.
I'd similarly contest this, or at least part of this, on two, maybe three levels.
One, people tend not to "seek verification" for much of
anything, so saying people don't do it when they've been raised to believe X is, to me, overstating the importance of raising people to believe X. Inertia is powerful and most people don't care about most things, but it's hard to tell how potent X-raising is when
any default tends to stick around until dislodged.
Two, in my experience people are really only stubborn about things they care about- so usually instinctive and/or cultural things. Tell somebody their god is stupid and made up, and they'll get mad. Tell somebody that glass is not, in fact, a slow-flowing liquid, and they'll be skeptical but not angry, just dubious. Until, of course, you
make it about something they care about- if you're a jackass about telling them what an idiot they are, they're likely to respond that
you're the idiot for not even knowing something so
obviously true. But at that point, it's just tribal bullshit, not directly related to the truth or falseness of the actual statement.
Three... honestly? In my experience, even when people
do care, it often feels like they know the thing itself isn't the actual issue half the time. Religion is a big offender here- I mean, really? You want to tell me, with a straight face, that there's an entity powerful enough to create the entire world, who is deeply interested in your personal actions, and you're not learning original Hebrew and ancient Jewish culture to better understand what this terribly sky terror wants and is like? But even with social issues and the like, it often feels like the issue isn't that they genuinely believe that every scientific study that contradicts them is irrelevant or fraudulent, it feels like they just don't care because that's not the real issue. At a bare minimum, I'd wager a
lot of people aren't nearly as convinced of their own arguments as they are concerned about what would happen if the other guys won.
Sports team favoritism or friendly trash talk would of course be the poster children for this concept, since they know and admit it most of the time, but still often look pretty identical to people arguing deeply held beliefs. I can't swear they're the same or at what frequency they're the same, but it seems to me that it's a lot more often than you'd think.
TL;DR: I think religious fervor and similar-looking convictions are often tribal chants more than literal statements of genuine belief.
Author
Topic: On the acceptance of statements and the burden of proof (Read 13597 times)