People process belief and fact the same way

[themusicteacher]

Now here's something interesting from the always intriguing field of neurology:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/216551?from=rss

This could be the reason as to why you will never (well, at least rarely) convince a purveyor of woo that they are wrong. As many of us are aware, these people are "true believers." In my view, they wantonly ignore facts and verifiable evidence in favor of ideology and superstition but they are not doing so out of malice or spite; they believe what they believe as if it were fact. Belief and fact, it would appear, are one in the same on a certain level. The last paragraph is the most interesting part, though.

 

[jasonpatterson]

My way of looking at it is that there is nothing special about supernatural/religious thought, neurologically speaking. We're not accessing the 'god' center in our brains, or anything else ridiculous that I hear from time to time.

 

[Personal Grudge]

I have no problem with believing that several purveyors of woo or religious believers are "true believers". I can easily accept that many believe these delusions just as much as a patient in a mental hospital may believe he is a superhero. Thankfully, most of the religious believers and woo purveyors are not prevented by their delusions from functioning in society.

I really doubt we'd have enough hospitals, medication, or doctors worldwide if we had to institutionalize all Christians, Muslims, etc.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

From the article:

"It is generally imagined," [Harris] wrote to [Miller] in an e-mail, "that scientific facts and human values represent distinct and incommensurable ways of speaking about the world. Consequently, most people assume that science will never be in a position to resolve ethical questions or to determine how human beings ought to live."...But, says Harris, the more we know, through science, about how people live—and how they think, and what makes them happy—the more real information we'll have about how best to live together on this planet. The fMRI experiments do not pertain to these largest questions, of course. But they do show (again) what neuroscientists already know. "Intuition" and "reason" are not two separate activities. They're interconnected.

I've been arguing this very thing for years.

From the brain's point of view, religious belief and empirical data are the same.

I think Miller (or Harris if this is a quote) is describing two different things here. Belief is the equivalent of 'conclusion' and non-scientific analysis of empirical data vs scientific analysis of empirical data is really what is the equivalent thing being described here. In other words, Poor critical thinking skills lead one person to conclude those supposed faith based 'beliefs', while the other is using better critical thinking skills to draw 'conclusions' based on the empirical data.

You can argue the semantics of faith, beliefs, and conclusions. We've had long threads going round that mulberry bush. The critical difference is whether one evaluates that empirical evidence in a way that merely supports pre-existing but unsupportable beliefs or whether one evaluates evidence in a way that has been shown to be consistently correct, aka the scientific method or process.

We know where people go wrong analyzing evidence. And we can identify proper analyzing techniques that are consistently successful. That's how we know which methods constitute critical thinking and which don't. I know the god believing skeptics on this forum don't want to address the problem. But this kind of study demonstrates the issue is not one of gods speaking to people 'in their hearts'. The issue is one of having baseless beliefs vs evidence based beliefs.