ps418

How true! This describes my brother's conversion to fundamentalism perfectly.

Bubba

Which would explain why Christians are so scared when someone expresses doubt. Also why they are so scared of the evidence for evolution.

Bubba

P.S. Patrick-I never knew your brother was fundie.

ps418

Oh, yes. He has called me more than once to tell me about the latest revelations on Art Bell. He thinks Hovind and Ham are geniuses. He believes that UFO's are piloted by evil spirits and are harbingers of the last days, he's a KJV-only nut, he thinks hell is literally inside the earth (same place as the UFOs), he won't let his son do the Christmas or Halloween festivities, or watch anything more offensive than Veggie Tales. He's an endless source of amusement for me and my family, and a walking poster-child for the dangers of dogmatic belief. I love him dearly, of course.

DMB

I am so thankful for the high quality of the big guns on this forum. Keep up the good work, chaps!
<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Aahz

Ha! I am a thread killer at ARN. Just about any thread dealing with random, probability, or math I can usually kill with one or two posts. A couple of examples:

<a href="http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=000199;p=2" target="_blank">This thread sputtered and died after my last post.</a>

<a href="http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=000215" target="_blank">This one died much quicker.</a>

[A little secret: I know Theo the Creo from other boards and we are sort of...coordinating our posts.]

<a href="http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=000236" target="_blank">This one actually got locked down and Theo and I rebuked about the rules</a> I am so proud.

<a href="http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=000137;p=2" target="_blank">Oddly this thread is still going, but very slowly.</a> Warning this thread has a high MEGO factor unless you are into mathematics especially probability theory.

Overall, here is my assessment.

1. On average the typical IDist has a piss poor understanding of probability theory (and mathematics in general). This goes even for fairly smart guys such as Mike Gene.

2. They can't see the bullshit Dembski is shoveling (with a front-end loader) because of 1 above.

3. When somebody shows up and starts to demonstrate 2 above they run away faster than an Olympic sprinter in tho 100 meter.

Its a hoot.

Bubba

I'm an electrician by trade. I make a living pulling wire and bending conduit. Dembski doesn't impress me in the least, and I'm not a mathematician.

Bubba

Oh, and Patrick, I fully understand. My sister thinks Harry Potter is the work of the devil.

Aahz

Well it is my opinion that intuition is a very valuable thing. On another board there is a poster who has a very good intuitive grasp of probability, IMO. Not much formal training in it, but can solve some tough problems none the less. So, lacking a formal education doesn't mean you'll necessarily be snowed.

tgamble

Maybe you were adopted?

Quetzal

Lizard:
The cognitive dissonance inherent in the intelligent fundy or creationist - well educated, stable family, decent job, etc - is one of the key things that is driving me to wonder about the memetic evolution idea. It would fit with a "memes as units of 'natural selection'" hypothesis.

Consider: In population biology, it's possible to have two distinct alleles for a given characteristic existing and expressed in the population at the same time, as long as the "new" allele can coexist polymorphically with the original until it becomes fixed and supplants the old one. Although using terms from biology to describe a cultural affect can be pretty misleading (and is really stretching it), it sort of makes sense in this context. These intelligent "believers" basically represent transitional forms. If, for the sake of argument, you accept that the specific memes making up the "religious" or "believer" worldview can be considered as distinct units (yeah, it's a stretch), then the "intelligent fundy" you describe displays what could be termed memetic polymorphism. The religious memes dominate when the subject gets too close to home (i.e., self identification through human's special place in the universe, etc). Scientific memes dominate at all other times. Think about the religous memes having been fixed for a very long time (consider an intelligent person in the Middle Ages, or during Republican Rome, or Middle Kingdom Egypt: what memes would predominate?), then a "mutant" meme-set - the scientific one - arising in the population. I'd say evolutionarily, the scientific meme-set is winning the competition. It make take another few hundred years, but will eventually prevail. It's more evolutionarily "fit" given conditions in the modern world.

This is all very ad hoc, I know. I'm also guilty of looking at an end state and trying to extrapolate backwards in time. But an interesting thought piece, anyway.

Lizard

I've read about memes before, but I'm still a little unsure what they are. Can you enlighten me?

Can a person's receptivity to memes change due to religious conversion? Often, I've heard creationists say they used to "believe in" evolution (Usually, these days, they call it "Darwinism," which is rather quaint if you take it literally.), but now they see that it's all a big lie.

I wish I knew exactly how one can be unconvinced of things which are well supported by evidence and successfully indoctrinated in evidentially unsupported beliefs.

Social isolation? Need to follow a strong leader? Desperation for sure answers that never change? I don't know.