Tim (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} evil_mr_tim) wrote,@ 2007-05-06 04:03:00 |
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| Current mood: |  contemplative |
| Current music: | My Humps - The Black-Eyed Peas |
| Entry tags: | creationism, culture, evolution, psychology, religion, wins |
Evangelical Amnesia, and why I often feel like I've wasted my time
Some of the most fun (though 'fun' could easily be substituted with 'angry typing') my good friend Robert and I have had in the week preceding this one (this one was devoured almost entirely by his and my respective ancient-greek videogames, God of War II and Titan Quest), was a debate he and I (initially only he) were involved in on RichardDawkins.net. I have been known to colourfully (colourfully can be substituted for 'unwisely') refer to RichardDawkins.net as "the mecca of atheists", but doing so is wrong not only because it conjurs the incorrect conception of atheism as a 'religion', but because there are actually a noticable (not exactly large) number of theists making their way around the comment-pages.
Robert and I concern ourselves almost entirely with the discussions that take place in the comments at the feet of posted articles, as to actually wade into the topical forums of the website is to enter a no-man's-land of the most confrontational and showboating of theists, clashing 'intellects' with an upsetting majority of overzealous teenage atheists who are (as I understand it) essentially responsible for the tragic public conception of atheists as irate 'rebels' moreso than independent thinkers. This is not to say we don't therefore encounter any regrettable remarks, but they are a tolerable minority and do not force our hands into days worth of unrewarding, corrective counter-arguments.
Recently, in the oddest of places - an article entitled 'The Pope Abolishes Limbo' - we encountered a person (here-after referred to as a 'man', not to case gender aspersions, but simply as short for 'human') calling themselved "devolved". devolved came onto the scene describing himself as a 'backslidden evolutionist', who suggested that he had an honest intellectual concern that evolution is based on an 'unreasonable' presupposition of a materialist paradigm, which (as a presupposition) is comparable to the presupposition of any degree of supernatural presence. Thus, devolved concluded, the theory of evolution and the theory of special creation are explanations of equal merit, and science should embrace intelligent design as a real, useful hypothesis. Starting at around comment #34024, a debate with devolved began, fuelled in part by the skepticism generated from his claim "So I discover that far from being a scientific certainty (and I will donate £1000 to a charity of your choice if you can find me one proof that doesn't depend on presupposition) that evolution is a belief system".
There were many early contributers to the discussion (myself not included), but as the debate 'raged' on, and various people's approaches were thrown upon devolved in the hope that it would stick, the man's intentions slowly became more clear, and his opposition in-turn refined into a smaller number of more qualified arguers. When his opponents had been reduced, in essence, to two men (Robert, and biochemist Billy Sands), I entered the frey also, both in the form of co-authorship of some of Robert's comments, and a few comments of my own. And what a sight it was.
devolved's ruse of an honest intellectual inquiry was progressively stripped away, revealing a hardcore creationist with a creation-agenda to advance, and a long list of one-sided sources for him to quote-mine in support of intelligent design (this of course meant there would be no £1000 going to some needy charity, but we suspected as much from the beginning). In retrospect, I can only assume that devolved must have had the purest and most confident of faiths in his cause, that belief that his side was so genuinely true that any argument would ultimately have to bring said truth out for all to see. I say this because the man was desperately in over his head. His grasp of real science was below my own, far below Billy Sands', and clearly below even Robert's (who possesses no formal training in science, he's just a bright lad). He relied exclusively on the scientific power of lengthy quotations he did not understand, all the while maintaining that any disagreements between we three and the ID 'experts' in his quotes, must be due to a dogmatic lack of scientific review on our part.
The whole thing can still be read here, of course. Anything in Robert's posts that seem too 'sciency' for Robert are likely from me, and vice versa for anything in my posts that seems too clever and punchy to have come from my fingers. But assuming anyone reading this has anything better to do with at least 20 minutes of their lives, the run down is as follows: We win. Following a coincidentally well-paced triple-whammy, refuting all of the final legs on which he was attempting to stand, devolved stopped commenting, and a fellow known as 'kkant' concluded the proceedings with "Once again, nice responses to devolved folks. Talk about an ass-kicking. :)".
There were many early contributers to the discussion (myself not included), but as the debate 'raged' on, and various people's approaches were thrown upon devolved in the hope that it would stick, the man's intentions slowly became more clear, and his opposition in-turn refined into a smaller number of more qualified arguers. When his opponents had been reduced, in essence, to two men (Robert, and biochemist Billy Sands), I entered the frey also, both in the form of co-authorship of some of Robert's comments, and a few comments of my own. And what a sight it was.
devolved's ruse of an honest intellectual inquiry was progressively stripped away, revealing a hardcore creationist with a creation-agenda to advance, and a long list of one-sided sources for him to quote-mine in support of intelligent design (this of course meant there would be no £1000 going to some needy charity, but we suspected as much from the beginning). In retrospect, I can only assume that devolved must have had the purest and most confident of faiths in his cause, that belief that his side was so genuinely true that any argument would ultimately have to bring said truth out for all to see. I say this because the man was desperately in over his head. His grasp of real science was below my own, far below Billy Sands', and clearly below even Robert's (who possesses no formal training in science, he's just a bright lad). He relied exclusively on the scientific power of lengthy quotations he did not understand, all the while maintaining that any disagreements between we three and the ID 'experts' in his quotes, must be due to a dogmatic lack of scientific review on our part.
The whole thing can still be read here, of course. Anything in Robert's posts that seem too 'sciency' for Robert are likely from me, and vice versa for anything in my posts that seems too clever and punchy to have come from my fingers. But assuming anyone reading this has anything better to do with at least 20 minutes of their lives, the run down is as follows: We win. Following a coincidentally well-paced triple-whammy, refuting all of the final legs on which he was attempting to stand, devolved stopped commenting, and a fellow known as 'kkant' concluded the proceedings with "Once again, nice responses to devolved folks. Talk about an ass-kicking. :)".
What was odd wasn't that devolved could not defend his position. It was, after all, empirically and rationally incorrect. What was odd, was that within a couple of days time, in the comments of other, newer articles elsewhere in RichardDawkins.net, devolved appeared once again. He appeared fresh, anew, almost phoenix-like, making similar (if not identical) claims to those he made in the comments for the previous article. He was unphased by the mountains of evidence and reasoning we had launched at him, and other atheists began politely disagreeing with him, unaware of the ultimate direction it would take...
Now, I said that this behaviour was odd, not surprising. Obviously, I have had experiences ('run-ins', if you want to be dramatic) with theists before, wherein I presented a (by all accounts) superior case, often had their point of view apparently regress with admissions of arbitrarity or irrationality, only to find them a short time later, just like devolved, acting as if nothing had happened. The best example of this would be my friend, and Robert's better friend, Michael Ockert, also referred to colourfully as 'The Reverend' or sometimes 'Doc Ock' for his love of medicine (and perhaps a snide reference to his firm belief in faith-healing). I can recall at least two separate occassions in which a conversation with Michael that moved into our respective beliefs, progressed as far as I can ever get it, several admissions of shaky foundations, followed by an almost alarming degradation into bible-quoting. But in both the cases of devolved and Michael (as well as others whose discourse follows similar lines), they have been presented with information and arguments that by all rights should be transformative, convincing, and impossible to deny. To quote one of my heroes, Sam Harris (the star of the new userpic that Robert made), "Reasons are contagious", and "In the end, reason just has to win". It is the Kantian categorical imperative that there is no subjective denying of that which makes sense! So how does it happen? How do these people walk away from ideologically scathing encounters such as those Robert, myself, and secularists like us provide, and come back with their beliefs untouched? This is not the case all the time, as many moderate theists have 'converted' to agnosticism or atheism after being presented with potent arguments, but this rejection of good reasoning happens often enough for me to attempt to coin a name for it.
It is what I like to call, Evangelical Amnesia. I do not for a second think that those indoctrinated by dogma possess 'immunities' to the process of rational realisation that the rest of us are subject to, nor (given the highly lingual nature of subjective thought) do I credit the theory that these theists possess various strong arguments inside their heads, that are in real-time rebutting our claims, which they are simply unable to articulate to others. Rather, I find it a more realistic conceptualisation that these people are in fact seeded with doubts, the kinds of doubts that are shameful to admit in their paradigms, and following the encounter in question engage in a retrospective process of self-reindoctrination.
I use the word 'Evangelical' not only to allude to the evangelical christians who commonly display this behaviour, but also to imply that there is a directed zeal involved in this process of forgetting. That these people must work hard to prevent the arguments from being transformative, by re-framing the arguments they heard, in retrospect, as being less certain, less convincing, less right than they truly were. As such, it would be a matter of cognitive dissonance. The preserving factor, I theorise, is the very lifestyles they lead, which for the most part would centre heavily on the dogma with which they are affiliated. If, let's say, Michael, were to listen to Robert and I tomorrow, and become an atheist, it would be not only a radical ideological change for him, but would mean many lifestyle changes too. His family, his peers, his not-really-faith-healed girlfriend, they not only know him as a religious man, but many of them share in his religion with him. With no more tithing and no more praying, he simply would not be the Michael we know anymore (though he would certainly be a Michael I'd welcome just the same). Psychologically, when we are confronted with a situation (or potential situation), in which we realise that our beliefs and intentions (in a word, our thoughts) do not match our actions and selected circumstances, we are left with a very simple choice. Change the actions, or change the thoughts. Cognitive dissonance theory refers specifically to the motivational power of such realisations, and how this motivation can be channelled surprisingly effectively into the distortion of perceptions and beliefs in order to conform to a difficult reality (Stockholms Syndrome is a well-known example).
I would like to raise awareness of this issue, and encourage everyone I know who encounters Evangelical Amnesia (in all its forms) to identify it as such. After all, as Soren Kierkegaard famously said, "Once you label me, you negate me", referring to the dismissive and pre-adaptive power of labels and identifiers to stigmatise and inhibit. In this case, I think it would prove a valiant example of 'telling it like it is', and serve to raise consciousness on this issue of often overlooked hypocrisy.
Tim.
