Leave a comment

Comments 4

gjm11 December 8 2009, 00:12:01 UTC
I don't really see what's either surprising (to anyone) or worrying (for theists) about the "discovery" that religious people tend to think that God thinks what they think. If God is omniscient or nearly so, then "God thinks X" is pretty much the same as "X", which in general a person will assent to iff they assent to "I think X". (Which, of course, is not the same as saying that they believe "X if and only if I think X" or "God thinks X if and only if I think X ( ... )

Reply

pw201 December 8 2009, 21:00:05 UTC
Well spotted. On looking at the comments in that blog post, I find David Killoren agrees with you: to get the study's result, it's sufficient that your subjects believe God is omniscient. Apparently the authors mention it too and attempt to show show their conclusions are still valid, but not, I think very successfully. As Killoren says, the fMRI stuff is still evidence, thought I'm not sure how reliable fMRIs are.

Killoren also suggests a couple of other things they could try, one of which is working out whether people think all their moral beliefs are aligned with what God thinks.

Reply


simont December 8 2009, 16:49:39 UTC
The odd thing about the "Things I Won't Work With" blog is that the one that scared me most out of all of them was dimethylmercury - and yet it only got a mention in passing rather than meriting a whole post of its own!

Reply

gjm11 December 8 2009, 19:40:01 UTC
FWIW, my reaction was the same. As one commenter on the TIWWW blog said: "Things that go boom with a ball of flame are sissy stuff compared to things that destroy your brain months later."

Reply


Leave a comment

Up