Does This Explain It

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For a while now I have been curious as to why people will accept the fantastical without any need for supporting evidence, but will then demand the most stringent evidence (often beyond the realm of possibility) if anyone tries to show that what they believe has naturalistic causation.

I am wondering if it has to do with a lack of knowledge about knowledge itself. I.E how do we know what we know? what are the historical steps in the world of science that led to the great discoveries?

I am starting to think that without an understanding of the historical advances people do not get just how successful the Scientific method has been in furthering our knowledge of the natural world. It is as if they think that each discovery has happened in isolation and that there has not been a gradual progression. As Newton (and others before him) said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"

In "Why Does E=MC2, and why should we care" Brian Cox and Geoffrey Foreshaw say this about Albert Einstein

"He did not have an academic post as a university of research Establishment, although he discussed physics regularly with a small group of friends, often late into the night. An unfortunate consequence of Einstein's apparent isolation form the mainstream is the modern temptation to look upon him as a maverick who took on the scientific establishment and won; unfortunate because it provides inspiration to any number of crackpots who think they have single-handedly discovered a new theory of the universe and cannot understand why nobody will listen to them. Ins fact, Einstein was reasonably well connected to the scientific establishment, although it is true that he did not have an easy beginning to his academic career.


Are people so dismissive of the need for evidence because they do not understand how the advent of the system of testing Hypothesis against nature and observation, has brought us from millennia of stagnation to the modern technological world in such a short period of time (around 400 years if you do not count the outstanding scholars in the Islamic world who so tragically got all but destroyed by Genghis Khan)

IMO people who haven't had a good science education don't seem to grasp the concept of empirical evidence, or evidence full stop for that matter; similarly they have difficulty understanding what the word "theory" means in a scientific context and seem to confuse it with "an idea". I guess also that having gone through the scientific education system, it not only makes us much more rigorous in our approach to investigating claims but also gives us an insight into the way the physical world works and what is likely to be true and what is likely to be false; so when someone makes astounding claims that contradict what we already hold to be true about the world, we require astounding evidence to back it up, not some half baked fantasies or conspiracy theories or "because my religious book tells me" etc.

From an ex-religious person's perspective....

1) You've grown up with it and taken it onboard without much question because there are other things you turn your attention to.

or

2) You've had one or a series of emotional events that coincided with religious events.

Also, do you notice how music can provoke emotions and also attachments? Then there's the crowd brain and the whole framework of support for the belief structure, a structure that has evolved over the millennia.

For me, to some degree, it was all of the above. But then, my mind worked away in the background, sifting all the hype, emotion, inconsistencies, theology etc and one day it presented to me a choice. It wasn't a choice really because the conclusion was solid.

The hardest part was that I had invested several decades into something that I now had to let go of.

Narrator thanks for your reply, I understand how religion works and the extaordinary lengths religious parents and communities go to when indoctriating their kids. Kudos to you for breaking free.

This thread was inspired by the current discussion regarding giants, no matter how hard the posters on that thread try they cannot get through to the OP that basing hypothesis and conjecture with only folk lore as evidence does not in any way resemble a rational approach to learning. Yet whilst the OP is more than happy to accept the existence of now extinct giants, she demands an entire history of the planet before she accepts any notion of human contribution to climate change.

As we are seeing this kind of believe in the fantastical creep beyond religion I am wondering what causes this Juxtaposition of acceptance and denial.

Maybe because they don't actually believe for rational reasons? It's way more emotionally based, culturally ingrained, fear based in some cases and hijacks a load of normal mental processes (read The God Virus, the author goes into these in more depth), the result of which is a weird but sophisticated belief structure that doesn't place much weight on the importance of valid evidence. Added to that the cognitive dissonance that is caused in their minds when counter evidence is presented to them is very uncomfortable, so people generally tend to want to avoid it by rejecting evidence that contradicts their core beliefs.

Confirmation bias runs rampant and people will see what they want to see.