[Artoemius]

Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists.

It's one thing to go to a church (there even might be purely social reasons), and it's another thing to discard overwhelming scientific evidence and believe something based on the principle of not needing any evidence at all. I become especially sad when I think of the confused minds of the poor children of these people.

On the topic, I've found The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins a very enlightening read if one wishes to understand the arguments of religious people.

[donw]

The point is not that creationism is an obvious case of twisting the facts to fit theories.

It is that, if you want to have any hope of bringing a creationist over to your side, you need to be able to understand and articulate both their arguments, and their point of view.

If you can establish that you understand them, they are going to be a lot more receptive to you asking the hard questions about their beliefs (this is best done by asking them to convince you to be a creationist, and then asking those hard questions).

Calling those people idiots does nothing other than give them a legitimate reason to dislike both you, and by extension, other people that "believe in evolution".

Somewhat related to that, creationists tend to be deeply religious, so books like The God Delusion -- which I very much enjoyed, by the way -- are almost guaranteed to turn off a creationist. It would be better to recommend books that explain evolution through a Christian world-view, as they will have a much easier time relating to the material.

[72deluxe]

If we replace "creationists" with "Apple users" in the first sentence, is this still acceptable comment here on HN?

Personally I think the God Delusion by Dawkins is as far from my perspective as could be possible, so I would not recommend it as a book for people to understand "religious people" (as if you could pigeon hole people like that!). Blanket stereotyping forgets about individuals.

[coldtea]

>Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists.

You'd be surprised.

You can easily find creationists with higher IQ than you, that can out-solve problems in your field faster than you.

And the same for most categories one can dismiss as "idiots", except people with verifiable cognitive impairment.

[Nursie]

I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ.

This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. Not all forms of faith and belief require you to reject evidence, mind, but this one most certainly does.

[dagw]

I knew a very smart and successful scientist doing biochemistry research at a pharma company who fell squarely in the Intelligent Design camp. Rather than seeing it as a wholesale abandonment of science they simply felt that the evidence of the prevailing scientific view was not that strong, and that ID offered firmer theory for the beginning/evolution of life than any other theory.

[Nursie]

In which case they were wrong, and most likely trying to reconcile their religious leanings with their self-image.

[dagw]

Well sure, but that doesn't make him an idiot.

[Nursie]

Depends on your definition. People called me an idiot (well, my partner did) when I hit myself in the hand with a hammer, really hard, while fossil hunting. So hard I had to go to hospital...

But in other respects I'm at least a reasonably intelligent software engineer!

[coldtea]

>I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ.

That stretches the definition of an idiot considerably.

>This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief.

That could be beneficial for one's emotional health (belief in higher power and all that) and thus the smart thing to do in some cases.

Who said "identifying reality correctly" is the smarter thing to do? Sometimes, not being too logical can have great benefits.

Here's an old argument for this:

>Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived. The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux". In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza -- with small edits in [] to make the excerpt clearer)

And here's a newer one:

>Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illus...

[Nursie]

The specific problem with creationism and "ID" is that they claim to have objective facts but are actually faith. They do not embrace the irrational as you seem to be encouraging. Quite the opposite - they dress up in the clothes of scientific argument whilst actually rejecting the method, yet claim to have objective truth.

And personally, yeah, I think anyone that can't cope with reality as it is, that needs comforting fictions of higher powers, is de-facto weaker and worse off.

The scientific method has advanced our society immeasurably. Evolutionarily speaking our rationality and logical thought has given us such amazing success it's hard to see how that is supportable at all. It's also not clear what they mean by "tuned to fitness" there. He seems to consider that abstractions and shortcuts are the same as unreality, which appears orthogonal to this debate.

[crististm]

You might want to remember that while scientific method is pretty useful, it does has a weakness. It has all the bases covered except for the hypothesis.

Where do hypothesis come from?

[Nursie]

From hunches, partial observations, suggestions from prior research, various other sources of questions about what may or may not be correct that warrants further investigation.

I'm not sure how that's a weakness?

[Nursie]

The other thing that strikes me as a conundrum here is that, if one is aware of deliberately choosing unreality over reality, are you really choosing unreality?

I.E. how is it possible to choose fiction as fact in the knowledge it is fiction?

I don't really understand the mindset...

[coldtea]

>I.E. how is it possible to choose fiction as fact in the knowledge it is fiction?

That's just the moment of choice though. Given enough conditioning and getting used to it yourself, it can become as convincing (to your own self) as any reality.

Besides, don't people chose convenient truths over reality all the time, creationists or not?

Even the belief in science, which usually is a belief in fiction (an ideal of how it should be conducted) as opposed to how it's practiced and what interests and motivations are in play (from corporate tampering to "I'll review this peer reviewed paper favourably, because that guy is a friend of a friend, or they might help with my grants, etc." -- which can even function at a subconscious level, e.g. instinctively being more positively predisposed to papers by people you know or can help your career).

[Nursie]

But you would still know that you had a moment of choosing unreality.

Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no. People that choose inquiry over ignorance are the ones thay actually make stridea out of the darkness and got us where we are today.

"Belief" in science is the wrong way to think about it. Understanding that the scientific method has flaws but is still far superior as a tool to discover what is, rather than proclaim it without evidence or shy away into comforting fictions, seems the best way to approach knowledge.

[crististm]

There is a particular video of Feynman about scientific method where he describes the dual slit experiment. He notes that the "scientific method" should have been able to reproduce exactly where the electrons will go, in different experiments. The experiments are not reproducible in that sense, but only "statistically" which is a completely different thing. Feynman beliefs are irrelevant.

There is also the argument that if you yourself do not accept evidence that creationists do, that does not mean that evidence is not there.

You might also want to read/see Hamming about science and how mathematics is not exactly free from presuppositions.

And there is also the Goldbach conjecture where you find that a system generates facts about itself that can be demonstrated only by going outside the system - ad infinitum.

I did not read the paper you mentioned but God does not exactly work like people regularly assume, that is "you pray and God will do you good".

The idiot argument is convenient but weak. It just gives a quick way to dismiss counter arguments

[crististm]

Too late to edit...

That would be The Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel - not Goldbach

[reitanqild]

Creationist, son of creationists here :-)

Although I guess there are creationists and there are creationists:

If you ask me about science I will answer with science. I did well in school, including biology and introduction to astrophysics.

If you hold a gun to my head and ask if I still belive this nonsense about the world being created I'd guess I'd say yes (if I can't get around to disarming you, I don't like armed people with strong ideological beliefs going around trying to convince people :-/ )

On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.

[Swizec]

My favorite explanation has been: science answers What/How, religion answers Why. It's when we start asking one a question for the other that we get into trouble.

Which is what I don't like about [some] creationism. It tries to use a Why tool to answer a How question.

And as long as you take Biblical stories to be metaphors and/or best-effort explanations from before we had the data that we have now, they're perfectly fine stories that make plenty of sense as an explanation.

Adam&Eve for instance. If all you know is that it takes a man and a woman to produce a baby, it stands to reason that at some point there had to have been the first pair.

[nitrogen]

The NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria argument/How vs. Why) position is useful to try to coexist peacefully while establishing a more solid rapport, but is not itself universally accepted[0]. For example, philosophy is also capable of answering "Why" questions with or without the help of religion, and neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology can explain a lot of the "How" that actually drives what we perceive as "Why".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Rec...

[Swizec]

To display my ignorance: I'm not sure philosophy is that different from religion. At least much of philosophy that hasn't spun off into harder sciences.

Could religion not be considered a philosophical framework?

Thanks for showing me there's a name for why vs how. I had no idea.

I think the atrength of this distinction also varies between people. I know many religious atheists who believe in the value of religion, in its teachings and traditions, even in some hybrid concept of heaven and hell, possibly god, but who do not believe God exists as a factual entity or that anything from any religious text is fact rather than metaphor.

But I also come from a country that is 68% christian but only 32% of the population says they believe in there being some sort of god.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Apparently "Catholic Atheism" is a thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

[marklgr]

No snark, but I guess white supremacists also find their model pretty useful. The obvious question is, does anything go, provided it makes some people feel good somehow?

[reitanqild]

I'm obviously biased but I feel the comparison is a bit weird.

[flukus]

> On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.

What useful model does creationism put forward?

[reitanqild]

Mostly not creationism specifically but my religion.

[andrepd]

Useful perhaps, in that it makes you feel good. But like another poster pointed out, nazi ideology made its followers feel pretty good.

[reitanqild]

More useful though in that it made me stop hating and get control over my impulsiveness.

[NhanH]

One of the arguments for evolution involves some very non-trivial calculation on probability of whether it could result in the world we're in right now (not the maths itself, but the sequence of reasoning). It has been a while since I read Dawkin's books, but I don't think the books cover those kind of arguments. I think there are quite a bit of writing on lesswrong on the topic.

I've met creationists that believed in micro evolution: microbe can evolve to get certain resistance. But not the macro one, that is natural selection can result in human as we are right now. I was absolutely not able to justify the probability that it can happen.

[Scarblac]

If you shake a bucket of all kinds of different marbles for five minutes and then record the exact configuration they end up in, you'll find it was extremely unlikely that they'd end up in exactly that configuration.

Is that an argument for the current state of the marbles being created from nothing?

[combatentropy]

No, but what if you shook a bucket of marbles and out came the Statue of David?

[AstralStorm]

The probabilities cannot be calculated as we do not have interstellar travel required to inspect worlds that evolve separately from our own. So, that is no argument, just speculation. Same problem as with Drake's equitation and aliens.

A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that.

At least we can see how the stars begin, change and die.

[humanrebar]

> A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that.

No. Just some creators.

[AstralStorm]

No, just a few known laws of physics and chemistry. The conditions required are expected to happen spontaneously during planet formation.

We just don't have a handle on how common those conditions are. And many other subsequent conditions, for cellular life, for multicellular, for tissues and organs. Finally, for intelligence and sapience.

[humanrebar]

The point is that we cannot prove there is no creator by creating life. There is still a creator involved.

The 'best result' (assuming we're itching to disprove God) would be to show an origin of life is plausible. But even that doesn't prove where life on Earth actually came from.

[flukus]

> I've met creationists that believed in micro evolution: microbe can evolve to get certain resistance. But not the macro one, that is natural selection can result in human as we are right now. I was absolutely not able to justify the probability that it can happen.

At that point they aren't arguing against evolution so much as they are cosmology, geology, physics etc. The only difference between micro/macro evolution is the timescales involved and the timescale is what they don't accept.

[emodendroket]

If you want to understand the arguments of religious people you should probably listen to them and not a polemicist against them, but it's a mistake to equate "religious people" (or even Christians) with "creationists" in the first place.

[humanrebar]

Since creationism is fundamentally a metaphysical premise, attacking deism through induction and observation is inconclusive but maybe a fun thought experiment.

Succinctly, if miracles exist, they violate natural laws. Claiming that natural laws and observations (carbon dating, say) do not allow for miracles is begging the question.

[civilian]

You're right that creationists are pretty deep into idiot territory.

But alsetmusic's fact-finding mission could still be useful! Right now he doesn't even know where to start on how to construct an argument, because he doesn't know what creationists have been told.

There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science, that we're still looking to fill. He'd be able to acknowledge certain fossil gaps and irregularities, while describing how they still fit into the great scientific theory.

[flukus]

> There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science

From what I've seen the arguments aren't that sophisticated, they start with an outright rejection of most branches of science. Amusingly, evolution is the one they criticize the least.

[Trill-I-Am]

The creation museum posits that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time before the great flood a few thousand years ago. They also say that dragons were real.

[enraged_camel]

Exactly. It's pure fantasy. Looking for shreds of intelligence in it is foolish. To

[Scarblac]

If a new fossil is found that fills one of those gaps, the museum will then proudly claim there are now TWO gaps there!