I thought the whole thing was a fascinating read even though a lot of it has not been fully digested…mainly beause my brain decided some of the concepts needed to be set to one side as “they did not compute” , or in truth I just did not understand
I am a history nerd and find some scientific writing as incomprehensible to me as early Amaraic.
So, Walter, I did enjoy everything you wrote in this thread. Excellent stuff.
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First, thanks Walter. I know that was a lot of work. Having written technical papers, I am aware of how much care is needed in choosing the right words to accurately convey the information, but also to avoid misunderstanding.
Like OMSAC, I’m still digesting it. But I do have a comment:
Since we expect apologists to misstate the science, I think it would be helpful if we had some “soundbite” level responses to common misconceptions. Can you help here?
Further, there is a psychology at work here. We’ve talked about being resistant to understanding, even after being repeatedly corrected. Does anyone have a handle on this psychology?
Along those lines, I have an anecdote. I worked with a guy who observed that some folks have a modus operandi he called “First Learnings”, where the first time they learn about something is the last time they are capable of learning about that thing, even after being confronted with contradictory information. They are just incapable of changing their thoughts on the subject, whatever it is. I imagine their brains are like a “Write Only CD”. That would explain why this happens, but surely there is a way of breaking through that. I suspect repeating the new information is the way - ala “Tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth - Joseph Goebbels”.
Yes, I know he didn’t actually say that, but the phrase is consistent with some of the things he did say. This is an example of what I am requesting - short, close to accurate, soundbites that are useful in conveying the message.
Reminds me of the chestnut we were bathed in as children: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it”. We were literally conditioned to function in this way, and the church made sure it presided over our “First Learnings”.
For a long time I saw this as a feature, not a bug. After all, if all learning is conditional / contingent / unsettled, how would you ever make progress? I could not see it as a process unless all apprehended truth was of the capital-T variety, carefully built on what came before.
The unspoken part of its appeal is that one doesn’t have much work to do. Once one has (so one thinks!) definitively learned a thing, no more effort need go into it. Apologists do the heavy lifting and have plenty of surface plausibility.
It took me quite awhile to get comfortable with how knowledge really works: it has complex interrelations, and onion-like layers, and we can only approximate full understanding, and then mostly only in context. This is scary stuff for people habituated to un-nuanced, black-and-white thinking. It feels like equivocation, untethered from reality. When all it’s really untethered from is our imagined reality. What we thought reality was.
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Yes, that seems to be a different way of expressing that “First Learnings” thing.
I don’t think it is a conditioning as much as it is an inherent - to some people - characteristic. I’ve used myself as an experiment to see how I process new information. I could see where my line of thinking could deviate from the way others process new information.
Yes, conditioning helps cement bad information in the brain, but I still think there is more going on - and I am hoping that in that “more” is the key to finding a counter.
That was one of the things I realized about myself - that I was aware that I might have to rethink things. I also realized that this was one of things that seemed different from other people.
I think that is the gist of it - that it takes work to unlearn something. But there is more to this phenomenon than just that. We’ve all seen folks twist themselves into pretzels to avoid admitting they could be wrong.
Indeed!
Yeah that is definitely in the mix. People have a need to be right and a terror of being wrong. The irony is that if you are a fundagelical, your rightness is defined by your tribal association with a minority group and you’d have plenty of company and a lot less cognitive dissonance if you DID change your mind.
But then there’s also an appeal to being in the supposedly clued-in scrappy minority, standing against the Forces of Darkness, etc etc.
There seems to be a lot of the “Herd Mentality” going on here. It would explain why it is difficult to get these folks to reconsider - that they would be ostracized by their tribe - and is incredibly frightening to them - and fear is a primary motivator for these folks. I know I am more motivated to seek the truth, and mostly immune to the herd - and I am drawn to folks who think that way.
The odd thing is that these fundagelicals are more a part of very large coherent minority - especially right now! - and not part of a small scrappy minority, even though they paint themselves that way.
By contrast, their opposition is fairly disorganized - and they like it that way - makes them feels like individuals which is consistent with their self-image.
Yes, I know the territory, Goml.
If memory serves, just about a month ago, didn’t we have exactly the same experience with an apologist calling himself JustCurious? He was corrected on his misunderstanding of the Thermodynamic argument for a finite and closed universe, yet a few pages later just regurgitated the same thing, as if nothing had happened. To add insult to injury, he even had the temerity to accuse us of having closed minds.
I might add, he contacted me privately a while back, after making his formal disappearance from the public threads, being all chummy and trying to strike up some kind of dialogue. Here’s a portion of what I said to him.
However, I’m not entirely pleased that you’ve messaged me out of the blue like this. I don’t doubt that your interest in me is genuine. But please be advised that I do not wish to open up a private channel of communication with you or enter into some kind of dialogue with you.
I’m sorry to say that I found your conduct in the public forum to be less than honest and less than open to genuine discussion. When presented with evidence that cut the ground from underneath your arguments, you persisted in holding to them. I could cite examples of this, but I suspect that’d you’d argue the point. Which might then lead to the very thing I’ve stated that I do not want - a private dialogue with you.
Therefore, if do you have something to say to me or to any of us, then please do so in the public forum.
Also, here’s a piece of free advice to you JC. If you do return to the forum with the fixed purpose of holding onto your beliefs regardless of the evidence we present and regardless of how we knock your arguments down, then which one of us has the closed mind?
The very accusation you levelled against is the very thing you’ve been guilty of. But like the man with a plank in his eye in the parable - you can’t or won’t see it. You can only see the specks in other people’s eyes.
So, this is goodbye JC.
If I do see you again in the main forum I sincerely hope that your mind will be more open than it was last time around.
Walter.
So this echo’s your very point Goml and lines up nicely with what CapriMark1 wrote about “First Learnings”. Once an idea gets fixed in someone’s head, it’s near to impossible for them to revise it.
Oh dear. 
Walter.
I suspect Mordant is onto something here, Sheldon.
Snuffing out cognitive dissonance so that a “First Learnt” idea can be maintained is probably where Craig is at.
Thank you Old_man_shouts_at_clouds.
Should you wish to revisit any of those tricky concepts, either here or in private, please let me know.
I’m at your disposal.
Walter.
First off, I appreciate what you say about conveying information, CapriMark1.
For this thread I had to walk a fine line between simplifying things enough to make them understandable and keeping them accurate enough to do sufficient justice to the science.
As I was re-reading your post I remembered what this psychological phenomenon is called. That is, when someone doubles down on a factually incorrect belief, even when presented with copious evidence that it is wrong.
Here what Google AI says about it.
The backfire effect is a cognitive bias where, when presented with evidence contradicting their beliefs, people reject the evidence and strengthen their original, often incorrect, stance. Rather than correcting misinformation, this reaction reinforces it, commonly occurring on deeply held or emotional topics. It is seen as a defence mechanism against cognitive dissonance, where the brain treats challenging information as a personal attack.
And here’s a Wiki page that covers it. Belief perseverance - Wikipedia
Thank you,
Walter.
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How different this mindset is to the one required of a scientist!
The whole point of science is to doubt everything and keep on testing everything to destruction.
Then, having acquired new evidence in that testing, which shows that what was once believed to be the case isn’t so, you change your beliefs accordingly.
How difficult it is for some people to accept this!
Reality CANNOT BE as flimsy, uncertain and tentative as this!
Reality MUST BE fixed, certain and as reliable as the bedrock we stand upon!
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Yes and no. Truer in the US than elsewhere. Evangelicals, broadly defined, are about 17% of Christians worldwide, about twice that percentage in the US, but fundamentalists are a subset of even that. In that sense they are in the minority. I think they are also not the monolith they present themselves as. Just the holiness / Pentecostal / charismatic vs “miracles are not for today” divide is pretty significant.
They are a noisy, demanding, aggressive minority and have figured out how to align themselves (in ironically “unholy” alliances) with power brokers. They have gerrymandered and otherwise elbowed their way into power. For now.
Backfire Effect - got it!
But it appears that for First Learners, the Backfire Effect is inevitable - and perpetual. I’m not so pessimistic to believe that there isn’t some way to counter it. So far, I am using the “Repeat it often” approach, hoping that eventually, it will get through. I don’t have very much evidence that that actually works!
Well, there must be some kind of psychological mechanism to counter it, Mark.
Otherwise I wouldn’t be here in this forum as an atheist and sceptic, would I?
Nor would other members who came from strongly religious backgrounds.
You too?
Nor would other forums like this one exist for lack of people who have countered the Backfire Effect.
Once again, evidence points the way to the truth.
Thank you,
Walter.
In the US, people who used to identify as fundamentalist, now identify as evangelical. I don’t think that is true for the rest of the world.
Editorial Comment: I think the Fundamentalists of yore realized they had poisoned the term and found “Evangelical” more to their liking, so they adopted it. In other words, they cleaned up their image without actually changing anything but the name.
While they used to be 2 separate groups, in the US, they are essentially the same - recognizing that the old Evangelicals were a milder form. Put another way, the Fundamentalists drove the liberal evangelicals out, but there weren’t many of those.
I think the term “evangelical” is now becoming poisoned the way “fundamentalist” used to be. But these things move slowly. I don’t see another term that could similarly be adapted.
No, I came to the realization when I was forming my thoughts on religion. Even though my family belonged to a church and I had participated, it had very little psychological impact on me. I went from being a child who just followed the rules without any understanding to a knowledgeable adult without having gone through the adolescence of ingraining those things into my psyche. I am fortunate in that respect not to have any residuals of religion.
Ok,
Then you avoided a lot of cognitive dissonance, family stress, peer pressure and disapproval from a church community.
Thanks for that info.
Walter.
I was away at college and pretty much left to my own devices. When I confronted the religion question, it took about a month, but I didn’t have any interference to deal with. I am thankful for that.
That is largely true in practice here. There are evangelicals who will bristle at being characterized as fundamentalists, but you’re right, in the US, fundamentalists have largely co-opted the label and rendered it way less meaningful. Back in the day, my tribe was fundamentalist – explicitly so, it was even in our organizational name – but yeah we did happily embrace “evangelical” partly because it was less freighted and more reasonable-seeming. Another example of nuanced meaning that is being lost.
We also culturally appropriated evangelical structures and orgs as if we had anything to do with them. I used to read Christianity Today for example, and was occasionally confused by their relative open-mindedness on certain issues, like abortion. That was an evangelical rag. It was acceptable, I suppose, because Billy Graham founded it. I think Graham straddled the evangelical / fundamentalist divide that has since eroded. His son Franklin has gone off the fundamentalist deep end though.
I still think it’s probably more accurate though to see fundamentalism on a global basis as a subset of evangelicalism, even it the boundaries are getting fuzzy and ill-defined. Usually what you see for percentage figures within Christianity refers to “evangelical” so I assume that’s the broad label much like when people say “Christianity” is about a third of all humans – there they are referring to a vaguer, cultural Christianity, not to something more specific like Catholics or Protestants even.
I know someone like that. Their kids know it and when something goes wrong, there is a race among them to be the first to frame the issue to dad; because only the first opinion dad encounters has any value. He’s a Mormon with 8 kids.
And the kids know about the backfire effect as well (although perhaps not by name). If someone else has already told dad their version of reality, they know it is pointless to fight against it. The first impression becomes reality, no matter the dissonance it might create.
We used to call it the “the Dalton Effect” (their last name is Dalton).