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You’ve Got to Be Kidding
Posted by KTK

NYTimes article today about yet another sociobiological argument for religious faith as an evolved trait. Ho-hum (there is a lot to sociobiology that clearly must be true, but I’m tired of them coming up with stories about how some behavioral traits could be evolutionarily advantageous if they had evolved, without any evidence that they actually could have evolved, or, more importantly, did so). But this caught my eye:

[W]hatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran . . . . His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

You’re shitting me.

First, who crosses their fingers during turbulence? There are atheists who do that? How does he know?

More importantly, his students are really unwilling to put their hands in an “African relic” because he says it has a curse on it? Where the hell did he find these students - at a Raiders of the Lost Ark fan convention? Admittedly, teenagers (as about half of college students still are, despite being legal adults) tend to be hyper-suggestive and somewhat superstitious, until they’ve had a chance to settle down and test their beliefs in the world a bit, but this is ridiculous. I suppose they also believe that if you say “Bloody Mary” in a mirror three times, you’ll be killed in your sleep. Oy.

That being said, I was on an East Coast campus in the early 90s when a scare went through the students of a bunch of schools in the region, to the effect that some supposed prediction of Nostradamus had declared that “all the beautiful children” would be murdered on a certain date and this clearly pointed to one or the other of the elite colleges. (Obviously, their egos had nothing to do with this.) Most of the students pretended to take it only mock-seriously, but many of them vacated the campus on the night in question.

I suppose it’s a question of just not having had to really live by their beliefs yet. It can be hard to hold out for rationality when almost everyone around you openly endorses superstition and you have only your own convictions to fall back on. But that wooden box thing is still pathetic.

March 5th, 2007 General, Religion, Culture, Science, Education | 7 comments