Wednesday, October 23, 2019

86 "Atheistic" - Mr. Hung

https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-God-Meaning-Life-Evolutionary/dp/0521762782/
Nathan H. Lents
@nathanlents
According to the Bible, God created Adam from dirt, yet there is still dirt.

Richard Dawkins Compares Creationism to Holocaust Denial


Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public. This is largely because Darwin’s theory directly contradicted the supernatural accounts of human origins rooted in religious tradition and replaced them with fully natural ones. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

So there you have it: According to Rossano, religion exists not because God imparted the religious impulse to human beings, or because God revealed some special truth about Himself to us, as most religions claim. Rossano would have you believe religion is “an adaptation” and “religion came to be because religion evolved”.
Seems like Rossano just helped Darwin’s universal acid just eat God right out of the origin of religion. Yet Rossano expects us to accept his shiny-happy assertion that Darwinian evolution is in no way a “universal God-dissolving acid.”
 https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2020/01/10/teaching-evolution-to-college-students-with-creationist-views-requires-innovative-approaches/?mc_cid=1452e2d6d2&mc_eid=e2d6a0f33bevolisliesign


https://skeptiko.com/161-outspoken-atheist-jerry-coyne/
From my very first job, which I guess is 30 years ago this past December,  I was required to teach Introductory Evolution and when you do that and you do a lot of reading about it you don’t even really have to teach about evolution to become aware that there’s huge resistance to accepting the scientific conception of evolution by the American public. Only about 40% of Americans accept evolution and only about 12% accept it in the way that we scientists do as a sort of purposeless unguided materialistic universe.
You become aware of that pretty quickly. You find that some of your students are resistant to evolution because it contravenes from their notions about human specialness or about morality or about religion or whatever. 

UNACCEPTABLE!

Why Is Religiosity Negatively Correlated with Evolution Acceptance in the United States?

Many studies in the United States show that individuals are less likely to accept evolution when they are more religious (Ha et al., 2012; Glaze et al., 2014; Rissler et al., 2014; Barnes et al., 2017a, 2019; Dunk et al., 2017).1 Christianity is the predo­minant religion in the United States; about 90% of those who identify as religious self-report they are Christian (Pew, 2015). Thus, when considering the relationship between religiosity and evolution acceptance in the United States, we are largely considering the relationship between Christian religiosity and evolution acceptance.

Christian religiosity is associated with lower evolution acceptance, in part because some Christian religious beliefs and Christian religious cultures are perceived to be in direct conflict with evolution (Scott, 2005; Numbers, 2006; Hill, 2014; Kahan and Stanovich, 2016; Saad, 2017). For instance, it is the cultural norm to be opposed to evolution within some Christian denominations (Numbers, 2006). Further, a Christian’s beliefs about creationism and evolution can impact that person’s acceptance and belonging within their Christian community (Barnes et al., 2017b; Barnes and Brownell, 2018), which may lead some individuals to reject evolution. Several research studies show that the beliefs of one’s family and church members are major predictors of evolution acceptance (Winslow et al., 2011; Hill, 2014; Barnes et al., 2017a), which supports the notion that those Christian cultures that are anti-evolution are a barrier for their members to fully accept evolution.

In addition to anti-evolution cultural norms, Christians can also hold a literal interpretation of their Bible that can lead them to reject evolution. If one takes the creation stories in the Bible literally, one would have to believe that species were created separately from one another, which is in direct conflict with a central tenet of evolution that all of life shares a common ancestor. Thus, literal interpretations of the Bible have led some Christians to adopt anti-evolution beliefs. For instance, young Earth creationism is the belief that species were created in their present form 6000–10,000 years ago, while others adopt old Earth creationism and believe that species were created in their present form over millions of years. Other Christians may adopt a mix of special creationism and evolution in which groups such as birds, mammals, and fish were created separately from one another by God, but then subsequently evolved (creationism with some evolution) or that all of life evolved, except for humans who were created separately by God (humans-only creationism; Yasri and Mancy, 2016). All of these variants of special creationism rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible to some extent (Yasri and Mancy, 2016). However, there are many Christians who do not believe special creationism and instead accept evolution.

There are many ways that individuals, including scientists and religious leaders who are Christian, report they have reconciled their religious beliefs with an acceptance of evolution (Miller, 1999; Collins, 2006; Tharoor, 2014). Those who adopt a deistic evolution view may think that their God started the universe but did not have a specific goal or purpose for evolution (Yasri and Mancy, 2016). Those who adopt a theistic evolution or interventionist evolution perspective may believe that their God created life with a goal or that their God actively intervenes in evolution (Miller, 1999; Collins, 2006; Yasri and Mancy, 2016). The main difference between these views is the extent to which one believes one’s God is involved in evolution (Yasri and Mancy, 2016). The commonality in these views is that all include a belief that life on Earth shares a common ancestor (Miller, 1999; Collins, 2006; Yasri and Mancy, 2016). However, are these views in which God is involved in evolution compatible with the scientific theory of evolution? It depends on whether one believes that science is, by nature, atheistic.

...

College Biology Students May Think Evolution Is Atheistic and This Could Lead to Lower Evolution Acceptance

Past qualitative data from several studies indicate that students may have the conception that evolution is atheistic, but we do not know the degree to which this perception exists among biology students. Winslow et al. (2011) interviewed senior Christian biology majors. Many quotes from students who changed from special creationism to acceptance of evolution indicated that they first perceived evolution was atheistic, but then changed to believing that evolution and Christianity could be compatible before they accepted evolution. In a study by Scharmann and Butler (2015), the researchers asked nonmajor biology students at a community college to journal about their experiences learning evolution. In the paper, the researchers presented many quotes in which students indicated they did not know that they could believe in God and accept evolution. In a past study in which our research team implemented evolution instruction that was designed to be culturally competent for religious students, we asked students what they appreciated about the instruction and many religious and nonreligious students wrote that that they did not previously know that someone could believe in God and accept evolution (Barnes et al., 2017). Brem et al. (2003) found that 88% of students perceived it was harder for others to “believe in a supreme being” if they accepted evolution, which suggests they might think that evolution is atheistic, but the researchers did not ask students if one could believe in a supreme being and accept evolution. These data warrant exploring the hypothesis that atheistic perceptions of evolution may be prevalent and may influence acceptance of evolution among college biology students. 



https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-food/202203/not-believing-in-evolution-predicts-bigotry-and-racism

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10258415/
You Tell ME You're Religious And I'll Tell You You're A Racist!

HEYYYYYY,
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/prisoner-wants-answers-about-evolution/
"the large majority of people in prison are both religious and, to differing degrees, uneducated (at least less educated than the public at large)."
I THINK OF MY READERS IN THIS SENSE. THE VAST MAJORITY OF YOU ARE RELIGIOUS AND UNEDUCATED (AT LEAST MUCH LESS EDUCATED THAN THE PEOPLE WHO READ, WRITE, STUDY, AND PERFORM THE SCIENTIFIC WORK THAT I EXCERPT). MOST OF YOU ARE FULLY COMMITTED TO YOUR DELUSIONAL, NONSENSICAL RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND ARE UNWILLING TO CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT THEM AND MOST OF YOU KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT GENETICS AND EVOLUTION OR HOW THEY AFFECT YOUR LIFE AND HOW THEY CAN BE APPLIED TO YOUR LIFE. AND FOR THESE REASONS I FEEL SORRY FOR YOU!
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gqgjz/atheist-in-british-prisons-hussein-kesvani
"Religion was a huge thing in prison; they were all mad for it," Alan tells me. "Part of it was the survival instinct: some of the boys who were associated with the prison gangs converted to Islam, and that was more to be part of the pack than driven by any sincere belief. They wanted to be part of a group, and I don't blame them—prison's a fucking lonely place."
...
 When I ask Alan why he didn't simply pretend to be religious, he shrugs. "I'm not a good actor. I'd have the opportunity to speak to the prison chaplain if I wanted, but I didn't see much use, and I wasn't willing to pretend I was religious to get fairly mundane privileges." Few people chose that path. As a result, most of Alan's prison life was lonely, with his time spent exercising, watching TV, and sleeping.



https://twitter.com/robsica/status/1669095955310714880
Rob
@robsica
"So are you a believer now?  Evolution is controversial because its very existence seems to attack our core beliefs about our own goodness, and the biggest questions regarding human purpose." thisviewoflife.com/darwin-in-your





 https://www.edge.org/conversation/paul_bloom-deena_skolnick_weisberg-why-do-some-people-resist-science
 The developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.

 In some cases, there is such resistance to science education that it never entirely sticks, and foundational biases persist into adulthood.Our intuitive psychology also contributes to resistance to science...

One significant bias is that children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, four year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"), a propensity that Deborah Kelemen has dubbed "promiscuous teleology." Additionally, when asked about the origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide and to prefer creationist explanations. 

 Just as children's intuitions about the physical world make it difficult for them to accept that the Earth is a sphere, their psychological intuitions about agency and design make it difficult for them to accept the processes of evolution. 
 ...

 One reason why people resist certain scientific findings, then, is that many of these findings are unnatural and unintuitive...

 22 Feb 2018
Those ignorant of biology are the ones most enslaved by it.
 Turn This Up! Listen, All Of You Uneducated People Have The Minds Of Children!
"..children, first of all, see all of this design and purpose and when they're taught that natural selection is not purposeful, it's not a designing kind of process in a strict sense, that runs against their intuitions and so creates a barrier for them to understand how evolution works. Further they tend to towards species essentialism, thinking that different natural kinds have strict boundaries. OK, so that the idea of one animal being the ancestor of another, one species being ancestral to another species doesn't make sense. Deep time is difficult. There all kinds of difficult concepts in evolution for children." 
http://bostonreview.net/arts-culture-literature-culture-politics-science-nature-arts-society/tania-lombrozo-can-science
Research in experimental psychology offers a host of compelling explanations for why this could be. Perhaps humans are innately predisposed to creationism. Perhaps religious beliefs are “natural” and contemporary scientific commitments the psychological anomaly. There is something to be said for these claims, but if creationism—and the rejection of human evolution—is the belief toward which our species is naturally predisposed, we’re faced with an equally perplexing mystery: How is it that some people manage to embrace human evolution, and, indeed—to borrow Darwin’s phrase—to find “grandeur in this view of life”? 
 ...
For example, the psychologist Paul Bloom argues that creationism and belief in God may be “bred in the bone,” byproducts of the very evolutionary forces that shaped the human mind.
On this view, certain features of human psychology leave us pining for a creator. For instance, some have claimed that humans are “promiscuously teleological,” saddled with a tendency to construe objects and their properties as designed for a purpose. Understanding the natural world in terms of design suggests some prolific operator behind the scenes, so theistic stories of creation fill a useful explanatory role for the teleologically minded. Relatedly, humans appear to be overzealous in our attributions of agency, inclined to posit some sort of person or beastie at the slightest provocation—the sound of a broken twig in a forest, the creak on an old staircase, or the face-like constellation of whorls in a cloud. With a hyperactive agency detector constantly acting up, it's not so hard to entertain a world populated by gods, ghosts, or gremlins.
…
Why Human Evolution Is Hard to Swallow
In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Richard Dawkins quips, “It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.” Indeed, many psychologists have argued that, beyond the desire for comforting religious belief, additional tendencies conspire to make natural selection especially difficult to understand and accept, particularly when applied to the case of humans.
For starters, understanding evolution requires wrapping your head around some pretty abstract concepts, such as probability, geologic time, and what the biologist Ernst Mayr called “population thinking”: evolution isn’t a process that occurs at the level of individual organisms changing over time; it is better characterized as change over time in the proportion of individuals within a population who have particular characteristics. But this shift in perspective is difficult to achieve, and in fact mirrors the historical development of evolutionary ideas, with predecessors to Darwin often characterizing processes of change at the level of individuals. For example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a naturalist who worked a generation before Darwin, believed that offspring acquired the characteristics of their parents, but that many of those characteristics were acquired within the lifetime of the parent, making individual organisms the site of evolutionary change.
Another cognitive bias that challenges population thinking is what psychologists call “psychological essentialism,” the idea that categories—in this case biological species—all share some common, underlying essence by virtue of which they have their characteristic properties and belong to the category they do. On an essentialist view, variation across individual members of a species is incidental. If a species changes over time, it must be because the common, underlying essence is changing in each individual. With natural selection, however, variation isn’t incidental but imperative: it’s a prerequisite to the differential survival and reproduction that fuels evolutionary change. Without variation there is no selection, so failing to appreciate the role of variation is a sure way to misunderstand Darwin’s theory.
Just as cognitive and existential concerns work in tandem to make creationism attractive, additional existential worries raise barriers to endorsing evolution, whether or not it is properly understood. People prefer control and order to feeling powerless in a disordered world, and natural selection is largely about luck and death. One study found that when primed to think about their own powerlessness, even relatively secular students found “random” evolution harder to swallow: they preferred intelligent design more often than when they were primed to feel powerful in a predictable world.
Additional concerns apply to the case of human evolution, in particular. People find it dehumanizing to conceptualize themselves as animals, and human evolution underscores the continuity between humans and our (distant) cockroach cousins. Research in social psychology and social cognition suggests that people endorse something like a great chain of being with moral and spiritual aspects. Humans are somewhere in the middle of the chain, with deities above and non-human animals below. Associating animal characteristics with humans has been used to justify inhumane treatment; it strips people of human uniqueness and certain aspects of agency and moral consideration. An evolutionary history shared with other animals—and even plants and bacteria—might threaten the separation between human and non-human that maintaining our “specialness” seems to require.
Finally, people often draw inappropriate conclusions from evolutionary claims—conclusions that they prefer to reject. One study asked undergraduates to identify whether the truth of evolution would have negative, positive, or neutral implications for a host of social and personal issues. The researchers found that the overwhelming majority of students queried believed that evolution made it harder to find purpose in life, threatened the existence of free will, and justified selfishness and racism, among other undesirable ends. These claims are examples of what philosophers call the “naturalistic fallacy,” the error of deriving “ought” from “is”—an error that readers often make in response to strictly descriptive scientific findings. For example, the idea that genes are selfish might offer a compelling description of some evolutionary dynamics (though even that is controversial), but it doesn’t follow that human selfishness is appropriate.
If the vast majority of people fail to understand evolution, find it dehumanizing, and think it justifies all sorts of perversity, is it any wonder they’re disinclined to accept it, especially when creationism offers a more heartening alternative? 
It may be that assorted mental dispositions and shortcomings—a preference for teleology, hyperactive agency detection, anxiety concerning death, psychological essentialism, a preference for order and control, an unhealthy fascination with human uniqueness, and the naturalistic fallacy, all wed to what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—are enough to explain people’s rejection of human evolution in favor of some form of creationism. 
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-cognitive-psychology-of-belief-in-the-supernatural
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/wired-for-creationism/304440/
"HACK INTO HER BRAIN, CRASH EVERYTHING DOWN THEN REBOOT...MILLION $1" - ALPHA BETA BOSSALINI

When Niggas Say "Nigga, All That Shit's Bullshit!" They're Really Just Saying "Nigga, I Don't Have The Interest To Read The Scientific Things You Excerpt, I Don't Have The Patience To Read The Scientific Things You Excerpt, I Don't Have The Reading Ability To Understand The Scientific Things You Excerpt, Nor Do I Have The Intelligence To Understand The Scientific Things You Excerpt, So Nigga All That Shit Bullshit!" Hey, Brothas, Instead Of Telling ME "Nigga All That Shit Bullshit!" Tell ME "Nigga, I'm Uneducated, I Have A Low IQ, And I'm Close-Minded (Have Low Openness). So Whatever That Shit Is That You're Writing Goes Over My Head And Even If I Did Understand It, Nigga, I Wouldn't Believe Any Of It Because It Goes Against My Intuition And What I've Been Taught  To Believe All Of My Nigga Life (What I've Learned From Family, Friends, And My Nigga Life Experiences)!" PRAISE JESUS!

Most Of You Are Unfamiliar With Evolutionary Logic And Are Thus Not Conscious Of The Evolutionary Reasons That Motivate Your Thought And Behavior Because You're Uneducated (Even You 4-Year College Graduates Who Were Never Exposed To Evolutionary Theory Are Uneducated). I'm Educated, Though, And Can Explain A Million Things From An Evolutionary Perspective About You, Your Family, Your Friends, Your Relationships, Your Culture, And How Your Society Evolved! WHATEVER! Want To Get Educated? Read Mi Blogs!

 https://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-Mind-Neuroevolutionary-Interpersonal-Neurobiology/dp/0393705315
WHY AM I AN ATHEIST AND YOU NOT? BECAUSE I HAVE A HIGHER IQ THAN YOU AND MORE EDUCATION THAN YOU, SPECIFICALLY IN REGARD TO HUMAN EVOLUTION (GENETIC EVOLUTION AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND HOW THEY CONSPIRED TO CREATE BELIEF IN GOD AND RELIGION). SO, NOW THAT I KNOW ALL OF THIS I CAN'T BELIEVE IN AND WORSHIP SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T EXIST (SOMETHING THAT'S A PRODUCT OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN MIND).

G0D Is A Product Of The Mind (The Human Mind's Genetic Evolution) And This Mind-Created G0D Influences Your Thoughts And Behavior! Once You Discard The Concept Of G0D Your Thoughts And Behavior Change. This Is Why Atheists Are Suspicious, Cautious Of, And Intimidated By Theists - Atheists Have No Idea What Theists' G0Ds Are Instructing Them To Do (Maybe That Theists G0D Wants Him To Kill Several Infidels Today, Maybe That Theists G0D Wants Him To Molest (Sodomize) Several Boys This Week, Maybe That Theists G0D Wants Him To Feed, Clothe, And House Several Filthy, Foul Smelling, Mentally Unstable Homeless People This Month At His Mother's House; Who Knows). 
Posted by at