The Pre/Trans fallacy

Here's an interesting article by Ed Halliwell about the failure of many people (scientific researchers not least among them) to distinguish between pre-rational forms of religion and the more sophisticated "trans-rational" varieties, what Ken Wilber calls the "pre/trans fallacy."

It describes a recent study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found "that religious people with cancer are three times more likely to receive aggressive life-prolonging medical treatment than non-believers."

The method used to determine who was "religious" are rather curious:

In this case, the study identified the pious by getting them to agree with a variety of statements, such as whether they "focused on religion to stop worrying about their problems" or that religion "was the most important thing that kept them going."

Another study, one which found that "religious people experience less anxiety when they make a mistake," used statements like, "My religion is better than others," and "I would support a war if my religion supported it." Halliwell suggests that these beliefs "are likely to be held by those in the pre-rational phase of belief, for whom faith may be an ideological crutch that shields them from uncertainty and autonomous decision-making."

His conclusion is spot-on:

These studies probably tell us more about how scientists perceive religion than about "the religious" who, even within the same tradition, often have attitudes and experiences as different from one another as from the most hardcore atheist. If these studies were conducted in a way that reflected this, my bet is they would produce very different results... More importantly, it would do much to educate scientific materialists that not all religious experience is as unsophisticated as they would have us believe.

Read the entire article here.

The Wit and Wisdom of Ben Stein

"I had long thought," says Ben Stein, "that Darwinism had a huge role to play in the mindset of the leaders of the Nazi party, and consequently a huge role to play in the Holocaust."

Ouch. What is he implying? That the fact that scientific knowledge may have led to evil actions somehow disproves it? I wonder if the Japanese are similarly skeptical of the possibility of nuclear fission, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Later, in the same Toronto Star article, in response to the decision by a Dover, Pennsylvania court to exclude Intelligent Design from the science curriculum, I read this pearl of wisdom from Stein:

"You cannot tell me for one minute that a court is competent to tell me what is science and what is not. A court is not divinely inspired. It's just some guy in a black robe."

*Jaw drops*

Does this guy really think only a divinely-inspired authority is capable of deciding what should and should not be taught in a science class?

Dear Mr. Stein: maybe you are unaware of this, but "science" has a definition. It's too complicated to get into, but empirical verifiability is a major criterion -- which, unfortunately for you, excludes "Intelligent Design" right off the bat. If you want to get more sophisticated, you might also consider that "falsifiability" is another criterion. In other words, it would have to be possible to demonstrate that a theory is false if, in fact, it was. "Intelligent Design" fails that one, too. That's why it shouldn't be taught in science classes. It's not that it's bad science. It's that it isn't science at all.

You don't have to be "divinely-inspired" to make that judgment; you just have to know what "science" is.