Untrue intuitions lead people to not believe in science

Religious people often claim that believing in God is a difficult path to follow, since it goes against the ways of the world.

Actually, understanding the truth about materiality is a lot tougher than embracing spiritual falsities. If you doubt this, check out an interesting New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer, "Why We Don't Believe in Science."

The main conclusion I drew from the piece is this: if our intuitions about how the physical world works often are so wrong, why should we believe that our intuitions about God, heaven, soul, spirit, and other aspects of a supposed spiritual world are correct?

Some excerpts:

Last week, Gallup announced the results of their latest survey on Americans and evolution. The numbers were a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere: forty-six per cent of adults said they believed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power.

...Such poll data raises questions: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view.

Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. And then there’s the irony of evolution: our views about our own development don’t seem to be evolving.

This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin.

...It would be so much more convenient if the laws of physics lined up with our naïve beliefs—or if evolution was wrong and living things didn’t evolve through random mutation. But reality is not a mirror; science is full of awkward facts. And this is why believing in the right version of things takes work.

Of course, that extra mental labor isn’t always pleasant. (There’s a reason they call it “cognitive dissonance.”) It took a few hundred years for the Copernican revolution to go mainstream. At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long.

Comments

[Matjaz]

I'd like to point out that the word intuition is completely misinterpreted in their article.
We do not intuit the sun revolving around earth - we are cognitively interpreting the senses.
Have we forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs in science came from intuition?

[Brian Hines]

Matjaz, "intuition" is another word for what the "fast brain" does. Neuroscience has found that there is a fast and slow side to the human brain.

We make quick intuitive judgements, and also slow reasonable conclusions. Both are vital and important. If a large snake is in our path, we jump without thinking. Then, we look at it closely and determine whether it is poisonous or not.

Intuitions aren't always based on sensory experience, though this is all we have to work with: what we've experienced. For example, people have an intuition of a "self" that watches as if from on high what the body does.

But neuroscience finds no sign of a self. This is an illusion, though with evolutionary advantages -- or we wouldn't have the sense of selfhood.

Yes, scientists use intuition, like we all do. But intuitions aren't always true. They have to be confirmed via the slow brain, especially if a decision is important or significant, like whether the earth goes around the sun, or if someone should be married.

You seem to believe that intuitions can pop into the brain from outside the brain. There's no evidence of this. Intuitions are the fast part of the brain's processing, while reason is the slow part of brain processing.

[Matjaz]

Thanks for a heartful response.
(and thanks for this great site)

No, I don't really believe that something can come from outside the brain, I'm not even convinced there is such a thing as an outside.
I find it rather silly that we keep putting primal instincts and deep insight into the same basket, just because they share one similarity, both lacking an analytical involvement of the conscious mind.
There's probably many more sources of information being passed through to the conscious, that we elegantly wrap and regard it as the same thing.

[Juliano]

"and that the sun revolves around the earth."
But it DOES from our perspective...?

ALSo always keep in mind that---science does NOT know what matter is nor what consciousness is. So railing against the ALREADY dualistic orthodox religions and biggin up 'materialism' is still being *also* naive.

[Roger]

Brian,found this from:
http://dictionary.babylon.com/intuition/

---this would be a belief/faith oriented definition, with the source other than the brain.

"Intuition: The working of the inner vision, instant and direct cognition of truth. This spiritual faculty, though not yet in any sense fully developed in the human race, yet occasionally shows itself as hunches. Every human being is born with at least the rudiment of this inner sense. Plotinus taught that the secret gnosis has three degrees -- opinion, science or knowledge, and illumination -- and that the instrument of the third is intuition. To this, reason is subordinate, for intuition is absolute knowledge, founded on the identification of the mind with the object. Iamblichus wrote of intuition: "There is a faculty of the human mind, which is superior to all which is born or begotten. Through it we are enabled to attain union with the superior intelligences, to be transported beyond the scenes of this world, and to partake of the higher life and peculiar powers of the heavenly ones." From another point of view, intuition may be described as spiritual wisdom, gathered into the storehouse of the spirit-soul through experiences in past lives; but this form may be described as automatic intuition. The higher intuition is a filling of the functional human mind with a ray from the divinity within, furnishing the mind with illumination, perfect wisdom and, in its most developed form, virtual omniscience for our solar system. This is the full functioning of the buddhic faculty in the human being; and when this faculty is thus aroused and working, it produces the manushya or human buddha."

[Brian Hines]

Roger, that's a philosophical/spiritual view of intuition. Here's a dictionary view:

"The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning."

[Roger]

Correct.....that ability has it's source, the human brain.

" From another point of view, intuition may be described as spiritual wisdom, gathered into the storehouse of the spirit-soul through experiences in past lives; but this form may be described as automatic intuition."

-- the source sounds like something other than the human brain. This would need to come from belief/faith.