Time Immortal

It’s perhaps pretty to think, for some, that we could just do away with Religion and order/govern society on the basis of strict reason. The problem with doing that, however, is that reason, so very often, can be — and is — tainted by that pesky human element:

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false believe is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction….a pair of political scientists, Brendan Nyhan of Duke and Jason Reifler of Georgia State, have shown a similar effect, this time concerning misinformation surrounding the presence of WMDs in Iraq, tax cuts, or stem cell research. Participants were shown news reports that contained inaccuracies, followed by a correction. The news reports were not real, but were presented to the volunteers as coming from either the New York Times or Fox News. Again, the findings suggest that facts that contradicted political ideology were simply not taken in; if anything, challenging misbelief with fact checking has the counterintuitive effect of reinforcing that misbelief.

I always laugh when atheists attempt to suggest that their belief in God could be motivated with the presentation of proper evidence, when in truth the opposite would tend to happen: even good, solid evidence would be greeted by most of modern atheism with either ignorance or a collective “that’s it?”