Where does 'The Spirit' come from?

[_charity]

About Galton's experiment. 1 subject. Self-report. And he thought he knew the results ahead of time. Oops. Pseudo-science.

And about an experience with the Spirit. If you haven't had one, you can't possibly understand what it is like.

[_Chap]

About Galton's experiment. 1 subject. Self-report. And he thought he knew the results ahead of time. Oops. Pseudo-science.

And about an experience with the Spirit. If you haven't had one, you can't possibly understand what it is like.

Firstly, nobody, least of all me, is citing Galton’s story as if it was a piece of statistically valid testing offered in a peer-reviewed journal with the implication that its results should be reproducible within a standard margin of error. To suggest otherwise is to attack a straw man.

On the other hand, the mere fact that an experiment is a ‘one-off’ need not mean that it is will have no influence on the scientific community, especially when it is a counter-example to beliefs that were previously widely held. I have already mentioned the example of the 1919 eclipse as a test of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Even better known than that is the story of Galileo’s challenge to Aristotle’s dynamics by showing that a large and small metal ball fell at pretty well the same speed when dropped from a tower (we need not argue here about whether Galileo actually did that; it is the impact of accounts of the one-off experiment that matter).

On self-reporting: does that not happen extremely frequently in psychological testing, where subjects respond to questionnaires asking them to rate themselves on levels of anxiety, well-being, and so on? That happens all the time, surely?

But of course I do not offer Galton’s evidence as a piece of published science supported by NSF grant 123456789. His story functions, rather, to open up a possibility of a certain way of thinking about religious reverence. Galton tells us that he could produce feelings of profound reverence and awe towards a cartoon figure simply by worshipping it regularly. The fact that he could do make himself feel awe towards a ridiculous object (and one that he knew to be without significance) by choosing to worship it does not prove anything in a rigorous sense – but it does open up a new possibility of looking at the fact that all over the world and throughout history human beings report profound feelings of awe, reverence and spirituality from the practice of religious rituals that are vastly diverse, and which to non-believers often seem frankly ridiculous.

For strong religious believers, the answer to this situation has sometimes been to say, with the Psalmist “As for the gods of the heathen, they are but idols”, and to discount the religions of others as being of no account. To some Christians, it has not been possible to deny that “heathens” are experiencing something powerful – but one simply ascribes it to Satanic deception. In such cases as Charity, the tactic is to claim that one’s own experience is in some way an exception, the only ‘genuine’ and unmistakeable spirituality.

To such people one can reasonably say “if your spiritual experience was simply self-induced, and a result of years of voluntary psychological conditioning, wouldn’t you like to know?”.

So, as a Korihorian version of Moroni’s promise I suggest to believing LDS that they should try Galton’s experiment in updated form: after a week or two of systematic prayer and obeisance to the sage of Springfield, and regular prayerful viewing of old Simpsons episodes, act on this passage of scripture:

“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask Homer the Eternal Dad, in the name of Bart, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Homer, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of Duff Beer.”

I bet you will find that you gain a testimony that you may have to work quite hard to get rid of, as did Galton with Mr Punch.

[_Mercury]

About Galton's experiment. 1 subject. Self-report. And he thought he knew the results ahead of time. Oops. Pseudo-science.

And about an experience with the Spirit. If you haven't had one, you can't possibly understand what it is like.

It is highly ironic that on one hand you disregard something as pseudoscience and in the next breath invoke your imaginary friend.

You are childish and deluded.

[_Chap]

For those who find the Galton experiment not scientific enough for their taste, do try this:

http://www.economist.com/science/displa ... d=10875666




This is a $3.1 million project to use scientific tools to study the phenomenon of religion. As the Economist article says:

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

Relevant to this board is one interesting insight by scientists involved in this project: a religion that increases the investment it demands from its members actually increases the solidarity amongst them:

Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on.
Leviticus's children

On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

When the Brethren read this, LDS can perhaps look forward to 20% tithing and a five-hour block on Sundays. That should weed out the freeloaders ... And an important contribution of religious belief in maintaining group solidarity comes from the way believers can be persuaded to police themselves - or rather, to believe that they are being policed all the time by Someone Else:

.

.. Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be to rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for cheats to detect and police themselves as well. In that case a sense of being watched by a supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus proposes that belief in such beings would prevent what he called “dangerous risk miscalculations” that would lead to social deviance and reduced fitness.

One of the experiments he did to test this idea was to subject a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student's ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Dr Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. He found that those who had been told the ghost story were much quicker to press the space bar than those who had not. They did so in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student's death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student. In short, awareness of a ghost—a supernatural agent—made people less likely to cheat.

Note that a completely untrue ghost story makes people more moral .... need one despair entirely about the rationality of humanity? No, it seems ...

Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social insecurity and religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of the religion in question, it is the least secure societies that tend to be most fundamentalist. That would make sense if adherence to the rules is a condition for the security which comes from membership of a group.

If people are more secure, they seem to need religion less. But of course the LDS church, as a social institution, seems to do its best to ensure that the social cost of leaving the group is really high. Quite a well-designed business model, one would say.

[_Dr. Shades]

Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social insecurity and religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of the religion in question, it is the least secure societies that tend to be most fundamentalist.

Now what message board does that remind us all of?

[_solomarineris]

About Galton's experiment. 1 subject. Self-report. And he thought he knew the results ahead of time. Oops. Pseudo-science.

And about an experience with the Spirit. If you haven't had one, you can't possibly understand what it is like.

Oh, no! Of course how could he have a spirit? Only faithful is privileged to have one. Let's hope he has a brain which serves him halfway decent.