Denigrating religion and promoting atheism can be fun and meritorious, but I see such activities as treating a symptom rather than the disease. And I wonder, is treating the disease even possible? Maybe all one can do is produce more pharmaceuticals. I tend to lean toward this pessimistic view, and so I pose the question in the subject.
It would be nice if one could say, “He’s a physicist [or neuroscientist]; of course he doesn’t believe in God or ghosts.” But you cannot. Unfortunately irrationality, rather than the converse, is, it seems, fundamental to human nature. Education in sciences seems to positively correlate with atheism, but science also correlates with close-mindedness*. That said, I’m a science fanatic myself, and a broad spectrum push for science funding and education would probably make the world a much better place regardless of the state of average human reasoning prowess.
Widespread adoption of atheism would definitely eliminate a great deal of nonsense, but while I was a very excited atheist when I first deconverted, I have since realized many of the atheists I’ve met are not what I would call rational people. Rationality, in my experience, seems to be correlated with atheism, but atheism is certainly not dependent on it. And so I take less pride calling myself an atheist these days; I prefer to think of myself as “someone who strives to overcome his cognitive biases and treat issues impartially, in particular when they provoke an emotional reaction”.
Nowadays, I think less about the problem of religion and more about the problem of irrationality—which I see as the root cause of almost all human problems. We are self-righteousness; our brains justify our actions. We are wired for coalitionary behavior; we paint our teams and ourselves in a positive light. We interpret evidence in terms of previous beliefs, rather than develop beliefs from evidence. This is human nature. Evolutionary psychology is ready with answers to why. But is there any solution?
The consequences of our cognitive inclinations are easy to see in religion, but they are equally (or more) obvious in the political sphere, and certainly present, but perhaps much less obvious in the sciences (unless you’ve had the pleasure of attending a heated colloquium on some obscure topic). In fact, irrationality seems to permeate most everything to a disgusting degree. I would write some examples, but this is already getting long.
Adults who have already escaped formal education and found steady employment are probably a lost cause. I suspect they’ve more or less settled on a method of learning and assessing information, interacting socially, and so forth that works for the lives they’ve already established. For them, I think we can only compete with alternative information sources directly—presenting alternative memes that compete with irrational memes but propogate in the same irrational manner. For example, promulgating atheism to oppose religion and “green morality” to oppose climate denial and climate apathy. These tactics seem to be working, and while I’m glad because I agree with the ideas, it is still disappointing to see them spread essentially by being fashionable. And even if rational memes were to reach 90% acceptance or so, it would not necessarily mean the population was itself more rational.
In order to cultivate a more rational society, I think formal education must change dramatically. Consequently, I think the efforts of this charity should primarily target formal education. Such efforts should have broad enough appeal to garner support from organizations that would otherwise see this project as a threat. I get the impression most people think education is important and that it is hard to speak directly against efforts to improve it. Moreover, this is possibly the only way to to even approach the problem of basic human irrationality directly.
Throughout my education I remember a lot of ado about the dichotomy between critical thinking and rote memorization. Despite this, it was mostly memorization of facts (history, biology) or domain specific problem solving algorithms (english—that is, essay writing, physics, math, and chemistry). I remember learning the “scientific method” in grade school in order to complete a “research” assignment, but I don’t remember anyone explaining the generally applicability (maybe because quality reasoning is still generally limited to science). In 6th grade I learned about propaganda tactics, and for some reason that really stuck. (Judging by the state of television, apparently I’m an outlier.) But I first remember learning about the variety of named logical fallacies in argumentation in college—which is way too late, in my opinion. College students that take psychology 101 are introduced to concepts essential to understanding our general irrationality such as cognitive biases, but I am not sure how much it helps. Though I never took a psychology class, I skimmed through an introduction to psychology book and saw Gazzaniga’s experiments discussed; however, the psych. students that I’ve talked to remember the topic when I jog their memory, but the implications seem not to have made much of an impression. All in all, I don’t think our (US) current education system attacks the problem of irrationality to any appreciable degree. (I admit my education may not have been typical.)
In the same way that math or english is presented a sequence taught each year for the entirety of grade school, I believe rationality should be taught each year with subjects ranging from legitimate logical argumentation to confirmation bias. Critical thinking is already a meaningless buzzword, but that might make it a good title and improve the scope and appeal. This seems like more of a “What would you do with a billion dollars?” style answer. Education reform? In America?
An “easier” course may be to promote policies that would increase the quality of teachers. I believe quality teachers make an enormous difference. And I think something as simple as raising grade school teacher salaries to nearly professor (adjunct, if you have a weak stomach) levels should draw in more bright, capable teachers.
Ultimately, I think I’m going to have to tend to my garden, but I feel if we are to expect any real change in average human reasoning, a bottom up approach through formal education is necessary. Starting from the top with reasonable memes isn’t likely to bring change beyond the change those memes themselves directly bring about. This is, of course, merely my hypothesis.
* I do my best not to pull purportedly factual claims out my ass. At the same time, citing in a forum post strikes me as absurd. If you dispute any facts presented above, I’ll be happy to find my sources. In this particular case, it comes from a paper (that I do not have access to) Gazzaniga (whom I seem to think is somewhat reliable) uses as a source in “The Ethical Brain”.
