Comments on: People don't accept evolution just because they're smart

By: C

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:36:18 +0000

Thank God there are conservative Christians that accept the fact of evolution. Evolution by natural selection was a great discovery and should be embraced by all. I know there were Christians out there who are smart and accept science, I just didn’t know there were conservative Christians with a non-14th century worldview. It’s refreshing and I’m glad they are reading this blog and following and accepting science. It’s the only tool we have to observe physical reality. Being a biblical literalist is dishonest and basically throwing all reason out the door. They are missing out on so much beauty in the world. It’s like they are bullet proof from reality.
Great site for anyone interested:
http://firstcontact29.blogspot.com/

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:45:26 +0000

To go on, Biblical literalism really is literalistic only in a very limited way. Specifically it means “Do not adapt the Bible to make it conform to [some defined subset of modern scientific knowledge, especially evolution]“. Many “literalists” give highly symbolic readings to the Bible, especially but not only the book of Revelation, by treating statements as “prophetic”. Furthermore, almost nobody anywhere takes everything in the “Old Testament” literally — the dietary prohibitions, polygamy, levirate marriage, uncleanness taboos. There’s a so-called “second covenant” for Christians, but it’s never spelled out in detail, so people pick and choose.

If you want to screw with a literalist, ask them about the waters above the firmament. Few of them are prepared on that topic.

By: Don

Don — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:16:48 +0000

John Emerson gets close to the way it works. Religion is part and parcel of culture.

By: abb3w

abb3w — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 06:41:57 +0000

ATTEND looks an interesting addition to the mix; so does ABANY. COHORT and AGE have negligible impacts.

Unsurprisingly, BIGBANG is related spectacularly.

By: Tom Bri

Tom Bri — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 03:00:03 +0000

What John said. Literalists either read it without bothering to think about it, or can’t remember what they read yesterday, or, don’t read it at all and just accept others’ word on what it says.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 18:43:17 +0000

Biblical literalism is strongly correlated with lower levels of education and intelligence.

I suspect that what we’re talking about is also coordinated to conventionalism and respect for church authority. I say this because true Biblical literalism would lead to massive confusion, since it’s a long, complex, contradictory text. So “Biblical literalism” is short for “accept authorities who present an easy-to-understand literalistic interpretation of the Bible which reinforces a set of known social conventions.” Bible literalists mostly want to just have to learn things once, because learning is painful, and to know the important things instead of just wondering about them.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:54:47 +0000

#11, the variable is in the previous posed. It’s EVOLVED in the GSS. as for “good form,” i wrote the post in 5 minutes. so give me a break.

By: marcel

marcel — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:45:24 +0000

I take it that this regression includes a dependent variable (in my field, economics, it is considered good form to name the dependent variable when displaying regression results). What is “Belief in Evolution”? (Did I win?)

By: Maciano

Maciano — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:07:00 +0000

Razib,

Even though I accept evolution completely and do not believe in God, the Bible or Jesus, I still fear Him, have an instinctual hope for/belief in justice (punishment for evil and hurtful people) and must admit I sometimes pray during periods of desperation.

I can’t explain it myself, and have no hope it helps, but still do it. It might be a leftover from being raised religiously; my mother’s family was very conservatively Protestant. My suspiscion is that If you ever bought into religion (even though, it was at a young age) it might never truly leave you?

By: dave chamberlin

dave chamberlin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:54:34 +0000

Good to see Tom Bri stand up for intellegent conservative Christians because they do exist. We can each feel part of something greater than ourselves our own way. Get tolerant and open minded Emil, lest you become part of the problem you think you rise above.

By: Tom Bri

Tom Bri — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:42:01 +0000

Hi #3 Emil. Why not? You must not get out much, if you think conservative Christians can’t be interested in evolution, have a scientific education, participate civilly in a blog discussion.
#6 Sandgroper, exactly. The Gospels don’t agree on his last words. Kinda kills the literalist.

By: bob sykes

bob sykes — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:38:33 +0000

It also depends what you mean by “evolution.” My lefty wife believes in evolution, but denies Darwin’s theory of natural selection, at least for humans. She’s probably a Lamarckian. I suspect the great majority of highly educated people are really Lamarckians, again at least with respect to humans.

As to why Tom Bri reads this very good blog, maybe he has an open mind and wants to learn stuff. Maybe he’s not a bigot.

By: Sandgroper

Sandgroper — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:03:54 +0000

Tom, it depends on which Gospel you read, doesn’t it? My recall is Geza Vermes concluded he said “Lord, why have you forsaken me?”, then he uttered a wordless scream, then he died.

But I’m surely no biblical scholar, and not everyone agrees with Vermes – I’d be interested in your answer.

By: Emil

Emil — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 08:16:19 +0000

Wy the fuck is a conservation christian reading this blog?

http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/jesus/intelligence%20&%20religion.htm

By: Tom Bri

Tom Bri — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 03:29:30 +0000

Bible literalists are a special bunch. Now, I’m a pretty conservative Christian, but, when I run into these people I just ask ‘em what Jesus’s last words were.

Then ask them if Jesus spoke in parables, and if we are supposed to take parables literally.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 03:23:37 +0000

When I replicated your regression and added a wordsum^2 term, that turned out to be significant (P = 0.008). The coefficient for wordsum was 0.321 and wordsum^2 was -.028, indicating a non-linear effect that starts out positive but ends up negative. I agree with you, however, that controlling for the Bible variable, etc. probably has its own issues (someone once warned me about controlling for intervening variables, I think), so I’m unsure about any interpretation beyond ‘interesting!’

By: Clark

Clark — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 01:10:35 +0000

I’m sure Razib is out having fun on a Friday night. So I’ll throw out a link to an old post of his that goes through this. WORDSUM & IQ & the correlation. He convinced me…

Only caveat appears to be once you get too far from the mean.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:23:37 +0000

I wouldn’t consider vocabulary a valid measurement of education or intelligence… and what is the sample population?