“You can teach people Bayesian math, but even if they’re genuinely very good with the math, applying it to real life and real beliefs is a whole different story.”
The problem is that people do things, or believe things, or say they believe things for reasons other than instrumental truth.
Many people have done that throughout history. Homosexuals married and had children. Atheists attended church. While they may have had private disagreements that their closest relatives knew about, they were advised to keep quiet and not embarrass their family.
In fact, religion in America is something of an oddity. Here, you’re actually expected to believe what you espouse. That is not the case throughout most of the world. People treat their religion more like an ethnicity or family tradition. They espouse things for social reasons.
In Europe, people call themselves Anglican or Lutheran or Catholic often without much thought to what that really means. When I, at the age of 12, told my European mother that I didn’t believe in God, she responded, “What do you mean? You’re Catholic!” As if that meant something other than the system of beliefs in question.
It’s similar to the legend about the man in Northern Ireland who said he was an atheist. “But are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?” was the reply.
In the Far East, the situation is even more complicated. Traditions like Buddhism and Confucianism are not mutually exclusive. And in Hinduism there are many gods (or many versions of one God, depending on who you ask). Each family “worships” a different God by invoking that God during various ceremonies. But if you attend the wedding of another family, you supplicate to that God, and you don’t argue about it. You don’t care. Your association as a Shiva-worshiping Hindu or a Vishnu-worshiping Hindu is ambiguous at best.
Likewise, I think that many intelligent and scholarly people who identify as Catholic (Ken Miller) or Jewish (Aumann) do so in just this (social) sense.
“You can teach people Bayesian math, but even if they’re genuinely very good with the math, applying it to real life and real beliefs is a whole different story.”
The problem is that people do things, or believe things, or say they believe things for reasons other than instrumental truth.
Many people have done that throughout history. Homosexuals married and had children. Atheists attended church. While they may have had private disagreements that their closest relatives knew about, they were advised to keep quiet and not embarrass their family.
In fact, religion in America is something of an oddity. Here, you’re actually expected to believe what you espouse. That is not the case throughout most of the world. People treat their religion more like an ethnicity or family tradition. They espouse things for social reasons.
In Europe, people call themselves Anglican or Lutheran or Catholic often without much thought to what that really means. When I, at the age of 12, told my European mother that I didn’t believe in God, she responded, “What do you mean? You’re Catholic!” As if that meant something other than the system of beliefs in question.
It’s similar to the legend about the man in Northern Ireland who said he was an atheist. “But are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?” was the reply.
In the Far East, the situation is even more complicated. Traditions like Buddhism and Confucianism are not mutually exclusive. And in Hinduism there are many gods (or many versions of one God, depending on who you ask). Each family “worships” a different God by invoking that God during various ceremonies. But if you attend the wedding of another family, you supplicate to that God, and you don’t argue about it. You don’t care. Your association as a Shiva-worshiping Hindu or a Vishnu-worshiping Hindu is ambiguous at best.
Likewise, I think that many intelligent and scholarly people who identify as Catholic (Ken Miller) or Jewish (Aumann) do so in just this (social) sense.