I am reading this now, anyone else familiar with it? I think there are some really interesting things so far just in the first chapters.
Just how rigid occult beliefs can be is documented in an interesting
experiment done with students in a psychology course at Concordia
University in Montreal (Gray 1984). The course was called “The Science
and Pseudoscience of Paranormal Phenomena.” Students were
given a test at the beginning of the class to see whether they believed
in ESP,ghosts,or miracles (see table 1). At the end of the semester
they were asked the same questions to see what effect studying these
phenomena would have on their beliefs. Then,to get an estimate of
the stability of any change in beliefs,the students were asked the same
questions a year later.
Students Who Believed in the Phenomenon
| before the course | after the course | a year later |
Extrasensory perception (ESP) | 85 | 54 | 68 |
Unidentified flying object (UFO) | 69 | 51 | 46 |
Astrology | 55 | 43 | 61 |
Ghosts | 43 | 34 | 45 |
Psychic healing | 49 | 35 | 43 |
Miracles | 43 | 46 | 54 |
Reincarnation/Life after death | 69 | 55 | 57 |
Lawson andWeser (1990,589) report similar findings in another study
and note that “the less skilled reasoners were more likely to initially
hold the nonscientific beliefs and were less likely to change those beliefs
during instruction. It was also discovered that less skilled reasoners
were less likely to be strongly committed to the scientific beliefs.”
I have found some ideas in this book so far to be illuminating, and in other ways not surprising, since we seem to see a lot of the same stuff daily here. I am curious to hear if anyone else is familiar with this book though, it seems a good source so far...
-x
"Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact ” which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!"
-Stephen Jay Gould