Dueling superstitions
A survey from Baylor University finds that believers in the supernatural are less likely to believe in the paranormal, and vice versa:
The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology.
The ISR researchers found that conservative religious Americans are far less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal than are other Americans, with self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious far more likely than other Americans to believe.
It’s as if we have only so many superstitious brain cells, and if we fill them up with one kind of superstition, we crowd out other kinds of superstition. I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:56 am
I think that Christianity has always been opposed to the paranormal and superstition, fundamentalism especially so. It would be interesting to study whether believers of other religions, Muslims or Buddhists, for example, also eschew paranormal beliefs. In any case, I wonder if it is not a matter of number of brain cells to be filled up as a psychological need that isn’t being met. And I wonder if what active intellectual atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens believe about the paranormal. Who will undertake this study?
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
There is certainly a rationalist point of view that regards the supernatural and the paranormal as equally ridiculous, and I think both Dawkins and Hitchens are of this persuasion.
There is a different point of view that regards religion and science as being comparable authoritarian belief systems. If someone with this point of view breaks away from religion, he is likely to be open to pseudo-science as well.