I Am Fundamentalist, And So Can You.

This started out as a post about a recently-reported negative correlation between IQ and religious belief (thanks to Craig McGill for the link). It was going to be relatively restrained by local standards; while it's hard to resist the temptation to rub one's hands at yet more evidence that only Stupid People Have Imaginary Friends, I'd have voiced reservations over the unwarranted conflation of "academics" with "smart people" (believe me, there are as many dumb folks in those hallowed halls as there are anywhere else except maybe Fox News); the use of a single score to measure that multifaceted bag of traits we call "intelligence"; even the sloppiness of some of the third-party coverage (this headline, for example, gets the study's findings completely ass-backwards).

In the end, though, I decided to leave those poor bastards alone and come out of the closet myself.

I use the word "fundamentalist" in the sense promoted by Jonathan Rauch: anyone who cannot seriously entertain the possibility that they are wrong about their basic beliefs. It applies pretty obviously to Biblical literalists and their ilk, but the term is not limited to them. It extends to me. I suspect it even extends to the likes of Richard Dawkins, even though he has stated publicly that he would be willing to change his mind on the subject of God. All it would take, he says, is "evidence".

Which is a laudable attitude, and one that reflects the basic difference between science and religion. The question that's been occurring to me lately, though, is, what kind of evidence would it take to turn me into a believer? How much would be enough? God is such an outrageous proposition from so many angles that almost any alternative explanation would be more parsimonious. Mass hallucination. Brain tumors. The Matrix. Aliens with a propensity for juvenile practical jokes.

Imagine a scenario in which the heavens literally opened up, and a Big White Dude with a Mighty Beard and a flotilla of cherubim stroking His Divine Genitalia stared down at me through the clouds and proclaimed in a mighty voice,

I, God, exist! Take your photographs! Run your tricorder!
BELIEVE IN ME!

Would I believe? Fuck no. This has to be some kind of trick. And no matter how much evidence piles up — a smiley face embedded in pi at the thirteen-trillionth decimal place; a cosmological consensus that yes, there's really only one universe, and it really just does happen to be configured with all its physical constants tuned precisely to permit our existence; the literal appearance of the Four Horsemen — all of that, appearing in the face of such astronomically-massive odds, would still have to be weighed against the likelihood of the alternative.

What are the odds that I'm a brain in a tank or a computer simulation, and some bored undergrad is fucking with my sensory inputs? Pretty damn low. What are the odds that an entire physical multiverse was created by means unknown by an omnipotent omniscient sentient entity that exists eternally, without any cause or creator of its own?

Lower. Way lower. (Or at least, that model raises far more numerous and substantive questions than it pretends to answer.)

The bottleneck here is my own mental processes, my own ability to parse input from the outside world, to trust that said input even reflects an objective outside world. The limits are always in me; the brain contains too many tricks and shortcuts to trust implicitly, especially if it serves up something I consider impossible. Whatever input is thrust into my face, hack will always be a more parsimonious explanation than god.

Which leaves me unconvertible, and reduces me to the status of fundamentalist— and Dawkins' grand pronouncement about "evidence" to empty sophistry.

Sucks to introspect.