Forrest Mims on Amp Hour

[timb]

It just goes to show that you can't simply dismiss creationists as "idiots" or "stupid".  I find it interesting to try to look beyond the delusion to try to understand why they would want to hold that point of view. Particularly obviously clever people with a keen interest in scientific discovery.

When I read Richard Dawkins book "the god delusion" one thing I took out of it was that religions facilitate their survival by getting new followers when they are young. Children haven't had time to learn about dangers that could imperil their survival and hence the genes. Religion exploits the biological imperative of human young, who cannot survive independently, to need to obey adults.

I wonder if there are statistics on what percentage of creationists did not have parents who also were creationists. People who later in life decided to embrace creationism and religion in general. I also wonder why when the child has matured they "choose" to retain such beliefs. We let go of the easter bunny, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus when we reach an age where we can reason the facts out for ourselves. God is similarly a fanciful human invention but the delusion is retained by many into adulthood.

Probably the answer lies in power and influence, and wealth for the clerics. Also you would need to confront being deceived by your parents and that they are wrong. Maybe there are social pressures too.

I think most people would rather take the easy road. Growing up surrounded by religion and then becoming an Atheist as an adult means you have to start asking questions; very tough ones that make you very uncomfortable. Most people go down that road by noticing the fallacies and inconsistencies of religion and then seeking out answers, which requires critical thinking skills and intelligence. This is what makes me so in awe of him being a Creationist. He's obviously got the skills to see it's BS () but he just can't see the Forrest through the trees. (That was awful, I know.)

Adults don't believe in Santa or the Easter Bunny, but they do believe in God. People take the easy road, the shortcut to information, by looking around and noticing that everyone around them believes in God, so they assume it to be true. After all, how could *everyone* be so wrong, right? That's part of the social pressure. The other part is that nobody wants to be an outsider, so even if they have doubts they go along with it anyway to keep up with the status quo.

...a non sociopathic atheist is generally a romantic...

I don't think most Atheists are sociopaths. I think there are two distinct groups:

1) The Romantic Atheist: Like you said, these are the ones that generally go with the flow and are live and let live. In my experience, these are people who grew up either loosely religious or with no religion.

2) The Angry Atheist: These are the people that are angry at religion and the religious. I personally think the anger stems from being controlled by religion from an early age; people that had overly strict or fundamentalist parents, were forced to attend church daily, went to Catholic schools and so forth. Instead of just moving on and living life, they harbor a deep seated resentment towards anything religious and seek to punish anyone connected to it.

[JoannaK]

Excellent show. I'm sure Mims has had a lot more stories to tell, so I'd like to hear him again on some later show.

Kaz911: IIRC the Swedish have word Gammalt, that means old, so may well be related since swdes/norwegians did quite a lot bisness with brits in old times.

Joanna - I'm Danish - and my wife is British - from "Up North" UK - and in the North of England there are a LOT of Scandinavian words most likely from the Vikings went on their "raids" - and a lot of the towns have Viking names. I have one of their local dialect "dictionaries" and at least 80% of the words there are from old Scandinavian (norse) influence.

There's been some discussions of the northmost parts of UK resigning fro,m the brits and perhaps even jionming the Nordics .. Humon has made some nice comics about.. http://satwcomic.com/part-of-the-gang

[Stonent]

It's like when you have someone you really look up to, perhaps even idolize, then one day find out they're a child molester. Only, this is worse; he's a...CREATIONIST!

I respectfully disagree with your choice of comparisons. 

But I was glad that Dave didn't engage him on his personal beliefs like he tends to do.

My mother's side of the family was Lutheran, my father's side was Catholic. My grandfather (on my mom's side) was an avid fossil hunter and even discovered a new species of trilobite but the museum mysteriously lost the sample he sent to them after they confirmed it was a yet unknown species. My guess is some scientist wanted the credit and swiped it.

I was never raised thinking the world was only 6000 years old and I've never met anyone personally who did, but I never had any problems reconciling religious beliefs with scientific theories of creation either. I've always been fine with the big bang being the way it was done. And it wasn't until my teenage years that I met someone who didn't think that way and that's the only person I have met in person that was like that. 

[Zero999]

Please let's not ruin the topic by talking about religion.

I grew up on the 90s and have most of his books. I like his friendly style and it's a good introduction to electronics and enabled me to understand many concepts even though my maths wasn't very strong back then.

On the downside I don't rate him as an engineer. I find the books a bit repetitive (the same circuit is often shown several times), they contain too many errors and inadequate explanations of many of the circuits.

I still have the books somewhere but I've also got them in PDF format on my hard drive.