Women more likely than men to believe in the spiritual and supernatural - why?

Great Debates
81

Yes, as I mentioned it seems you got garbled at the start of the discussion and became more entangled with each post, and a certain strategy of avoidance didn’t help your case. Since your more recent posts were rather inscrutable, I went back a bit in the thread rather than try to figure out the confusion you dug yourself into, and addressed your points from there onwards.

These are well established points. You made the mistake of confusing the disciplines of science with some of their less wholesome practitioners, passing judgement on the scientific method and community as opposed to a few bad scientists (and you appeared ignorant of the significant role played by news media in popularizing fraudulent unverified claims such as the cold fusion fiasco).

I invite you to read my posts again. Nowhere have I mentioned anything about your comments on female superiority. What I found irritating was your faux-authoritative dismissal of science, your corresponding attitude, and your subsequent garbled arguments. Nothing whatsoever to do with male/female intelligence differences.

By the way, I don’t think we have debated before, but if I really “hadn’t been able to see straight” as you suggest, you would have had a rather more excoriating response from me. I decided you were perhaps a bit confused and opinionated on this topic rather than an outright troll, so you got the nice treatment. I’m the closest thing you have to a “good cop” in this thread.

Not sure what this means. If you are referring to intelligence differences again, then there is some evidence that females are the more social human animals. However on re-reading the thread it strikes me that you weren’t talking about that when you started firing off your views on science and the supernatural, which is what I was addressing.

If you are talking about social interaction, here too the scientific method can be extremely useful. For example, someone applying tenets of the scientific method (and critical thinking) to human interaction will be more patient, better informed, and better prepared to deal with eventual problems (such as anger) in the course of such interaction. The emphases on collecting good data, avoiding hasty conclusions, recognizing one’s bias, and exposing fraudulent claims can serve one in good stead in most kinds of social (and other – consider business for example) interaction.

Intelligence differences between the sexes and related jokes really don’t bother me, though I disagree with the simplified statement that women are more intelligent than men. Intelligence is a relatively poorly understood measure of mental prowess, and, as explained earlier by a few posters, may be analyzed into several components. Women perform better at some tasks, men at others. To make the claim that one is more intelligent than the other I’d like to see solid evidence and arguments based on that evidence, and possibly mechanisms to explain the differences (e.g., are social factors primarily responsible?). Hand-waving and jokes are fine for MPSIMS or the Pit, but in GD more substance is required.

When you figure out how to turn this sentiment you mention above into a proper argument you can post it, however I strongly suggest using the search function for the GD forum first. For now enjoy the links, there’s some good stuff in there.

82

fessie, when you gain lekatt as an ally, you know you’re in real trouble!:stuck_out_tongue:

Actually, fessie, et al, the fundamental issue in this sub-debate concerns physicalism/materialism, which is the worldview that asserts that everything real is either a material entity or is a form or function or action of a material entity. Materialism also posits that everything that happens in the universe is theoretically explicable without any recourse to any non-empirical or non-material reality.

No one has ever adequately demonstrated the existence of anything non-materialistic. Unless you are the first and can convince us of such an instance, your underlying thesis and arguments – which presume the existence of the non-materialistic – is utterly useless and misguided.

If something is real, it can be explained materialistically, i.e., scientifically. Anything that can’t be so explained can’t be real unless you refute materialism.

83

Wow, thank you so much Ambushed, that’s really something to think about. You’ve explained a great deal.

You’re right, Abe, that many of my arguments have been piss-poor and I shouldn’t be so flippant, that’s a mistake on my part; please accept my apologies. I think my garbled arguments come from the fact that I’m trying to get at something that’s difficult for me to verbalize; because my approach is really about synthesis and not analysis since I’m an artist and not a scientist (nor a business person); and perhaps also because I’m pregnant with twins and not particularly at my cerebral height right now. The other day I was almost to my car before I realized I wasn’t wearing any shoes, so perhaps I shouldn’t be in GD in this state.

I still have many questions regarding materialism, empiricism and science, but I’ve been trying to compose a decent response for well over an hour and still can’t get it done. It’s time to let it go. I am fascinated by how different our thinking is.

When I’ve gone birdwatching and been around people who know the names of this and that, who can identify trees because they’ve memorized what we’ve decided to call them and therefore claim “knowledge”, I’ve always felt that they were just really good at playing a game. From the time I was a child I always thought there was a big gap between mastering statements made about something and truly knowing that thing.

On the other hand, when I draw something or paint it, when I’ve studied its relationship to light and space and experienced its texture and presence, when I’ve established the spiritual connection that enables me to create its image, well then I feel like I “know” it. And when I do it right it shows in my work and people respond because there’s something “real”.

Take it or leave it, an artist’s view is quite different from yours. Thanks for challenging me, I’ve learned a great deal.

Leroy I believe I would quite enjoy participating in a spiritual thread with you.

84

Yes, we could talk about the spiritual on my message board if you wish. I don’t think spiritual things can be explained, they need to be “felt”. I agree with your statements above, especially how people think they know things by being able to name them.
They tend to confuse the symbol (word) for the thing.

Our schools teach materialism, and the students believe it. Spiritualism comes from within and can only be discovered individually.

Love
Leroy

85

Let’s leave aside the fact that this assertion is entirely unsupported, and that it relies on an assumption that there is more than the material. So, how on earth do you know the difference between this hypothetical spiritualism of yours and a delusion? Doesn’t it bother you that spiritualism (or more properly dualism, to use Ambushed’s excellent and concise summary of the philosophy of the current problem) has never gone farther than the anecdotal stage?

A religious fanatic is absolutely convinced that his spirituality is actual, and that it is the result of pious behaviour in the service of God. However personal conviction, no matter how deep, does not rule out delusion – quite the contrary, it can be the cause of delusion.

I strongly suggest anyone not intimate with critical thinking read this good intriduction on the topic. I circulated it among staff in my company a couple years ago to help (with some success) put a stop to all sorts of unfounded rumours:

Introduction to Critical Thinking

Glad to hear it’s all sorted, Fessie. I doubt there’s a person on these boards who hasn’t logged off utterly confused and bewildered at one time or another. Doubt can be much more interesting and useful than certitude.

If I may add a couple more comments based on these observations:

It’s more than a memorization game though, it’s the quest for as good an understanding as possible of a certain subject. For example, I am sure your friends the ornithologists know well the behavioural differences between various species of birds, their social organization, intelligence, their calls and songs, physical characteristics, distribution, lifespan, diseases, parenting habits, even genetic make-up. All these data are extremely useful and valuable, not just because accurate data are intrinsically “good”, but also because the information almost inevitably leads to more information, perhaps on a different topic entirely. In the case of birds, study of their genetic make-up and of avian pathogens can lead to improved information and insight about, for example, human diseases such as some strains of the flu or SARS, since those diseases were originally avian before they jumped the species barrier.

Or, studying the various forms of flight developed among different birds (e.g. condors, ravens, hummingbirds are all built quite differently and employ very different styles of flight) can provide information about flying in general, evolution and adaptation, aerodynamics, the birds’ environment, and so forth.

It’s much more than a memory game, and it’s incredibly complex. It’s a huge universe of data and relationships waiting to be identified.

Absolutely. But I don’t see this as in any way incompatible in any epistemological way with scientific knowledge or the scientific method. You receive a lot of visual input from one particular object, and come to understand its visual representation so that you may interpret your vision of it on to the canvas. Viewers then respond to your execution and of course your vision, including aesthetic criteria, emotional cues, etc.

Science does something similar in the observation stage, except that the observer’s “personal” contributions are minimized and the object is examined in a variety of ways in addition to the light in the visible spectrum reflected by it. Then various tools (e.g. statistical anaysis) are brought in to make sense of the information collected.

Clearly it is difficult to produce science using art, and to produce art using science. Two entirely different things, though scientific theories of art are highly interesting.

Back to the OP, I vaguely remember a study a couple years ago that demonstrated experimentaly the social transmission of paranormal beliefs. I’ll try and find it, in case it sheds some light on why women seem to buy into the paranormal more than men – it may be something as simple as certain stronger social tendencies of one sex over another.

86

I was unable to locate the study on-line, but I located a mention in Skeptical Equirer (vol 26, no. 2, March/April 2002).

The study itself is published in Sociological Perspectives (vol 44, no. 1, 2001). The study was conducted by Barry Markowsky (U of Iowa) and Shane R. Thye (U of S. Carolina).

Some comments from the authors:

Again, sorry I could not find this on-line, I really miss the days when searching for something would result in finding it.

The above may provide an interesting angle to address the OP. Could the differences in male and female social behaviour account for the apparently higher likelihood of female (versus male) belief in the paranormal?

87

It would certainly help to cite the title of the study, so here is the info again, this time complete:

Barry Markovsky and Shane R. Thye. “Social Influence on Paranormal Beliefs.” Sociological Perspectives 44(1):21-44.

88

Thank you, fessie and Abe.

I advanced this position in an debate in a major thread here a couple of years ago, but it was ruined by a language-game-playing, 400 pound guerilla sophist who focused almost exclusively on how I put things instead of what I’d said. Sigh…

Fessie, I must say that I’m impressed by your openness and willingness to reconsider your ideas, even if you don’t end up changing your mind. Well done!

89

Note: how something is said determines what is said. Mess up the language, and you fail to communicate.

90

From the “Critical Thinking” article referenced by Abe:

I’m happy to say that some of this might actually be happening here!

There is more belief in the paranormal/supernatural among women. The original question is “why?” and fessie (correct me if I’m wrong) says it’s because belief in non-rational, non-scientific thinking/feeling is useful, and more useful to women, because science can’t explain everything.

I certainly agree that science doesn’t, and probably won’t in our lifetimes, explain everything. Abe, when he says:

appears to agree on this point.

I sure would like to be able to read that article about Social Influence on Paranormal Beliefs. Is there a reprint available anywhere?

Here’s my question: does acceptance of non-linear data (intuition) really lead one to accept paranormal or supernatural or spiritual thinking/feeling? I’m a computer guy, but I don’t analyze my love for my kids, I just go with it. I have read many parenting books, and they enforce my belief that kids mostly need encouragement. Certainly they have affecting my parenting style, but when I deal with the kids on a day-to-day basis, I just go with the gut–do what feels right. When I play guitar, the best solos are the not-thought-out ones, when “something” takes over and the notes just come out. Despite my acceptance of these non-scientific feelings, I still don’t believe in God, or reincarnation or etc.

So, is the female greater belief in “that stuff” because women have more use for non-critical thinking or is it “Social Influence…” or something else?

PS Good luck with the kids fessie–you think your “cerebral height” is limited now, wait until they’re running manically around the house screaming at each other! :slight_smile: (I have 6.)

91

I have no conscious awareness of how my body processes the information it receives from the environment. I don’t have to think about maintaining my balance, or analyzing the patterns of light that enter my eyes. I don’t monitor my homeostasis, control my digestion, consider my breathing, or direct my dreams.

Do you really think I’m not aware of the value of this unconscious and nonconscious processes?

And do you really think these processes can’t be understood?

92

I doubt the poll results. There could easily be a bias here, such as, perhaps women are more likely than men to ADMIT to believing in the listed categories.

Where there’s a majority of women believing in a category, there’s also a majority of men, even if it’s smaller. So I guess men are pretty intuitive too.

The study also shows that Christians are much more likely than non-Christians to believe in each category. Does that make Christians less rational thinkers? If so, how did the US ever get to the top of the technological heap?

93

More education than most other places and ditto resources.

94

That’s quite true. But I didn’t mess up or fail to communicate correctly; there was nothing wrong or misleading in what I wrote. No one objected but the sophist.

The sophist simply did what sophists do: they ignore the plain reading and clear semantic content of the text and instead play word games and similar forensic tricks to throw off the debate into an entirely different territory, where he can throw around strawmen and such to avoid the arguments which demonstrated his position to be seriously flawed.

I had written: Materialism also posits that everything that happens in the universe is theoretically explicable without any recourse to any non-empirical or non-material reality.

But the evading sophist jumped stupidly on the word “explicable” and wildly careened the debate into the ludicrous issue of to whom it might be theoretically explicable! That’s ridiculous and inexcusable.

I didn’t fail to communicate, TVAA; my clear, effective language was simply abused.

95

As abusive as the sophist may have been, he may also have had a point: less educated or less intelligent people are unlikely to feel that rational, scientific theories account for their experiences.

They would necessarily be more likely to accept logically incoherent but emotionally satisfying explanations.

96

I sometimes think all any of us ever do is accept emotionally satisfying explanations. It’s just that for some, logic is more emotionally satisfying than illogic.

97

Knowledge can come in the form of a simple observation, or in the deductions you make from those observations about the underlying mechanism causing the event you observed. If one has “spiritual knowledge” in the form of merely an observation, that knowledge is utterly useless.

Suppose that at random intervals, you observed an angel appear in your living room and refill your candy dish, regardless of how empty it was at the time. Assuming your observation was accurate, this knowledge still does you absolutely no good, because you cannot establish a causal mechanism by which you could predict the angel’s appearance. If your bowl was empty and you had guests coming over, you would have no idea whether you ought to buy your own candy for the dish, or if the angel would come by and do it for you. You would know that angels exist, but could not actually put that knowledge to any use.

In order to be at all relevant to our lives, knowledge must be used to predict events reliably. If the form of your “spiritual knowledge” is such that you learn about the spiritual world, what mechanisms it operates by, how to predict when a spiritual event will occur or spiritual force will act, and how to manipulate conditions to produce a spiritual event/act upon need…well, I’d say that’s useful knowledge. But if all you have is a vague “feeling” of some “hidden spiritual force”, or something like that, then there’s no way to translate that knowledge into anything useful, there’s no way to improve your life or anyone else’s with that knowledge, it doesn’t help you bring about desirable consequences. Knowledge about the function of a spark plug is much more valuable, because it allows you to create a vehicle that will reliably operate as time-saving transporation. Astrology, if it actually worked, would be useful knowledge, because you could predict character traits of other people and use that knowledge to your advantage.

So I wouldn’t mark the distinction between logical and spiritual knowledge. If the knowledge leads to discovery of a reliable mechanism, I don’t care whether the mechanism is natural, supernatural, spiritual, material, or whatever, nor do I care how that mechanism was discovered, by small logical steps or a burst of intuition. Rather I would mark the distinction between knowledge that can be used to predict events, and knowledge that cannot be used to predict events. The latter is utterly useless and irrelevant to our lives.

98

Not to mention some evidence that 3) occult/psychic powers actually exist.

99

I like Mr. Svinlesha. I also found it interesting that Abe and blowero ignored the many varied posts that opened the topic in favor of discussing it at great length with someone who spoke their language.

100

I like him too. He’s a very eloquent writer.

Gosh, I guess me & Abe are just big sacks of shit, then.:rolleyes: