[LINK] Former Christian fundamentalist: Science robbed me of my faith

I'm a former Christian, and I'm fascinated by intelligent Christians' ability to compartmentalize.

In every other area of their lives, Christians can be savvy, skeptical, rational...only to be credulous when it comes to religion.

In fact, they compartmentalize even at the "faith" level. Christians can give plenty of rational reasons why miraculous claims by Muslims are obviously dubious, but feel sincerely justified in believing supernatural elemants of their own creed.

In my efforts to understand what is going on in the mind of Christians, I've (currently) concluded the following:

• It's largely emotional and psychological, separate from rational components of their mind.*
• There is often childhood indoctrination involved.
• There is often a significant life-changing event or existential crisis involved prior to conversion.
• There is much to lose from leaving—Social, professional, emotional networks.
• There is little to lose by staying. Pascal's Wager, etc.
• Many don't actually "believe" in any true sense of the word—they just play along and don't make waves.

*Some seem to be able to reason about their beliefs (apologetics), but most of those attempts deconstruct down to some form of Pascal's Wager or Kierkegaardian Leap, which are essentially the same thing—"Why not believe? Life is hard and it can't hurt."

There are a few Christian/spiritual thought schools I'm impressed with. They have depth and devotion, admit agnosticism on many issues, don't dogmatically ignore evidence, etc. To what extent this group can be called "Christian" is disputable, but it's how they see themselves, so...

I think there are lessons to be learned.

Here's how it started for this guy:

starting with the realization that my God of the Gaps was gone.

A lot of not dumb people have trouble with

“How could all of these amazing forms of life, myself included, have just happened to arise?”

I watched the following BBC Documentary a while back. Some interesting stuff I hadn't seen before, and I've done the whole machine learning schtick, where it's obvious recursive iterative processes with cost feedback can do most anything.

http://documentaries-plus.blogspot.com/2011/08/secret-life-of-chaos.html

The title seems a misnomer, as it was more about systems producing spontaneous order than chaos.

Add to these physical examples of spontaneous order a little background in computational learning and optimization, and it's completely obvious that with billions of years and bazillions of stars, the universe can churn out things with tremendous function.

(Me, I find it strange that people make such a big deal out of evolution, while embryonic development and morphogenesis is about a zillion times more amazing, as it turns one tiny little undifferentiated blob into a baby in 9 months. )

I think the other hangup about evolution is conceptual. High school biology talks about species - at least back in my day. Then a creature is of one species and not another, so how could it magically transform form one to another?

If you take a nominalist approach instead, and just note the diversity of creatures, with varying degrees of the ability to interbreed, it's no shock that the population statistics change over time, and interbreeding clusters merge and split and move in state space.

Physical spontaneous order plus some simulations of spontaneous order, functional development, and population evolution and clustering. It's simple, when the right pieces are presented. Most people haven't seen those pieces.

Open Thread.

How about we stop jerking ourselves off over the fact that we can outthink Christian fundamentalists? That would be a pretty solid application of rationality.