How to get along with people who have different Metaphysical viewpoints

lisab

Re the bolded text: that's so true! In fact, once people are in that state of mind, your facts and data only make them dig in deeper.

Ivan Seeking

Funny that you would remember that. It was almost 8 years ago!
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=31585

New link
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bridgi...n_two_cultures

I only needed to search what you provided. I didn't remember a thing about it.

netgypsy

There are two kinds of people in the world - a.) those who study the facts and form their beliefs from those facts and b.) those who select the beliefs they wish to be true and seek out only those facts that agree with these beliefs.

Some of my family came to the US from northern Ireland. We had very simple rules for adult conversation. One avoided three topics - religion, politics and sex.

Discussing either of the first two would get you killed very quickly.
Discussing the third - if you had to talk about it you were obviously not participating.

Even though we're now several generations away from that war torn time where bombs were placed in baby carriages these three rules seem very sensible.

If you are an a.) and have to work with a b.),they are particularly applicable.

zoobyshoe

It stuck deeply in my mind: first time I'd ever heard an articulate statement of what it was like to be on the other side of the fence.

I'm glad you found it and the new link. I couldn't think what terms to search.

MarcoD

You took away all favorite topics of people in the Netherlands!

(Well, except for the weather of course. Which is always a variant on: It's twelve degrees Celsius and raining.)

Pythagorean

I just can't keep uber-religious company and I often tell my mother she's wrong. I have two friends that used to be evolution denialists and I very respectfully told them they were wrong and they both are a lot more considerate of it now. One, whom I expected to research the topic on his own before arguing with me again, has since become an atheist (he changed his world view: accommodation).

The other seems to have incorporated evolution into his world view, crediting it as one of God's miracles (assimilation); he believes that there is no instantaneous divine intervention, but that God set the initial conditions of a deterministic system.

Anybody that aggressively and blatantly denies evolution has not adapted a rational view of the universe or they would have been convinced by the evidence if they actually took the time to digest it; But most importantly, it's the difference between people who think actions in the universe requires some causal explanation, and those that think a lack-of-explanation (i.e. magic) suffices.

Antiphon

Post withdrawn.

jim hardy

I usually say to them something along the lines of
"Science is trying to figure out how God set up Mother Nature to work. After all, if you were building a universe wouldn't you make it run pretty much automatic , with some rules of how things are gonna behave, so you dont have to micromanage every single atom? Math must be one of His languages. It's just that the guys who transcribed the original Bible weren't fluent in it. And consider who was their audience -- nobody spoke advanced mathematics back then. They'd only recently figured out Pi, for Pete's sake."

You might enjoy reading Robert Jastrow's "God and the Astronomers", , i think it'll help you with this social conundrum.


Good Luck !

old jim

Adyssa

I have the perspective that none of us have a 100% complete idea of where we come from, why we are here, or what happens after we die.

With that in mind, I can talk to anyone about anything. My view is not 100% correct, their view is not 100% correct. I might mention that I was raised Christian (protestant, baptist if you want to get specific) and have since adopted a more or less agnostic view. I'm comfortable talking to people of any faith and I have a genuine interest in their views. It's not my place to say they are wrong. I can't prove anything. I might let them know that I don't immediately take what they say as fact, but with some tact, that is a sentence I can make inoffensive.

I don't know why many atheists feel that they must belittle religious believers. I guess there is an evangelical aspect to many religions whereby believers do attempt to convert non-believers, but it is my experience that this is usually done in a way that is not quite as forcible as the convertee likes to tell everyone it was. The violent fundamentalist types are few and far between. I don't usually enjoy being evangelised to, but by the same token, I don't throw science books at people and demand that they accept THE FACTS either.

A little live and let live, by definition, never hurt anyone. :)

Ryan_m_b

1) You'll need to provide some context of what you are talking about but mostly that is simple to answer; I came from a certain town, I came from my parents, I came from a species whose evolution is...
2) Begging the question by assuming a "why"
3) We have a very good idea of what happens when you die. Your bodily functions cease and you decay. There has never been any indication of anything else, it's like asking what happens to a candle when you blow it out.
I can talk to anyone about anything but I often disagree with them and I will vehemently argue the point if I think that their belief is detrimental to me, others and society at large (I'm not so concerned if it is detrimental to them).
Yes but views can be tested to see who has evidence to support them. If they cannot be tested and there is no evidence then the correct answer is "I don't know". Also regarding "100%" correct I would implore you to google my signature and read the essay by Asimov.
Why does "proof" matter? All that matters is evidence, you don't have to 100% absolutely know something to know that it is. Regarding whether not it is your place it depends on the setting obviously. Workplace behaviour and pub behaviour is very different. Finally let's say that Alice does not know why Y causes X and Bob claims he does. Alice can look at Bob's claim and point out all the flaws in his reasoning and research thus showing that this claim is wrong without actually having a claim of her own.
I think many people feel it worth fighting depending on the situation. I don't care if someone privately wants to believe whatever they want but beliefs and the mechanisms you use to determine beliefs determine your actions which influence others. I think it was PZ Myers who said (something like) "some people ask me why I bother to call myself atheist. Well if there was a large group of people in this country that wanted to control the behaviour of everyone else on the basis of their belief in Big Foot you'd better believe I'd be calling myself abigfootist".

Also it isn't just religion we are talking about here. So called "alternative medicines" drain millions of pounds out of systems like the NHS and soak up billions of dollars world wide. There are huge industries dedicated to scamming and taking advantage of vulnerable (and often sick people) on the basis of pseudoscience and irrational belief. The world doesn't care what you believe, it will kill you anyway if it can. Anything set of beliefs (and therefore actions) that aren't formed from an evidence based system just aren't going to be as well equipped to deal with a variety of situations.
That would be fine if the irrational beliefs of others weren't harming and killing millions world wide (no condoms in a HIV epidemic anyone?)

Galteeth

So I had a discussion with the person in question and it went very well. Basically, I just explained that I have a different perspective then him, and he was fine with that.

As far as discussing this with friends, I actually have convinced two of my friends that evolution was real (well one of them I had to give her a book to read that convinced her.) one interesting thing, the other friend was initially offended by my views, feeling they were closed minded, but after a two hour long conversation, was convinced. However, i got the sense that she was somewhat unhappy coming to this conclusion; she preferred her previous belief system. As for what is the point of discussing such things, well, with close friends, I like to talk about meaningful things sometimes.
With the latter girl, in response to her saying everything is energy, i started off with, ok, define energy. That quickly got to the heart of the matter, the question whether there could be something exerting influence that was on-physical, and if so, was it subject to consistent rules. After admitting that it in order for something to exert influence on the physical world, there had to be a mechanism by which it was doing so, and consistent rules that governed its interactions, she saw that such a thing had to be inherently physical.

Galteeth

On the subject of self-proclaimed skeptics, i will say, i think there are some skeptics that are a bit "blinded by science" so to speak. I have seen those that can't separate their own opinions from their science-based viewpoints, or who feel that any opinion that can't be quantified is inherently invalid, not making a distinction between the objective and the subjective. Perhaps it is individuals like this who are partially responsible for "non-skeptics" being so defensive.

chiro

Look, I like science as much as a lot of people both laymen and scientific professionals themselves but I had to something about this:

Firstly science is caught up in a bit of a twist: it is very narrow yet it makes highly inductive statements. There has been some great success of doing this kind of thing like for example Newtons investigations into gravity, but again given what is done it is a very dangerous thing if this nature is not fully acknowledged.

Trying to extrapolate highly inductive statements out of a very narrow set of experiments both controlled or uncontrolled is not wise if there is no caution exerted on both the experimenter and by anyone analyzing it.

The other thing is that the kind of segregation, hyperspecialization and isolation amongst different fields doesn't help the cause but makes it worse.

Yes we are starting to see a lot of interdiscplinary investigation, experimentation and so on between the fields that were previously isolated but again I have to stress it's very early in the game (of science) and the simple fact is that our techniques and knowledge are very very primitive.

People might say that mathematics is complex and that mathematicians are geniuses but Von Neumann was right in saying that essentially mathematics is simple when you consider how complex life is and I agree in some respects after studying mathematics myself.

So even if you don't want to consider things like the near death studies or things like that, at least acknowledge that we are at a primitive age in our understanding, and also that with our technique of taking very narrow data of any kind (controlled, uncontrolled, whatever) and trying to develop highly inductive statements, you are bound to end up having many disasters versus the many successes.

This is definitely something everyone should at the very least consider: the fact that there is only relativity between things and not blatant 'true' or 'false'.

While the premise is good, again we are way to narrow minded to take in a lot of the detail as human beings.

Again it boils down to taking a very specific stance and considering a very limited context. This is not a shot at you or any other scientist it is just our current limitation as human beings.

We can't take in everything at once so we have to filter things in our mind, make assumptions and simplify things as much as possible.

So what ends up happening is that a lot of information that is deemed 'useless' or 'not significant' ends up getting filtered and even if someone has a good logical heuristic for their argument, the data that the argument is based on might not be a good thing: garbage in garbage out.


I hope for the sake of humanity that scientists make all efforts to rid the field, its politics and anything related from these attributes, but I'm afraid as human beings I don't have much faith.

Scammers will always find ways by taking advantage of well established and legitimate areas as well as non-established areas to do their work. One audience may have attributes that are suited to the scammer, but again scammers will always find a way regardless.

Also to finish, I wanted to add that we live in a world of great deception.

It's everywhere in the smallest ways and you would be a fool to think that you don't live in a world that is flooded in it.

Part of our job as human beings is to try and discern what is deception and what isn't and it is not an easy job for any human being to do.

We all have our experiences, our preconceived thoughts and notions and everything else that contributes on how we see the world and even with this we still have a great challenge in trying to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Pythagorean

But it is kind of a shot to assume that most of what you've said in your whole post isn't already considered by scientists. It's kind of our starting point... kind of the very idea that ignited the age of reason. Kind of why we require evidence to make claims...

chiro

Well when you see some scientists being arrogant in their viewpoint, then yes it becomes a valid thing to say.

Arrogance isn't just limited to scientists but to all human beings and I did not categorize all scientists with this attribute whatsoever.

So yes it wasn't a cheap shot at 'scientists' as a group and when you get a scientist that has a bit of arrogance then yes it needs to be made clear to them.

In fact you should make it clear to anyone regardless of if they are scientists or not.

Also I never said that science is a bad thing: I'm a member at PF for christs sake!

Galteeth

This reminds me of some old Dilbert strips, featuring "Dan, the illogical scientist"

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Illogical%20Scientist

chiro

I'm surprised he doesn't have two black eyes let alone one.....