
Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias - tlb
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30863-7
======
skh
My brother-in-law is a fundamentalist Christian. My sister homeschooled all 8
kids from kindergarten through 12th grade. His view is that since God made
Adam as a full grown man then it's possible that God created the world “with
age” in his parlance. The point is that people who want something to be true
will engage in the nececcsry mental gymnastics to justify their belief. It’s
not unique to firinge ideas but it is easier to spot in people with fringe
ideas.

EDIT: The fringe idea I referenced above is the notion that God created the
world to look like it's really old even though it isn’t old. I've not
encountered this rationale before. My comment is in no way diminishing
religion.

~~~
ars
It's hardly a fringe idea. It's actually pretty mainstream.

It even has a dismissive name: Last Tuesdayism.

You have to be careful to keep the idea separate from Young Earth Creationism!

Young Earth Creationism directly contradicts observation. In contrast
believing the universe was created already old does not conflict with science
(you just can't prove it one way or another).

~~~
diego_moita
So basically you're saying that this "God" thingy created the world to look
like it evolved and changed but this is the way it always was? Such that he
planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists?

Do you really believe this idea? Do you think it is worth intellectual
respect?

Edit: for perspective: there was a time the Catholic church rejected reason.
It ended badly to Galileo and Copernicus and had very bad repercussions on the
church credibility, from Spinoza to Voltaire. American Pentecostals and
fundamentalist Jews and Muslims should learn that lesson: on the long run
reason wins.

~~~
dragontamer
> So basically you're saying that this "God" thingy created the world to look
> like it evolved and changed but this is the way it always was? Such that he
> planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists?

There's a large number of people who believe this.

Its a bit weird, because it implies that God is above lying to his followers.
So as a Christian myself, who believes in Omnipotence (all powerful),
Omniscient (all knowing), and Benevolence (all-loving), the viewpoint that God
would explicitly lie to us is almost certainly against the 3rd peg: its anti-
benevolence.

Anyway, different Christians obviously have different beliefs on the matter. I
am in agreement with the poster you responded to: it is an... unfortunately...
mainstream belief in some Christian communities.

I'm sure there are holes people can poke at my specific denomination of
course. So it'd be hypocritical for me to push too much against the belief
that "God is tricking us to see the true believers vs the evolutionists".
But... yeah, its just not a belief I can get behind.

> Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool
> scientists?

Generally speaking, the argument goes to look at the Old Testament,
specifically the Book of Job. In the Old Testament, God tested some of his
prophets with incredible tests (ie: letting the Devil kill his kids, take all
of his wealth away, etc. etc). So the idea of "God is just testing us" is
generally the argument that comes forth.

I guess the general idea is that God can cause issues that seem big to us, but
are small in the great scheme of His plans. If you want the religious
background on this particular school of thought. The Book of Job has the
prophet lose everything, but eventually gains greater prosperity in the end.
In particular, Job deserves prosperity because even when all hope was lost, he
kept his faith.

Still, that fundamentally doesn't quite explain why God would particularly lie
to us humans about the "evolution" issue. So I've never personally liked this
particular religious argument. I find it far more likely that God would prefer
us Humans to discover science and properly make discoveries and advance our
culture for the good of all mankind.

\------------

It comes down to Biblical Literalism. Some people believe that the Bible is
literally true. That there were exactly 7 days of creation, that Methusala
lived over 900 years old... that a dude named "Samson" had magical hair, etc.
etc. And since Biblical Literalism is a foundational peg to those
denominations, they go through great pains to prove it.

Alternatively, if you're in my camp, you are open to interpreting the Bible.
My denomination believes that the Bible is a collection of stories that God
wants us to know about. Not necessarily that the word is literally true.

~~~
diego_moita
I am very sorry, you talk like a sensible person. But the more you explain it
the less respect I have for religion.

American Pentecostalism sounds like a very stupid tribal superstition to me.

I come from an European and Catholic background. Catholicism and the
Protestant mainstream that adopted most of their Theology (e.g.: Anglicanism,
Lutheranism, Calvinism) do have a deep respect for science. They learned that
lesson painfully, after what they did to Copernicus and Galileo.

Pentecostals are headed to serious mistakes if they think anti-reason can take
them anywhere.

~~~
flukus
You might be surprised by the official catholic position on evolution. There
take on evolution for instance is:

> Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official
> position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time.
> However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the
> impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to
> him.

That isn't evolution via natural selection, that's evolution via gods hex
editor altering the genome, they explicitly reject natural evolution:

> While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental
> creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in
> atheistic evolution.

They also believe in a literal Adam and Eve:

> The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written
> entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states, "The
> account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a
> primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of
> man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human
> history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first
> parents"

Catholics are creationists, just not of they young earth variety.

Edit - Source: [https://www.catholic.com/tract/adam-eve-and-
evolution](https://www.catholic.com/tract/adam-eve-and-evolution)

~~~
giomasce
That is not the official catholic position. That is just a random webpage
written by a self-proclaming catholic editor to promote their books. Do not
try too hard to harvest for official catholic positions on matters that are
not the core faith ones (and history of the Universe most certainly is not):
there are more than a billion catholics around the world, coming from any
social status and literary level. There cannot possibly be a position common
to all of them on nearly anything, except maybe core faith matters.

That said, you are right in your conclusion, because it is true that (nearly
all) catholics are "creationist", in that they believe that God created the
universe and everything in there. But many of them also believe in evolution
via natural selection, in the very same way you believe it and as shown by the
proofs and scientific thinking that our society has accumulated. There is no
hex editing by God: it is still true that evolution happens under the guidance
of God, because it happens under the laws he created. But (actually, just
because of that) without the need of touching anything. On the other hand, it
is also true that he may do some hex editing if he wished to, but many
catholics agree that there is no need to believe that this has actually
happened.

~~~
AstralStorm
You can use the Canonical Law Codex and papal bulls if you're so inclined to
check the official statements of the Catholic Church. These are very
interesting and nuanced positions on many weirdnesses accumulated over
centuries.

------
olliej
Ok, so right off the bat I have issues with this paper.

* A topic like this, especially with the stated result, seems super likely to be subject to confirmation bias so we need to be careful not to fall prey to that. The paper title seems geared to produce that.

* Study 1 (the college student study) had N=157, and as is the nature of such quizzes seems way too biased to be meaningful given the claims being presented. All were from one university, they received course credit for participating, 135 were psychology students, etc. This is ignoring potential bias in the results (I recall studies discussing the desire of study participants to "help" studies). So I don't believe anything super meaningful should be taken study 1.

* Study 2, French population analysis had a larger sample, but I'd still be reticent to make huge statements. The supplementary material doesn't include the actual quiz questions, but seems to be a 1-4 scale of agreement with a list of conspiracies + horoscope + creationism. The creationist question conflates young earth and creation theories which are obviously correlated but aren't strictly the same (I've known creationists who still realize actual age of earth)

* Study 3 is also super biased, N=513 French and 220 Swiss, 72% of the French participants were students at the host university. Again the Swiss students (but not the French) received course credit for participating. Participants were also informed of the goal of the study ahead of participating which could reasonably be expected to skew data.

Honestly it irks me that a paper like this has got into something like Cell as
given the claims being made I would expect/requirer a larger and less biased
sample and more information about the actual quiz contents.

~~~
arminiusreturns
Thank you for articulating what I was thinking as well. Seems like poor
science from my quick reading of it for the same reasons you state.

------
EdwardDiego
Creationism inherently incorporates a conspiracy theory - that evidence of a
young earth exists, but is dismissed or even hidden by scientists because of
their "faith" in secularism.

E.g., the Grand Canyon totally proves a global flood, but scientists refuse to
accept that because of their "faith" in the earth being billions of years old.

~~~
whatshisface
You could probably find a correlation between any two things that involve
rejecting mainstream beliefs, right or not. I'm suspicious of any theory that
tries to divide everyone up in to the "enlightened ones" and "the dumb ones,"
on the grounds that you could minimize friction with the public by accepting
_every_ mainstream belief, whereas trying to be as right as possible would
mean both disagreeing where society is wrong _and sometimes when society is
right,_ because if you're in the business of trusting yourself at all you will
make at least a few mistakes.

To make it personal, think about it like this: if you start by saying to
yourself "this thing society thinks is acceptable is wrong," and if you then
go on and apply that mindset to everything else, there is a nonzero chance
that your honest first-principles evaluation of, say, young-earth creationism
would come out positive. Unless you think your inner compass has a zero false
positive rate, spin that wheel again for every single commonly accepted belief
and you're essentially guaranteed to end up believing at least one think that
might appear in a study like this.

~~~
codezero
This article talks about cognitive bias, not dumbness or enlightenment:

“which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency
detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness.”

Plenty of smart people suffer from cognitive bias, I’d bet most do to some
degree.

------
dang
All: if you comment here, please keep it substantive and avoid shallow
dismissals, religious smiting (for or against) and whatnot.

------
toss1
Good work here on the teleological bias.

The question is what's behind it? My working conjecture is that it is some
people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity of many events being essentially
random, chaotic, or stochastic. They'd rather have an evil cabal deliberately
executing the 9/11 attacks, or school shootings, or faking the school
shootings, than to accept that sometimes things just get very far out of hand.

But, other than rough observation (and likely confirmation bias), I've not
done much to substantiate this conjecture. Comments?

~~~
soundwave106
First Google I came up with the psychological profile of a conspiracy theorist
is here:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/)

Lots of interesting points IMHO. It is mentioned that those who "habitually
seek meaning and patterns in the environment" and cannot tolerate mundane or
unclear explanations for big world events are more prone to conspiracy
theories. So on one hand, on this, I think you are right.

On the other hand, a lot of the article is devoted to the notion that
conspiracy theories are a social defense mechanism among the more vulnerable,
threatened, and/or powerless population.

Narcissism -- both of the self, and tribal narcissism, is also mentioned as a
factor.

(Ironically, as the article mentions, conspiracy theories tend to make it less
likely that individuals will take actions that, in the long run, might boost
their autonomy and control. Thus the article calls conspiracy theories a
"self-defeating form of motivated social cognition".)

I'll buy that it is a messy combination of any or all of the above factors
that lead to a belief in conspiracy theories -- such make sense from my small
sample of people I know who are more prone to conspiracy theories.

(They do note that "vulnerable and disadvantaged populations that have been
identified as most likely to benefit from [conspiracy theories]" have not been
as extensively studied as they would like to see. Interesting conclusions so
far though.)

~~~
dnomad
There's a good chunk of literature that demonstrates conpiracists have
different brain structures. This is why people who believe in one conspiracy
theory are more likely to also believe in other (conflicting) conspiracy
theories and, on an individual level, what you're dealing with is a paranoid
cognitive style [1].

The other part of this is that there seems to be a strong element of social
contagion. The research here is still new but it's becoming more and more
clear that social media can virally amplify paranoia within a population [2].

So there's probably a good chunk of people who might exhibit excessive
paranoia (some studies put this at 10% [3] but I recall numbers as high as 30%
after 9/11) but then it may be possible to technologically amplify this.

[1] [https://qz.com/1286982/why-do-people-believe-in-
conspiracy-t...](https://qz.com/1286982/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-
theories-because-they-want-to-feel-unique/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-
ref...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-
attacks-germany.html)

[3] [https://www.livescience.com/37419-paranoid-beliefs-
common.ht...](https://www.livescience.com/37419-paranoid-beliefs-common.html)

------
danielvf
My all time favorite is conspiracy theory is that the positions and angles of
street inspection stickers on the backs of road signs are secretly driving
directions to concentration camps for foreign UN soldiers to take people to.

I've known plenty of conspiracy theorists, on both sides of the political
spectrum - black helicopters, chemtrails, faked moon landings, flat-earthers,
NSA-records-your-phone calls-and-emails, white people were bred on an island
by a professor named Jacob and are inherently evil as a result of the process,
US government did OKC, US government did 9/11, Mossad did 9/11, JFK...

But I don't think the defining characteristic of these "believers" is not
belief, but rather unbelief - a feeling that someone is lying to them. A lot
of times they'll argue in the same evening for mutually contradictory
conspiracy theories. Or will happily switch to a different theories about the
moon landing as soon as I show some evidence against their first one. It's not
at all about any one particular theory being true.

In end, perhaps it's a good thing to have a some percentage of the population
be disposed to a little skepticism about those in power.

~~~
stallmanite
NSA-records-your-phone-calls is a bit unlike the other entries in your
conspiracy list, n'est-ce pas?

~~~
danielvf
Funnily enough, I heard both that and the road sign one from the same person
in the early nineties.

------
jrs95
This is interesting and IMO generally true. But, not everything that is called
a conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory. Asking “who benefits from this
policy, and are they in a position to have influence in creating or
maintaining it?” is not inherently a conspiracy theory. But anyone who’s doing
something different from what they’re saying would prefer you didn’t notice.
And if people are noticing, they’d probably want to dismiss their critics with
whatever means they could. Including dismissing legitimate criticism and
skepticism as paranoid conspiracy theories. This is especially confusing
because there is overlap between actual conspiracies or at the very least
dishonest politics/leadership and what people prone to paranoia and
conspiracism would be more likely to think about. I just don’t like the idea
of people allowing the charicture of a conspiracy theorist to stop them from
thinking critically about the information they are being presented.

~~~
empath75
I would argue that a true conspiracy theorist doesn’t just believe that a
single event was the result of a single group of people, but that the
conspiracy is near omnipotent and responsible for many unrelated terrible
things.

It’s one thing, for example, to believe that some aspect of the 9/11 story
doesn’t hold up — perhaps that you believe the government covered up for Saudi
involvement. That may be right or wrong, but it’s at least something that’s
plausible.

A true conspiracy theorist would believe that the whole thing was made up and
never happened, or that the whole thing was planned and executed by the
Illuminati, who have been working together for centuries to control the masses
through mind control.

~~~
dudul
I don't disagree with this comment, but unfortunately the label is also used
against the people described in your 2nd paragraph.

------
nafizh
I couldn't find the distribution of religious affiliations in the supplemental
material. Did anyone find it?

Surely, if you are going to do a study as such, you need to disclose the
numbers on religious affiliations of the participants. It would be fun to see
the correlations of analytical ability and affiliation to a particular
religion. Or if you want to brush all religions under the same rug, then it
doesn't matter.

------
sattoshi
I am not at all used to academic writing and am finding it difficult to find
the questions they asked participants.

Could anyone point me in the right direction? I can't really think anything of
this study without them.

------
empath75
I’ve always believed that conspiracy theories are fundamentally motivated by a
belief that things happen for a reason.

If a bad thing happened, seemingly undeserved, there must have been some dark
force behind it — if not Satan or witches, then Jews or communists or Muslims
or globalists or gays or whatever. The alternative — that people suffer for no
reason at all, is intolerable for some people.

~~~
codezero
Interestingly that is what the article implies - though they use the term
teleological thinking to refer to the belief things happen for a reason.

~~~
sometimesijust
Actually that's not what the study implies. They found "rejection of science
and animism" to be a stronger predictor of conspiracism. Although "finalism"
was found to be second best so it is certainly part of the mix but going off
this study you could not say it is the fundamental cause. In fact the
researchers are careful to point out that they have established correlation
and not cause.

~~~
codezero
Thanks for clarifying. This is clearly out of my league :)

------
diego_moita
To me, the most interesting about this belief that "everything is part of a
master plan and a big conspiracy" are:

1) There is always some kind of political undertone on it.

2) The ones most prone to believe in it are the ones most gullible to accept
authoritarian rule. No wonder that every dictator, from Maduro to Erdogan to
Putin and Jiping love so much this argument.

------
ohsupbro
Don't 100% of these "findings" also apply to anyone that believes in
evolution?

~~~
olliej
I'm not sure what you're saying here -- evolution is a theory, specifically it
has a huge amount of accumulated evidence that indicates that the theory is
correct, and makes meaningful falsifiable predictions which have also been
validated, and numerous long term experiments that agree entirely with the
theory.

Religion is defined by faith in something/anything explicitly in the absence
of evidence, hence "faith".

Conspiracy "theories" often use the absence of evidence as de facto evidence.
Which is not remotely logically sound.

------
claydavisss
Not really. No one needs a label for things that are false.

Conspiracy theories are things that could actually be true but are designated
as ridiculous by someone who perceives discussion as a threat. But lo and
behold, "conspiracy theories" sometimes are true despite our efforts to write
them off as quackery.

My favorite example is Mark Klein

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein)

who was derided and written off as a conspiracy nutjob until his allegations
surrounding the diversion of telecommunications traffic ended up being true.

We see it and participate in this every day. If you suggest there is life
somewhere across the galaxy, they call you an astronomer. If you say you say a
flying saucer in a photo of our own solar system, you are a nutjob. What is
the fundamental difference?

~~~
krapp
>If you suggest there is life somewhere across the galaxy, they call you an
astronomer.

No, that has nothing to do with being an astronomer.

>If you say you say a flying saucer in a photo of our own solar system, you
are a nutjob. What is the fundamental difference?

The "astronomer" claims there is _likely_ life somewhere across the galaxy,
but doesn't state with absolute certainty that it exists, where it exists,
what it looks like, etc.

Whereas "you" claim, explicitly, to have seen it in a photo, and that it is a
flying saucer, and that anyone who says otherwise "perceives discussion as a
threat."

Given the size of the known universe, the laws of physics forbidding, so far
as we know, any form of FTL travel, the lack of any widespread corroborating
evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life or technology in our solar
system, and the tendency of the human brain to see things that aren't there
(paredolia, false memories, etc.) the likelihood of what "you" believe to be a
flying saucer _being_ a flying saucer which just happened to be in the right
place at the right time to be caught on camera is very, very, very low.

The fundamental difference between "nutjob" and "not a nutjob" is that the
"nutjob" refuses to believe it _can 't_ be a flying saucer, regardless of the
statistics or evidence to the contrary, whereas "not a nutjob" accepts that it
almost certainly isn't.

The axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" exists for a
reason - not because the people requiring proof can't handle discussion, but
because those claims inevitably require revising known science to be true, and
"ordinary proof" is never sufficient to prove their case.

