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Swimmer963 comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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Put them in a situation where they need to use logic and evidence to understand their environment and where understanding their environment is crucial for their survival, and they'll figure it out by themselves. No one really believes God will protect them from harm...
I have some friends who do... At least insofar as things like "I don't have to worry about finances because God is watching over me, so I won't bother trying to keep a balanced budget." Then again, being financially irresponsible (a behaviour I find extremely hard to understand and sympathize with) seems to be common-ish, and not just among people who think God will take care of their problems.
Why not? Thinking about money is work. It involves numbers.
Moreover, it often involves a great deal of stress. Small wonder that many people try to avoid that stress by just not thinking about how they spend money.
I think that's mostly because money is too abstract, and as long as you get by you don't even realize what you've lost. Survival is much more real.
Well... as something completely and obviously deterministic (the amount of money you have at the end of the month is the amount you had at the beginning of the month, plus the amount you've earned, minus the amount you've spent, for a sufficiently broad definition of “earn” and “spend”), that's about the last situation in which I'd expect people to rely on God. With stuff which is largely affected by factors you cannot control directly (e.g. your health) I would be much less surprised.
Once you have those figures, it is deterministic; however, at the start of the month, those figures are not yet determined. One might win a small prize in a lottery; the price of some staple might unexpectedly increase or decrease; an aunt may or may not send an expensive gift; a minor traffic accident may or may not happen, requiring immediate expensive repairs.
So there are factors that you cannot control that affect your finances.
Does this cause you to doubt the veracity of the claim in the parent, or to update towards your model of what people rely on God for being wrong? I guess it should probably be both, to some extent. It's just not really clear from your post which you're doing.
Mostly the latter, as per Hanlon's razor.
"Praying for healing" was quite a common occurrence at my friend's church. I didn't pick that as an example because's it's a lot less straightforward. Praying for healing probably does appear to help sometimes (placebo effect), and it's hard enough for people who don't believe in God to be rational about health–there aren't just factor you cannot control, there are plenty of factors we don't understand.
There hasn't been a lot of money spent researching it, but meta-analysis of the studies that have been conducted show that on average there is no placebo effect.
That's really interesting...I had not heard that. Thanks for the info!