Religious people are commonly thought to be biased towards believing things that cannot be proven, that must be taken on faith. Often, the idea of faith is taken to mean that there is no evidence at all. When this perspective involves science, the result is sometimes pseudo science – things that sound scientific but are actually implausible or even incorrect.
There is often also an implicit assumption that non-religious people do not have such biases, and that secular reasoning is more rational. However, it’s clear that isn’t always the case, since all people are subject to various biases and some examples from history illustrate this particular case.
It turns out that throughout history, new ideas have been put forth that stretch existing perspectives in ways that sometimes look like religion. It seems like this is more common when the discoveries are at the edge of known science. That makes sense, because ideas that truly extend our understanding are likely to look unusual. So if that unusual characteristic looks supernatural in some way, then it is easily dismissed out of hand by secular thinking.
For example, floods swept across the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last ice age. These are called the Missoula Floods. When they were first proposed, they went against the prevailing perspective that geologic processes were generally uniform over time, not catastrophic. In addition, the catastrophic nature of the proposed floods seemed similar to the Biblical flood narrative, and this association made acceptance of the proposal even harder for some people.
Similarly, when astronomical observations began to indicate that the universe was expanding and scientists realized this implied that it had a beginning, the Big Bang model was developed. However, many did not like that proposal, and instead promoted a steady state expansion. One of the difficulties that some people had with accepting the Big Bang model was that it was too close to the idea of a Biblical creation. In addition, the concept of a beginning to space and time raised the uncomfortable (and almost metaphysical) question about what might exist outside of our spacetime reality.
Even Einstein, when struggling with some of the strange ideas related to quantum physics, referred to them as “spooky action at a distance”, as if even the appearance of something supernatural was reason to suspect it.
In all these cases, the new ideas turned out to be right, but the bias of secular thinking caused some scientists to reject them.
A new area where similarly biased thinking may be happening is with research into the nature of consciousness. This is definitely a topic that is at the edge of known science, so it is very possible that new ideas may be needed. However, because consciousness seems to be immaterial, some of the emerging ideas seem to involve metaphysics even though they have nothing to do with religion or anything supernatural.
For example, some researchers use the term “soul” as a shorthand way of representing this seemingly immaterial aspect of consciousness, even when they are not talking about anything supernatural.
The danger, of course, is that some researchers will dismiss such ideas because of a potential link to religion, just like in the previous examples. However, while those examples took time to have significant societal impact, the need for us to understand consciousness may be coming faster with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The development of AI is beginning to raise a number of questions that would benefit from, maybe even require, a better understanding of consciousness. At some point, we will want to assess whether the things we are creating are conscious, how they relate to humans, whether they should be treated as people, and even how they might affect us as conscious beings ourselves.
Robust understanding of these things could guide the development and deployment of AI, but since we don’t currently have such understanding, AI is progressing in an unguided manner. Whether this turns out to be a problem remains to be seen, but in the race between developing and understanding AI, especially given the serious implications, it seems prudent to leave open all avenues of investigation without slowing things down due to unfounded biases.
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