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Survey results: Only 5.3% of general philosophers of science accept or lean towards theism

Denyse O'Leary
December 4, 2011
Atheism, News, Philosophy, Science
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Here (preliminary results):

Accept or lean toward: atheism 115 / 150 (76.6%)

Other 27 / 150 (18%)

Accept or lean toward: theism 8 / 150 (5.3%)

That probably plays a huge, unexamined role in the fact that no one criticizes utter nonsense around the multiverse or “consciousness is an illusion.” Some atheists and agnostics do criticize the nonsense, but they are surely the brighter lights on the string.

Comments
Apologies. I wasn't refining the results properly. So it's closer to 7% .MedsRex
December 4, 2011
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That probably plays a huge, unexamined role in the fact that no one criticizes utter nonsense around the multiverse or “consciousness is an illusion.”
Most people recognize the multiverse as a speculative hypothesis. For people not working in physics, it isn't anything to get worked up about. "Consciousness is an illusion" should be taken as an admission that cognitive science is not making much progress in understanding consciousness. As best I can tell, people outside of cognitive science and AI mostly don't think it an illusion.Neil Rickert
December 4, 2011
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Where are these numbers from? In the link given it is more like 18% of all respondents were in the “accept or lean towards theism” category. Still not a huge percent but a little more what I would have expected than 5.3%.MedsRex
December 4, 2011
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That probably plays a huge, unexamined role in the fact that no one criticizes utter nonsense around the multiverse or “consciousness is an illusion.”
--That is laughable. The multiverse is among the most controversial and criticized ideas in all of science. And as much as the “consciousness is an illusion” mantra is repeated here, I’m having trouble finding anyone that believes such. So far the best I could find, after much looking, is a Dr. Susan Blackmore who seems to make that claim but even she adds the caveat: “To say that consciousness is an illusion is not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that it is not what it seems to be” – umm, ok. And later in the same article implies that she believes that consciousness is indeed real: “we can consciously hear a song on the car radio, while we are not necessarily conscious of all the things we do as we’re driving.” and “Whenever you ask yourself, “Am I conscious now?” you always are.” So, I suspect she was just using language that she knew would get attention.goodusername
December 4, 2011
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