![]() In a God debate I did recently, Frank Turek was tying himself up in knots to justify these religious beliefs that are clearly faith based. But of course as we mentioned before, this is confirmation bias at work, and smart people, educated people, are even better at finding clever arguments and reasons than non-smart, non-educated people. There are social, cultural, family reasons, personal reasons, emotional reasons, we’re raised to believe this, or it had some influence on me when I was young, or it was a teacher, or a particular book, or something leads you to a belief system… and then you go about justifying and rationalizing the belief for a whole bunch of apparently rational reasons. Which is to say that all of us form our beliefs for a variety of reasons. And the short answer is that smart people believe weird things because they’re really good at rationalizing beliefs they’ve arrived at for non-smart reasons. As I said before, no one thinks they’ve joined a cult or a pseudoscience belief system. Michael Shermer: Well of course they think they’re applying critical thinking to their sacred cows. But why is that? And what can be done about it? ![]() Why do smart people believe stupid things? And I guess you might say: “Well they don’t apply critical thinking to their sacred cows”. ![]() Michael Frank: Michael you speak a lot about smart people believing stupid things: a flat earth, Illuminati, conspiracy theories, that kind of thing. ![]()
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