"Believing Bullshit" Stephen Law on Atheists Talk #143, November 27, 2011

Interview:
Download/Listen: http://feeds.mnatheists.org/~r/AtheistsTalkRadioShow/~3/xTDuRhU4_IQ/Atheists_Talk-0143-20111127.mp3

Stephen Law (Oxford, England) is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London; provost for the Centre for Inquiry UK; and the editor of Think: Philosophy for Everyone (a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy). He is the author of numerous books for adults as well as children, including The Greatest Philosophers, Companion Guide to Philosophy, The War for Children's Minds, and Really, Really Big Questions, among other works. His latest book, for adults, is Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. "Wacky and ridiculous belief systems abound. Members of the Heaven's Gate suicide cult believed they were taking a ride to heaven on board a UFO. Muslim suicide bombers expect to be greeted after death by 72 heavenly virgins. And many fundamentalist Christians insist the entire universe is just 6,000 years old. "Of course it's not only cults and religions that promote bizarre beliefs. Significant numbers of people believe that aliens built the pyramids, that the Holocaust never happened, and that the World Trade Center was brought down by the US government.

"How do such ridiculous views succeed in entrenching themselves in the minds of sane, intelligent, college-educated people and turn them into the willing slaves of claptrap? How, in particular, do the true believers manage to convince themselves that they are the rational, reasonable ones and that everyone else is deluded? "Believing Bullshit identifies eight key mechanisms that can transform a set of ideas into a psychological flytrap. Philosopher Stephen Law suggests that, like the black holes of outer space, from which nothing, not even light, can escape, our contemporary cultural landscape contains numerous intellectual black-holes—belief systems constructed in such a way that unwary passers-by can similarly find themselves drawn in.

While such self-sealing bubbles of belief will most easily trap the gullible or poorly educated, even the most intelligent and educated of us are potentially vulnerable. Some of the world's greatest thinkers have fallen in, never to escape."

See also "A field guide to bullshit," interview in New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028160.200-a-field-guide-to-bullshit.html