Is much modern psychology a “scientized version of original sin”?

_{Denyse O'Leary

July 1, 2019

Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience}

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Sometimes sounds that way. But, as Steven Poole, author of Rethink shows in his survey of the sociology literature, at any rate, the underlying psychology assumptions about human behavior are often wrong or questionable:

He calls it a “scientised version of original sin” but one accompanied not by sermons but by bureaucratic attempts to mold behavior. As he goes on to show, the underlying assumptions about human behavior are often wrong or questionable.
Just recently, it came out that researchers were baffled by the tendency around the globe to return lost wallets rather than pocket the money. When the behavior contradicts the theory, the behavior seems at least doubtful, if not clearly wrong.
“Who started the war on reason anyway?” at Mind Matters News

It had to be a religion for sociologists. Otherwise, it would have been abandoned.

See also: The lost wallet returns—and experts are baffled Social scientists struggle for explanations as to why people turned out to be more honest than theory led them to expect

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LOL Good thing tooAaronS1978_{July 2, 2019
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AaronS1978
Yeah but doesn’t genetic determinism explain absolutely everything about human behavior with no way of falsifying it.
Aaron, I’m sure that you are aware that genetic determinism has not been considered by scientists for more years than I have been alive. Which is more years than I care to mention. :)Brother Brian_{July 2, 2019
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as to:
The present climate of distrust in our reasoning capacity draws much of its impetus from the field of behavioural economics, and particularly from work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1980s, summarised in Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). There, Kahneman divides the mind into two allegorical systems, the intuitive ‘System 1’, which often gives wrong answers, and the reflective reasoning of ‘System 2’. ‘The attentive System 2 is who we think we are,’ he writes; but it is the intuitive, biased, ‘irrational’ System 1 that is in charge most of the time. Other versions of the message are expressed in more strongly negative terms. You Are Not So Smart (2011) is a bestselling book by David McRaney on cognitive bias. According to the study ‘Why Do Humans Reason?’ (2011) by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, our supposedly rational faculties evolved not to find ‘truth’ but merely to win arguments. And in The Righteous Mind (2012), the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the idea that reason is ‘our most noble attribute’ a mere ‘delusion’. The worship of reason, he adds, ‘is an example of faith in something that does not exist’. Your brain, runs the now-prevailing wisdom, is mainly a tangled, damp and contingently cobbled-together knot of cognitive biases and fear. (2016) STEVEN POOLE, “NOT SO FOOLISH” AT AEON
So they want us to trust their reasoning that our reasoning is not trustworthy? Do they even pause for even one moment to think their argument through before they rush to publicize it? Apparently not! The argument defeats itself in the most fundamental way possible for crying out loud. It undermines the very reasoning upon which the argument is, and must be, based. Of course. it is not their reasoning that is untrustworthy. Their reasoning is working just fine. It brought them to that conclusion did it not? The irredeemable flaw lies in the fact that they have followed the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution out to the bitter end and have found that the Darwinian worldview cannot support reasoning itself. Here are a few more instances where people, people who are committed to a materialistic (Darwinian) understanding of the mind, have 'reasoned' all the way into saying that their reasoning itself is not trustworthy:
AN ATHEIST ARGUES AGAINST REASON And thinks it is the reasonable thing to do MICHAEL EGNOR MAY 24, 2019 Excerpt: Think of the irony: a professor of philosophy, who is paid only to reason, uses reason to argue against reason. Welcome to the bowels of atheist metaphysics. It would be funny if it were not so dangerous to our culture and to our souls. https://mindmatters.ai/2019/05/an-atheist-argues-against-reason/
The following interview is sadly comical as a evolutionary psychologist realizes that neo-Darwinism can offer no guarantee that our faculties of reasoning will correspond to the truth, not even for the truth that he is purporting to give in the interview, (which begs the question of how was he able to come to that particular truthful realization, in the first place, if neo-Darwinian evolution were actually true?);
Evolutionary guru: Don't believe everything you think - October 2011 Interviewer: You could be deceiving yourself about that.(?) Evolutionary Psychologist: Absolutely. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128335.300-evolutionary-guru-dont-believe-everything-you-think.html
A few more examples of epistemological suicide by Darwinists,
"Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth; sometimes the truth is adaptive, sometimes it is not." Steven Pinker, evolutionary cognitive psychologist, How the Mind Works (W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 305. Why Atheism is Nonsense Pt.5 - "Naturalism is a Self-defeating Idea"video Excerpt: "Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life." Richard Dawkins - quoted from "The God Delusion" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-5rsrDRGM
Thus leading Darwinists themselves readily admit that Darwinian evolution undermines reasoning itself. And yet, since these supposedly leading thinkers are so committed to believing that Darwinian evolution must be true, these leading Darwinists do not even bat an eye before they commit epistemological suicide and say, for all the world to hear, that their reasoning is not reliable. Of course, the only remedy in order for them to hold on to their sanity, and for them to not commit epistemological suicide, is for them to jettison the worldview that denies their reasoning is reliable in the first place. Namely, they must jettison the Darwinian worldview that forced them into denying that their reasoning was reliable. But alas, after dealing with Darwinists for several years now, I'm firmly convinced that most Darwinists would rather jettison sanity itself than ever jettison their belief in Darwinian evolution. The alternative for them, i.e. belief in a Creator, is simply unthinkable:
Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself - Nancy Pearcey - March 8, 2015 Excerpt: Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false. To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value. So how can we know whether the theory of evolution itself is one of those false ideas? The theory undercuts itself.,,, Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality. The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God. They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/03/why_evolutionar094171.html
Of supplemental note: C.S. Lewis, in his ‘argument from reason’, once made this interesting comment, “One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins.”
“One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.” —C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry (aka the Argument from Reason)
And again C.S. Lewis reiterated his claim that ‘reason must be absolute’ this way, “Reason is given before Nature and on reason our concept of Nature depends. Our acts of inference are prior to our picture of Nature almost as the telephone is prior to the friend’s voice we hear by it.”
THE ARGUMENT FROM REASON – John M. DePoe Excerpt: (CS) Lewis closes the third chapter of Miracles with this conclusion: Reason is given before Nature and on reason our concept of Nature depends. Our acts of inference are prior to our picture of Nature almost as the telephone is prior to the friend’s voice we hear by it. When we try to fit these acts into the picture of nature we fail. The item which we put into that picture and label “Reason” always turns out to be somehow different from the reason we ourselves are enjoying and exercising as we put it in. [. . .] But the imagined thinking which we put into the picture depends—because our whole idea of Nature depends—on thinking we actually doing, not vice versa. This is the prime reality, on which the attribution of reality to anything else rests. If it won’t fit into Nature, we can’t help it. We will certainly not, on that account, give it up. If we do, we should be giving up Nature too. http://www.reasonsforgod.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DePoe-The-Argument-from-Reason.pdf
Moreover, recent advances in quantum mechanics, (i,e, the closing of the free will loop hole), have now empirically validated C.S. Lewis’s philosophical claim that ‘reason must be absolute’ and that “Reason (must be) given before Nature”. https://uncommondescent.com/human-evolution/philosopher-eliminates-human-exceptionality-by-ejecting-reason/#comment-677540 All of this fits very well into the Christian's worldview Verse and quotes:
John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” What is the Logos? Logos is a Greek word literally translated as “word, speech, or utterance.” However, in Greek philosophy, Logos refers to divine reason or the power that puts sense into the world making order instead of chaos.,,, In the Gospel of John, John writes “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). John appealed to his readers by saying in essence, “You’ve been thinking, talking, and writing about the Word (divine reason) for centuries and now I will tell you who He is.” https://www.compellingtruth.org/what-is-the-Logos.html “Atheists can give no reason why they should value reason, and Christians can show how anyone who believes in reason must also believe in God.” Cogito; Ergo Deus Est by Charles Edward White Philosophy Still Lives Because God Isn't Dead
bornagain77_{July 2, 2019
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The lost wallet phenomenon isn't complicated. It does depend on self-interest. Real people understand human nature better than "social" "scientists" do. http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2019/06/not-mystery.htmlpolistra_{July 2, 2019
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Yeah but doesn’t genetic determinism explain absolutely everything about human behavior with no way of falsifying itAaronS1978_{July 1, 2019
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