Re: climate change times are a changin'
That's way too simplistic. Beliefs are informed by many things, including feelings, experiences, study and analysis, and much more.
Feelings are determined by biological events? They are influenced by biological events (not sure what a biological event specifically is in comparison to a plain old event), but not determined by them. There is freedom of thought, people do change their minds (sometimes just with further consideration of a matter, not because a further event of some sort determined that they would), etc. This still doesn't fit into nice tidy conceptual boxes.
I had at first written "dominated by" rather than "determined by," but I wanted it a little stronger. I agree, that's too far, your language is better. I'll go with "overwhelmed by."
By "biological event" I meant to include not just events like who your best friend was and what he believed but also who your father was and what he taught you, what the local community was and what their norms were, etc. How for example faith is passed between generations. That indicates faith is a social construct, not a rational choice, but it's too restrictive to say "a man learns his faith from his father" since other events matter -- who was his favorite teacher, or probably most importantly of all how was deviation from a family faith dealt with in his locality.
Let me try again.
Of course there is always variation and we
are always talking in terms of probabilities and tendencies rather than any sort of iron determinism.
However, our (I hate this word but I'm going to use it just this once because it's the exactly correct word) phenomenological (gak, I really wish there was a better word, believe me; use "subjective" if you want -- it's not quite right but it's about 90% there) experience of the relationship between emotions and ideas is sometimes wrong. We think we are changing our views based on data and that our beliefs are thus rational. We think when we read Aquinas and he makes a good point that is contrary to our prejudices we adjust our belief. This is true when we are thinking about what to have for dinner or whether to pass the slowpoke in front of us. But when the subject matter is more emotional and is deeply rooted in our sense of self, the actual causation is reversed: we see the data we need to to hold onto our beliefs. The Aquinas statement isn't a "good" point in the first place if it doesn't support our beliefs. Not our ideas -- ideas are easy to change -- but our serious bedrock formative beliefs. Those aren't going anywhere no matter what tries to dislodge them.
There are several formal cognitive biases where this has been experimentally proven (and they're fascinating), but the bottom line is: we don't choose what we believe, our beliefs choose us. We
do get to choose the data we encounter and interpret and evaluate, so we shape the empirical strata that is supposed to moderate our beliefs, and we shape it unconsciously to eliminate dissonance. We're stuck, literally -- we can't escape a belief, unless we're confronted with a situation in which the beliefs themselves somehow come into conflict and one must go down. Nussbaum in
The Fragility of Goodness does a good job of convincing me that
even then we don't really stop believing in one of the contradictory beliefs -- we just hold both in our minds and to hell with consistency. Antigone never rejects either of her fundamental beliefs, she just gotta do what she's gotta do, knowing (and accepting) exactly what that means for her. That's why she's tragic and not just inconvenienced.
Now I'm stopping because I just had the urge to also use the word "overdetermined," and there's no way I'm using both those horrible jargon terms in one post.
