In this post, I want to show you an atheist tweet, and then contrast the atheist tweet with some scientific evidence.

Look at this meme that was recently tweeted by a serious atheist:

That’s the tweet, now let’s see the scientific evidence.

Look at this article from the Weather Channel which talks about the most recent NOAA hurricane estimates:

A new hurricane season forecast issued by The Weather Channel on Tuesday says we can expect the number of named storms and hurricanes in the 2015 Atlantic season to stay below historical averages.

Meanwhile, we should also be concerned about tornadoes, and here is a graph of that:

As of September 25th, 2015 (the black line) is near the record low (the pink line).

By the way, the leftist Los Angeles Times is now reporting that the hurricane caused ZERO deaths. It was much less powerful than the hand-wringing global warmists wanted us to believe.

Previously, I blogged about how the reliable satellite measurements of global temperature show a 19-year pause in “global warming”. And of course we have the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), a period from the 9th to 13th centuries when global temperatures were warmer than they are now. That’s why there are viking villages encased in ice on Greenland. Changes in global temperatures occur naturally, most likely due to solar activity variations.

I understand that it’s fun for atheists to send each other pictures that make them feel smarter than theists, but at the end of the day, we should care about the data, shouldn’t we? I mean, we should be driving at truth using scientific evidence, and not just amuse ourselves with comforting myths that make us feel smug and self-assured.

Who’s irrational now?

Now, let’s take a more generalized look at which group, atheists or theists, are more likely to believe in ridiculous superstitions, using survey data from the center-left Pew Research Center (and not some meme tweeted on Twitter).

The Pew Research survey is here.

Here are the parts that I found interesting:

More:

Notice the numbers for Republicans vs Democrats, conservatives vs. liberals, and church-attending vs non church-attending. The least superstitious people are conservative evangelical Republicans, while the most superstitious people are Democrat liberals who don’t attend church. I think there is something to be learned from that. It’s consistent with the results of a Gallup survey that showed that evangelical Christians are the most rational people on the planet.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal article about the survey done by Gallup, entitled “Look Who’s Irrational Now“. Again, this is data, and not some meme tweeted on Twitter.

Excerpt:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity.

[…]The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

When I think of the “weird” things that evangelical Christians believe, I think of the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life and the sudden origin of animal body plans in the Cambrian. All of that science is superstition to an atheist, and yet all of it is rooted in mainstream science. Not just that, but support for our “weird” views has grown stronger as science has progressed.

There are many, many arguments for theism in general, and Christian theism in particular:

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The building blocks of life and the early Earth atmosphere
• The origin of life: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument
• The applicability of mathematics to nature
  
• Arguments and scientific evidence for non-physical minds

I can accept the fact that an atheist may be ignorant of the science that defeats his atheism, but that’s something that has to be remedied with more studying of the evidence, not tweeting memes to each other and giggling like children. There is no science that supports atheism, just as there is no science that supports superstitions.

The Pew Research survey is here.

They are trying to see which groups believe in superstitions and new age mysticism.

Here are the parts that I found interesting:

Click for full image.

Click for full image.

Notice the numbers for Republicans vs Democrats, conservatives vs. liberals, and church-attending vs non church-attending. The least superstitious people are conservative evangelical Republicans, while the most superstitious people are Democrat liberals who don’t attend church. I think there is something to be learned from that. It’s consistent with the results of a Gallup survey that showed that evangelical Christians are the most rational people on the planet.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal article about the Gallup survey entitled “Look Who’s Irrational Now“.

Excerpt:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity.

[…]The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

When I think of the “weird” things that evangelical Christians believe, I think of the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life and the sudden origin of animal body plans in the Cambrian. All of this is superstition to an atheist, and yet all of it is rooted in mainstream science. Not just that, but they’ve grown stronger as science has progressed. I can accept the fact that an atheist may be ignorant of the science that defeats his atheism, but that’s something that has to be remedied with more studying of the evidence, not less. If you generate a worldview by 1) your desire to dispense with moral judgment and/or 2) your desire to prefer Star Trek and Star Wars to mainstream science, then of course you are going to have an irrational worldview. I’m not saying that all atheists do this, surely someone like Peter Millican does not. But for rank-and-file Dawkins acolytes, I think this is pretty accurate, and it’s why we get the survey results that we do.