I wrote:
As I said, doctors can be as wrong as anyone. The fact that they believe in miracles has no bearing on whether miracles exist or not. In fact, doctors resemble baseball players, actors and sailors in that a successful outcome in their jobs are often largely a matter of luck (random events, or events beyond their control). . .
Belief is not distributed randomly. It correlates with various well-defined parameters such as education, wealth, profession and so on. And of course it depends a great deal on national origin and culture.
Let me rush to add that it does not correlate with intelligence, as far as I know. Many highly intelligent people are religious or believe in miracles. In some societies, virtually all of them do -- or at least they say they do.
And it really is true that people in some professions tend to believe in miracles. It should be no surprise that surgeons tend to. You might counter this by saying surgeons actually encounter miracles frequently, and those of us do not look over their shoulders should not second-guess them. As I said, the mindset of biologists blocks this argument. Biologists are even closer to the wellsprings of life, and they encounter death more often than doctors do. If miracles exist, biologists would presumably have more chances to observe them because they see life in nature, unprotected by human skill, much the way ancient people experienced human life.
(I am assuming, of course, that humans and other primates are no more likely to experience miracles than snails or guppies do. From biologist's point of view, we are not privileged, and no more deserving of miracles than a cockroach or guppy would be. I spent a lot of time working with guppies in a biology lab, and in my opinion, they love life as much as we do, and they have as much fun as we do.)
High intelligence, training, and lots of modern education tend to give people good judgment and a reliable grasp of reality. But sometimes, in some special circumstances, they produce the opposite effect. This is usually caused by an accident of history, or a pocketbook issue which clouds objectivity, or some deeply held traditional belief (such as religion). For example, people who are highly trained in nuclear physics and especially plasma physics tend to discount the possibility that cold fusion is real. Their reasons are all irrational and unscientific. I wrote a long boring document listing all the major reasons why the 2004 DOE review panel dismissed cold fusion. It is a 44-page catalog of nonsense. Most of their assertions are contradicted in middle-school science textbooks. For example, 5 reviewers forgot that "Theoretical objections to experimentally proven facts are a violation of the scientific method" (or they never learned this in the first place), and 4 of them failed to note that "Data from newly discovered phenomena often seems inconsistent."
The DoE panel revealed that many professional scientists have no training in basic scientific methods and logic, which is appalling. They do not know the ABCs of their trade. They resemble programmers who never learned the value of top-down, modular data structures (as opposed to spaghetti code) or carefully selected variable names.
Other examples of highly irrational educated people include the top management at General Motors, and the US intelligence experts who concluded that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
- Jed
