* Beliefs, attitudes, and values
or…
* The open and closed mind; investigations into the nature of belief systems and personality systems

Which one were you referring to? Or was it something totally different?

Another book that’s a must for anyone interested in critical thinking is Dr. S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, which is currently in about its three-dozenth printing.

People of faith see the world that they cherish changing for what they must — given their belief systems — consider the worse. Gay marriage, while none of their business and having nothing to do with the sanctity of their own unions (which, after all, Christianity teaches is between us and God) is still a threat to their comfort.

Likewise other issues that seem at variance with their belief systems. These can easily become skewed. Thus, a righteous concern about abortion becomes confused with the concept simply of Right to Life, which can then engender knee-jerk reactions such as we saw with the tragic Terri Schiavo incident.

Much of this is fear-based: fear of the unknown, of being forces to change, of finding themselves, ultimately, to be wrong. Combine that with a general ignorance of science in the population at large, and the reasons for a resistance to the idea of evolution become obvious.

What you said actually reminded me of something else my professor spoke about: black and white thinking vs. gray thinking. To put it simply, at earlier levels of learning / education, people generally want black and white answers. As a person learns more and more about the world, they come to see that black and white is mostly wrong; in fact, there’s very rarely anything that’s truly black or white. Everything is instead gray. He personally feels that attending university and seeing things through the various lenses (science, social sciences, philosophy, etc.) is one of the best ways to deepen your understanding and acceptance of the grayness of the world.

This is what we refer to as black and white thinking. Each of us has two frames of reference, what Rokeach called “belief systems” and “disbelief systems.” Our belief systems inform, for better or for worse, our everyday interactions with what we perceive as reality. They involve relatively fixed ideas. If racial prejudices are part of our belief systems, our behavior toward people of other ethnic backgrounds will reflect them. If we hold to particular religious convictions, they will illuminate our view of the world in those respects, to greater or lesser extent.

That extent is related to our disbelief system, the things that others believe – or seem to – that are at variance with our beliefs. On a good day, when our lives are running smoothly and we’re enjoying a feeling of well being, we may be able to consider other people’s ideas with a degree of equanimity. We may be able to see their point, if not agree with it completely, and consider ways in which it does not necessarily conflict with our own world view.

When, however, our world is looking bleak, we automatically revert to our own belief systems – the emotional places where we feel most secure. The degree to which we do this is related to things like understanding of the “big picture,” level of education, amount of lifetime exposure to the beliefs of others, our long-term success in dealing with the world, our desire to be open minded, and various other factors including peer pressure (it’s hard to be a liberal in a redneck bar). The important thing to remember is that we all do it, and we may never realize it.

Science, basically, is a very pragmatic method: it has specific rules that work pretty well to reach certain sorts of results. It doesn’t claim to be or do everything, or even to explain everything. It does what it does, and it often does it so well that other people get envious of it and try to appropriate it for their own ends without respecting the rules or why they are essential to both the method and the reliability of the results.