4 years ago: ‘Dismaying’

Feb. 16, 2009, on this blog: ‘Dismaying’

“Not believing in Missouri” doesn’t affect the Show-Me State one way or another. To say that you don’t “believe in” Missouri is really to say that you deny it exists — that its existence is a fact you refuse to accept. That’s delusion No. 1. Delusion No. 2 is a corollary to that refusal — the idea that your belief or disbelief somehow makes it so. These are delusions because Missouri does, in fact, exist, and because its existence is not conditional upon your “belief” in the reality or unreality of that fact. Both of these deluded notions, I think, are a part of what many of those respondents meant when they told the pollster that they “do not believe” in evolution.