Believing in Clearly False Things

How Many Fallacies Can You Spot Here?
There is a movement afoot that declares Americans to be stupidly adhering to false beliefs, out of their control due to evolved traits of inherited belief genes.

The following ABC story starts like this:

“Why do so many people hold beliefs that are clearly false? A recent story on ABCNews.com said 80 million Americans believe we have been visited by aliens from another planet, and numerous studies show that millions of people believe in ghosts, extrasensory perception and, of course, alien abductions.”

“According to biologist Lewis Wolpert of University College, London, all those beliefs are clearly false, and they all share a common beginning. It may well have started when the first human realized he, or she, could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together.”

The article is accompanied by a picture of cavemen, entirely unrelated except by inference. Wolpert, who acknowledges his atheism, proceeds to wind a tale of his own evidence-free belief, that of evolution of the belief in weird things. As in all evolution stories, the narrative is salted with statements in the form of X “gave rise to” Y, with a complete vacuum of evidence to back up the claim.

Only in evolutionary science could a person be called a “scientist”, and get away with such stuff.

In actuality the basic premises are logically faulty. Take this one for example:

“Why do so many people hold beliefs that are clearly false?”

What is implied here is that falseness is a definite outcome of an empirical investigation, performed by Atheists / Materialists. But this is clearly not a rational conclusion. None of the mentioned “clearly false beliefs” can be proven one way or the other given current evidence. So the premise is biased toward a preconceived outcome, and the investigation is fabricated on that – false – substrate.

Perhaps these beliefs are, indeed, false. They are not, however, clearly false. They are assumed false due to lack of evidence, perceived low probability of occurrence, and Philosophical Materialism.

Since Philosophical Materialism is logically false due to being self-contradictory and non-coherent, then perhaps these beliefs are known to be false due to lack of evidence and low probability of occurrence. But lack of evidence and low probability of occurrence also plague evolution itself, especially abiogenesis, the only possible material source of First Life.

So the real issue is probability of the beliefs, not that they are clearly false. To a person who has experienced "something" that an atheist scientist has not experienced, the probability of the existence of that "something" is high. The scientist is not rationally able to claim that it is "clearly false"; yet they persist in doing so.

In fact, the most improbable beliefs of all are Philosophical Materialism, Atheism, evolution, including abiogenesis. No one has experienced these things, yet these beliefs are taken to be true, not only true, but the basis for science and the attempts to destroy other belief systems. This is a sure sign of irrationality and illogic. It should not be considered science.