Box clever

An interesting article on belief that Kottke noted and which will unfortunately disappear behind the NYTimes' paywall in a few days. (Aside: The most interesting thought is from David Sloan Wilson, who, apart from tenaciously defending group selection a little too hard, suggests that the "adversarial relationship" between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor.) But back to the boxes. First one:

[Anthropologist Scott Atran] sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. "If you have negative sentiments toward religion," he tells them, "the box will destroy whatever you put inside it." Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver's license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don't believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

I think they're afraid that the smiling man in front of them who claims he has a magic box is going steal their driving licence. What does this look like? It looks like a magic trick - "I have here a box of power, would anyone in the audience care to put their driver's licence in it?" Answer: no thanks, let some other sucker do it. His work's interesting, but this experiment is just a stunt. There are more interesting boxes[65], such as the one in the experiment by psychologist Justin Barrett mentioned later in the article:

Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, "Crackers." Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, "Crackers."

And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, "Rocks.".

It would be interesting to ask other religionists what they thought. Outside the Abrahamists, there are plenty of gods that can be tricked.