Los Angeles Times: Thinking can undermine religious faith, study finds

[Bolo Boffin]

37. I didn't misunderstand what you said.

I fully accept the point of your post, as you call it. But the paragraph of it I quoted contains a contradiction, which I pointed out:

The "professors" are totally wrong on this point. The brain does not process information in two distinct ways. The so-called intuitive thinking processes, or "gut instinct", is merely the brain processing information at a subconscious level. This type of thinking can be superior to conscious reasoning when a person's conscious reasoning starts from false premises.

The brain does process information in two distinct ways. You describe them even as you deny them in that paragraph. Recognizing the solution to a puzzle based on past experience is a distinctly different way of processing information that calculating the solution.

Both ways have their faults and both ways have their strengths.

I'm suspecting oversimplification in the study, too, but I'm not going to pass judgment on it without reading it first. And it's not the simple questions or other tests used in the study that's the flaw. Those questions and experiments have been used in other research and have already demonstrated a documentable blow to confidence in self-reporting in any belief or statement, not just religious ones. I just don't understand how this study has broken any new ground, and the LA Times article appears to be a poor source of information on the study.