Monuments to Cognitive Dissonance
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Episode 29 - Monuments to Cognitive Dissonance
Denis goes on a road trip to Kentucky with a couple of his former church brothers. They talk creationism vs. evolution, christianity vs. agnosticism; all the while surfing waves of cognitive dissonance.
Here are some photos of their trip to the Creation Museum and The Ark Encounter.
Denis prepares to encounter the ark. He's wearing his favorite religious t-shirt, "St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast"
Three stories high. Plenty of room to hold the ancestors of all the species we see today. Does that mean creationists believe in evolution?
If you crave sadism in your museum dioramas...
Heaven and Hell are undeniably real. But believers and non-believers may disagree as to where and when they exist.
Humans and dinosaurs. Two great species that speciate great together.
Regardless of your belief in the garden of Eden, there must have been a person whose mind was the very first to awaken to the horrifying fact of his or her certain death. Could this dreadful knowledge be our most human of human attributes? Ever since, each of us joins in communion with these primordial 'death-knowers', made whole in their awareness of impending doom, yet irreversibly fractured by it also. We all taste the fruit, sometime between our 6th and 10th birthday.
...you've come to the right place.
This exhibit suggests that humans (namely the wicked ones who inspired God's flood of judgement) may have made a contribution to dinosaur extinction.
If the Noah's Ark books you're reading to your children left out this image... you're doing it wrong.
Show Notes
Steve mentioned C.S. Lewis' book, Surprised By Joy.
Denis mentioned Sam Harris' book, The Moral Landscape, which makes the case for a scientific understanding of morality. You can also read the Challenge to the Moral Landscape, where Sam awards a winning writer $2000 for the best rebuttal (and would have gladly paid $20,000 to any writer capable of changing his mind).
Earlier in the show Denis mentioned how Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson perfectly modeled the practice of "steel-manning" each other's arguments. The video is available: