Dr. Jack’s Texas Sharpshooter approach to discussing organized monotheism in his TEDxCLE talk trivializes religious systems like polytheism and animism. Dr. Jack asserts a deontological basis for people to balance their interests across science and religion. He supports this using scientific data he collected across his experiments that contained cherry-picked data that omitted history by only sampling living people. Dr. Jack’s theory presented a hasty generalization that indicates that were one to focus more on science, he says, “the more your personality resembles that of a psychopath.” (Jack 15:52 – 16:03). Opposing this, he says that, “people who are religious identify more with all of humanity.” (Jack 15:01 – 15:09). This is hasty because with this small time frame, a group of people can look like just about anything.
Dr. Jack made a weak case for why he sees more scientific-minded individuals lacking empathy and taking on less perspectives, focusing instead on listing positive effects of religion such as that the believers, “…live 7-10 years longer than people who are not, they have higher emotional intelligence, they’re better at emotional self regulation…” (Jack 12:35 – 12:57). This is a red herring because he attributes people with predominantly religious faith with values that clash against the history of the Abrahamic religions. This history includes Crusades, Inquisition, Encomienda. These events indicate that there exists no justifiable case for organized religion in this scientific age in Dr. Jack’s talk, which is evidenced by the resurgence of the more polytheistic and animistic interests that are seen with Paganism. Establishing a religious belief to train an empathetic mind is what I find fault with, more so than his alternatives such as, “becoming a student of history, anthropology, of great art and great literature.” (Jack 18:07 – 18:15). Jack’s focus on religion may be a conformational bias.
This bias is evidenced in his comparison that between “scientific” and “religious” equates to “psychopathic” and “empathic”, respectively. The issue is that the first two are personality traits and the others are psychological tendencies, and his talk conflates proofs of correlation between them. Instead of establishing causal relationships, Jack merely jumped from conclusion to conclusion to appeal to the emotion of the audience rather than reiterate his previously-stated argument in his conclusion. I feel that his argument for religion overshadowed his actual point of there being an empathetic side of the mind which religion falls under the domain of.
Works Cited
Jack, Anthony. “A Scientific Defense of Spiritual & Religious Faith.” YouTube, TEDxCLE, 10 July 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BihT0XrPVP8. Accessed 07 Oct 2024.