I recently became a fan of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on Facebook. If you don’t know anything about the FSM please visit the link. The story is an amazing one, and involves one man’s fight against the Kansas School Board on its consideration of teaching “Intelligent Design” in public schools. An old college buddy of mine commented on my fandom by saying he preferred to keep faith in the ID, or Idiot Designer, claiming the drawings of the FSM were too elementary to be taken seriously. There’s some truth to that claim, and possibly some sarcasm as well, but the point of the FSM is much deeper and more humorous.

Coincidence, or the meddling of the FSM, the ID or some other power, delivered a related article to my Inbox this morning. The piece claims that promiscuous teleology, a type of erroneous thinking, may be a reason separate from religion which explains why people buy into the concepts of creationism or intelligent design. The article’s discussion of these two topics is general and not necessarily in reference to the Christian versions. So, what’s the problem?

“The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design,” says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study.

Kelemen has documented the same kind of erroneous thinking – called promiscuous teleology – in young children. Seven and eight-year olds agree with teleological statements such as “Rocks are jagged so animals can scratch themselves” and “Birds exist to make nice music”. These mistakes diminish as kids take more science classes and learn causal explanations for natural events.

Diminish, not disappear. Just because something has a use doesn’t mean it exists for that use. Damn.

People continued to agree with false teleological statements, particularly those that endorsed an Earth intended for life. But non-believers were just as likely to make these errors as religious students, they found.

Education goes only so far in extinguishing mistaken beliefs about the physical world, Keleman says. “It suggests that we’re quite explicitly failing in science education, certainly with these undergraduates.”

Good thing our schools are on the way up. I don’t believe in either creationism or intelligent design but will gladly admit to being a victim of promiscuous teleology; I am human after all. The larger issue here is that this type of thinking makes us vulnerable to falsities in all aspects of life, not just with the spiritual.

For this reason, it’s not surprising that non-religious, college-educated adults fall back on purpose-seeking explanations. Many people have little understanding of evolution and instead view it as a cultural belief, thinking: “‘I’m a good secular liberal, I’m no yokel, I believe in Darwin,’” Bloom says.

Evolution as a cultural belief? We’re in trouble.

He also wonders if extensive science education could blunt the tendency to fall back on teleological explanations. “It might turn out that if you put Richard Dawkins or Einstein or whomever [to the test], no matter how expert or educated they are, they might still make these mistakes.”

Indeed, Kelemen is running similar experiments on volunteers with stronger science backgrounds to see if they, too, fall back on such childlike reasoning.

Our inability to combat promiscuous teleology with a more thorough use of logic and reasoning is disconcerting. One of the other major conclusions drawn in this study is that promiscuous teleology increases in pressure situations. “A first round of experiments suggested that adults make more teleological mistakes when pressed for time than when not.” What or how do we need to teach our children to mute this type of thinking?