Let's also not leave out the sheer ignorance in his account of belief. He's basically pushing an extremely simplified form of rational choice theory that doesn't measure up to the facts. If most people are rational, then are the stats that are biased against him also products of that rationality? What we're left with is a situation where rationality is a meaningless term, since all decisions must be its products, even though the majority of people don't necessarily accept what he would call the most "rational" of the choices presented to them, or a situation where rationality doesn't explain choices fully. Let's take a look at this foolishness:
This is a laughable point. In a place, say, rural Pakistan, where media access is rare and the society is overwhelmingly homogenous, does a child have the choice to reject what they are told from their earliest days as a thinking being? They have little access to alternative ideas, no way of empirically testing many of the ideas that are transmitted to them, etc. If this situation can be called a situation of choice (which it must, in the author's scenario, where "not a single one of us" doesn't ultimately choose our beliefs) then we are left with the problem of explaining how this rationality leads to entire communities believing in things that are markedly untrue, untested, and well, irrational, even in the face of facts to the contrary. The overwhelming majority of people raised in a particular religion, for example, remain within it, so the idea that demographics mean little doesn't even require much to disprove. Another way to put it is to ask if Eve made a rational choice to be with Adam- the author wants you to believe that she did.
This crosses over to this next point:
So why does half of America still not believe in evolution? Why does at least a 3rd of the population believe that Obama is a Muslim? Why do so many people vote on scenarios involving fictions like "death panels" and "socialism?" We're a country with no shortage of access to all the information needed to make a thoroughly informed choice, and yet people are not swayed by evidence. In other words, if the author responds to my Pakistan scenario by stating that if there was more access to information, the choices of the people to believe would change, well, the case of America provides a serious challenge to that simplistic claim. Once again, the problem is that the author is either forced to claim that the half of America that doesn't believe in evolution made their choices rationally, or that rationality is much more complicated, and not alone or even necessarily the dominant factor in determining belief.
