The Nature of Belief, cont.page 2

The complicated nature of reality makes full understanding difficult to achieve. So, sometimes, we settle for answers to our questions that are easier to remember, especially when we feel that the answers are to questions that aren’t likely to have an important impact on our lives.

Gravity shows us that we can’t fly if we jump from a mountaintop without a winged suit. Disease shows us that our bodies are mortal and that, most of the time, saying our wishes aloud for recovery, chanting sacred words over water that we use to cleanse the faces of the sick, or hovering our hands over a sick body—these ritualistic acts don’t provide the results we want.

Under the extreme stress of terminal illness, desperation leads otherwise reasonable people to reach for any cure. They seek alternative medicines only after all mainstream medicines have failed and their doctors have given them a death sentence, so that the only tangible loss for trying unproven remedies is their monetary cost.

Ah, but there’s that one time that a dying loved one gets better. The cure seems like a miracle. Medicine can’t prove that the praying and the herbs and the sacred water didn’t strengthen our sick father’s immune system. The doctors can’t demonstrate what degree of help their patented medicines contributed compared with the help of God’s intervention. There are no measures to determine such things. Without measures, we may believe what we wish, what makes us feel good, what seems to fit with everything else we believe.

We devise an extremely complicated explanation for why praying works, but why it works only in rare instances. We devise religion. We keep religion as a backstop when medicine can’t explain an outcome that doctors expected from their knowledge of how the body typically reacts, how a disease typically progresses, how a scientifically tested medicine forestalls the progress of a disease and by what mechanism.

We also seek meaning and explanations of our experiences that provide order to things that seem random and meaningless. Sometimes, we accept untrue explanations because they just “feel right” to us. We are satisfied with just feeling right, like when we depended on the way that words just sounded right together as a measure of their grammatical correctness, rather than learn all the complicated rules of grammar through sentence diagramming; the way we constructed sentences was at least correct enough to allow us to pass English class that year.

We learn to recognize important patterns to avoid chaotic distress in our lives. If we see what happens to people who are bitten by snakes, we control the pattern by avoiding snakes. Misinterpreting the causes of the patterns and acting on our misinterpretations may or may not lead to disaster, but if we experience a few successes in conforming our behavior to patterns that have no causal effect, we develop superstitions.

Superstitiously, we think that a low-effort ritual that we perform, such as tapping the top of a soup can before opening it, makes the pull top open easier.  When we shoot with a cocked forefinger at a piece of paper on the ground, and the paper flutters, we know that the wind caused the movement but still like to think that our minds sent an invisible bullet and improved our aim. Believing that we are impervious to an audience’s criticism of our speech makes us more confident in our delivery. Belief that good people go to heaven gives us an illusion of control over our souls.

“Benefits that a belief would deliver even if it were false are not evidence that it is true. Perhaps everyone who believes she is of above average good looks [gives a woman] gains in confidence. Believing that he is protected by a guardian angel may make a soldier bolder in battle. But, again, that is no evidence that guardian angels really exist” (Whyte, p. 151).

A wrong explanation is worse than no explanation, but we refuse to believe in no explanation, because, paradoxically, we are both blissful in ignorance and anxiously inquisitive in our demand for knowledge. We’ll take a wrong explanation, and look no further to prove to ourselves just how wrong it is.

We believe in possibilities rather than risk a specific belief that is wrong. It’s possible that there could be a large primate, commonly known as Big Foot or Sasquatch or Yeti, as yet undiscovered by science; the Mountain Gorilla was not officially discovered until the 1920s and many new species living in ocean depths are being discovered every day and written about in Nature magazine. We don’t deny, but if we’re smart, we admit that the probability of Big Foot camping out in South Carolina and never being captured by a deer hunter, or the probability of paranormal phenomena, is negligible.

Believing that most things are possible forces people to suspend definitive judgment on just about everything, even when something is contradicted by high probabilities. Police who apprehend a home burglary suspect ten minutes after commission of the crime reasonably conclude that the sterling serving dish stuffed down the suspect’s pants didn’t miraculously teleport itself there as the suspect claims as he resists arrest. The police can’t disprove the suspect’s claim of teleportation, but still they reject it because it is improbable, because they know that there is yet no evidence that supports the reality of teleportation. They match the tread on the suspect’s shoes with the mud left in the foyer of the burgled home, and they recognize the suspect from his past arrests for the same type of crime. They determine that the probability is that the suspect in custody stole the serving dish from the burgled home.

Hypothetical examples that are so rare as to be improbable ever to happen should not be the basis of a system of principles.

But untrue information leads us to develop opinions based on unverifiable and unverified supposition. We develop a faulty view of reality. We begin to think that reality is fluid instead of firm. We forget that there is a distinction between the external world and people’s perception of it, and that perceptions that differ from reality are wrong. We come to fear nonexistent gods and forces of nature, rather than learn truths that allow us to respect nature and more quickly adapt to it, come into harmony with it, systematically control it where we can as a way of improving our lives.

Wrong and disappointing results follow from basing our decisions on wrong information. For instance, believing that there is justice in the world puts our minds at ease but permits us not to take part in the arduous task of daily ensuring justice. If we wrongly believe that it is better to swim against a vortex riptide in the ocean, we expend every ounce of our physical energy and drown.

People seek information that assures them that they’ve made the right decision, have the right viewpoint, because opposing information causes dissonance in a carefully constructed, deeply invested world view. We may choose to actively avoid and ignore information sources who hold opposing viewpoints.  We sometimes distort opposing information that we peripherally receive so that we won’t be obligated to fit the information into our belief schema as credible and worthy of consideration or follow-up research.

This powerful urge to find meaning makes us easy for others to delude, so gullible that we are even willing to delude ourselves. We may find ourselves wishing for improbable outcomes that defy the physical properties of objects and natural laws. We begin to think that rationality can be faith based, that anything is possible. We forget that evidence has rules: “Evidence forms the ‘philosophical basis for belief’” (Jamieson, Wrong, p. 60). Personal testimony, reports, and anecdotes do not necessarily constitute evidence, but sometimes they do, and we tell ourselves to keep our minds open. In our haste to make sense, we believe unreal things: we delude ourselves that someone who doesn’t love us, does, that we’re not alone, that someone is in control, that there is a design.

“When pressed, the faithful often claim that faith is required because man is incapable of knowledge in this area” (Whyte, p. 36). Usually, when faith overrules reason, it means that those with faith don’t want to believe the evidence that is available, that they refuse to analyze the evidence because it will force them to reconcile the inconsistencies that evidence presents to their belief system, or that they don’t want to acknowledge that the lack of evidence doesn’t necessarily constitute evidence in support of their faith.

The absence of immediate negative consequences reinforces how we perceive events and how we act on the meaning that we assign. But external forces actively try to influence how we find meaning.

Attending church is a way to both reinforce current belief systems, educate oneself in the dogma of one’s religion, and gain the support of others who similarly believe in God. We conform to the rituals that our fellow churchgoers perform, happily surrendering a part of our individuality. We comply with the church leader’s directions because he is articulate, has studied our belief system in more detail than we have, has advanced to a high-prestige position due to his study, and demonstrates confident authority. His charisma makes it difficult for us to reconcile any need we may feel to think critically and independently about our beliefs. Churchgoers trust in his authority.

The church leader presents a one-sided argument each Sunday, to people who most likely would not have visited the church if they didn’t already agree with the church’s positions on religion and the nature of God. His congregation feels safe in church from those who represent religion’s opposition, in a haven of comfort; churchgoers have no need to guard against the directed criticism of evolutionists, scientists, humanists, and atheists.

Regular church attendance offers an enduring and consistent, socially minimal reward that, over time, solidifies commitment to the message offered by the church leader. Congregants are asked to find support for the leader’s message throughout the week, such as the request to practice compassion during moments when anger would normally dictate their actions and their punishment of offenders. Successful at-home exercises reinforce belief in the leader’s message.

Some preachers preach hell and eternal damnation. “Messages that induce fear dampen our disposition to scrutinize them for gaps in logic. When the message is fear arousing, personal involvement and interest in it minimize systematic evaluation. In the language of cognitive psychology, ‘[L]arge levels of negative affect such as fear may override cognitive processing’” (Jamieson, Dirty, p. 41).

Beliefs are learned. The first “facts” about reality that children hear is from their parents, and those beliefs will hold until the child encounters competing information or if and until he chooses to rebel against his parents as a means of maturing and breaking away to become his own person. Early investment in even a ridiculous notion, however, can be so powerful as to cancel out future learning. Early flawed conclusions tempt adults to preemptively degrade their  belief in real facts when they’re presented.

We are not born with a tendency to believe either factual or false statements. Some of us become attuned, through high awareness in social experiences, to the verbal and nonverbal twitches that people fail to conceal when they intentionally tell lies, as contrasted to when they convey false information that the speaker believes to be true. We are not born skeptical, but learn through positive feedback for good decisions we make after critical analysis, that there are substantial areas of gray and lapses in the knowledge others claim to have. When our cognitive processing of information and our perception of reality are accurate, we learn to detect deception, logic errors, and when to trust that nagging feeling in our intuition, which is a collection of information we possess that we haven’t yet fully integrated, identified, and categorized for application to specific situations we encounter.

People don’t develop critical thinking faculties at the same rate or in identifiable stages, or at the same depth. Those who spend a disproportionate amount of time playing computer games or texting in fractured English on faceless social networks lose opportunities to develop other more important socialization factors—the people and institutions we grow up with and that help shape our lives and make us well-informed adult. Hours are lost that could be dedicated to school studies of diverse topics or to physical activity or to honing social discourse skills. Critical acuity and intelligence suffer a kind of atrophy when they don’t receive equal attention, or rather, when socializing forces like parents and teachers permissively allow nonproductive activities for children.

Beliefs are neither genetically hard-wired nor unalterable. They can be influenced by additional learning. Persuasive argument can unseat beliefs, assuming the audience is open to new information and that an individual’s resistance to reason has been weakened. Once beliefs are acquired, individuals must deal with emotional appeals for opposing viewpoints that usually bring about cognitive dissonance, that is, cause intellectual confusion because they are logically inconsistent with those that an individual already holds. These opposing viewpoints must be wedged into the individual’s belief system, or rejected.

People have a powerful need to somehow fit factual information into their well-tended and nurtured belief systems and subsystems, especially when the new information seems diametrically opposed to other information that we think is true. But we have a faulty memory of facts. Is what we consider a fact really just a story that our parents told us in our childhood, that period of mental hyperactivity and impressionability when easy concepts were all that our developing minds could grasp? Why are those old wives tales and myths so hard to shake from our memories, to correct with new information? Are such childhood stories like the first language that we learn in terms of the difficulty we have in learning competing stories in the future?

Fitting in facts that conflict with existing beliefs often requires distorting the facts so that they appear consistent, or consonant. Alternately, we can bend the flexible abstract beliefs that we already hold, or completely reject new facts based on their acknowledged inconsistency. We think, “If I must debate the legitimacy of a claimed fact and can reject it, then from an egoistic framework, it is at least possible, as seen from my personal experience, that others must also be debating its legitimacy.” People can integrate one bizarre belief in a huge network of other bizarre beliefs that have no connection to one another or to irrefutable evidence. What the beliefs have in common is a superordinate ideology.

“It’s just his opinion,” you hear people say when others’ opinions differ from their own. This is a rejection that concedes that a particular position on an issue might be wrong, but that one’s own is not. “Believing in something doesn’t make it real, necessarily” is a rejection that acknowledges that belief in real things is valid, because the essence of the thing we believe in has reality, which wouldn’t be affected by anyone’s belief or disbelief in that reality.

In defense of their own beliefs, people may often logically apply truisms to others but fail to see the applicability to themselves. They know that they themselves have the correct facts, not the incorrect facts; what they themselves believe is real. But another defense, “People can be wrong,” indirectly acknowledges that what others believe might also be right. The same reasons one rejects others’ beliefs are the same reasons one must consider rejecting one’s own beliefs.

The new information must be incorporated or it must be rejected, because to hold conflicting and inconsistent beliefs under the same circumstances is evidence of irrationality or insanity. It “is impossible for contradictory statements both to be true. Iranians believe there is only one god, not only in Iran, but everywhere. This belief cannot be true in Iran but false in Papua New Guinea [a polytheistic culture]. If it is false anywhere it is false everywhere” (Whyte, p. 155).

However, the nonuniversality of a belief does not equate with its falsehood as a fact, whether in Iran or Papua New Guinea. For instance, a fact about one geographic location may not apply as a fact in another location which has different topography and climate. And a fact of geography can change based on natural disaster (tidal wave, natural land erosion, volcanic activity) or man-made alteration (land excavation, bomb testing), so that what was a geographic fact yesterday might not be a geographic fact in the future. Descriptive delimiters set boundaries for when and under what conditions that something is true. Everything outside the limits is subject to a greater number of variables and must be defined conditionally. The facts of Papua New Guinea’s weather or statistical percentage of New Guineans who are polytheistic can’t be said to be the same as the weather in New Haven, Connecticut and can’t be applied as facts about the religious beliefs of New Haven’s residents. All facts demand correctness within context.

Those who experience failure, such as failing to evoke expected gratitude from those to whom we show compassion as recommended by a church leader, must find an excuse for the failure. The church acolytes who practice compassion may tell themselves that they extended it imperfectly, or that the subject is unreasonable (a method of discounting called vilifying the victim). The churchgoer may excuse the failure by reminding herself that satisfaction from external sources demands control of too many factors, so people should expect only the internal satisfaction of showing compassion to others. Many psychologists agree that this assessment is generally correct, since emotionally healthy people have an internal locus of control and the intelligence to realize that limits must be placed on the scope of personal control.

“‘There are many layers of belief,” psychologist Carol Nemeroff says. ‘And the answer for many people, especially with regard to magic, is, “Most of me doesn’t believe but some of me does.’” People will often acknowledge their gut reaction and say it makes no sense to act on it—but do it anyway. Other times, they’ll incorporate superstition into their worldview alongside other explanations. “For example,” says Susan Gelman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, “God puts you in the path of an HIV-positive lover, but biology causes you to contract the virus from his semen.”’

The result of these explanations is the reduction of dissonance for the sake of maintaining allegiance to the church’s teachings and to the church leader’s advice.

We also come up with excuses so that we can avoid personal embarrassment when we are wrong or when our bad deeds have been exposed, and soon, with repetition and frequency, we start believing the excuses because we want to believe that we are essentially good, and bad acts contradict our self-image of worthy, and trustworthy, human beings.

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