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I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.
Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.
This process of belief-dependent realism is patterned after the philosophy of science called “model-dependent realism” presented by the University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking and mathematician and science writer Leonard Mlodinow in their book, The Grand Design,
“On Being Sane in Insane Places,” by Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan.2 The article, now one of the most famous ever published in the annals of psychology, recounted an experiment by Rosenhan and his associates in which they entered a dozen mental hospitals in five different states on the East and West coasts, reporting having had a brief auditory hallucination.
principle of belief-dependent realism dictates, once the belief is formed, reasons can be found to support it.
Collins concludes his summation with this biting editorial: “Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable.”
Christian scientist explaining genetic proof of evolution to fellow Christians
natural law, with two exceptions (in Immanuel Kant’s poetic description): the starry heavens above and the moral law within.3
This does make me wonder that if you had been born at a different time or in a different place you might have had a different leap of faith with a different religion, and thus there is always going to be some cultural-historical component to belief.
This is where belief is ultimately personal—belief-dependent realism. There are no ultimate answers to these eternal questions.
when people encounter claims that they know little about (which is most claims for most of us), intelligence is usually not a factor in belief, with one exception: once people commit to a belief, the smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
What happens is that the facts of the world are filtered by our brains through the colored lenses of worldviews, paradigms, theories, hypotheses, conjectures, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through living. We then sort through the facts and select those that confirm what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away those that contradict our beliefs.
If it turns out that I am wrong and that there is a God, and it is the Judeo-Christian God more preoccupied with belief than behavior, then I’d rather not spend eternity with him and would joyfully go to the other place where I suspect most of my family, friends, and colleagues will be, since we share most of the same principled values.
Even the difficulty of constructing comprehensive models in the biological sciences, however, pales in comparison to that of the workings of human brains and societies. By these measures, the social sciences are the hard disciplines, because the subject matter is orders of magnitude more complex and multifaceted with many more degrees of freedom to control and predict.
If you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made what is called a Type I error in cognition, also known as a false positive, or believing something is real when it is not. That is, you have found a nonexistent pattern. You connected (A) a rustle in the grass to (B) a dangerous predator, but in this case A was not connected to B. No harm.
When the association is real, however, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the descendants of those who were most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning and is fundamental to all animal behavior, from C. elegans to H. sapiens. I call this process patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.
Foster and Kokko used Hamilton’s rule to derive their own formula to demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing that a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor the patternicity.4
Although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the patternicity phenomenon endured the winnowing process of natural selection. Because we must make associations in order to survive and reproduce, natural selection favored all association-making strategies, even those that resulted in false positives. With this evolutionary perspective we can now understand that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.
problem we face is that superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old.
Uncertainty makes people anxious, and anxiety is related to magical thinking.
Perhaps this is what Voltaire meant at the end of Candide, in the title character’s rejoinder to Dr. Pangloss’s proclamation that “all events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds”: “Tis well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our gardens.”
As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a “theory of mind”—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we practice what I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.
agenticity, or why you may be in church today
2009 trip to Austin for a debate with creationists at the University of Texas. While in town I paid a visit to Lance Armstrong’s famous bike shop Mellow Johnny’s (so named because Americans butcher the pronunciation of maillot jaune, French for “yellow jersey”).
Persinger uses electromagnets inside a modified motorcycle helmet (sometimes called the God Helmet) to produce temporal lobe transients—increases and instabilities in the neuronal firing patterns in the temporal lobe region just above the ears—in the brains of subjects. Persinger believes that the magnetic fields stimulate “microseizures” in the temporal lobes, often producing what can best be described as “spiritual” or “supernatural” episodes: the sense of a presence in the room, an out-of-body experience, bizarre distortion of body parts, and even profound religious feelings of being in
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Why does this happen? Because, said Persinger, our “sense of self” is maintained by the left hemisphere temporal lobe. Under normal brain functioning this is matched by the corresponding systems in the right hemisphere’s temporal lobe. When these two systems are out of sync, the left hemisphere interprets the uncoordinated activity as “another self” or a “sensed presence,” because there can only be one self. Two “selves” are reconfigured as one self and one something else, which may be labeled as an angel, demon, alien, ghost, or even God.
As he summed up for our show, “Four hundred years ago the paranormal included what in large part is science today. That’s the fate of the paranormal—it becomes science, it becomes normal.” Or, it simply disappears under the scrutiny of the scientific method.
I suggest four explanations: (1) an extension of our normal sense of presence of ourselves and others in our physical and social environments; (2) a conflict between the high road of controlled reason and the low road of automatic emotion; (3) a conflict within the body schema, or our physical sense of self, in which your brain is tricked into thinking that there is another you; or (4) a conflict within the mind schema, or our psychological sense of self, in which the mind is tricked into thinking that there is another mind.
Controlled processes tend to occur in the front (orbital and prefrontal) parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known as the executive region because it integrates the other regions for long-term planning. Automatic processes tend to occur in the back (occipital), top (parietal), and side (temporal) parts of the brain.
Neurons do not fire “soft” in response to a weak stimulus, nor do they fire “hard” in response to a strong stimulus. They either fire or they do not fire.
Therefore, neurons communicate information in one of three ways: (1) firing frequency (the number of action potentials per second), (2) firing location (which neurons fire), and (3) firing number (how many neurons fire). In this way, it is said that neurons are binary in action, analogous to the binary digits of a computer—1 and 0—which correspond to an “on” or “off” signal being passed along a neural pathway or not.
What we actually experience is what philosophers call qualia, or subjective states of thoughts and feelings that arise from a concatenation of neural events. But even qualia is itself a type of neural binding effect, integrating inputs from countless other neural networks downstream.
Were we only logic machines churning out products that were the result of strictly defined cognitive algorithms, nothing new would ever be created or discovered. At some point we must think outside the box and connect the dots into new patterns.
there’s a fine line between the creative genius of finding novel patterns that change the world and the madness or paranoia of seeing patterns everywhere and being unable to pick out the important ones.
rendering the theater of the mind an illusion. There is no theater, and no agent sitting inside the theater watching the world go by on the screen. Yet our intuitions tell us that there is. This is the foundation of agenticity in the brain that further reinforces belief-dependent realism.
“Several psychological studies appear to support [seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch] Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection,”
This research supports what I call Spinoza’s conjecture: belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.
leading Harris and his colleagues to conclude “the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent.” That is to say, both believers and nonbelievers appear to evaluate the veracity of both religious and nonreligious claims in the same area of the brain. In other words, there is no “belief” module or “disbelief” module in the brain, no gullibility network or skeptical network.
belief module v42.0
the left-hemisphere interpreter, which integrates inputs from all the senses into a meaningful narrative arc that makes sense of both senseful and senseless data. Tie this process into our body schema, theory of mind, and dualistic agenticity and it becomes clear how easy it is to develop a plot in which we are the lead character whose meaning and importance is central to the story and whose future is eternal.
it is natural for us to believe that we have a timeless and eternal essence. We are natural-born immortalists.
The deeper reason scientists remain skeptical of psi—and will even if more significant data are published—is that there is no explanatory theory for how psi works. Until psi proponents can explain how thoughts generated by neurons in the sender’s brain can pass through the skull and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response.
ESP+
“The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.” It might prove an interesting experimental test of his theory for Goswami to leap out of a twenty-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies.
suite of mechanisms used by religion, which I define as a social institution to create and promote myths, to encourage conformity and altruism, and to signal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a community.
This is one vital role that religion plays, such that even if violators think that they got away with a violation, believing that there is an invisible intentional agent who sees all and knows all and judges all can be a powerful deterrent of sin.
Flood myths show similar cultural influence. Predating the biblical Noachian flood story by centuries, the Epic of Gilgamesh was written around 1800 BCE. Warned by the Babylonian Earth-god Ea that other gods were about to destroy all life by a flood, Utnapishtim was instructed to build an ark in the form of a cube that was 120 cubits (180 feet) in length, breadth, and depth, with seven floors, each divided into nine compartments, and to take aboard one pair of each living creature. Virgin birth myths likewise spring up throughout time and geography. Among those alleged to have been conceived
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Resurrection myths are no less culturally constructed. Osiris is the Egyptian god of life, death, and fertility, and is one of the oldest gods for whom records have survived. Osiris first appears in the pyramid texts around 2400 BCE, by which time his following was already well established. Widely worshipped until the compulsory repression of pagan religions in the early Christian era, Osiris was not only the redeemer and merciful judge of the dead in the afterlife, he was also linked to fertility and, most notably (and appropriately for the geography), the flooding of the Nile and growth of
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1. The burden of proof is on the believer to prove God’s existence, not on the nonbeliever to disprove God’s existence. Although we cannot prove a negative, I can just as easily argue that I cannot prove that there is no Isis, Zeus, Apollo, Brahma, Ganesha, Mithra, Allah, Yahweh, or even the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But the inability to disprove these gods in no way makes them legitimate objects of belief (let alone worship). 2. There is evidence that God and religion are human and social constructions based on research from psychology, anthropology, history, comparative mythology, and
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In other words, agnosticism is an intellectual position, a statement about the existence or nonexistence of the deity and our ability to know it with certainty, whereas atheism is a behavioral position, a statement about what assumptions we make about the world in which we behave.
agnosticism and atheism
The burden of proof is on believers to prove God’s existence—not on nonbelievers to disprove it—and to date theists have failed to prove God’s existence, at least by the high evidentiary standards of science and reason.
Einstein responded on September 28, 1949: I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.
me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
