Recent discussions, readings and a seminar on recovering from traumatic brain injuries, got me thinking about the benefits and the harm that comes with strong, irrational beliefs – such as the belief in a personal god, belief in prayer, belief in pseudoscience. I feel that there is a good foundation for why you should want to be a skeptic, and not believe in outrageous claims, without extraordinary evidence. I understand that claiming an unknown object in the sky is space aliens is more satisfying to some people, or that someone recovering from a disease has been served a miracle, but while these are comforting beliefs, they are not based on a rational examination of the evidence.

It’s been medically shown that people who have a strong belief in something, tend to be happier and healthier. The doctor at the seminar I attended, pointed out that in the recovery process, skeptics and atheists did not recover as quickly. I think this was put out in a way to both placate the religious members of the audience, and also to state that the cause of the recovery was not based in some religion, but rather a side-effect of the many benefits that come with having an active and supportive social structure, and a positive attitude. (You must admit, people in religious cults at the airport have very positive attitudes!) A person’s attitude, and having strong support structures that offer a sense of community; all these things contribute to having a positive attitude. There are lots of people who are happy, and don’t think much about it. Being happy and enjoying life doesn’t require religion, but for many people, they get happiness out of church. Hell, some of the happiest people I know are in cults!

If you take the blue pill, you stay in the Matrix. You stop searching for truth and accept the false assurance of a made up world. That’s a very happy position to be in. You eat your virtual steak, or your “Jesus crackers” and you drink the Kool-Aid, as it were, and you’re happy. I think it is actually more work to accept responsibility for thinking, for being a good person, for having to figure out what is right and wrong, and for meeting people that you really have something in common with, when you are a non-theist. Non-theists don’t believe in God, just like they don’t believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy. That isn’t much to build a community on. So, they don’t automatically have a religious group to turn to that all believes in some mythology. And, frankly, outside of the immediate family, there aren’t lots of groups that adults participate in any more. So the medical findings are not a recrimination on atheism or skepticism, as much as they simply state the facts that people with strong support communities are healthier and recover faster from injuries. This also doesn’t imply anything about the efficacy of prayer or the correctness (truth) of religion. One should not accept a philosophy blindly, simply because of the promise of happiness, long life, and so on. But, that’s just my opinion, and it seems I’m in the minority!

I think that believing in something outrageous or silly, is ultimately harmful. If pseudoscience makes it easier to accept ridiculous claims (ghosts, UFOs, astrology) then it biases you to accepting desires as truth. Rational people should always be skeptical of pseudoscience – it usually implies non-critical thinking & wish fulfillment. People who have inherent biases are likely to make skewed decisions, even harmful ones. But, when it comes down to it, I think that people are either Blue Pill or Red Pill people. Some of us really want to explore nature and find truths on our own. We don’t trust the “truths” that are handed to us in some document (be it the Bible or from L.Ron Hubbard). We are skeptics, and in order to be true to that, we treat everything in life skeptically. I don’t know that this implies we have less trust in our lives, but at least that we have less blind trust.

On this topic, I was thinking of what Hume wrote about credibility of sources. Suppose someone you know told you their friend saw a car hovering in the sky, or saw a UFO. You might believe it because it was a friend of your friend and there was implicit trust, or you might believe it because you have a desire for UFO stories to be real. In any case, it is a weak relationship because it is second-hand and pretty circumstantial evidence at best.

If you found an old book in a cave, or if someone a long time ago did, and it described something incredible, like a floating cigar-shaped “thing” or “wheel”, you would probably doubt it more because you don’t know the author. In court, it would certainly not be very credible evidence. However, humans have a tendency, developed through evolution, to accept incredible stories as true. Sometimes, because they like UFOs and want UFOs to exist. Sometimes because they believe things written by people that may never have actually existed, because they don’t think too critically, or skeptically about things and generally accept whatever is told to them. You can see how dangerous this can be if you are this way, and you watch lots of news, and start to think that is really how the world is. Or, if you accept the healing claims of Homeopathy or other mystical mumbo-jumbo that might keep you from seeing real doctors and really cause harm.

This is exactly the same kind of weak, biased thinking that goes into accepting religion, with one exception: usually children are indoctrinated into a religion based on their parent’s beliefs, and they are entirely uninformed and have no choice in the matter. If you are raised in India, you believe one god, and if you are raised in Alabama, another. Because it is something that goes back to the beginning of time (your birth) you aren’t as likely to question it. In fact, there is peer pressure to prevent you from asking questions and thinking critically about it. So, not all biases are created equal.

What does this mean? I guess it means that we can identify people with different tendencies, some want more than natural scientific explanations can offer (with the inevitable gaps in knowledge that happen). There are people who are more willing to believe or take things on faith, than others, especially if they were trained to from a young age. Sometimes these people who have lots of faith in things, can then get excited about them, or not have to worry about things because they have relinquished responsibility to a “greater power”. That is refreshing for some. As a child, it is a lot of fun, and it made me happy to believe in Santa Claus, until I was about 7 or 8 years old, then it became silly to me. There are others who do try to look at everything as objectively as we can, and we are not satisfied with making up stories to fill the gaps in our knowledge. We are satisfied with not knowing what is at the center of a black hole, while others need to invent an answer.

People come in all types. That’s not a bad thing. That’s diversity. But, I do think that people should be aware when they choose to live with certain biases, and not consider that these biases provide a clear and rational view of the real world. If you believe in things that are incredible, getting back to Hume’s argument, then you should require extraordinary evidence. If you don’t require evidence in those situations where you want to believe in something (a god or UFOs…) then you should at least admit that you have no proof and you may well be wrong and you are not thinking critically about it. You get some good feeling from it, and leave it at that. You are a Blue Pill person, and that may well be in your nature, and it may do more harm than good to try to convince you with logic that your views are skewed. Just understand that those of us who have a natural and rational view of the world are applying critical thinking, and consistent logic to what we observe, and we are counting both the hits and misses. We are trying to be fair and objective, and open-minded. We try to accommodate for the biases we recognize that we have. We are open to strong evidence, but live by Occam’s Razor; believing that the simplest answer is often the correct one.

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