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The Science Delusion: "The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology."
. Scientific principles of rationality have certain democratic virtues that many of their rivals lack. One of the virtues of scientific rationality is that it privileges principles that — as we in fact just noted — everyone appeals to most of the time — just because we are built that way. Of course the fact that people can’t help but use methods like observation and logic doesn’t prove that those methods are always more reliable than others, or even reliable at all. (Just as the fact that people thought the earth was flat doesn’t mean it was). But it does mean that principles which privilege these methods — which give them more weight than others, no matter what the question — have an obvious virtue: they recommend methods that aren’t secret or the province of a few. They recommend methods that everyone can and does use. Indeed, it is this very virtue of scientific methods that was so celebrated in the Enlightenment. Prioritizing scientific methods is liberating precisely because it frees one from appeals to authority, from the thought that something is true because some person, religious tradition, or political party, says so.
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even science has its first principles. These principles — call them epistemic principles — tell us what methods and sources to trust. They are fundamental (“first”) precisely because you can’t defend them without relying on them. (Try giving a good argument for why logic is reliable that doesn’t use logic.) As some of the comments on that post reveal, the fact that it is difficult to defend first epistemic principles is what causes many people to think that even science is based on faith. Defending the principles of science by relying on them seems like no defense at all. So, some conclude, reasons run out and faith takes over.
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This reaction is understandable. But it rests on a mistake. It is right that we can’t give epistemic reasons — evidence — for those fundamental principles that tell us what evidence to trust. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give reasons for those principles at all.
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even if the facts are out there, they do not exist in a vacuum. They need to be held up by something. For instance, a scientist works to collect a wide range of facts, but she doesn’t stop there. She then works on a theory to explain said facts. This theory is based on the facts, but it is distinct from the facts themselves. It is better thought of as an explanation of those facts. Beliefs are our expressions of confidence in the facts and the theory (and the process by which we gained them). Your degree of certainty that a certain explanation is true is based on the facts — the more the better — but there is still the need to state your degree of confidence in the facts and the theory. This leads to the psychological phenomenon we call belief.
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What is a belief? Broadly speaking, a belief is a proposition a person holds to be true. It is an attitude toward some suggestion about how the world is. I submit that there are at least three ways to use the word belief.
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The first is to believe that things and objects exist. A simple example would be that you believe that you are reading from a sheet of paper or computer screen (laptop, desktop, Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc.) at this very moment because your senses are relaying such information to your brain and you see no good reason you are being deceived. A more complex example would be your belief that a country exists, even if you have never visited the country. You can still believe such a place exists because you have read about it, observed photos, and other people you know and trust have told you about their visits. There is little reason to doubt them, and little evidence for a global scheme to invent countries.
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People believe what they want to believe, often in defiance of fact and logic.
When the CSIRO launched its Changing Atmosphere website last month, research leader Paul Fraser insisted the timing was not in response to recent criticism of climate science. Rather, the peak scientific organisation simply wanted to let the facts speak for themselves.
However, a rather inconvenient truth needs to be borne in mind: recent research shows that ''facts'' alone rarely persuade us to change our minds on anything significant. In fact, they frequently entrench a contrary view.
Numerous studies underline how impervious to evidence our strongly held convictions are. Whether on political, religious or ethical issues, it seems our minds have an unusual power to reorganise contrary facts in order to support our beliefs.
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all good reasoning expresses and proceeds from prior commitments and beliefs and relies, at every step along the way, on believing – however cautiously and critically – the testimony of others engaged in this and similar collaborative enterprises. I emphasise "collaborative" because at the heart of the inadequacy of frequently repeated accounts of the supposed incompatibility of "science" and "religion", and of the imagined conflicts between "faith" and "reason", is the failure to appreciate all our intellectual enterprises are social enterprises, projects undertaken in community.
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George Steiner argued that "any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs … is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence". One supposes many of his readers found this contention bizarre. But Steiner believed there would be "no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, so fundamental as to be constitutive of the relation between word [the logos] and world".
The study found no difference in the ethical behavior of believers and nonbelievers. But participants who saw God as compassionate were more likely to cheat than those who believed in an angry, punitive God.
Millions of individuals in the UK believe in UFOs and ghosts. Yet we know that there is no credible evidence for any visitation from outer space or for some dead souls hanging out in abandoned houses. On the other hand, there is now overwhelming evidence that humans and other species on the planet have evolved over the past 4.5bn years. And yet 17% of the British population and 40% of Americans reject evolution. It seems that for many there is no connection between belief and evidence
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Some – maybe most – of the blame can be attributed to an education system that does not train people to think critically. Similarly, most people do not understand methodologies of science and the way theories get accepted. For some, scientific evidence has no role in the way they envision the world.
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This is a life-changing event for the abductees. They feel a sense of uniqueness. Abduction may have been painful, but they were the ones who were picked. While the public mocks claims of alien abductions, many abductees join support groups that include others who share similar experiences. For the abductees, evidence is irrelevant. They know it happened. They experienced it. These abductions form their whole worldview and provide an explanation for the occasional paralysis at night, a sense of uniqueness and meaning in life, and a community of like-minded individuals.
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Where do all these false beliefs come from? Why are so many of our beliefs out of sync with reason, evidence, and argument? And, what, if anything, can we do to guard against falsehood, while at the same time increasing the stock of the true things we believe? This is an age-old question -- one taken up by Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Hume, James, Dewey -- to name just a few. With all that accumulated philosophical wisdom -- not to mention the advances of science, the decline of superstition, the fall of tyrannical regimes that tried to bludgeon their citizens into believing lies -- with all that intellectual progress, you might think that nowadays we believe a lot more truth and a lot less falsehood than we used to.
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it has much more t do with the social structure of cognition. By that I mean to point to the fact that once in a while some genius pulls off an amazing feat of cognition -- like inventing the calculus. And thanks to our ability to learn from other people -- and the social structures that make that more and more possible -- the rest of us schmucks get to go along for the ride.
But of course, the very social structures that enable us to learn the truth from other people also enable us to learn false things from other people. Think of the ways stereotypes or superstitions are handed down from generation to generation. And to make matters even worse, the dirty little secret about our minds is out. And that knowledge allows some people to be in the business of exploiting our mental foibles to make us believe all manner of crazy things.
Belief is about truth, not feelings
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Belief isn't a wormhole to knowledge about God – it's a cognitive function that should be flexible and open to correction
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Can we choose what we believe?
The answer to this question has to be: yes, of course we can, and the idea that we can't is a recipe for credulity and passivity and helplessness before authority.
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