Faith in the facts

I keep waiting for a day to go by in which someone in the Trump administration doesn't say something completely batshit insane.

The latest person to try to reach the summit of Mount Lunacy is Dr. Mark Green, nominee for Army Secretary, who apparently got his Ph.D. from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.  Because besides such bizarre statements as "the government exists... to crush evil," particularly evil in the form of transgender people who are just looking for a quiet place to pee, Green has gone on record as saying that he not only doesn't accept evolution, he doesn't believe in...

... the Theory of Relativity.

In a speech that focused not on what he would do in his role as Army Secretary, but on The Universe According To Mark Green, he said, "The theory of relativity is a theory and some people accept it, but that requires somewhat of a degree of faith."

No.  No, no, no.  Faith is exactly what it doesn't take.  Although religious folks will probably disagree with me on this definition, faith is essentially believing in stuff for which you have no evidence; and as such, I've never really understood the distinction between "faith" and "delusion."  All that it takes to accept the Theory of Relativity is understanding the evidence that has been amassed in its favor.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming.  Given its staggering conclusions -- weirdness like time dilation, the speed of light being the ultimate universal speed limit, and warped space -- it is understandable that after it was published, scientists wanted to make sure that Einstein was right.  So they immediately began designing experiments to test Einstein's theoretical predictions.

Needless to say, every single one of the experiments has supported that Einstein was 100% correct.  Every time there's some sort of suspected glitch -- like six years ago, when physicists at CERN thought they had detected a faster-than-light neutrino -- it's turned out to be an experimental error or an uncontrolled variable.  At this point, media should simply have a one-click method for punching in the headline "EINSTEIN VINDICATED AGAIN" whenever this sort of thing happens.

What is funniest about all of this is that the technology Green would be overseeing, as Army Secretary, includes SatNav guidance systems that use GPS coordinates -- which have to take relativistic effects into account.  If you decide that you "don't have enough faith" to accept relativity, your navigational systems will gradually drift out of sync with the Earth (i.e., with reality), and your multi-million-dollar tanks will end up driving directly off of cliffs.

So you need exactly zero faith to accept relativity.  Or evolution, or cosmology, or plate tectonics, or radioisotope dating, or any of the other scientifically sound models that Green and his ilk tend to jettison.  All you need to do is to take the time to learn some science.  What does take faith, however, is accepting that anyone who has as little knowledge of the real world as Mark Green does has any business running an entire branch of the military.

Anyhow, there you have it: our "alternative fact" of the day.  It's almost as good as the "alternative fact" of the day before, which came straight from Dear Leader Trump, to wit: Andrew Jackson was a good guy with a "big heart" who "was really angry about what he saw happening with the Civil War."  Oh, and the Civil War could "have all been worked out," and that "people don't ask the question" about why the Civil War started.

Except, of course, for the thousands of historians who have been writing about the causes of the Civil War for decades.  And Andrew "Big Heart" Jackson was responsible for the forced deportation of fifteen thousand Native Americans from their ancestral homes, in one of the biggest forced relocations ever perpetrated, and in which a quarter of them died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

Oh, yeah, and I don't think Jackson was particularly angry about the Civil War, given that he died sixteen years before it started.

So it'd be nice if our leaders would stop saying things that turn the United States into a world-wide laughingstock.  I'm planning on going to Ecuador this summer, and I'd really like it if I don't have to tell the Ecuadorians I meet that just because I'm an American doesn't mean I'm an ignorant, raving loon.  Thank you.

Faith in science

I was asked an interesting question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday: Are people who say they "believe in science" admitting that for them, it's a religion?

I think that a good place to start is with the definitions of "religion" and "belief."  So here you are, courtesy of Merriam-Webster:

• religion: the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods; a particular system of faith and worship.
• belief: a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing; conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence

I think you can see that in its most literal sense, science isn't a religion given that it has nothing to do with any superhuman controlling powers, but it does involve belief by the second half of the definition -- becoming convinced of the truth of a statement because of examination of the evidence.

However, I think this is a fairly shallow analysis.  People have come to use the word "religion" to mean "any set of beliefs arrived at by faith, or that cannot be arrived at by rational analysis."  The belief in reincarnation, therefore, would qualify as a religion in that sense, because there's bugger-all evidence that it happens, and yet people believe it fervently.

My own perception of things -- and I'm no philosopher, so take this with a grain of salt and feel free to argue with me if you like -- is that the only sense in which science is like a religion is at its very basis, i.e., the assumption that the universe obeys certain physical laws, and is knowable through examination of evidence.  Belief systems that reject the reality of the external world -- such as the stricter forms of Buddhism -- would also reject that science is telling you anything valid, because in their view, there's nothing relevant about the external world to study.  But we do have the fact that science has a pretty damn good track record of producing results consistent with what we observe.  If you reject the basic assumption that the scientific method is a valid way of getting to the truth, you're also rejecting just about every technological advance humanity has made since our distant ancestors left their caves.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But once you've accepted the baseline assumption that the method works, the rest doesn't rely on belief at all.  Anyone with access to the data can do the evaluation themselves; anyone with the equipment can replicate the experiments that generated the data.  Science is, in that sense, the most egalitarian of pursuits.  It's open to anyone with sufficient brainpower, and even the most set-in-stone law of science can be challenged if the data contradict it.

It's why this video, that appeared on YouTube last week, pissed me off so much.

This is a woman speaking to a class at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), claiming that science needs to be "decolonized" -- i.e., that it is the province of rich white males, and therefore the results are suspect.  It's inarguable that the pursuit of science has for years been accessible only to rich white males; the fact that our society has for centuries been male-dominated and white-European-dominated is hardly in question.  And she's right that it's a tragedy.  The idea that we have for generations wasted the talent, brains, and creativity of anyone but the privileged few is dreadful.

But the claim that because of that, the results generated are probably wrong is idiotic.  Again, once you accept the methods of science -- and that does not appear to be what she's arguing against -- you are driven to your conclusions by the evidence, not by what gender or ethnicity you are.  Further, anyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or any other personal or social criterion, is able to challenge your claim if they have better or different evidence.

So science does share some things in common with religion and belief, but it is only at its most basic assumptions, which hardly anyone questions.  After that, logic and evidence take over -- no faith, trust, or blind belief necessary.

Faith, belief, and agnosticism: a guest post by author Cly Boehs

My dear friend, the author and artist Cly Boehs, was inspired by one of my posts from two weeks ago to write an essay of her own responding to the points I brought up, and I have invited her to present it here.  You can (and should!) read Cly's short stories, posted on her wonderful blog Mind at Play, and I encourage you all to buy her brilliant collection of four novellas, The Most Intangible Thing, available at Amazon here.  I know you'll be as entertained and intrigued by Cly's writing as I am.

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On Skeptophilia on December 24^th, 2013, in an article entitled, "Elf highway blockade," you ask the question, “…how do specific counterfactual beliefs become so entrenched, despite a complete lack of evidence that entire cultures begin to buy in?” You state that you get how individuals can become superstitious but are perplexed by how cultures can do this—supposedly because more heads should be better than one? The underlying question seems to be—why wouldn’t there be enough dissenting voices in such groups to stop such ridiculous claims? How can so many be so wrong about something so outlandish? 

Since I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching, thinking and writing about why people (as individuals and groups) believe what they do, I’d like to take this question on, at least offering an opinion in brief form. Over time, I’ve come to two major conclusions (1) groups don’t use factual evidence any more than individuals to come to their beliefs; and (2) once individuals’ beliefs are strengthen by numbers, the believers take on a superior hue such that they disavow any other claims than their own—they are right and that’s that. You seem to be asking how this can happen when there is contrary factual evidence readily available for them to see. To a rationalist, a term like “factual evidence” is redundant because both “facts” and “evidence” imply objectivity. To a person basing evidence on faith or will-to-believe, “evidence” lies in subjective truth; and since that truth’s validity is based on personal experience, the more of those will-to-believers you can gather together, the greater the validation of truth (see below).  

I’d like to draw attention to two points about both individuals and groups that allow any belief (superstition or not) to become foundational to them. First, culture, the state, the church, all organizations and institutions are made up of individuals and studies have shown that what the individuals in the group believe becomes strengthen by numbers. Which brings me to my second notion: that belief(s) of the group are held together because they believe they are right, often the only right. The strength of belief gained in numbers produces a feeling of superiority such that the group forms an “us vs them” mentality and most often (depending on how significant the belief is to the group) takes it to battle against other beliefs. Lord knows we have enough examples of this throughout human history and in foreign affairs today. 

It is tremendously important that we remember that groups are made up of individuals—that in the most important way, groups do not exist in and of themselves. When we begin thinking that they do, we end up in extreme situations such as with the Nazi mentality of World War II, the mass execution of 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The defendants at the Nuremberg trials (or any others for that matter) can claim immunity on the grounds of mass-think. Which leads me to this business of feeling superior and safe because of being right. 

I realize in your article you are talking specifically about superstitious group beliefs—beliefs way, way out there like believing that elves not only exist but have rights. But I ask you, how far off is this from the now institutionalized belief that our supreme court recently translated into the law of the land, that corporations are individuals with rights? And how far away from beliefs such as transmigration of souls and transubstantiation is the belief in elves? Or that Buddha’s mother, before his birth, was struck on her right side by a white bull elephant that held a lotus in its trunk, an elephant that then vanished into her— or as another story goes—the elephant entered her womb and shortly after disappeared? This is after the elephant walked around her three times—well, of course it was three times. Three is the magic number of fairy tales and religious triads, right?

We all know stories from sacred texts that defy objective evidence—water into wine, an ass speaking on the road to Damascus, parted water to expose dry land (Buddha performed this one before Moses), a Hindu holy man changing jackals into horses and back again at will and the list goes on and on. Miracles or superstitions as a foundational belief arises out of “faith,” as a belief not based on facts. In fact, such beliefs as miracles and superstition are a demonstration of faith. Actually, it’s why they are there. Faith of this kind produces massive power in individuals especially when socialized and politicized, which makes faith-based belief(s) concrete in ritual and activism. Superstition works in this way because when individuals, strengthened by groups, believe against “the odds,” e.g., the Anabaptists against the Catholics and Protestants; the American Revolutionaries against English and French militaries—such polarities only strengthens each in what they believe is right. [A study demonstrating this clearly showed up recently on the site politico.com in which two psychologists demonstrated that the more extreme a person’s views are the more they think they are right.] The most important component in any cultural or polarized situation is belief, not reasonableness, facts. And this is because facts change by necessity; while belief can remain consistent and constant if founded in faith, the will-to-believe. The validity of a belief is often expressed in this constancy down through time, e.g. the Vedas are 3500 years old and Christian time is counted since Christ and so forth. There is comfort in not only being right but being so with such consistency and constancy. 

So how does a group of people (note that a singular verb is used for the term “group”) end up believing that elves should be given rights to stop a highway through their sacred territory? By individuals comprising the group believing elves-are-individuals-with-rights. And these individuals find strength in this belief by numbers in the groups and by the outlandishness of the belief as proof of faith in that belief. According to this logic then, the crazier the idea, the greater the faith needed to believe it; therefore, the greater the proof of its validity. Trust of this sort and the will-to-believe—a trust to act in faith before any supporting evidence, one of William James’ terms for this is “confidence”—can be constant in a way reason based on facts cannot. And the stronger the faith of an individual or group is, the stronger the belief. And because of this, psychologist and philosophers of all kinds of stripes have opted for head over heart, reason over emotion-and-feeling, reason over will. And it’s easy to see why. When people fear that their faith or will-to-believe is taken from them, they know that what they regard as constant, permanent, is gone; living in a constantly ambiguous state-of-affairs leaves one too vulnerable. ‘Tis unsafe. 

But polarity is not the answer. An alternative to rightness-in-belief lies in the willingness (note the word) to believe conditionally—not to give up belief. We will believe (again, note the word). We have to believe in order to function, actually to literally live at all. We don’t have all the facts for what we believe, never will. But in order to develop more fully as individuals, our beliefs have to be founded with an open heart and mind. And in order for this to happen, individuals have to believe in the self over groups, have to understand how culture can be an obstacle to self-identity, and have to be willing to die because believing this is deeply threatening to those caught in the whole system of belief that states “being right” is all there can be, especially when it comes wrapped in the outrageous intentionality of religious fervor. 

And what about imagination and creativity in all of this? The human capacity for ambiguity is at the heart of creativity, true self-identity, justice and all human endeavors with inherent freedom for the individual in them. Ambiguity is not waffling between one held belief and another—it is remaining open to the possibility that states-of-affairs can be other than they are perceived to be. In other words, we can be wrong. And the human ability to be wrong is inherent in so much of what we learn. [Gordon pointed out to me recently Kathyrn Schulz’s TED talk, “On Being Wrong,” which is a beautiful declaration on why we seek solace in being right.]

My view is not that we should evolve to a state of rationalism over beliefs based on faith or will, but become individuals with an ability to suspend belief just as we suspend facts. By “suspended belief or facts,” I mean lift the total-rightness-of-belief, out of its foundational bedrock, i.e. hold what is known either as fact or belief-through-faith in regard, even respect, even act on it until something else replaces it. But when suspended belief of this kind is presented to individuals as a possibility, they usually become more radicalized in their position than before. They can’t give up the constancy of faith over the inconstancy of facts, when in order for all of us to live as fully as possible, we have to give up both so that we can embrace both. What’s interesting is that when suspended belief is presented to a rationalist, meaning they have to take the agnostic position over the atheistic one, there is just as much fluttering of feathers and great resistance. Since rationalism is based on evidence (observable facts) and without it, there can be no belief, they are just as adamant in their position as Faith-and-Will believers are in theirs. Suspended belief doesn’t mean no belief. It means not knowing or even not knowable—which is what agnosticism is.

So what to do with the Friends of Lava and the project detrimental to elf culture?

What would “suspended belief” look like for both sides in this dispute? Why not negotiate and do it while applying Gordon’s suggestion of critical thinking thrown into the mix…mess—the discussion being along the lines of how far traditions in culture should/could be allowed to influence progress of a practical nature. But also, discussion with some open-mindedness has to be there as well, lifting that desire to be right and listening to the other side, working together to meet some middle way in the situation. We have these negotiations going on all the time—the ten commandments monument in the Alabama Judicial Building and another one in Oklahoma on its state capitol grounds as examples. Is this really too terribly different from the Icelandic version of respecting the Little People and their territory? Unfortunately we haven’t found a way yet to discuss such disputes without the rush to polarities and the superiority of our views—so until such time, it is left to the settlements in the courts.

Magical thinking and falling crucifixes

Today we have a story from Newburgh, New York about the power of prayer, and the untoward results thereof.  [Source]

David Jimenez, a devout Catholic, prayed every day in front of a giant, 600-pound marble crucifix in the Church of St. Patrick, asking god to heal his wife Delia, who was suffering from ovarian cancer.  Doctors told the couple that Delia's cancer was in remission in 2010.  Elated, David offered to spend hours meticulously cleaning the crucifix, as a sign of his thankfulness that his prayers were answered.  Unfortunately, what neither he nor (apparently) anyone else in the church knew was that the crucifix was held to the wall by only a single screw, and when he started scrubbing it, the screw popped loose, and the crucifix fell over on top of Jimenez, crushing his leg.  He was rushed to the hospital, but doctors were unable to save his injured leg, and it was ultimately amputated.

Last week, Jimenez's lawyers announced that they have initiated a lawsuit seeking $3 million in damages from the church.

This story has elicited a lot of sardonic laughter on atheist websites.  I understand why people responded that way -- irony always seems to generate laughter, even when it involves injury or death (look at "The Darwin Awards").  Me, I feel sorry for the guy.  After all, he was throughout the incident only acting from the best of motives; care for his ill wife, thankfulness for her recovery, gratefulness to the church for their support.  Whether the church owes him $3 million is not for me to say; but clearly if what he claims is true, that the 600-pound statue was only secured by a single screw, he might well have a case.

What I don't get here, and (honestly) probably never will get, is how anyone gets caught up in that kind of magical thinking in the first place.  It is undeniable that Jimenez and millions of others seem to take "the power of prayer" as a matter of course; "pray every day" is commanded from pulpits all over the world every Sunday.  And there are thousands of accounts of times that the "power of prayer" resulted in cures (or as they call them, "miracles").  My question is: do these people really not get cause-and-effect?  Delia Jimenez was cured by doctors, presumably through chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, or some combination; David's kneeling in front of a crucifix had nothing whatsoever to do with it.  Before you can make the claim that the "power of prayer" really works, you have to explain all the times it didn't work with something more than "god has a plan" or "god works in mysterious ways."  If you pray for Uncle Frank and he recovers, and I pray for Aunt Betty and she doesn't, you can't just say that Uncle Frank's recovery proves that prayer works and wave away what happened to poor Aunt Betty.

Of course, the toppling over of the crucifix adds another surreal element to the whole thing.  If you believe that god really was behind Delia Jimenez's recovery, don't you find it odd that god walloped her husband with the very object of devotion her husband had been praying in front of?  One of the commenters on the story stated, "God healed Delia Jimenez and then punished David Jimenez for idolatry.  Catholics always have had trouble obeying the Second Commandment."  This kind of made my head spin.  Do you really think that a deity, especially one of the kind Christians worship, would work that way?  "Through my power, and because of thy prayer, I have healed thy wife, but now I'm going to smush thy leg because thou didst pray the wrong way."  Really?  That's what you believe, that's the god you worship?  A god who would do such a thing would beat the Greek deities in simple capriciousness.  In fact, I think that given a choice, I'd rather worship Hermes.  At least he knew how to tell a good joke.

I guess the bottom line is, I will never understand magical thinking.  I honestly do try to be tolerant of others' beliefs, however I sometimes come across as an arrogant know-it-all.  But stories like this make me realize that there is a wide, probably unbridgeable, gap between the way I think and the way most of the religious think.