Belief: How Our Minds Work (and How They Don't)

By Gil Carroll

Do you know why you believe what you believe?

In order to make sense of the world, human beings search for patterns and make assumptions. But our need to make sense of things does not guarantee that we will make reasonable sense, or that our beliefs will be truthful.

Do we develop our religious and political beliefs using the same process? Should we?

How do we know whether one of our beliefs is wrong?

In a conversational style, this book discusses how we come to belief today, and how our minds can actually get in the way of our search for truth by leading us into various cognitive biases and logical fallacies

Using insightful quotations of scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Carl Sagan, and philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell, David Hume and Karl Popper, this book addresses questions like:

• How does a conspiracy work? (with special attention paid to the 2020 Presidential election fraud allegations.)
• How did the modern process of constructing beliefs develop?
• How do we scrutinize our beliefs, to make sure that they have a solid foundation?
• How did skepticism come to play such an important role in discovering truth?
• How did the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution both play into the modern scientific attitude toward belief?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Reasons Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736629314

Book preview

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Durable Solutions

Belief

––––––––

How Our Minds Work

(and How They Don’t)

Gil Carroll

––––––––

Good Reasons Press

Copyright © 2021 Gil Carroll

First Published by Good Reasons Press in 2021

www.goodreasons.co

Cover Design by Bianca Bordianu

Editing by Dale Ulland

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All rights reserved, Good Reasons Press. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact Good Reasons Press, www.goodreasons.co.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-7366293-0-7

eBook ISBN 978-1-7366293-1-4

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"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

— William Kingdon Clifford

Introduction

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.[1]

– Baruch Spinoza

HISTORY IS LOUSY WITH beliefs that were once commonplace but that seem absurd today. These include the beliefs that fairies live in the woods (as do leprechauns); that there exist witches who have sex with demons in the forest at midnight (we should find these witches and burn them); that worms are created when rainwater mixes with dirt; that leaving wrapped bread and cheese in a dark corner will create mice; that fleas come from dust and maggots from rotting meat; and that human sperm look like little people.

Also, Earth is flat, and the sun, the moon and the heavens orbit around it; telescopes and microscopes are tools that trick the senses and should not be trusted; and garlic neutralizes magnets. Heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects; seeing happens when our eyes shine invisible rays on objects; malaria comes from bad air; travel by train can cause insanity; if people travel faster than the speed of sound, they will die; and space travel will puncture holes in the atmosphere that will let the air to leak out.

To say modern people are more intelligent than past generations would be simplistic and self-serving. However, it is true that humans have changed considerably over the past five centuries regarding how we construct our beliefs. We have also adopted a few ways whereby we can scrutinize our beliefs.

If we choose to, that is.

We are comfortable assuming that our beliefs are correct, and so we feel no need to scrutinize them. This is unfortunate, as the bias we have to favor our own beliefs is a bug and not a feature. Some beliefs are better than others. Some beliefs are more harmful than others. As described in the phrase He who would own a monkey should pay for the glasses it breaks, we are responsible for the damage caused by our bad beliefs.

Do we hold any beliefs today that will seem eccentric or quaint – or even shameful – to our descendants?

Should you feed a cold and starve a fever? Spread butter over a burn? Pee on a jellyfish sting? My friend’s son thinks that turning on the porch-light causes the sun to set.

Is the world run by a few secret organizations such as the Illuminati and the Dead Bones Society? Are these organizations conspiring to implement a New World Order that nobody knows about (except, of course, those fortunate people who do). Some claim this NWO will take power after it causes a global economic collapse, possibly triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, possibly with the assistance of 5G-network technology. Some say the United Nations is a witting participant in this conspiracy, and therefore we should suspect their intentions and their actions.

At one time, people believed that the atmosphere contained a mysterious element called ether. Today, we say the universe is full of dark matter, stuff we can neither see nor measure directly. Some believe that the Large Hadron Collider in Europe – used to smash particles into one another at super high speeds – could open up a black hole that might suck Earth in.

Is the gift of speaking in tongues real? Does God really care if we eat pork or help refugees? Does the Bible predict the future of the United States?

Is DNA research real science? What about gene editing? Magnetic bracelets? Does hypnosis work? Do vaccinations cause autism? Can people become possessed? Does the pyramid shape emit energy? Does quantum theory have spiritual implications?

Some people believe Earth is heating up at an unprecedented rate that will cause devastating destruction and possibly even mass extinction. Some believe that human activity is to blame for this warming. Others dismiss climate change as just a natural fluctuation or possibly even a Chinese hoax.

Is being gay a circumstance that can – and should – be cured?

Did Bill and Hillary Clinton have John F. Kennedy Jr. killed? Some people believe that if you fall off a cliff, you will die of shock before you hit the ground. Some believe Barack Obama is really a Kenyan-born Muslim, and others believe he is neither Kenyan-born nor Muslim; rather, they believe, he was born in Hawaii. Some think the world ended in 1914 – or 1978 – or in 2000, but few noticed its demise because it ended only on a spiritual level. Some believe we are now in the end times. Some say 9/11 was an inside job. Others think belief in evolution will lead to atheism and communism.

Many people in the 1930s thought that water that had been made radioactive was a health drink. Today, some people say Kombucha is healthful.

Our beliefs ultimately lead to policy. For example, some see the growth in human population as a major threat. Others think that making birth control or abortion widely available is an even worse threat. Some people think that race is real, and that brain size and skin color influence intelligence and therefore we should take special care how we organize society. 

It is not only the odd stuff people believe that should concern us. A bigger problem might be the true things that we do not believe. Will our descendants consider our hesitancy to take climate change seriously the ultimate act of irresponsibility? Will we hand them a world without polar bears, hippopotamuses and snow?

This book is about belief. We will discuss the various ways through which we arrive at a belief: Reason, tradition, intuition, prejudice, authority, observation and experiment – they all play a role in determining how we believe. Ideally, we establish our beliefs upon good reasons and guard against the many ways we can fall prey to bad beliefs.

Chapter 1, titled The Run-Up to Reason, begins with a brief discussion about the process of making sense of the world as it worked before the massive changes brought by the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. In Chapter 2, The Great Demotions, we discuss the adjustments to the various paths to truth that sprang from these changes. Chapter 3, The Surge of Reason, concerns the paths to truth that emerged as other paths declined, including the rising primacy of the fact. Chapter 4, Science, discusses the development of science and why it has had such a significant impact on the way society gathers knowledge. In Chapter 5, A Good Theory, we drill down on the scientific way we approach an issue and discuss why the process of developing a sound theory is critical to the reasoning process. Chapter 6, The Grand Conspiracy, the Super-Spreader of Poor Thinking, discusses the many ways a non-critical mind can stray from the path of reason. Finally, in Chapter 7, Going Forward, we suggest ways to ensure that our thinking stays rigorous. My hope is that readers will gain an understanding of the historical events that led to the modern belief process; that there still are traps that can compromise human reasoning; and that there are steps we can take to ensure that we do not fall victim to these traps.

Why Is belief important?

Beliefs are inevitable

Humans cannot help but organize reality into categories of belief. That’s what we do. We symbolize. We rationalize. We defend. We are constantly creating arguments and defending them in our internal chatter – our self-talk. We then express them externally to our family, friends and community. We construct reality filters and starting points of discussion. Next, we draw patterns that simplify and generalize, and we construct bulwarks from which we defend our beliefs.

We cannot avoid participating in this organizing process, and in this sense we are all scientists, albeit probably we are poorer scientists than we could be. Our brains are always organization machines, but they are not always unbiased and consistent reasoning machines.

Beliefs have consequences

While we have no control over whether we organize reality, we do have control over how skillfully we do it. The essence of the independent mind, said author Christopher Hitchens, lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.[2] We have control over the degree to which we draw our beliefs from authority and tradition; the degree to which we fall prey to comforting prejudice, cognitive traps and logical fallacies; and the degree to which we apply skeptical reasoning and humility toward our beliefs.

If the ability to reason is what sets humans apart from other animals, then we have an interest in leveraging reason as best we can. Galileo Galilei, the most famous case of an individual choosing observation over authority, said, I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.[3]

Our beliefs determine how we structure our lives. They determine our religious orientation, our political ideals and associations, our consumer appetites and behavior, our romantic preferences, and our short-term and long-term goals. Beliefs also determine how – and whether – we enter into the corrective discussions that ensure that also our beliefs are reasonable. Beliefs not only determine what will occupy our minds, but they fuel what we do and don’t do. Our beliefs inform our days, months and years, eventually determining how we live our lives. Therefore, we should take care that they are formed responsibly, with care and intention.

Beliefs bubble up to form collective versions of reality

We have hygienic responsibility not only over our physical health, but also over our epistemic health. We create hygienic systems that ensure our physical health while protecting others from the consequences of our hygienic neglect, such as the spread of harmful disease. Our intellectual hygiene is equally important. Intellectual hygiene not only helps ensure that our own reasoning is sound, but also protects others from the consequences of our poor reasoning, such as the spread of harmful beliefs.

Beliefs are susceptible to all sorts of deceptions

The sun revolves around Earth. The king is God’s representative on Earth. Slavery is the natural order. Mice spontaneously generate from straw. Each of these beliefs was at one time commonly accepted. Evolutionary theory, climate change and immigration are divisive issues of our day. Wherever we land on these issues,