What is belief?

Elsewhere (http://www.librarything.com/topic/147626#3804935) we've started to discuss the appeal of a great story - whether that be the Bible or other supernatural fiction, and I've started to wonder whether that is another reason for many people's beliefs. That leads on to the obvious question of what exactly is a belief? My main query here is about how much actual choice we have about what we believe. Pascal, for example, set out his own faith in terms of it being a choice, making a conscious decision to believe because of certain benefits to himself. To what extent can faith be called a choice? Do we have any conscious say in what we believe?

I'm always interested to hear about atheists in periods when "everybody believed", for instance, I came across a discussion of such in Ladurie's Montaillou, a history of a Cathar village in early 14th century. One such atheist was an ordinary peasant, probably illiterate, who, ploughing his field (I paraphrase) never saw the "need" for god. Nature was all there was for him and nothing more was necessary. (These testimonies came up during Church trials of heretics.)

Obviously, we cannot know how frequent such attitudes may have been, when records are sparse, and religious allegiance was universally enforced.

I'm inclined to think that for the vast majority the happenstance of belief or its lack is never a result of wholly conscious or wholly unconscious decisions.

The most significant condition seems to be upbringing. Religious parents tend to raise religious children.

I "believe" the evidence for a biological basis of faith, mediated by the environment, is pretty compelling:

- In over 900 societies studied, all were found to have religion.
- Humans are naturally predisposed to seeing patterns (even when analyzing random data) and to projecting agency where it doesn't exist, perhaps as an evolved defense against unseen dangers.
- Subjects can be biased toward greater honesty in testing if they are reminded of the 10 commandments shortly before the test, and persons of faith are more likely to donate money to charity. Both would have been advantageous to small communities of hunter gathers.
- Sub-populations show a bias in the percentages of believers. In all groups, women are slightly more likely to believe, and the likelihood is positively correlated with the number of children a woman has. Perhaps because they would have benefited from the social support network provided by religious communities. Other groups, such as persons with Aspergers, show a strong genetic predisposition away from faith.

This perspective isn't all that new, with researchers like Dean Hamer hypothesizing the "God Gene", though I don't think his work has been all that convincing.

I read The Source by James Michener many moons ago. I found if a terrific read.

"The Source" of the title was a spring at the heart of a settlement. The settlement had built up on this particular location because the spring was there.

Michener told the story of an archaeological excavation of a site in Israel. His book structure worked very well with every alternate chapter being set in what was then contemporary time (1960s) and the other chapters being short stories recounting an incident from each level in the dig from the time of cave men to the then present day. Using this technique he traced the development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam starting with a caveman sensing the wind and ascribing it to a supernatural being.

I am also a great believer that some governments/societal leaders have been quite supportive of religions for the reason that Marx pointed out; i.e. when a population follows a religion that is based on a moral code that is generally against violence and theft then that population will be more easily managed.

Arturo Perez Reverte pointed out in The Seville Communion the majority, if not all, the religious people in the Vatican do not believe in god, but that they are career clergy and have to give the outward appearance of believing to maintain their power. I think this is the same motivation for many politicians who portay themselves as being god fearing individuals as this will help win votes.

I have a book by Geoffrey Atkinson called The Creation Memos in which the creation is simply a building site - a piece of real estate. If you can get hold of a copy it will shatter your faith in the biblical version for ever.

Here is a description of the disaster that was creation taken from the dust cover of the book:

“Some years ago a team of researchers left their headquarters at the Guttenbelli Foundation in Stockholm, bound for a systemic search of the Dead Sea. The small team, consisting of just 793 archaeologists, 971 trainee archaeologists, 4,835 labourers and a dietician, was armed only with primitive equipment: 35 heavy-duty mechanical diggers, two million dollars' worth of highly advanced sensory equipment and a snorkel.

In the course of their research the team came across an unmarked filing cabinet which, it later transpired, contained all the paperwork relating to The Creaation. Years of painstaking documentation followed, during which time the team slowly pieced together the real story of The Creation of The World, and the results of their studies are published here for the first time.

Through the numerous letters, invoices, brochures and telephone messages, we learn that an enormous property concern on the edge of the galaxy commissioned the project through their proven agent in the field: God. He in turn sub-contracted the work to a somewhat dubious firm known as the Cosmic and Universal Construction Co.

From the start, the project was doomed. The builders, whose usual line of work was restricted to double glazing and loft conversions, proved worse than totally incompetent ... the suppliers of fixtures and fittings were equally inept ... completion dates came and went, unheeded by the workmen ... the level of craftsmanship could most kindly be described as shoddy ... and there was even a strike by The Creation Workers Liberation Front.

The memoranda, telex messages and schedules - or The Creation Memos, as the contents of the Dead Sea Filing Cabinet came to be known - cover the series of unmitigated disasters more commonly referred to as The Creation of Heaven on Earth. It's a hell of a story."

#5 Thank you, pinkozcat. That looks like fun.

>5 pinkozcat: Sounds like a fun read. A little like something Douglas Adams would write.

>1 Booksloth: Booksloth, to me one of the lessons of modernity is how much conscious life is merely the tip of the iceberg. It is hard ever to know how much of choice is voluntary rather than driven by unconscious factors, or from where belief ultimately derives. So much is overdetermined.

The easy part is convincing ourselves we have perfectly rational reasons for our convictions.

We might profitably ask how much our skepticism is freely chosen, or influenced by other factors in ourselves, perhaps of which we are not fully aware. I say this with the utmost respect for the attempt at honest self-reflection, however encumbered by the inherent restrictions of our nature.

> 1

Something that you hold to be a truth, with or without evidence or potential to be validated.

#9 I'd go even further and say that belief is something which you know without question to be the truth.

>2 LolaWalser:, The most significant condition seems to be upbringing. Religious parents tend to raise religious children.

Doubtful. My parents never missed an opportunity to go to church, and bring as many of their eight offspring as possible with them. Mom was a founding member (possibly it first leader) of the Rosary Society in their parish, as was her mother in hers. Dad spent seven years in a Jesuit seminary before deciding it wasn't his calling. All of us were baptized, confirmed, and went to the church's elementary (K-8) school. The three oldest went to a Catholic high school. One of them, and the rest of us graduated from the public high school ("protestant school", as my parents called it.)

So, of the eight of us, all stopped going to church as soon as the parents decided we could go on our own, as the church was within walking distance.
When they made Saturday night an alternative to Sunday morning, there was absolutely no way they could monitor our coming and going. Fast forward a few decades, and one sister is hyper-religious, and one brother, who married a devoutly Catholic girl, are the only two of us who claim to be "believers". Frankly, I have doubts about my brother's sincerity. But, the other six of us are either agnostic or outright atheists.

Expanding the scope a bit, the majority of my (several dozen) cousins, also brought up in strict Catholic families, very few of them bother going to church, although they don't really talk about it either. One is a member of a truly cult-like religious group.

Locally, yeah, it seems that parents who keep their kids involved in church activities all the way through high school seem to be successful in their offspring attending church as adults. I suspect it's something in the unfiltered water...

I have been reading Wilful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. Chapter 2 is about love and is entitled, “Love is blind”. In this chapter the writer discusses various forms of love and how those in love turn a blind-eye to the fails of the individuals, or the institution that is the subject of their love. Scenarios discussed, and supported by interviews from real cases, include extra marital affairs, child abuse, both within families and centred on institutions (much focus on the scandals in the Catholic church in Ireland), and the case of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect.

It refers to work carried out by neuroscientists (Bartels, A. and S. Zeki (2004), “The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love”, NeuroImage 21(3): 1155-66.) in which subjects brains were scanned using an fMRI scanners while they thought about people they loved. This research found that thinking of loved ones activated parts of the brain associated with reward: the cells that respond to food, drink, money or cocaine.

Considered more illuminating were the areas that were de-activated, namely the areas responsible for attention, memory and negative emotions, as well social judgement and the ability to distinguish other people’s feelings and intention.

Heffernan uses this evidence to conclude that indeed love is blind.

Taking this together with the fear people would have of losing everything (e.g. the security of a family life; a career that has been depended on an individual or institution that is at fault; etc…) Heffernan hypothesises that the result is wilful blindness.

I would suggest these are the same mechanisms that apply for many people who hold beliefs that do not stand up to empirical evidence. The cost of their not believing is so high it is safer for them to play along with the beliefs rather than think logically through the evidence presented to them, and continuing to believe keeps them linked into the positive reinforcement of their familial or social environment, i.e. the environment that gives them a feeling of self-value and love.

>12 pgmcc: I agree with you and Heffernan. It fits with what one observes. We've all met intelligent theists whose arguments are obviously flawed. That they employ mental barriers preventing the dissolution of what they hold dear explains much. And it's an explanation I think we skeptics must be prepared to accept. The situation is not that we've managed to climb some intellectual mountain and that we only need to show theist the way up. It's much less flattering and far more difficult. Theists are in a sense being quite reasonable. What comfort is it to know a more accurate age of the cosmos when it comes at the expense of ostracism and re-education?

>13 MartyBrandon: What comfort is it to know a more accurate age of the cosmos when it comes at the expense of ostracism and re-education?

Probably no comfort at all, but in the words of Dr. House, "knowing is better than not knowing."

>14 southernbooklady: I'm also with you and House on that one. It's just that your great new insight, will have little impact in a democracy if the people are unwilling to accept it. Science becomes impotent when it is ignored.

Science becomes impotent when it is ignored.

Somewhere it has been said, ‘success commands attention’.