Why do believers believe those silly things?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The Philosopher of Biology John Wilkins has a series of excellent articles on beliefs and sociology over in his blog evolving thoughts. Given his background needless to say he focuses on creationism and climate change but obviously has a great applicability in general. More or less, in a way far, far more eloquent than myself manages to verbalize what I've felt about this sort of thing for a while. Very worth reading (yes, you have to read it though)

Part I; Part III; Part IV (Part II, the best and most important bit imo, is the one linked in the first paragraph)

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[afleitch]

That keenly interests me. I've posted on something similar before but based on people's internalisation for personal rather than social reward. What you posted is actually very inciteful.

We are the observers of this ‘god’ and indeed are the only observers of it which explains why we have a variety of different explanations and accounts of it. There is no outside sentient being who can corroborate our experience. Therefore David Hume’s law on miracles (a miracle is a violation of the natural law usually in favour of the observer therefore by reduction something miraculous is more than likely to be a misunderstanding of a natural event by the observer) applies not only to an individual person but also to humanity as humans cannot divorce their observations from their material self which is biased. Therefore the human understanding of god is inherently biased and biased understandings may be false.

What I mean by this is that humans have a great difficulty in juggling between intuition and empirical reality. While reality is ‘truer’ from a neutral perspective, intuition can ‘feel true’ For example, I live my day intuitively knowing that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night. It’s there and then it’s not. Of course, it’s always there and the ‘actor’ in the cycle isn’t the sun but the Earth. My intuition is wrong but it is of immense help for me to perceive it as true and to ground myself in the concept of a rising and setting sun. The belief in god or the supernatural as external actors is for some, rhetorically effective in that it fits well with that persons intuition and gives them grounding. For many however, that intuition is proven to their satisfaction to be false and it does not

Man makes gods because gods help man order the world. If you lived several thousand years ago and you’ve grown crops to feed your family, then your neighbour comes along and in a fit of callousness your neighbour destroys the crops then as your intuition tells you that your neighbour did it to hurt you. The next effect of the action on you is detrimental. What makes this assertion straightforward is that the actor in this event is another human. Now imagine you grow crops again the following year except this time there’s a severe storm. Now bearing in mind you don’t know anything about the weather; what reasons are you going to give for this destruction given that the effect of this destruction is going to be to your detriment? To humans, from effect comes cause, from cause comes intent so you may feel that the weather did this specifically to you. Let me explain. In these examples both explanations are informed by our intuition. In the first example the neighbour is an actor and he made a sentient decision. This was informed by our intuition but is confirmed by talking to the neighbour or at the very least understanding the emotive actions of others as being similar to yours. In the second example however while the weather is an agent it is a passive agent; it did not damage your crops to specifically hurt you. In this example (if we assume it occurred at a time before our understanding of weather) our intuition will be proven false in time but until then the weather to us is a sentient actor; a powerful and perhaps unappeasable one (though we may try). So it is natural for people to think the physical and mental realm is full of agents with our minds constantly attempting to infer their actions. In our day to day lives our interactions with others of our kind or predators or prey has ensured that evolution has tuned the brain to either spot agents or suspect them if they cannot be directly observed. (see Todd Tremlin) So for example, your day to day wanderings will present you with ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives.’ False positives are fairly harmless. If you think the ‘coiled thing’ in the distance is a snake when it’s actually a piece of rope then the cost of making this mistake is relatively low. If however you suspect the coiled thing in the distance to be just a piece of rope when it’s a snake, then you may pay a price.

However if you are faced with trying to make sense of an event that has no natural sentient agent (man or animal) or has no understandable natural non sentient explanation, such as weather or bushfire or supernova (because we now understand those things) then in our observations we retain the inference of an agent at work but modify the type of agent involved. Non natural agents are therefore ‘supernatural’ agents (and it is not surprising that religious texts often invoke the supernatural in events which can now be explain naturally and in turn seem curious to us today) However it goes much deeper than this as the hierarchy of concepts that we as human beings concern ourselves with are immense. We have basic concerns such as ‘why does it rain?’ which we now understand (though the temptation is there for some to infer an agent at work) and we have far more complex and unclassifiable concepts such as ‘why are we here?’ and ‘why do have free will?’ So again we may infer supernatural agents if we cannot personally accept or internalise a non supernatural explanation that meets the standards of satisfaction that we ourselves set. I will return to this in a minute.

So what of gods? They are essentially the ultimate agents; they are supernatural, spiritual, personal and can encapsulate everything that can ever be ascertained but not proven. For those who believe in god/s, their intuition tells them that there has to be a higher agent; a god to explain what they themselves need to understand. This can become self perpetuating. For example if someone has a problem in accepting something basic; say that the hurricane came because of the weather cycle and not because of divine retribution, the fact that we can empirically prove that the weather cycle caused the hurricane is of no consequence to that persons beliefs because that person has already established a supernatural agent that accounts for such actions. Accepting that they may be wrong violates their sense of intuition which as we have seen is very difficult to override even when presented with external evidence to the contrary. It is only when the person internalises the external evidence so that it replaces their natural intuition that they can then accept it. So the first thought of hurricane damage becomes ‘it is just a hurricane, what a terrible event’ rather than ‘it was sent deliberately to damage.’ This sort of internal re-organisation happens subconsciously all the time and is particularly evident in child development.

Now of course most of us, theists included, are more progressive in our understanding than the previous analogy would suggest (though it is important to note that many people still function at that level of attributability) But what about less tangible concepts such as free will? For people whose deity has moved beyond being a natural actor (the explanation for famine, earthquakes etc) and has instead receded as an actor through others; prayers, healing etc or merely become the representative of the unknowable, these deities are now broadly distinctive from natural agents. So what can we define them as? These gods fall into the classification of the ‘minimally counterintuitive’ (see Justin Barrett) Minimally counterintuitive concepts are those which violate intuitive presumptions. Barrett’s example is this; take something we can all agree on such as a tree. We all know what a tree looks like. We all know what trees do and what trees don’t do. The next step it to violate one of the assumptions. Say that you have an ‘invisible tree’ and you have a minimal counterintuitive. And that’s very supportive in sustaining religious faith. Now if I said I had a tree that could talk, turn into the Grand Canyon and grow televisions instead of apples then what I am saying is incredulous and the proponent would also be considered so. But violate just one assumption; say that the tree can grant you wishes and it is more likely to convince, especially as the tree is still essentially a tree. Ideas that are flatly counterintuitive are not useful to humans to either believe in or propagate.  The usefulness of a minimal counterintuitive is very important too so for example, if I said there was a god that ate dirt and excreted gold, even if I said he gave you some of the gold, then that’s too incredulous an idea for most people to be comfortable with. Likewise if we have a god being an relatively ordinary person except being able to fly then that’s both relatively mundane to be godlike and furthermore his flying abilities aren’t really useful to you. So instead successful gods tend utilise an anthropomorphic template and then violate it in a strategic way, like being everlasting or omnipotent.

So the idea of the omnipotent god has a powerful draw on the curious mind. Because we see ‘actors’ everywhere and in our example of the neighbour and the crops, assume these actors are thinking and planning, it is to our advantage to second guess their intention. For some that omnipotent god is seen to be the actor in say thunderstorms and the complexities of the big bang. For others he manifests himself purely in the former and not the latter (as the person has internalised the empirical reality) This makes both the defence of and arguments against the minimally counterintuitive construct particularly difficult. If the god violates one assumption and then it is argued/proven that the no violation has actually occurred (and our tree is in fact just a tree) then the constructed god if he is to be sustained, has to either violate a second assumption or an argument has to be made that the initial violation is still valid because the god is capable of ‘escaping’ empirical methods of detection. It’s the ‘dragon in the garage’ analogy. If you say there is a dragon in your garage and your friend goes to the garage and it isn’t there, then your dragon in order to exist has to be invisible to him. If other methods of detection are invoked that do not rely on sight, then for the dragon to be there he has to evade all those too. However at the same time as the dragon is evading everyone else’s method of detection, then if pressed, you have to outline precisely why you know or believe there is a dragon and why you can sense it and others cannot. Today, magic trees and volcano gods simply don’t stand up to scrutiny, but the more complex you make your deity the more sustainable it is even when the basis for the original belief (for example, the books of the Old Testament and New Testament) contains very basic minimally counterintuitive constructs that not only are demonstratably false, but the believers of the religion itself would consider to be allegorical rather than true.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

That keenly interests me. I've posted on something similar before but based on people's internalisation for personal rather than social reward. What you posted is actually very inciteful.

Personally, I found it insightful rather than inciteful, and I suspect you do too.

[patrick1]

This was a interesting and thought provoking series.  Thanks for posting. I particularly enjoyed the discussion in Part III.

The one omission that I would have liked to see discussed to open discourse with the "silly" is a a clearer delineation between belief and actions. What is the saying I may have picked up on a billboard somewhere, character counts. People may hold wrong or silly beliefs but that does not condemn them to a world of ignorance. Ethically, someone who is a creationist or a does not accept gay marriage or something could be a much better person than what is held as non-silly. A case being an evangelical Christian treating gay people better than a noxious gay individual.

I make this point because there is frequently a fundamental disrespect to those who hold opposing views. (I dont think the author is such a person at all, the opposite in fact). I don't think you can forget to always have the fundamental respect to the individual in mind, regardless of how wrong they may be. Argue strenuously against untruth, but with respect. If you start from a position of disrespect; and the use of words like silly is misguided imo, then the discourse is a non-starter. My personal distinction is once wrong beliefs turn into wrong action is when something has to be met head on with force if absolutely necessary.

Anyway, I am drifting from the meat of the article about how and why people believe what they do. It spoke to me because I personally have evolved, so to speak, on a whole range of issues and belief systems. Taken as an aggregate I would probably be barely recognizable from my firmly held ideas of a young man at 18. But I think my core character has stayed the same and for me that is a good thing.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Very interesting thread. Thanks for posting, Gully and others who have posted so far.

[Alcon]

Cool article.

I really think the idea of identity-signaling is incredibly under-discussed in academia.  It seems like a huge, obvious explanation of why people behave the way they do in religion, politics, etc., and why cultural diaspora (secular American Jews, for instance) oftentimes invest a lot of stake in signals whose significance they actively claim to disbelieve.  Even though I took a lot of politics and some religion and sociology-ish classes, I'm not sure we ever analyzed identity-signaling much.

Incindiery title aside, I don't think there is anything insulting to the religious about this idea.  This is a powerful pull on all of us.  It's not an exclusively tribal behavior.  We signal identities as individuals all the damn time, and many of our closest-held habits and traits are, when distilled to their roots, essentially things we adapted merely to signal fundamental things about ourselves.  Even if you think tribalism and religion are destructive forces, the basic behavior here is a building-block of most social relationships and personal development and has some seriously benevolent sides.

I do think parts of this article are a little unfocused.  For instance, the aside on alternative medicine is a bit meaningless -- sometimes, crisis events can drive people to change their opinions hold onto them tighter, or keep them the same...OK, well, duh.  All in all, though, it's fantastic.  Thanks for sharing it.

(Also, Andrew, that's a great piece of writing!)

[afleitch]

This was a interesting and thought provoking series.  Thanks for posting. I particularly enjoyed the discussion in Part III.

The one omission that I would have liked to see discussed to open discourse with the "silly" is a a clearer delineation between belief and actions. What is the saying I may have picked up on a billboard somewhere, character counts. People may hold wrong or silly beliefs but that does not condemn them to a world of ignorance. Ethically, someone who is a creationist or a does not accept gay marriage or something could be a much better person than what is held as non-silly. A case being an evangelical Christian treating gay people better than a noxious gay individual.

I wouldn’t get too caught up in the use of the word ‘silly’ otherwise you may end up proving the writers point To be fair, to an outsider, which is how one should approach research like this, a great deal of supernatural beliefs do appear to be ‘silly’ whether it’s that the movement of the stars dictates your personality, that water has ‘memory’ and can treat illness (yet for some reason the water forgets all the fecal matter that’s ever been in it) or that a prayer will help you find your car keys. It is ‘silly.’ On paper these are silly notions. Of course if you believe in prayer then you want that to be respected, just as much as the astrologer or the homoeopathist even if the person who believes in one ‘silly’ idea rejects other ‘silly’ ideas for being, well, ‘silly.’

If we take the evangelical Christian in your example, if he is ‘cool with the gays’ but comes from a ‘silly in-group’ that isn’t okay with it, then his ‘coolness’ isn’t coming from the in-group, it is coming from elsewhere. Even if he’s rejecting the position of the in-group it, then that rejection must be stimulated by an experience contrary to that articulated within in-group. If it is generally accepted that not having a problem with someone’s sexuality (i.e, the out-group) is not ‘silly’ (so non heteronormative sexuality is simply variant rather than deviant), then his inference is coming from the ‘non-silly’ outgroup. However that’s exactly how in-groups change and evolve.

In terms of the ‘in-group’, it’s worth noting that no community can ever sustain itself without outside influence. It is impossible, even with Amazonian tribes, or Amish, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Truthers or whatever to remain hermetically sealed. Groups will always change and then label then old orthodoxy as ‘imperfect’ because any group that considers itself to be ‘a truth’ must maintain that infallibility. For example, as part of a paper I did some years ago, I looked into church bulletins, newspapers and such published around 100 years ago in the Glasgow area on the idea of women’s suffrage. It was very difficult to find any published information that when addressing the issue, addressed it favourably with some notable exceptions amongst the Quakers and some Methodists for example. Some Presbyterian diatribes against women, using biblical references to deny women the franchise had rhetoric worthy of John Knox. However come the granting of the vote in 1918 to some women, I could no longer find any reference to the matter. If there was a discussion, it wasn’t being disseminated in the same way.  With the extension of the franchise to more women in the 1920’s it popped up again, but this time almost exclusively favourably and in at least a half dozen examples, favourably in the same parish newsletters and by the same ministers who previously opposed such measures. It takes time for new, external information to become internalised by the community group which is why on the issue of LGBT rights today, many church groups are simply not responding to outsiders or even to themselves on the matter rather than taking a positive or negative view. I’ve been involved with the LGBT rights movement from the best part of a decade, often with affirming churches and those ten years ago who were willing to lay down exactly why they had a problem with people being gay are now the groups who are now on the record as not wanting to talk about it, or not considering it important. Despite the fact that many churches condoned slavery and opposed women’s suffrage you will very rarely find their successor churches being candid about it, because reflection on the past proves fallibility; it taints ‘truth’. If mistakes were made in the past and if falsehoods were followed and practiced, how can one be assured that mistakes are not being made today?

To take a step away from religion and look at say 9/11 truthers, there is the wonderful story of Charlie Veitch, who was once the pin-up of the movement but now is publically against it. When he was asked if there were any psychological explanations for those who adhere to the conspiracy he suggested, quite insightfully that most have an obsession with victimhood and a hatred of ‘high achievers’ and people that get on with the world.  He suggested that the movement allowed introverts to collectively become more independent and more vocal so it gives people a crutch. Given the interconnectivity of for example, global terror and the interconnectivity of our ability to respond to it, every new terrorist attack from the London bombings to the execution of Lee Rigby on the street feeds into  a pre-existing framework. Everything becomes connected and because they are connected to the ‘great lie’ then they themselves must be part of that lie.

However there a more sinister and dangerous result of in-groups ‘evolving’; they fragment. However fragmentation doesn’t necessarily weaken an idea. If we take god for example, there is one side who says ‘There is no god’ and that is it. On the subject of god, there isn’t one and that’s pretty much the end of the story. For those who say there is one (if not more) then you have an uncountable number of different explanations. Does the fact there is a myriad of different and often contradictory explanations for god weaken the idea of god? No. If anything it’s quite the contrary; ‘there are so many different beliefs there must be a connected truth to it’ tends to be the rather passive and saccharine response to the issue. After thousands of years of human existence majority rules on that one. But if we take for example the anti-medicine movement, well that’s always been there too. You still have a subset of people that exclusively pray or drink their own urine and generally reject germ theory, but most of the objections to the dangers of surgery and medicine are more modern. You may find that people who are practice homeopathy, or are anti-vaccine may move in the same circles or alternatively they may be opposed to each other’s ideas in theory (while also sharing a laugh at people who drink their own piss), but they are part of the same myriad of groups that mistrust medicine or believe in sinister pharmaceuticals, or doctors making money by making you sick and so forth to the extent that in some circles; ‘well there are so many different arguments and opinions that maybe there is a truth after all’ becomes a common expression when it comes to the idea that medicine is somehow ‘dangerous.’ Regardless of how much bigger those circles become and the more fragmented they become, they are still unified by a ‘silly’ notion that counters rationality. For the same reason, it is no coincidence that the GOP is both the home to and the breeding ground of nearly every single conspiracy theory concerning the age of the earth, the gays, the military, climate change, medicine, health care, education, ‘socialism’ and vaginas. Birds of a feather and all that!

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

For the same reason, it is no coincidence that the GOP is both the home to and the breeding ground of nearly every single conspiracy theory concerning the age of the earth, the gays, the military, climate change, medicine, health care, education, ‘socialism’ and vaginas. Birds of a feather and all that!

Just to be clear, the Democrats are the home and breeding ground of a different set of conspiracy theories.

[bore]

I think, on paper, every world view, not just homeopaths and young earth creationists looks pretty silly if not downright bizarre. I mean basically the only argument of the creationists against evolution is one of incredulity- I can't believe that all of this diversity we see around us came from just one primordial creature. Anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows that its beyond counter-intuitive. How silly a belief looks from the outside says almost nothing about whether that belief is true or not.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I think, on paper, every world view, not just homeopaths and young earth creationists looks pretty silly if not downright bizarre. I mean basically the only argument of the creationists against evolution is one of incredulity- I can't believe that all of this diversity we see around us came from just one primordial creature. Anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows that its beyond counter-intuitive. How silly a belief looks from the outside says almost nothing about whether that belief is true or not.

That's true (I think actually that's especially true about political beliefs) but there quite a bit of difference between a theory of, say, ethics in which subjective opinion is always going to be somewhat essential and a theory of the origin of the universe or of bodily health, in which things are either true or not. And there's a great deal of knowledge which helps us indicate what is true and isn't (at least as far as anything can be said to be 'true')

[bore]

I think, on paper, every world view, not just homeopaths and young earth creationists looks pretty silly if not downright bizarre. I mean basically the only argument of the creationists against evolution is one of incredulity- I can't believe that all of this diversity we see around us came from just one primordial creature. Anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows that its beyond counter-intuitive. How silly a belief looks from the outside says almost nothing about whether that belief is true or not.

That's true (I think actually that's especially true about political beliefs) but there quite a bit of difference between a theory of, say, ethics in which subjective opinion is always going to be somewhat essential and a theory of the origin of the universe or of bodily health, in which things are either true or not. And there's a great deal of knowledge which helps us indicate what is true and isn't (at least as far as anything can be said to be 'true')

I basically agree with this-I don't believe my view that I am the messiah and the view that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066 are equally valid. I'd say though whether a belief is silly or not depends a lot on your axioms. For example, a Catholic could say that the doctrine of the Assumption logically follows from their main beliefs (Mary was conceived without sin, there is a God etc) and I wouldn't call that belief silly, but if an atheist were to disbelieve everything the church says, apart from the Assumption, that would be silly. I'd be very reluctant to call almost any political and religious view point as silly, seeing as so much of them are about your starting assumptions. The only beliefs I think which can properly be called silly are those that are either contradicted by empirical evidence, or which there is evidence of absence for, like creationism, homeopathy, libertarianism () etc.

[courts]

I think, on paper, every world view, not just homeopaths and young earth creationists looks pretty silly if not downright bizarre. I mean basically the only argument of the creationists against evolution is one of incredulity- I can't believe that all of this diversity we see around us came from just one primordial creature. Anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows that its beyond counter-intuitive. How silly a belief looks from the outside says almost nothing about whether that belief is true or not.

That's true (I think actually that's especially true about political beliefs) but there quite a bit of difference between a theory of, say, ethics in which subjective opinion is always going to be somewhat essential and a theory of the origin of the universe or of bodily health, in which things are either true or not. And there's a great deal of knowledge which helps us indicate what is true and isn't (at least as far as anything can be said to be 'true')

this sounds suspiciously similar to moral realism. or am i reading things that aren't there? in any case i suspect we're probably more on the same page than either of us feels comfortable admitting. you know what that means

[DemPGH]

Human beings have a desire to understand not only what happens, but why it happens. When they couldn't know, because they had built neither the technology nor built the knowledge, they invented myths and religions to explain it. Why is very often a component of any religion / myth. The Sun is there. Why? If you have the answer to that, you get a lot of power over how people think and can conduct inquisitions and so forth. (Actually, myths go back to pre-history when humans made images of fish gods and all kinds of deities)

Now as time progressed and we explained the cosmic mysteries that stumped our ancestors, we invented the idea that God through some manifestation has a "personal relationship" with lowly us. Lowly us. That's why religion persists today. A lot of people need the assurance of that idea or need to appeal to the imagination because the physical world does not present enough mystery to them. So, there has to be some "deeper" mystery behind it. The sublime? God? Yeah. Thus, they invented the "supernatural." It extends to aliens and all the rest of it.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Answer: because what's "silly" for you isn't for God.

[compson III]

Gully,

I will post later on why I'm dissatisfied with a signaling theory of beliefs.  Mostly, I think that belief's signaling function is epiphenomenal.  I don't think that this signaling process alone is enough to cement it within our genetics.

Also, if all that was required of beliefs is their costliness, then you could see frequent regime shifts in beliefs, where one set of costly beliefs becomes too costly and thus is quickly supplanted by another set of costly beliefs.  Instead, we observe a general conservatism in beliefs.  And if they change at all, they change fairly slowly.  This is the foundation for my own hypothesis.

I do believe that that developing humans have an innate tendency to be receptive to beliefs, just like they have an innate tendency to acquire a language.  Like language, there's nothing genetic which constrains us to a specific belief, but there's a genetic basis for the general faculty.  Beliefs are also irrational.  Thus, unlike intelligence, beliefs are robust to errors in judgement.  Furthermore, as I stated, beliefs are conservative.  It is nearly impossible for a belief to be undermined by another meme.

Here is the crucial hypothesis: Beliefs are the antidote to naive induction/empiricism.  Without beliefs, humans would only have their rational self to defend against the overwhelming power of induction.  Induction (knowing through observing) works under certain scenarios, but it is disastrous in others, because of the randomness and unpredictability of the environment and other humans.  Beliefs are evolutionarily selected (good beliefs will be passed on).  The most important beliefs are those that relate to what is not observed in the average life.  These are the very rare but very important events.  Memes which were flexible would be selected for these rare events, but would be discarded in regimes of normality.  Beliefs, on the other hand, are conservative enough to withstand contrary selection pressures in periods of normality.  Thus they enable societies to act much wiser than a non-belief society does.  This is why there are no societies of atheists (atheist according to the definition of each respective culture; of course a Roman's atheist is not a Christian's atheist) that have ever survived.  And generally, the older a belief, the better it is.

For example, imagine two kinds of people: people merely having memes and then people having beliefs.  Lets imagine they are living on islands of the pacific.  They can hold one of two ideas about their environment: resources are finite or resources are infinite.  This might seem like common sense or easily observable but it really isn't.  Some things seem to exhaust (coconuts) but others (fish) we can't really see how many there are.

Anyways the meme people spread out among societies among many islands and the belief people do the same.  The belief people have at least some societies that strongly hold the belief that resources are finite, and thus are very conservative in using them.  Meanwhile, a macro environmental change occurs which wipes out the abundance of fish.  Among, the believers there are societies who believed in finite resources and thus are able to endure the change.  Meanwhile, there are some non-believing societies which, luckily had memes which led them to the same.  Thus selection pressures operate on both the believers and the non-believers. 

The crucial difference comes after the selection event.  Those societies which believed are able to preserve the memory of that event through beliefs. On the other hand, after a return to prior conditions, those societies which just have non-belief memes will see that memory disappear.  The memes that were successful in surfing the selection event will be outrun by other memes in times of normality. 

Thus the believing societies will all be robust to any future repeats of the selection event, whereas among the non believers, only a random few will be robust.