Some thoughts on belief

Belief is a curious thing. Essentially it is a codified set of prejudices about the world.

I don't use the term prejudice as a negative here. What I mean is a set of assumptions that a person does not want to challenge. And I am not getting all "holier than thou" either (if you'll excuse the use of the phrase), I am quite aware of the masses of material that I take on faith.

Everyone has prejudices ... everyone. Whether they are true or false, whether deity centric or logic centric, there are large portions of our life individually and communally that we do not challenge with analysis.

We look at a glass and think, "it's empty", not "it's full of air". The best science teachers struggle constantly to break the preconception that air is nothing. The Annenberg Project has an excellent documentary on the continuing failure to actually get students to understand photosynthesis and the students' belief, even past graduation from MIT, that a plant gets its building materials from the water and nutrients in the soil. (Okay, everybody who had to rethink or look up photosynthesis raise your hands ... oh right ... I'm talking to a bunch of geniuses am I?)

We accept black boxes, cars we cannot build, cell phones we cannot diagram the electronics for. We accept their operation on faith. How many people are reading this note of mine who could read and understand the diagram of a computer chip. We are told that the circuits are logical ... and we believe it. We believe because it works and because we don't want to spend the time that it would require to find out for ourselves.

Sometimes that leap of faith pushes logic. Think of the faith in technology (or perhaps in humanity or even a deity) that would let some one strap themselves to a block of metal weighing several tons in the expectation that it will soar thousands of feet above the earth and land thousands of miles away. An aeronautics engineer will know the science. But most others have to use shared experience not knowledge.

I remember reporting aboard an aircraft carrier and hesitating on the pier knowing that the damn thing weighed 95,000 tons. My gut told me that it shouldn't float but my brain (and fear of prison) persuaded me that it did.

Belief, in and of itself, is not bad. It lets us concentrate on what's important to us and leave the rest to people who are interested in it. I don't want to know about the engineering of the aircraft, I merely want to get on it in Boston with the expectation of getting off it in Seattle. I don't need to know the cavitation of the screws of the ship to realize that I'm on the equivalent of a very large office building that is traveling at more than 50 mph.

So if someone who knows nothing about chaos theory wants to describe Hurricane Katrina as an "Act of God" rather than an "Act of Butterfly" I don't see that it makes much difference. Whether your belief is couched in technical terms or religious terms it is still belief.

... AND THAT'S NOT A BAD THING DAMMIT!!!

What is bad, is when you let your belief in stuff that you don't want to understand take over your life. The perversity of people continues to amaze me. The fact that they will turn around and say. Gosh I don't know anything about this so I'll do anything that anyone who claims to know about it says.

I'm not just talking about religion guys. You can make that connection yourselves. I'm talking about cell phone and MP3 players and computers and cars. I find it touching, for example, to see the simple yet transcendent joy in a teenager's face when gazing upon the glory that is iPod. It is the one true iPod and thou shalt have no others before it. All their friends have iPods, so it must be the right, the true, the only way. "Suffer the little children to MP3." All other forms of music are anathema.

Look at advertising. Talk about faith-based initiatives. An auto ad touts the speed. Can you drive that fast? No. But wouldn't it be nice to know that you could! We'll just wear the speed limits like the chains of martyrdom around our necks. Ooooh this detergent gets things whiter than white ... that beer will help me get friends ... 

But the total rejection of belief is as unbalanced as the total acceptance of it.

Our minds, all of them, are hybrids of what we believe and what we know. Often, belief and knowledge exist in dynamic opposition, providing us with two interpretations of the same thing.

We can believe that a hole is empty, and know that it is full of air. We can believe that the stars twinkle, know that it is just an effect of the atmosphere, then be bemused to find out that the light of some stars varies as its planets block its light. I believe that my car works properly, because I don't know how it works and I can't prove that everything is functioning as it should.

This balance always exists. It has to. Belief is at the basis of discovery just as it is often at the basis of the rejection of discovery. Knowledge comes from the successive proving of a chain of beliefs. A scientist believes something to be true and sets out to prove it. If he does, then it becomes knowledge, if he proves it untrue, it does not. Scientists are just people who can believe more creatively and extravagantly than other people.

But, in a way, scientists have it easy. They have a kind of call and response way of dealing with the world. The difficulty comes when you are dealing with the unprovable, those beliefs that are not subject to evidence.

Gods were created as a catch-all explanation for the unexplainable, for things that our ancestors could not understand. George Gamow in his book "1-2-3 Infinity" derives the title from the counting used by a tribe of hunter-gatherers who felt that it was unnecessary to count higher than three. Their numbers were 1, 2, 3, Many. To them, many was infinity, a number which stood for all those other numbers for which they had no names, and for them it was sufficient.

God is infinite. God is our "many". The concept that stands for everything we know is there and yet cannot be proved because we don't have the capacity or the tools. Does that mean that those things aren't there or cannot be proved? I'm sorry, I don't have the capacity or tools to answer that, but I do know that there is more to know, and I don't care what you call it.

Okay, I'm rambling a bit, so let me wander back on to the topic. The problem is not belief but, as I mentioned before, "blind faith".

Blind faith is such a wonderfully appropriate term. I see it as an atrophying of the ability to perceive anything but what is pointed to, as if you were an old carthorse wearing blinders. (A particularly potent image for those of us gifted with Hunter Mind ... ADD to the rest of you.)

If it were not so pervasive throughout history, I would suggest that it is a reaction to the stress of the info age, a way to let someone else take the burden of understanding. People who suffer from this form of mental atrophy seem tired of having to think, extrapolate, make decisions, and discover. They want to be led.

Is it any wonder the degree of vitriol they can spew when an article of faith is challenged. To argue logically seems beyond their capacity. Their vehemence born of the fear that all might not be as they have been told. Most people don't subscribe to "blind faith". Unfortunately, some of the loud people do.

Those of blind faith believe that "every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill laid low" without considering what it would do to the ecosystem and the economics of ski resorts. The sameness, the lack of surprises, comforts them and they "like sheep" desire only an immense sameness of flat pasture.

What a drab and boring place it would be if everyone on earth were just like us, believed like us, knew like us, acted like us, etc. It sounds an awful lot like a kind of Hell. Give me people who think I'm a pinko commie scumbag, or need the services of a mental health professional and are willing to argue. Give me diversity. Diversity is fun.