Belief, Evidence, and Using the Bathroom
Evidence
Some of you have brought up major matters bearing on the subject of belief such as perception, knowledge, the way beliefs often change, and so forth. They could be subjects in their own right.
For now, let’s keep the focus narrowed and stick to the question of “Why – when we do believe something – do we believe it?” Maybe the concept of “evidence” can provide a common framework.
Lots of ideas can come into our heads. To decide whether something’s true, we look for a reality check. We look at the evidence. How much evidence is there and how strong or weak is it? Our evaluation of the evidence is what leads us to view an idea as compelling or not. It’s easy to see this in examples from last post. Specifically, numbers 2, 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10 (more or less) are things we’d likely agree about because the evidence would be viewed by most people as abundant and strong. To look at just a couple of them:
- Most of us believe in gravity because we know it’s something scientists agree on very broadly. And most of us view science as a good approach to understanding the physical universe. If nothing else, it produces technologies that work.
- All of us believe in the existence of Papua New Guinea. Even if we haven’t been there, it’s on maps, we can see photos and read articles by all kinds of different people who say they’ve been there, and the general idea of the existence of far away places that we may not personally have happened to visit is supported by tons of evidence.
Sherlock Holmes Goes to the Bathroom
Number nine is interesting – the one about needing to use the bathroom but believing someone’s in there. It’s a common experience (all too common?) and lets us see how the strength of belief goes up with the strength of the evidence.
Say you’re a guest in someone’s house and you come downstairs to use the bathroom. But you see the door is closed and light coming from under the door. You believe someone’s inside. The evidence is pretty strong.
But say that after a few minutes you haven’t heard the slightest sound. You get up from pretending to read a magazine and walk toward the door, listening attentively. Still no sound. You lightly tap on the door and then a little louder… you are becoming convinced that your friend just forgot to turn off the light and left the door closed.
But if instead when you’d come downstairs you’d additionally heard the water running loudly in the bathroom sink, you'd very likely have waited a much longer time before trying the door. That additional evidence would have been especially strong because hardly anybody leaves the water on like that.
Outside the Box?
How does evidence apply or not apply to holding religious beliefs?
Posted by Paul at 10:45 AM Permalink
31 Comments:
If you can discern something empirically you don't need to use faith you can rely on good 'ol reason. Faith is required for the insurmountable and the unanswerable.
Here are two quotes from Will Rogers, one pro:
"You've got to go out on a limb sometimes because that's where the fruit is.”
One con:
"It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.”
I am of the mind that if it walks like a duck...
To that I'll add: Spirituality, because of it’s experiential nature, doesn’t require what I would consider a whole lot of faith. What I’ve experienced along my spiritual journey is true to me. I don’t believe it, I know it. And because of that, life has suddenly become easy for me in ways I could have never imagined.
Take gravity. I don't really care what scientists have to say about gravity, because my everyday experience is not affected by their theories and theorems. I know that if I drop a small spanner off a balcony several floors up, it might kill someone if it hits them on the head. I don't know it because of studying physics, but because it's a practical kind of thing that you don't mess with having different beliefs about.
If someone tells me he hears voices which tell him to do things, I'll be concerned for his mental health, and if he tells me God wants him to take vengeance on the ungodly, I might be worried for my own safety.
Apart from this I don't care what others believe. For myself, I don't want to believe anything. I have my own senses, my own feelings, my own intuitions, and whilst I am curious about many things, I can live with their fascinating mystery if no explanation is forthcoming.
Even if Jesus or Buddha says something in a holy book, I don't feel the necessity to believe or agree or venerate the author---or indeed the opposite.
I fear my belief in God is rather like the using the bathroom example. It's something only I really know is going on. I can't really prove it to anyone. It's personal and the experiences that brought me to that place are not things I can bestow on anyone else.
I've died a few times. The lover of science knows all about neurons firing in the brain. But my experience, not the white light thing btw, was so intensely real to me that I can't really discount what my senses told me.
And I live in a place that blinds me daily with amazing beauty. And science itself is such a wonder. To me it is examining God's details...and I'm a person that sees God in details. Not in an "intelligent design" sort of way...that entire idea seems too pat for words to me. The wonder of the amazing randomness of it all is a terrible beauty.
When I see a snowflake falling on water or a spring lizard or a double rainbow or one person's act of kindness. That's how I prove God.
A few years ago I realized with surprise that the desire/need to believe had fallen away, and I recognized that I was completely comfortable in my skin as an atheist. What is here in front of me in the world is amazing and dazzling, and I don't demand more.
It was as unexpected and as profound an experience as I've ever heard described as revelation.
evidence not necessarily scientific is generally applied to holding religious belief. the faith healing sessions are evidence! it is all a matter of convenience. if it is convenient and assists you in your current project you will believe it and tender evidence (maybe moral) to prove it. or else let it lie.
someone has said that 'any ideology, when it becomes an 'ism', gets corrupt as it acquires a structure which requires beliefs to convince and convert, leading to a power structure and struggle.
Having a religiopus experience would certainly help a person believe, but experience of that kind is so subjective ... some people will find "experience" in mere coincidence, others could see a burning bush and find a rational non-religious explination for it.
Even in non-religious situations actual experience isn't always trustworthy ... it's an accepted truth that eyewitnesses to a crime, for example, will likely have different experiences of the same event.
ROLAND: That’s my tendency also – to see direct experience as having more unifying potential than belief systems.
HOMO ESCAPEONS: I think so too. It always strikes me as incongruous when people assert religious beliefs with an attitude of certainty. Less-than-certainty is part of the very meaning of the word faith.
So if it walks like a duck it falls off the limb without getting any fruit, right? It’s true, and in more than one sense, that people sometimes make getting some fruit the major point of what they understand as their faith.
JANICE: I agree that focusing closely on direct experience has much more potential to unite us than focusing exclusively or primarily on doctrine. At the same time, I’m not so sure that we get to a point where there’s nothing left to discuss – at least in “life as we know it,” as they say. For example, your belief that going within leads to an experience of “pure being” - there’s potentially quite a lot to discuss there.
STARRY NIGHTS: Me too.
DENNIS: You, Roland, and Janice seem to be on the same essential wavelength here. For myself as well, there are a small number of things that I’ve experienced that I find central and which have had major impacts on how I live – making life “easy” in important respects, as you say, prior to the onset of medical problems; and now lending me strength.
These few good things include love and faith. And something else which I find even harder to get words around but have done my best at in writing. What I experience as faith could not be, as you suggest, faith in the other things that I know - there'd be no faith in that - although it does exist in relation to them. Sorry for being so abstract here. I guess it’s a kind of “comments thread digest” of what I write about in non-abstract terms in Original Faith.
YVES: That’s true - nobody needs science to perform simple mechanical acts that utilize gravity. Prehistoric people were dealing with gravity on a common sense, day to day level long before there was any such theory. But today, even without happening to have any personal interest in science, it has implications for all our lives because of the technological powers it gives to humankind.
The remainder of your comment, where you speak of not wanting or needing to believe anything, looks like you’re discussing religious beliefs in particular. Many people, including some who see themselves as non-religious and others who view themselves as spiritual, share your perspective here. (For example, see Hayden's comment on this thread.)
ROSIE: I’m thinking that your belief in God might not really be so much like the bathroom thing – and not just because putting the ideas of “God” and “bathroom” in one sentence sounds kinda odd, for which I have myself to blame!
If you found yourself in the guest bathroom scenario of the post, then if you’d had a friend with you, chances are they would have interpreted the evidence to reach the same conclusions you were reaching. But there’s far from a world wide consensus on the existence of God or even on what people mean when they use that word.
I share your appreciation of the details; at the same time, I haven’t been able to follow this to a proof of God’s existence. But I understand how much these “little things” mean. To me, your citation of them as “proof of God’s existence,” while not proving God’s existence in any way that I'm able to follow, is a way of suggesting how powerfully you’ve experienced them.
Near death experiences – that's a big enough topic that it could be a seperate post.
HAYDEN, MAGICEYE, CRYSTAL – I’ll get back here as soon as I can, all three interesting comments and coming at this with such different takes on the topic…
I just published the comment you made on my blog. Thank you for visiting it. Lately I have been in a blog slump; however, you inspire me to keep writing. I wish you had left a comment about one of my posts; however, it seems that what you are seeking is some dialogue with a UU on your Original Faith blog.
As you probably already know, the Unitarian Universalist (UU) faith does not have a creed. There is no statement of faith that we all say we believe. That is different from most other religions, which profess to have a shared faith. What I believe is different from what the other people who go to my church believe. One of the UUA principals is, "Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth." Is that what you meant when you said, “I've always been drawn to Unitarianism because of its inclusive, non dogmatic approach“?
It is my hope that I may encourage each other along the "spiritual path.” I do not intend to speak for other Unitarian Universalists, just for myself. As a person who was raised in a UU church, my religious beliefs have changed over the years and I expect they will continue to change as I learn. I don’t expect that anyone else will believe the same things I do -- or that what someone believes today will necessarily be the same as what that same person will believe a year from now.
It is my intention to visit this blog again and enter the discussion here on occasion. Thank you for the invitation.
Next time, I will attempt to be briefer and use fewer semicolons.
MAGICEYE: Sounds like you’re saying that you find belief – specifically, religious belief/argumentation – tendentious.
CRYSTAL: A lot of this turns on what we mean by “religious experience.” Personally, I think that all or virtually all human beings have it.
Love for example, if distinguished from a lot of things that get tangled up with it, is an important and universal religious experience. The “one with the universe” or “one with God” category of experience also clearly crosses cultural divides. If you read up on mysticism and read the accounts of people from different traditions they’re remarkably similar. People across traditions – and who are involved in no religious tradition - appear, when engaged in contemplative prayer/meditation and sometimes spontaneously, to undergo “altered states of consciousness” with the same essential qualities of being present to a far greater reality that eclipses self awareness as we normally experience it.
People’s responses to nature – again, world wide – often involve something of this sense of self transcendence and unity with a larger reality.
So while these might be described as subjective experiences, they seem to be characteristic of people generally.
Also: one of the things that strike me about love is that while you might call it a subjective experience, it takes us out of ourselves. If it’s a subjective experience, it’s one that brings us into greater contact with the wider world. “Mystical” or contemplative experiences (I don’t especially like the connotations of that word…) are less familiar and would take a lot more discussion. But I’d suggest that like love, while they might be termed subjective, this type of experience shares that same quality of taking us beyond ourselves.
Did I say I was going to make these replies shorter?? OK, the burning bush… this might get into the idea of miracles, which could be discussed at length – but I refuse!
About direct experience not always being trustworthy – that’s true. That’s why we seek to validate our experiences – for example, seeking out the opinions of people who are specialists in certain domains of experience, looking for consensus among them, examining the conditions under which observations are made, even validating our experiences by means of more than one sense… (It’s dark, I’m on a path in the woods, I think I see a branch at about eye level but put out my hand to see if it’s really there…) So some sorts of experiences make for more compelling evidence than others.
POLYHYMNIA: First, Help! Your blog doesn’t appear on your profile, I want to be able to get back to it…
Oh… (reading further…) Right! I remember it well because I’ve never had a UU (Unitarian Universalist) visitor - so you definitely HAVE to leave your url…
Right, that’s what I meant. Seems to me that the world could use a large dose of religious “tolerance” (I don’t really like that word, sounds like you can barely stand others...). And within Christianity, Unitarians have stood out in this area.
I say there are few too semicolons these days; personally, I like them.
GARY: You might want to take a look at the very first post, "Religion and Spirituality."
Most of the examples you gave would fall into the "with cause" area ... a warm fuzzy feeling that you experience when you're doing something like looking at a sunset, or meditating, etc.
The "without cause" stuff is experience unrelated to what you are doing ... just out of the blue, knock your socks off experience. That's the kind of thing I usually think of as religious experience.
If what you think of as religious experience is, as you say, common to people generally, maybe it isn't "religious" at all, not "suoernatural" or an encounter with something "other", but just an internally generated symptom of being human.
As for love being a religious experience, I think atheists would resent that description ... they love too :-) But I do sort of agree - John said God is love.
Before I realized my athiesm, I attended a Unitarian-Universalist church and really enjoyed my experiences there. I'm not sure I could attend as an athiest, since many of the sermons discuss God, but if I -had- to identify with a religion at this point (say, at gunpoint :D), I would go with UU. I think it's fantastic that people can agree to disagree and respect each other and learn from that. That's how it should be in all aspects of life. :)
In the material on mysticism that I've read - William James, Walter Stace, Evelyn Underhill, most was a while ago so I'm forgetting some... quite a bit from Buddhism... the main distinction seemed to be between what James calls “visions and voices” and the sort of experience that people are apt to describe in terms of a sense of unity with God – or with life, the universe. These experiences are beyond images and words. They can occur either spontaneously or through prayer and meditation. Having such experiences doesn’t require a religious belief system.
The term “religious” probably connotes acceptance of a belief system and participation in religious institutions to most people more than it does first-hand experience, so I’m sure you’re correct – that the first reaction of most atheists would be to reject that word.
MARISSA: I’m sort of straying from your main point, which was in reply to Crystal, but something about your comment makes me think that basic to what atheists reject may be the existence of an entity or realm that's to be regarded as divine in the sense of “supernatural.”
One last thought occurred to me, though ... when I tthink of that kind of religious experience that comes from pursuing activities like contemplation, or being in nature, I think of experience that can be self-generated and that doesn't necessarily depend on God as outside ourselves. It's religious experience without God ... or not God as different from us, but only a pantheistic God (God who is us). Visions and voices seem like they come from without, but are scary because we're worried they actually come from within (and we're nuts! :-). Maybe the truly scary thing is the idea that religious experience might be something out of our control, that doesn't depend on us?
We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift"…
- Albert Einstein
People who have religious beliefs don't care about evidence...it's about how it makes them feel.
I don't remember the dates but I seem to recall the phrase "desert fathers" in association with early Christianity and mysticism. And while it's entirely speculative, I can't help but wonder if it wasn't some powerful experience along these lines alluded to by Jesus's forty days and nights in the desert. It looks like this is the sort of experience the Buddha had and far from making him self absorbed or narcissistic, it led him to compassion and a lifelong committment to try and reduce the suffering of others through his Eightfold Path.
KATHY: So is that good, bad, or indifferent - and I wonder what Einstein meant there by "the intuitive mind." Maybe the creative mind? I read something on him a long time ago and hadn't realized until then that great scientific insight seems to be a matter of creativity just as it is in other fields.
The pain suffered by US & Israel with their battles with Islam, their pursuit of national self-interest instead of regional and global well-being; the persistence of the revenge mechanism; the furious disagreements about abortion, homosexuality and so forth. These are the symptoms of cultures in their death-throes.
"Belief" is a synonym in these contexts for irrational causes of disunity.
I enjoy the thoughtful company of your blog, but the topic to me is moribund and obsolete. The ship is sinking, why discuss its virtues or vices? The important thing is to get off and survive.
Nasra
Nasra
you asked.. "So is that good, bad, or indifferent?"
If religious beliefs are not moving the person to spirtual growth and change for the better of our world then whats the point? most religion has done more harm than good.
MARISSA: People also cite personal experiences of, say, Jesus’ presence, or that of an angel, or Mary – or the reliability of a psychic that they know – that they find convincing. One problem with anecdotal evidence is that it’s difficult to impossible to demonstrate it in some manner that allows others to see it too. Of course this isn't necessarily a problem for the believer but the result is that anecdotes are a weak category of evidence.
NASRA: Miracles – that could be a subject for a post right there...
KATHY: To me, that seems so self-evident and so consistent with those major religious themes of love and compassion – that is, as you suggest... what greater point can there be to religion than that it should do some good in the world?
Many people do argue that religion has done more harm than good. Certainly it’s done some harm. But certainly it’s done some good. Religion was involved with the crusades, for example – but also the civil rights movement. Same when you look at individual lives: for some, it seems to give them a sense of superiority and a shrill intolerance for people with different perspectives. For others, it leads them to alter self defeating behaviors and become contributing members of their communities.
I don't know how to measure whether overall it's done more good or harm. I do know that when it does harm it comes off as particularly noxious because its very business is supposed to be to do good!
Personally, I agree with you about the word “tolerance.” I prefer to practice radical acceptance.
Looking forward to your post on miracles.
I don't believe in the existence of Papua New Guinea.
I accept it, based upon data readily available.
<< Even if we haven’t been there, it’s on maps ... >>
Yup. That's just some of the data.
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