#2: On Evidence and Belief

It’s no secret that the number of individuals who identify as devout followers of an organized religion has been steadily decreasing in the West. However, a lot of individuals, if asked, would still identify as religious or spiritual whether it be a personal conception of god that they still pray to, or a “larger cosmic power and universal energy” which they believe in.

Personally, I find such half-in half-out religious and spiritual beliefs to be entirely unconvincing and unfounded. I feel that a large reason they persist is because they are sufficiently vague to avoid the kind of scrutiny we place on every other claim one might make about the world. Of course, such beliefs also persist because they can be valuable and useful in the sense of providing people with a sense of meaning, giving them a larger purpose, and providing them with answers. But being useful and valuable are not at all the same as being true.

Everyone is obviously free to believe what they want, but when those beliefs make clear assertions about the way the world works they are opening themselves up to either being right or wrong. And when evaluating whether they are right or wrong (not whether they are useful), they deserve to be scrutinized like any other claim.

Unfortunately, it appears that a lot of people alter their own bar/threshold of what constitutes sufficient evidence for them to believe in an idea when it comes to faith/belief/religion etc. This is to say, they buy in to the need for a high bar of evidence in every other area of life, but they time and time again significantly lower this bar when it comes to claims about some of the most interesting questions about reality and existence.

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Point 1: There is no true divide between the realm of science and the realm of faith/belief when it comes to understanding the world.

If we are looking to understand the world (not everyone is, but if you are), we have tools of reasoning, logic, tradition, wisdom, etc with which to do so. Science uses the scientific method leveraging rigorous evidence and systematic logical reasoning. Spirituality/religion/belief uses tradition, culture, divine texts, human intuition, blind faith etc. Ultimately, both are just attempts to understand the world and I don’t think we can treat them differently when evaluating whether their claims are true or false. Again, evaluating whether they are valuable and useful is a different story altogether. You can believe in something that proves to be extremely useful to you and to society, but you can also be completely wrong about it.

Point 2: There does seem to exist, however, a useful line that can be drawn between:

• A) the things which almost all of us accept as being explained by and settled on by science (the shape of the earth, combustion engines, the speed of light etc.)

• B) the things for which science currently has no (generally agreed upon) answer (reincarnation, consciousness, when life begins, etc)

Point 2.A: On the “settled science” side we mostly all agree on these things, and the tool we credit for our understanding is the scientific method. It is a systematic and rigorous evidence-based method of understanding the structure and behavior of the world.

Point 2.B: Then we have the things for which science currently has no clear answer. Again examples include god, reincarnation, the afterlife, karma. When it comes to this side there are some further sub-groups that can be useful to explore. But first it is worth asking:

If no, does the following impact your thoughts?

Point 2.B:i: The line between “settled science” and things “science has no answer for” is constantly moving and over the last few centuries has very clearly been trending towards expanding what is settled science. For example, our relationship to all other life on the planet was explained by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Atmospheric physics has allowed us to understand weather patterns intricately enough to make predictions just as people have always been doing, but with a much higher accuracy.

This means a lot of the things which we consider settled science today and for which we say systematic evidence is important to were previously on the “science has no answer for it” side. And the process by which it changed sides and became something we all agree upon as settled science was by using systematic reasoning and rigorous evidence on the “science has no answer for it” side. To me, at least, this shows systematic reasoning must be important on this side of the line where we may not have a clear evidence based answer (yet).

Point 2.B.ii: Perhaps that doesn’t convince you though so let’s take a look at a subgroup of the “science has no answer side”. This side is where most faith/beliefs/spiritual-ideas reside. So take the subset of beliefs that we would classify as potentially harmful beliefs. These are beliefs that have a claimed upside, but also have a high chance and/or very harmful downside.

When it comes to these beliefs I think almost everyone is quick to dismiss and debunk likely harmful beliefs that have weak evidence or no evidence of their benefit. Imagine someone claims that prayer will cure all the patients in a hospital and that doctors should be spending all their time praying for their patients instead of wasting potential prayer time by operating. Well, without rock solid evidence for such an extreme claim it would be ridiculous to take this risk despite the claimed upside of a divine miracle cure. This may seem too absurd of a case to demonstrate that evidence is needed on this side of the line because you wouldn’t really need to bother asking for evidence before dismissing an outrageous claim.

However, there are in fact times when we have medical practices that pose great danger to the patient and we need a way to determine whether or not the benefit is worth it. For example, blood-letting was the most common medical practice performed by surgeons for almost 2,000 years. Today, modern medicine has abandoned blood-letting after determining that in the vast majority of cases it was actually harmful to patients. On the other hand, we do still today perform the extremely risky and dangerous procedure of breaking open someones rib cage to perform open-heart surgery. The process by which we discard certain potentially harmful ideas and embrace others is rigorous evaluation of the likelihood and magnitude of the benefit in relation to the cost using evidence.

So I think most people already implicitly agree that we clearly need systematic reasoning and rigorous evidence on this side of the “line” in order to evaluate the truth of a claim that could potentially be harmful.

The final thing I’ll add about potentially harmful beliefs is that I think they include beliefs such as redemptive suffering in Catholicism, Karma in Hinduism, and even destiny/fate in general.

Ideas such as these can lead people to view their own suffering and that of others as justified and well-deserved. Entire societies are given the ability to overlook the injustices of slavery or an inhuman caste system when they can write-off the horrendous treatment of fellow humans as divinely ordained and accounted-for.

Holding such beliefs are not harmless and therefore require an evaluation of and a reckoning with their potential downsides using a system of rigorous evidence and logic.

Point 2.B.iii: The other subgroup on the “science has no answer” side is harmless beliefs. This would include personal beliefs, like faith/religion, belief in a guiding force, astrology, ~energy~, a personal god etc, that don’t directly affect other people. These may in fact be beneficial to yourself and to others around you. But when it comes to understanding whether such beliefs are true I think people delude themselves by significantly lowering the threshold for what constitutes sufficient evidence.

Point 2.B.iii.X: One camp of people simply don’t scrutinize or care whether their harmless personal beliefs are true or not. Of course, this is perfectly fine. We can all think whatever we want when it isn’t harming anyone. But in terms of evaluating the truth of such a belief, not scrutinizing or caring would not be an effective strategy.

I do think this camp is somewhat common among people who aren’t devout theists but still consider themselves spiritual or religious in some way:

• Something happens to you and whether good or bad you may offhandedly attribute it to karma, fate or destiny or a larger plan.

• You say everything happens for a reason because it helps to make sense of difficult or frustrating times.

• You speak in vague terms of something “beyond us” and something more to life because it is comforting to imagine a higher purpose or meaning.

• You believe in a cosmic universal energy that can be tapped into because you have experienced uncanny, improbable events for which you have no explanation.

A lot of the time, people say and believe such things because it helps them, or it appeals to some yearning within them, and they don’t do so with much scrutiny or care for whether what they are saying is REALLY true or REALLY the cause of some event. They’ve just adopted a saying from their parents or spiritual leader because it helps to make sense of life.

There isn’t much to say for people who do this since they seem more interested in maintaining some religious/spiritual connection with their parents and ancestors and having a catchy phrase that they can recite to help them through life rather than dissecting these ideas to find out if they are true.

If you’re not interested in whether such things and your harmless beliefs in general are true then there is no problem here. I just hope these aren’t beliefs that you impose on others.

Point 2.B.iii.Y: Another camp of people do think about whether their beliefs are true and may use weak evidence or personal experiences to support their harmless beliefs. Agreeing on a definition for strong and weak evidence and trying to establish when exactly there is enough evidence to believe in something isn’t even necessary here! Just examine the definitions and thresholds that you yourself use in every other realm of life. I don’t understand why someone would lower their standard for evidence or suddenly stop valuing systematic reasoning when evaluating whether their personal belief is true.

If an idea doesn’t meet the threshold of evidence and reasoning which you or anyone would use to establish facts on the science side of the line (Point 2.A), or the threshold to move things towards the science side (Point 2.B.i), or the bar to evaluate harmful beliefs (Point 2.B.ii), why would you continue to choose to believe in it?

Furthermore, when you choose to lower your threshold and believe in a harmless idea on bad evidence, what leg do you have to stand on when condemning someone with an extremely harmful belief based on likewise bad evidence or no evidence at all?

You undermine the importance of systematic reasoning and rigorous evidence by clinging to and defending unsubstantiated ideas.

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So, I ask again:

If you answer yes I just don’t know how you can be intellectually consistent and make statements like:

“I believe in Karma/Fate/Destiny”

“Everything happens for a reason”

“I believe in a non-physical soul that gets reincarnated”

“I believe in some higher power/cosmic ~energy~ that is beyond humans”

I have met people who explicitly tell me they don’t care much as to whether their personal beliefs are really true or not as long as it helps them out and provides value. I respect the honesty of such a statement and for these people the arguments and questions I posed here may be pointless.

However, I think a lot of people do actually care whether their personal beliefs are true. Otherwise, its hard to argue that you aren’t deluding yourself into believing something which you know deep-down is unfounded.
For these people, I don’t see why you would alter the threshold for evidence to believe something when it comes to your personal beliefs.

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Final Note

”Believers” often think non-believers are arrogant for being unwilling or closed off to the possibility that their beliefs are correct and that there may be more to the world than we can see.

However, I find belief to be more arrogant than the position of those who claim not to know. Asserting a belief means you claim to have an answer or explanation for how the world works. When you say everything happens for a reason, you are claiming to know something about the world. When you say there is a larger cosmic intelligence at play you are closing the door to the infinite other possibilities. To say “I don’t know why such and such happens” and to not commit yourself to an answer is to leave yourself open to the range of all possible answers.

To be a theist is to affirmatively claim that god exists. To be an atheist is only to say you are not a theist. It is the absence of a belief in god. It is not necessarily an assertion or belief that god doesn’t and cannot exist.

It can be analogized to the court system. If you have enough evidence to prove that someone on trial is guilty, then they can be convicted. If there is insufficient evidence to prove them guilty, they cannot be convicted. However, insufficient evidence of guilt does not mean that this person is certainly innocent. It simply means we cannot convict them as guilty. In the same way, to be an atheist is simply to say you cannot affirmatively claim that god exists. It is distinctly different from asserting that god affirmatively does not exist. It is simply an absence of a belief in god.

Personally, I am an atheist as I do not have a belief in god. I am certainly open to the possibility that a god exists. There is an untold number of things we don’t understand about the world and history has shown that paradigm-shifting discoveries can happen at any moment. I could be convinced of such an extraordinary claim given equally extraordinary evidence. But I have yet to see anything of the sort and therefore do not currently have a belief in god.