369 miles from Oklahoma City, to be precise. And then it's another 176 to Albuquerque, where we're stopping for the night with Midge and John. No doubt you've heard the old saw about rolling up the sidewalks at 10 PM? In Tucumcari, they apparently roll them up at 2 PM, as we discovered trying to find something open that served coffee. We were finally directed to the CircleK, which is the New Mexico version of WaWa. Having just Trekked the western half of Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle, we desperately needed some re-fortification, even though our struggle had been enriched several hours earlier by the 19 story cross in Groom, TX (pop. 587) shown above. I had been looking forward all morning to seeing the largest cross in the world, but this was not to be. Wikipedia later informed me that it was outranked by several others around the world, and was actually only no. 3 in the U.S. Too Much Information can be a sad thing.
However, the cross provides an excellent segue to our next commercial break: Why is there religion? I feel that this question has not received the attention it deserves. There are several standard answers:
1) "It gives people comfort." Big deal. So does heroin. You can't tell me that one of the biggest features of human life, crossing all cultures and extending back into pre-history, exists simply because people like it. (footnote: See Marx for more on this particular view.)
2) "Without religion, there would be no morality." To any non-believer, this is without doubt the most offensive explanation. Regarding this particular idea, Kurt Vonnegut said it best:
"A humanist is a person who believes that it is possible to lead a decent life without either the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment after you are dead."Indeed, it is highly arguable whether the net effect of religion on humanity has been an increase or a decrease in moral behavior. Here's Steven Weinberg, a nobel laureate physicist:
"With or without religion, good people will do good and evil people will do evil. But for a good person to do evil --- that takes religion."
No need to go into detail here, a few notable examples may suffice: the crusades, the inquisition, the holocaust, 9/11 ...
3) "People need to believe in something bigger than themselves", or words to that effect. Now we're getting somewhere. But we're still begging the question, which is: Why do people have this need?
Let's call this attribute of humanity the Propensity to Believe -- PTB for short. And by "belief" I mean religious belief, aka faith, as opposed to evidence-based belief. Believing that the sun will rise tomorrow doesn't count. What people really want to do, it seems, is to believe fantastic things, supernatural things, things not only unsupported by any evidence, but often contradicted by a mountain of evidence.
So, why does PTB exist? Any human trait this powerful and pervasive must have evolutionary significance. Which means that PTB is genetic, and because it is so pervasive, must at some point have conferred a survival advantage on those who inherited it. And what advantage might that be? My theory is that PTB enabled a superior form of social organization in primitive societies, namely theocracy. In most primitive societies that I know anything about (admittedly not very many), the ruler is either a god or at least speaks directly to one. And because his subjects have PTB, they believe it when he tells them that his commands must be obeyed because he is divine or is relaying instructions from above. In a battle between divinely inspired troops with PTB on a mission from God to kill the enemy on one side, and on the other side a non-PTB force who are wondering why they should risk their lives to kill some people they don't even know, which side is likely to prevail?
But now, by way of contrast, let's talk about evidence-based belief, aka skepticism, whence cometh my pen name. I think many people misunderstand the word "skeptic", confusing it with "cynic". There's no connection at all, really. A cynic doesn't believe in anything, or at least tries to claim that he doesn't, whereas a skeptic is happy to believe in whatever it is, provided that there is more evidence in favor of it than there is against it. So skepticism is all about basing belief on evidence, rather than on emotion or on what some authority has told you to believe. The phrase "question authority" is a skeptical statement. The question to be asked is "What's the evidence for what you're telling me? Why do you believe it, and why should I?"
That's the executive summary, but really it's more complicated. Most skeptics understand that there are degrees of belief. In order to believe something strongly, the evidence in favor must be strong. Not only that, as additional evidence arrives, it must be confirmative. If, on the other hand, contradictory evidence appears, this weakens the belief, and if enough contradictory evidence accumulates, the skeptic will discard the original belief, and may actually adopt the opposite, or some other alternative belief which is better supported by the totality of the evidence.
So, how do we measure degrees of belief? If you're either a gambler (which I'm not) or a Bayesian (which I am), you use odds. Now, for the quantitatively challenged, don't panic. This is not Statistics 101. Let's just say that, in principle at least, a Bayesian assigns a positive number to a belief, which we can think of as the betting odds favoring its truth. A value of 1 means there's no more evidence in favor than there is against, so he's neutral. A value greater than 1 indicates belief, while a value less than 1 indicates disbelief. The larger the odds, the stronger the belief. When new evidence arrives, the Bayesian computes something called the "Bayes factor" by a formula which we need not discuss here, and multiplies the prior odds by the Bayes factor to obtain the new odds, which are called the "posterior odds" if you want to know. The point is that if you strongly disbelieve something, (prior odds close to zero) you need a large Bayes factor (strong evidence in favor) in order to push your posterior odds above 1. In common parlance: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
Let's take an example. Should you believe that aliens have been visiting the Earth since 1947 in flying saucers? The prior odds are heavily against this. After extensive unmanned exploration of the solar system, no extraterrestrial life of any kind has been found, much less any highly advanced intelligent life. That would leave interstellar travel, which is basically ruled out by the theory of relativity except for a few nearby stars, which show no signs of any habitable planets. So, what about the evidence in favor? It is quite poor actually --- mostly unconfirmed anecdotal "sightings" of UFOs, some even more unlikely anecdotal accounts of "abductions", and a few blurry photos. Hardly extraordinary evidence. Conclusion: the posterior odds remain very low -- the UFO hypothesis is and always has been highly improbable.
3) "People need to believe in something bigger than themselves", or words to that effect. Now we're getting somewhere. But we're still begging the question, which is: Why do people have this need?
Let's call this attribute of humanity the Propensity to Believe -- PTB for short. And by "belief" I mean religious belief, aka faith, as opposed to evidence-based belief. Believing that the sun will rise tomorrow doesn't count. What people really want to do, it seems, is to believe fantastic things, supernatural things, things not only unsupported by any evidence, but often contradicted by a mountain of evidence.
So, why does PTB exist? Any human trait this powerful and pervasive must have evolutionary significance. Which means that PTB is genetic, and because it is so pervasive, must at some point have conferred a survival advantage on those who inherited it. And what advantage might that be? My theory is that PTB enabled a superior form of social organization in primitive societies, namely theocracy. In most primitive societies that I know anything about (admittedly not very many), the ruler is either a god or at least speaks directly to one. And because his subjects have PTB, they believe it when he tells them that his commands must be obeyed because he is divine or is relaying instructions from above. In a battle between divinely inspired troops with PTB on a mission from God to kill the enemy on one side, and on the other side a non-PTB force who are wondering why they should risk their lives to kill some people they don't even know, which side is likely to prevail?
But now, by way of contrast, let's talk about evidence-based belief, aka skepticism, whence cometh my pen name. I think many people misunderstand the word "skeptic", confusing it with "cynic". There's no connection at all, really. A cynic doesn't believe in anything, or at least tries to claim that he doesn't, whereas a skeptic is happy to believe in whatever it is, provided that there is more evidence in favor of it than there is against it. So skepticism is all about basing belief on evidence, rather than on emotion or on what some authority has told you to believe. The phrase "question authority" is a skeptical statement. The question to be asked is "What's the evidence for what you're telling me? Why do you believe it, and why should I?"
That's the executive summary, but really it's more complicated. Most skeptics understand that there are degrees of belief. In order to believe something strongly, the evidence in favor must be strong. Not only that, as additional evidence arrives, it must be confirmative. If, on the other hand, contradictory evidence appears, this weakens the belief, and if enough contradictory evidence accumulates, the skeptic will discard the original belief, and may actually adopt the opposite, or some other alternative belief which is better supported by the totality of the evidence.
So, how do we measure degrees of belief? If you're either a gambler (which I'm not) or a Bayesian (which I am), you use odds. Now, for the quantitatively challenged, don't panic. This is not Statistics 101. Let's just say that, in principle at least, a Bayesian assigns a positive number to a belief, which we can think of as the betting odds favoring its truth. A value of 1 means there's no more evidence in favor than there is against, so he's neutral. A value greater than 1 indicates belief, while a value less than 1 indicates disbelief. The larger the odds, the stronger the belief. When new evidence arrives, the Bayesian computes something called the "Bayes factor" by a formula which we need not discuss here, and multiplies the prior odds by the Bayes factor to obtain the new odds, which are called the "posterior odds" if you want to know. The point is that if you strongly disbelieve something, (prior odds close to zero) you need a large Bayes factor (strong evidence in favor) in order to push your posterior odds above 1. In common parlance: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
Let's take an example. Should you believe that aliens have been visiting the Earth since 1947 in flying saucers? The prior odds are heavily against this. After extensive unmanned exploration of the solar system, no extraterrestrial life of any kind has been found, much less any highly advanced intelligent life. That would leave interstellar travel, which is basically ruled out by the theory of relativity except for a few nearby stars, which show no signs of any habitable planets. So, what about the evidence in favor? It is quite poor actually --- mostly unconfirmed anecdotal "sightings" of UFOs, some even more unlikely anecdotal accounts of "abductions", and a few blurry photos. Hardly extraordinary evidence. Conclusion: the posterior odds remain very low -- the UFO hypothesis is and always has been highly improbable.
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