Why do people believe in things when the body of scientific evidence shows otherwise

[technodad]

This is not intended to be an attack on any denomination of belief. The aim of this thread is to try to understand why people choose to believe things, when there are far more likely explanations and why people choose to not trust the scientific opinion.

I am not particularly thinking about a discussion about religion because clearly "faith", some old books and preaching make a difference there (although, please discuss religion if it is relevant). I am thinking more about things like:

• People don't believe global is happening when the vast majority of the scientific community can provide evidence that it is.

• People believe in ghosts when their existance violates all the laws of physics and pretty much all "ghost events" (if not absolutely all) can be explained without mystery.

• People don't get their kids vaccinated (e.g. MMR), when it is clear that not vaccinating is orders of magnitude more dangerous than vaccinating.

• People think that palm reading, tea leaf reading, etc actually works...

• People believe in "alternative" medicines work, when every "alternative" medicine that actually works is now simple called "medicine"!

The rules are as follows:

1. You can say what ever you like, and I don't care if you insult me.

2. If you post something, you may have someone say something that challenges your deeply held beliefs, so please only post if this is acceptable to you.

3. No one is allowed to complain about anyone being horrible, or arrogant, based upon the fact that people will only post here if they are up for a debate (see 2).

4. There is no 4.

Dione, do you not think that the majority of people have beliefs based on the beliefs of the family/culture they were born into?

Most of the large organised religions recruit at birth or very shortly afterwards. I know there are a small number of conversions of previously non-believers as adults, but those tend to be a tiny percentage.

I don't have a problem with other people's beliefs, except when they lead to wars, prejudice & wide spread misery!

People develop beliefs based on what repeatedly works for them. It's like personal micro science.
You can't really have 'personal micro science' though, given that real science depends on reproducibility (by other experimenters) and peer review. Objectivity not subjectivity.

But then you are talking about religious and cultural learning Queen. These things can be manipulated to induce people to go to war, similarly they can be used to oppose wars.

The fact is that most people in the world follow a religion and most people in the world want to get on with their lives, work and child rearing in a peaceful, stress free manner.

There is a belief that religious people are dangerous. The numbers do not bear that out. There are of course violent people and master manipulators, but they do not need religion in order to be violent or propagate their wars.

Does anyone that believes in god/Jesus Christ believe that would have the same beliefs if they lived in a locked room with no contact to the outside world or in an isolated tribe somewhere?

Does anyone believe in a 'soul'?

YoucancallmeQueenBee I know the feeling. I struggled to make sense of it before realising that there was none.

We can look at how it comes about though. At it's simplest we can say that no one wants to know they will die eventually and when things get tough no one wants to be alone. I expect everyone gets times when they wish someone else could be in charge of their life and making the decisions. But how people go from wishing to 'knowing' is a constant source of amazement to me.

MostlyLovingLurchers Oh I agree you can't always wait for proof. If someone guesses out of desperation that is ok. If the evidence either way is thin than you make an educated guess based on best data so far, and that is fine too. We all do that in many areas. We're nearly always short of complete information.

What I suppose I object to is someone guessing and then going around telling people this is a cure. If people say "Hey this might be coincidence, but I ate cherries for a week and my cold cleared up" that wouldn't be a problem. I might even try the cherries myself. I wouldn't 'have faith' in them. I'd be aware they were a long shot. And of course of someone proved they didn't work I'd accept that.

LadyInDisguise You asked what proof there was that reincarnation didn't exist and implied that if there was none that would be a good reason to believe it did. No one who understands the way science works would say that as it makes no sense.

When I say I have no belief I mean I don't accept anything as certainly true/false based on guesswork. Which of course would be required to be religious or superstitious.

Show me that box I mentioned before. If I have no way to determine what is inside I will NOT choose something like an apple and forevermore believe there's an apple in there. That to me is madness. Especially when someone else is free to believe there's an orange in there.

Consider that I have never been to New York. So I don't believe it exists. I don't believe that it doesn't exist either. Both are irrational positions. I do have indirect evidence that it exists. 1000s of films which showed glimpses, references to it in 1000s of places. Chance remarks by people who have no obvious reason to lie to me and so on.

So the existence of New York is tagged in my mind as 'probably true'.

Btw you didn't tell me how you choose and why you do not believe in talking teapots

I just don't get the bit about what repeatedly works for them. How do you know what repeatedly works? What does that mean?

I don't think most religious people are dangerous, as that would be ludicrous & clearly not borne out by the evidence of the world around me. However, I do know that there have been numerous religious wars fought & that odd beliefs persist around religion that are the cause of misery for many: lack of access to contraception, women having to cover their entire bodies, circumcision, not eating certain types of food, women not being allowed to work - in fact an awful lot of repression of women in a number of modern day monolithic religions.

But the individual can replicate it for themselves and if it works for them, then they develop a belief regarding it.

A few weeks ago there was a thread regarding Amber Beads. The contributors who had used Amber beads all reported that they worked. They also stated that they knew that there was currently no scientific explanation as to why they should work. Yet because of these Amber beads, they were using fewer painkillers. Painkillers are scientifically proven to work but they can have a negative impact on the body'sorgans.

Should the users of Amber beads ditch them in favour of pain medication because science can explain painkillers?

But Queen, we also know that numerous wars, atrocities and misogynistic deeds have been committed without religion. Greed, power and cruelty are human failings. To believe that they are due to religious factors is naive and can be dangerous as it can lead the non-religious to believe that they are immune from such manipulation.

Dione, I didn't see the Amber bead thread, but it is well known that you can persuade your mind to believe things - that is how hypnosis works. If anyone finds something that helps them to control pain, then clearly they should stick with it.

I struggle to imagine using an Amber bead to control pain myself, therefore I would be unlikely to buy one, so it is possible that only those already susceptible to believing that Amber beads may work, would actually buy them & therefore are more likely to persuade themselves that they have a positive effect.

However, that seems to me to be slightly different to an entire faith or belief system.

Belief in the efficacy of amber beads is not a belief or faith system. It is simply a belief. Something that people believe in because it has repeatedly shown a beneficial outcome.

'Dione' the placebo effect is not a mystery to science.

If the beads have an effect other than placebo this can easily be proved. Wonder why no one has. After all there are loads of people selling them on amazon. Surely they'd sell more if it was proved and help more people.

Interesting then that in Australia, companies are not allowed to promote amber beads as having analgesic properties because there is insufficient proof that this is the case.

There are all sorts of beliefs out there but some of them are myths perpetuated by those who make money out of exploiting them!

And yet no one on the thread was making money. They just had a developed a belief and it worked for them.

I myself have no experience of them, I am merely using them as an example of why people believe things when the body of scientific evidence shows otherwise.

What I find interesting about irrational/supernatural versus rational/non-supernatural explanations for things is that people like me, who would ideally like to find a rational explanation for odd-seeming phenomena (by "rational" I suppose I mean "an explanation which fits the current laws of physics rather than having to invent random new ones") are usually perfectly open to there being more than one possibility.

Those who believe in the phenomenon supposedly being demonstrated - whether ghosts, homeopathy, God or whatever - are keen to attribute it to their personal favourite one.

This is why I get a bit stabby when the rational people on these threads get attacked for not being "open-minded" enough.

Now I think this is an excellent thread!

Now just for the story, I am a scientific person (as I have a PhD in chemistry) so know quite well about reproducibility etc...
It happens that I also know quite a bit about medicine/placebo effect and complementary therapies on a research level.
And I also think we are more than just a few cells put together. And I am religious.
Like many many scientific people out there. Believing in god, having a soul (or whatever you want to call it), or rebirth isn't actually incompatible with being a scientist. I mean even Steven Hawkins talks about god being at the start if the creation of the universe.

The first I want to say is that saying that the placebo effect is just a psychological effect is misguided and extremely simplistic. The placebo effect is much more than that because in effect it's this big box where you put all the things you can't control it don't know about in. And then if poss you dismiss it because ... Oh yes it's not reproducible (is that a word) so can't be taken into account.
But if that placebo effect is actually relieving your headache (as it is the case for paracetamol btw) why dismissing it? Wouldn't you want to find a way to get better wo all the side effects of drugs?

Then there is the issue that you have to be able to reproduce a result for it to be validated. Fine with a chemical experiment where you can control all the ins and out. But what about medicine? Or astronomy? In medicine it is nearly impossible to replicate exactly the same circumstances which is why different studies on the same subject can get so very different results. And astronomy where you just can't do the experience at all the best you can do is test the theory to what happens outside.

What I read here is the beliefs from a few people that if scientifics gave said that x happens then that's what it usbecause it's 'proper science'.
It isn't. What science tells us is a very small part if the truth. Thinking we hold THE thruth is wrong and thinking way too much about our own capabilities. We know a tiny tiny little bit if the world around us and gave no idea of what really ID the world around us.

Has that happened on this thread DadonIce?

Dione - not read all of this thread in detail yet so I don't know. I'm just saying it often has, on similar threads, in my experience.

Now I have a question for you.
If two lines are parallel, do they ever meet up meet up somewhere?

I mean even Steven Hawkins talks about god being at the start if the creation of the universe.

er, yes, is this the quote of his you meant? ... '“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”

The placebo effect is....it's this big box where you put all the things you can't control it or don't know about in.

I don't think that's true, but maybe I'm not clear on what you mean by that.
If you're testing what happens to 20 patients who take a pill and 20 patients who take the fake/placebo pill then any other effects out of your control apply to all patients. That's pretty much the point of double-blind tests.

We don't dismiss the placebo effect either. Not sure why you'd think so.

Were you asking me this? If two lines are parallel, do they ever meet up meet up somewhere?. If so you probably want someone who knows more about it. I would say that you'd have to be clear on what you meant by straight lines. by my definition they wouldn't, but I believe that in non-euclidean geometry they might.

If two lines are parallel, do they ever meet up meet up somewhere?
In Euclidian space, they don't by definition. If they intersect, they aren't parallel. Not sure what that has to do with this debate.

Because actually if you do use a different geometry, they do cut. Like, on long straight stretch of line, you see the rails of a railway meeting up at the horizon.

We normally use the Euclidean geometry but geometry based on a spherical surface also explain our experience if the reality.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Both actually even though they are not compatible, these two systems explain our everyday reality.

What it has to with the discussion is that this is an exams where both geometries explain our environment and have repeatilly shown to be true. On a scientific basis. But at the same time, they aren't true either.
It's just one example that shows that 'being proven scientifically' doesn't mean to be some sort if golden TRUTH that can not be changed. This isn't how our world works. Our world is a very complex one where one thing and it's opposite can co exist happily.
And then we would like to be able to reduce it to a few 'truths' that can't be changed? Hoe arrogant of us to even think we can.

The bottom line is that before being able to say that truth have to be scientifically demonstrated, then we need to be sure that we can indeed explain the world in that way. We also need to accept the reductionist theory as the only possible way (where by studying smaller and smaller parts if the whole we will then be able to understand the whole). And merely forget about the interactions going in between said parts for example.
And also that there is one theory that can explain everything. Always.

You can not talk about science and truth proven by science as being the one and only way to look at things without first talking about the philosophy behind science, the Cartesian explanation of the world, one solution or explain action for one fact etc..,,

Not a good example because the railway lines meeting up at the horizon are an illusion. A normal sized train can still run on them even though they might look like they meet to you.

But yes there are different ways of describing things. However that may not mean what you think it does. For example we could divide the day into 10 hours if we wanted. That wouldn't change the reality. Clocks use an arbitrary scale.

I'm not a mathematician, but I understand a lot of mathematics is like that.

Our world is a very complex one where one thing and it's opposite can co exist happily

Hmm not sure what you're getting at, but I'd say no it can't.

I did hope it wasn't going to be that sort of spurious argument.

Don't forget you were going to tell us how you picked one belief without proof over another belief without proof.

Otherwise I'm going to have to go with the pin and the list.