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.

No Curlew, I'm saying that I am now know of an irrational belief that I didn't know before.

An individual can change their beliefs. The beliefs don't change.

Treen - Is believing in God rational or irrational?

I would say that it's only rational to believe in something for which you have proof, or that corresponds with the weight of available evidence. If there's overwhelming evidence for the existence of god, then it's rational to believe in him/her/it.

Curlew, what do you mean Beliefs don't change?

Not necessarily Rational. Belief can be rational if it benefits the individual who holds it.

Therefore while there is no scientific proof for the efficacy of amber beads, the fact that it reduces the need for analgesics (and their side effects) in the believer means that it is a rational belief.

Dione, what about a belief in God? Is that rational or irrational?

Therefore while there is no scientific proof for the efficacy of amber beads, the fact that it reduces the need for analgesics (and their side effects) in the believer means that it is a rational belief

This isn't true.

It's not the amber beads that are reducing the need for analgesics, it's the placebo effect.

The only rational position on this is that the placebo effect has been triggered by the amber beads - but on their own, the amber beads aren't doing anything.

"Belief can be rational if it benefits the individual who holds it."

Huh? That's not what "rational belief" means AT ALL.

I give you magic water. You are so gullible that you think it will work, and convince yourself that your headache is now better.

There is nothing rational going on here, at any point.

Dione has to believe that everyone believes so she has to conclude that I'm lying or delusional. :)

Btw I wasn't entirely kidding when I said "doesn't it hurt?". People who believe in things become distraught if they doubt them. You only need to read the threads on here to see that. If they lose them entirely some people commit suicide because they can't cope with the loss of the belief.

If someone proves tomorrow that one of the things I thought was true is actually false then it will cause hardly a ripple because I never had a belief in it in the first place.

Believing that something is certainly true when the evidence for it is zero is irrational and damaging.

It's also a mystery how someone arrives at a belief as an adult. It makes some sense if you got it as a child since you assume that the adults telling you things can be trusted . That's why controlling enough schools is important to churches. They have to get to the children while still young enough to be vulnerable.

But as an adult?

"I have decided to believe that there's secret, invisible people living in my garden that no one can see, not even me"

"I have decided to believe in one of the thousands of gods. I picked out the one I now believe in with a pin and now I shall die rather than deny him"

Really?

Btw, like BOB, I have no beliefs in the 'faith' sense of the word.

To the best of my knowledge, I don't have any residual unquestioned beliefs left over from childhood. Never was told about Santa or tooth fairy, let alone an Abrahamic deity, so can't even imagine what those might be. When I'm told something new, I research it well enough to form an informed opinion on it.

I can't fathom what it must be like to just believe stuff you are told, whether it is "Jesus' mum was a virgin", "there is a heaven/hell" or "I'll do a few reiki signs, shake this over your head, and you'll feel better".

"Curlew, what do you mean Beliefs don't change?"

Science thinks, based on current knowledge, that, for example, the Earth revolves around the Sun. Somebody does some proper experiments and discovers that it doesn't. So science stops thinking the earth revolves around the sun.

Person believes that, for example, amber has pain relieving properties. Somebody does some proper experiments, and discovers that it doesn't. Person, however, carries on believing that it does in the face of the evidence.

I've always been fascinated by the amber one, by the way. I can't get my head round the people who swear by it being happy for their baby to be absorbing unknown quantities of an untested drug through their skin..........

Sorry, substitute Sun revolves around the Earth in my last post. Sorry, Galileo!

Back, my area of work and study is thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Belief is what drive these. Your assertion that you operate only within "reality" is something you have in common with the vast majority of people. Most people however, acknowledge the roles of belief and the unconscious in their lives. You, seem however to discount these as they are incompatible with your belief about yourself. Despite the scientific research regarding the role of the unconscious in our thinking and decision making.

You asked if having belief hurts. I assume you mean belief in a god. My answer to that question is no. But then I used to be an Athiest and that didn't hurt either, nor did it feel in any way empty, as some people with religion asked me at the time.

Cote, what you describe as gullibility, is actually an amazing ability. All the doctors I have spoken to would much rather their patients were able to manage (sometimes debilitating) anxiety with holy water, sugar pills, meditation or whatever, rather than the beta blockers that they prescribe for such problems.

Tell me do you really believe it is more rational to take beta blockers if you can achieve the same effect with something a lot less damaging to the body?

Just v. quickly as I'm working, but from yesterday:

Psychology is subjective insofar as it works with socially constructed ideas of normality.

Archaeology is in, some parts of the world, a minefield of politics and ideology (the archaeology of Jersusalem and middle east is the most obvious example.) Happy to say more about that if you're interested.

Just to repeat - I'm not interested in rubbishing psychology or archaeology, just recognising their complexities.

Interested in people saying they have no beliefs. I suspect that this is to do with semantics & identity more than anything else. More subjectivity!

I also find the distinction made upthread between science & pseudoscience really interesting - it's fair enough to say that some things done in the name of science shouldn't be taken seriously, but who gets to decide where the line is between science & pseudoscience (which just means 'fake science')? Jimpjams' post yesterday illustrated how subjective the thinking behind scientific studies can be.

This whole science vs pseudoscience line of thinking reminds me of fundamentalist religious people who draw a line between those people who are 'really saved' and those who aren't, or the 'clean-unclean' way of organsing the world. I can see why it appeals, because it taps into that very deep human need / instinct to organise reality into clean and unclean, saved and unsaved, good and bad, etc. But it doesn't seem very rational / reasonable to me. Was musing earlier that if I were ever to lose my faith, I just wouldn't be intellectually convinced by this type of atheism; I'm not wanting to be antagonistic for fun, but it just seems like another way of conceptualising the world so as to organise it, feel safer within a chaotic world and so on. Sorry if that offends.

Dione, I think it's possible you are using some other definition of belief. That's why I keep defining it.

Your assertion that you operate only within "reality" is something you have in common with the vast majority of people.

Most people however, acknowledge the roles of belief and the unconscious in their lives

You do know that those two lines contradict each other right? Though to be fair you may well have found people who assert that I suppose. But they can't really operate only within reality AND believe without evidence because those are mutually exclusive.

Let's do an experiment. Take any cardboard box and place it on the table. Now I want you to believe there's a pink talking duck inside. How long will that take you?

Sorry Head, you are right, I shouldn't have used the word only in that first sentence. Perhaps mOstlu would have been a better word.

Doh. That should read mostly.

Haven't caught up with the thread but just want to wave to Holo - haven't seen you for ages, when I was in my alternative guise of GrimmaTheNome.

"what you describe as gullibility, is actually an amazing ability"

Believing in the 'power' of ridiculous stuff like crystals & magic water is not an ability. It is more like an inability or disability - inability to think critically or a mental disability.

"All the doctors I have spoken to would much rather their patients were able to manage (sometimes debilitating) anxiety with holy water, sugar pills, meditation or whatever, rather than the beta blockers that they prescribe for such problems."

I agree with BOB - part of your problem is that you confuse things and never really define them well in your head.

Meditation is not woo. It is a mental exercise, effects of which have been documented through myriad scientific studies and quantified via brain waves etc.

Holy water & sugar pills called 'homeopathic remedies' are woo. There is no active ingredient in them that might possibly be a remedy to any problem (except, possibly, thirst). They don't work, they can't work.

It is quite worrying that you lump these things together in your head, which tells me that you don't actually know what we are talking about here.

"my area of work and study is thoughts, feelings and behaviors"

You can't have studied them much and/or in a formal context, if you ended up with the impression that a belief is rational if it leads to a chain of events that end up to your benefit.

You believe you can fly and jump off the balcony. Then you fall in love with the paramedic who tends your broken bones. You live happily ever after. So was "I believe I can fly!" a rational belief because all ended better than it would have otherwise?

No, it wasn't. And neither is belief in healing powers of magic water and sugar pills, even if it helps some people psychologically.

DioneTheDiabolist Tue 05-Nov-13 01:11:06
Belief can be rational if it benefits the individual who holds it. Therefore while there is no scientific proof for the efficacy of amber beads, the fact that it reduces the need for analgesics (and their side effects) in the believer means that it is a rational belief.

Dione- could you say a bit more about what you do?

I never said one dissertation meant science couldn't be trusted, I used it as an example of a 'non-biased' organization (Harvard) giving ethical clearance, funding, space, and perpetuated in the media (which they don't with most of their dissertations - they pushed this one for a reason) as science to show my point that science isn't neutral. I could have used last year's study that "showed" that Black women are 'objectively' the least attractive, I could use almost all of evolutionary psyc that tries to prove the our current systems of oppression are because of evolution rather than sociocultural history, I could bring about the hundreds of SAHM vs WOHM studies or trying to prove gender roles are innate evolutionary roles - those aren't done for the benefit of women or children but to push an agenda. The IQ test that the dissertation was based upon is held up as neutral science - regardless of the large body of evidence that it's bias that distorts results especially over a large population. The BMI is being used as neutral science when it was never intended for individual use (and the current move to study metabolically healthy 'overweight' adults and evidence that people can be fat and healthy - which could vastly improve their health service and alter biases in medical profession that has killed people - is hitting a lot of academic brick walls regardless of how the body of evidence grows because of internal bias within the systems that study this. Even though it could save lives, it's hitting walls).

Science has NEVER been neutral. Just because something comes under the banner of science doesn't mean that the methods and processes are free of bias. All the scientific methods and process can't make something free of bias or remove agendas. It doesn't make woo accurate, but it doesn't make science accurate every time either. The processes help, but the bias within academia still need to be considered when looking at any piece (and the media's bias when looking at any reporting of it). There are centuries of bias to get through, academia is rife with personal and institutional biases, to ignore those because it's been through academically approved processes is to ignore the distortion those biases give to reality. Science can only be trusted once it has been critically analysed through a lens that takes those biases into account.

People have bias, science has bias, things people use to explain things has bias and those biases must be considered when looking at what people - or science - come out with regardless of the safeguards and processes involved because if everyone involved in those processes have the same bias, that bias won't be picked up. Scientific racism still exists and has a long history even going through those process, Scientific sexism exists even going through those processes even with history. We live in a culture that has centuries of building biases to create our current systems, science is not free from that system and many things within science are specifically there to perpetuate systems of power inbalance. Science is not a pure source of knowledge (nothing is) and must be critically analysed just like everything else with our awareness of the biases in the world. To take it on faith because it is science that the methods and processes have made it a clear lens is not science at all, but still faith.

At least twice you complained that they were "trying to prove" something. It sounds like you are saying that some subjects shouldn't be studied. Is that your position?

Science has NEVER been neutral

Depends what you mean by "science".

• Science overall is the systematic study of the physical and natural world

• The scientific method is the set of procedures & techniques it uses to achieve this

One of the most important things that the scientific method is designed to do is bypass bias & present findings as they are, and not how we would like them to be. It achieves this consistently.

This doesn't mean that individual scientists can't be biased. People who fund & commission research could be biased. The way scientific findings are presented & applied could be biased.

But there are enough checks and balances in place (most notably peer review) to combat this.

Overall, science is not biased. You've proved it yourself. Who objected to the BMI & race data? Scientists.

It saddens me how very, very few people in this country understand science.