Why We Believe

I'm catching up on reading my magazines and ran across an article in Newsweek from a couple of weeks ago titled 'Why We Believe'. It's an interesting article and it's interesting timing considering the ACT book group is currently reading Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer.

Shermer is quoted in the article as well as Bruce Hood who has a new book coming out next spring, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. I'm still finishing Shermer's book Science Friction and haven't started on Why People Believe yet but I want to comment on some of what's in the Newsweek article.

The article starts out with a story of a 'skeptic' who believes he's the reincarnation of John Adams. This leads into another story of a woman who was scammed by someone claiming to be her dead son reincarnated. The article then talks about the evolutionary advantages of believing things and such but doesn't get to the heart of the matter. People are stupid. It's not just the religious, all people are stupid. It's our nature.

Some of us try to overcome the stupidity but it can be hard at times but we still work at it. Whenever someone has to say "There's no good reason to believe x, but I still do" that's classic stupidity. The religious usually call it faith, but I don't think faith quite covers it. The article points out that 90% of Americans are stupid.

The statistic that really bothers me though is this: 40% of Americans believe it's possible that aliens have grabbed some of us. This isn't the people claiming to be abducted, this is the people who believe their stories. This is up from 25% in the 1980s. Some people take a stance that being skeptical means 'having an open mind' and therefore they are willing to say just about anything's possible which is part of why the numbers have gone up. Skepticism is not 'having an open mind'.

Stating that anything's possible is not skepticism. On the other hand, there are people out there that try to say that most skeptics are cynics that are just out to disprove everything. At the heart of skepticism is basing decisions on the best available evidence. The scientific method is at the core of most skeptical investigations. Find the evidence and see where the evidence leads. In the process you have to be careful not to fall into any of a number of logical fallacies that can seem (at the time) to offer the correct answer.

So while the Newsweek article points out that it is normal to believe weird things, that doesn't make them true.

Here is a link to the full Newsweek article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/165678