The common defences used by superstitions, religion and sometimes conspiracy theories. Rational thinking pushed aside!
These three phenomena cover a wide array of activities and beliefs but share the same broad sense that they break away from what could be considered to be ‘natural’ and move towards trying to produce or support events that cannot be explained unless there is an unsupported theory behind the curtain. They use a selection of common defences in order to make sure of their own continuation, these are claims that are often made outside of the sorts of other logic and reasoning that perhaps every other part of our lives are subjected to. If I were to claim that I was in fact the best stock broker in the world (I know that in these times of financial melt down that most likely is not a difficult claim to make) then you would expect me too to back it up with at least something. If however, I were to claim to have the ability to speak to a family member of yours who has died, if I were really good at reading you and had been through some sort of education which might include Barnum statements & showmanship, I could actually make you believe that I was doing it. Based not on my actual ability but because you are vulnerable (primed even) and you were brought up in a society where even the slight possibility of these things being real means something to you! These three things which I will refer to as general superstitions rely on at least these five common defences that have to be in place or they will simply fail. There are two wider questions; are such superstitions true (the answer is no) and why do they even exist at all, of course these have very complex answers. Part of the reason behind this post was a promotional video for the Centre of Inquiry which describes superstition as ‘uneducated answers’ and how science makes it possible to have educated ones. Still I think it should go further; superstitions are failures in reasoning, as René Descartes promoted – reason & rationality are the sources of truth and the guarantors of progress.
Often such beliefs are anchored in such a way that it would most certainly feel like a loss surrendering them, still I will credit us all as being rational individuals and the common defences of superstitions are the justifications that allow rational individuals to keep on believing and acting in such a way as if these things were true. These are just the five general justifications and should be seen as an introduction rather than a complete answer.
There are certain levels of unquestioning positions for example this idea has come up in religious debates where an atheist is asked – if they were in a position of being with someone on their deathbed who was also very religious, would it be right to share a non-believing stance with that person. Perhaps this position is very unlikely to happen to anyone but it would certainly be harsh to refuse to pray with that person if they wanted to do so and it helped make them feel better. Likewise when someone has lost a loved one it would be uncomfortable to challenge the role of mediums or if someone dying of cancer thought that Reiki was there last hope in getting better. These situations are worth considering since it shows that there is always an investment into any belief and it is of course human nature to want to keep believing otherwise all the effort thrown in according to the demands of these beliefs is wasted. These are both external unquestioning positions, possibly under the guide of what harm could they do and also internal. To confront someone with a strong belief is often ended with conflict and to confront ourselves would bring harm to us. If we questioned whether the medium that told us our loved one is still in essence somewhere and still loves us, it would feel horrible and impossible to say to ourselves these things are not real. There is also the notion that our ‘western’ culture has moved away from nature, thus allowing us to see things that were developed before the onset of modernity as having an essence of truth and meaning to them. Whether such things are Reiki or acupuncture are believed to be formed by earlier cultures who knew something which we have lost or tap into unexplainable energy still results in them not working. Even in countries where Reiki and acupuncture were developed they are not seen as medicine and are not often offered as anything more than giving someone attention when they require it. In increasingly complex societies simple solutions and answers are often more appealing but it is to ignore the real significances that we have developed.
Could it be true? Fear is often behind our beliefs, take the example of religion and Pascal’s wager, it would appear it is better to believe in a particular version of God just in case. This is not a reason to be religious since you have no way of determining which version of God you should follow, so rather than the question of could it be true it should be replaced with ‘which one is actually true?’ and there is little outside ourselves to answer that question. If you think there are ghosts in your house, it’s better to think that than to know that there are simply ghosts in your head. Still even this scary realization I would suggest that it is better for them to be in your head because if they are in your house then this is a very disempowering notion since there is not a lot you can do about it. A lot of luck is based on trying to get things to happen the way you want them to be, still after a while it starts to become a method of how to make sure that you are not haunted by bad luck. So rather than increasing your chances of the good luck coming your way it becomes an anxiety and an avoidance of certain things like if you always perform the same action before you take an exam, the one time you forget or can’t perform this action, it can cause great anxiety. If we don’t come to understand the conspiracies then we are just sheep running towards what the controlling power wants us to think or not going to a faith healer might mean that our one and only chance is gone forever. Superstition often without it being realized is driven by fear rather than by thinking and much like with not knowing which God to worship we prefer to hedge our bets on one being right.
The largest defence is that of belief without evidence, I am sure there are books published on this subject alone. Let’s be completely honest here and say that no one goes to a medium without thinking that there are ways of talking to the dead and most people tend to stay in the same religion they are born into, very few people overall decide on a new one. So the ‘facts’ would suggest that we already hold belief without evidence and there are many social & psychological reasons for this. One of the most interesting claims to be made is that you have to believe in something otherwise it won’t work for you; like that one small part of your brain that deals with such issues is the whole determining factor behind its magic. We are not discussing staying positive in a negative situation we are talking of the absolute breaking of natural law. It does not happen to matter what it means by no reasoning or logic has any superstition held to be true and anything that truly works will do so regardless of your faith in its ability to do so. We should also not take comfort in filling in the gaps because we don’t yet understand what is going on, the world would not work if we believed anything until we could prove it to be false. The fact that we don’t know something should always be left at that, just because there are unexplained shapes and lights in the sky does not mean that there are aliens or their ships above us, just that there are unexplained shapes and lights in the sky to which we don’t know why they are. In order to get to UFOs and aliens we have to pretend to know something which we don’t and this is dishonest in every respect.
I have a very good example of this: I watched an episode of UFO hunters who in their discussions of vortexes and lines of energy converging in particular spots on the earth surface suggested that aliens come to earth in order to refuel using these energies. One of these places was Stonehenge where they did a series of experiments with dowsing rods to prove that those lines of energies existed because they admitted that the movement observed on the first go using these rods could have been an unconscious reaction they blindfolded a member of the team and then went out with them, this I suggest is where microsignals could have been present since in order to see if the rods moved towards the same direction at the same spot someone had to walk with this blindfolded team member. They went further to my delight and created a device that would remove all influence of the person holding the rods, this was logical and their aim was simple “… we removed Jeff’s ability to turn his hands [thus removing his ability to move the rods unknowingly].” Of course the rods did not move so you would have thought that this falsified their theory but rather than coming to this conclusion they came to the altered theory that the energy had to be focused by a human. So they did not prove anything and it was a waste of time and money to build the device to remove all unconscious movement. This is not to call them dishonest but rather they believed so much in their unsupported theory they were willing to abandon their own reasoning.
The worst problem with deduction is it assumes that you know everything before you reach your conclusion, such as in a case of telekinesis if you could not think of the trick behind the moving of objects you have to assume the supernatural until you learn new information that suggests that it simply was just a trick or in other words until a natural explanation is found. A lot of con artists were seen as having a special power until they were found out. The picture below shows this point but also the main problem behind all superstitions, it was a picture taken by NASA of what appears to be a face on the surface of Mars (to the left) but then as more pictures taken with better technology (middle and to the right) it starts to come clear that we are just seeing a face because our brains are trying to make sense of poor information.
This is the same type of problem that we have in the field of ghost hunting, if you put a person into a position where it is dark, almost silent and often cold why would we not expect their brains to hear a voice in any noise or a person shaped figure in the shadows since that is what we have been trained to do. If a new born baby 30 seconds old can copy a facial expression then it does not seem so far stretched that being human means we come situated already in a position were deduction is natural but can often cause mistakes in our judgements. Homeopathy seems to work if we are mildly ill as we tend to feel better over time naturally still we deduce that the water made us feel better (sorry meant homeopathic medicine not water). Our perception is often at fault!
Claims of authority are often used although in many forms the first is that of stealing words from science such as theory which means a theoretical framework with empirical regulators in place to support it; often in superstitions it simply means a guess. Vibration, energy and quantum which all have particular meanings in language and science but are often used to mean something magical. Vibration is nothing more than movement but it is the vibrations in homeopathic medicine that make it have healing power, which can only lead to the conclusion movement is the healer of all illnesses! Another form of authority comes from the claiming of being an expert in something when really they have no idea what they are talking about. In one of the many 9/11 documentaries it is claimed that the twin towers were demolished by use of explosives hidden in the building by someone who has never used explosives. Then in any good documentary you have the opinion of a real expert claiming that the amount of explosives required to do the job could not be hidden, I am not sure about you but I will always listen to the guy that has years of experience and knowledge over the village idiot. In debates about God or religion speakers’ present knowledge of quantum physics or evolution, since I don’t know anything about physics I will stick to evolution. Darwin’s origin of species is often described as an unguided change or about the origin of life, neither of these is true. It is very much like using Newton’s physics when we have Einstein’s physics, why would anyone use Darwin as an example of evolution when there has been 150 years worth more work done on the subject?
These short five points don’t always necessarily rely on superstitions being true or false, although I think my opinion comes through quite clearly. Often there is a lot of money and personal investment handed over to those who make such amazing claims, to me that does not appear to be a moral position to take. I certainly share the notion that we have and should continue to move away from unchallenged, unquestioned and ultimately useless methods of thinking that appear to provide us with very little. I share the notion in the video for the Centre for Inquiry that we can move past these superstitious ideas, we should and do know better. The value of reason, such as promoted by Descartes, put humans in control of their world and the ability to make it a better place for everyone. That is the real reason to why superstition should no longer be valued, it simply is no longer good enough for us and the more we become aware of these common defences the more we are able to dismiss nonsense.
*Image from: marsprogram.jpl.nasa.go and vipromaniarex.wordpress.com
nice post but everyone has his own point of view.
Re: UFO’s.
“People believe what they want to believe.” People who believe in UFO’s, who make that unwarranted leap from “Unidentified” to aliens from outer space, will see spaceships. Period.
Re: Deductive Reasoning. Very useful in math, but when used in day to day life, it is a fallacy (”a priori” thinking). Accepting an idea without sufficient proof, then deducing “facts” from it. The person who uses this kind of thinking usually “cherry picks” his facts, dismissing those that don’t agree with his theory.