During a recent friendly discussion about religion, someone pointed out that “believing is seeing.” In other words, I probably will not see evidence of God until I first believe in him. Once I believe in him, I will begin to see the evidence. Apparently.
Well, I agree that believing is seeing. As Errol Morris put it
If we want to believe something, then we often find a way to do so regardless of evidence to the contrary. Believing is seeing and not the other way around.
Yes, if you believe in something you will see evidence for it. However, I do not consider that to be a good trait. That is what happens with placebos. We believe they are helping us, and it affects our psyche. Placebos can improve our subjective well being. A placebo will probably not, however, decrease an HIV patient’s viral load. Similarly, belief in God does not increase the actual evidence in favor of God; it just affects our cognitive evidence selection mechanism.
An example
Let us consider a simple example involving superstition. I have heard people say that “bad things come in threes.” Some people are more specific, and believe that “deaths come in threes.” I will focus on the latter phrase. What does the phrase mean? I believe they are saying that if someone close to you dies, then two other people close to you will die in the near future. Deaths happen in groups of three.
If we were to graph the deaths of people close to us on a time line, it would look something like this (if the saying was true):
Here, D represents the death of a person who was close to you. You will notice that the deaths are grouped in 3’s.
Now, keep in mind that the death of someone who is close to you is also the death of someone who is close to a lot of other people. It then becomes a very difficult math problem. How could God makes sure that deaths occur in 3’s for everybody? You could pretty much rule out the factual basis of the claim on this argument alone. Nevertheless, let’s proceed with the example.
In reality, the time line graph would look different. A real time line of deaths of people close to you might look like this:
Here, the black D’s represent the deaths of people who were very close to you (e.g., a parent, best friend, etc.). The brown D’s represent the deaths of people who were not as close to you (e.g., a cousin, a friend from years ago that you did not see too often). You will notice that the deaths do not appear to occur in groups of 3. However, believing is seeing!
Convienent thresholds
If you believe that deaths come in threes, you will see it. You will become a victim of confirmation bias, due to an inconsistent application of thresholds. Which deaths ‘count’ in the group of 3? How much time has to pass between deaths before a new death is not counted as part of the group? Threshold flexibility makes it easy to confirm your beliefs. Behold!
An ‘X’ through a D means that we are ignoring that death. We ignore some of the brown D’s on the grounds that the person wasn’t close enough to us to ‘count.’ We accept brown D’s in the set when convenient. Also, notice the varying time window. We are pretty generous with the time window in the third set.
In some cases we might even ignore a black D if it clearly does not fit with the other groups. We will just forget about that disconfirming evidence. We tend to only remember evidence that confirms our beliefs.
Another example
The 23 enigma: “the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some permutation of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23.” Yes, the clever person can find a way to connect an event with the number 23. However, the clever person could do the same with just about any other number they picked. Believing is seeing.
Miracles
When something positive happens that seemed unlikely at the start, people will attribute it to God intervening. But if that same event had turned out bad, they generally wouldn’t attribute it to God’s intervention. An example of this occured in January 2006, where at first it was falsely reported that some miners had been rescued alive after being trapped for 4 days. See the headline in the Boston Herald:
Now that we know the twelve miners were killed, does this mean America’s prayers weren’t answered? Just like gambling addicts remember their big wins but not their losses, the fate of the twelve miners has transformed from a faith-inspiring act of God to another horrible tragedy in which it’s impolite to mention religion at all.
Again, here, we are talking about how evidence is selected. Once you believe, it’s easy to see evidence of ‘miracles.’
Evidence
So far I have given reasons why you should be very skeptical of claims that rely on belief first. In fairness, however, I need to consider the other side. It is possible that some evidence in favor of God is very subtle and very difficult for a non-believer to notice. If the evidence is real, however, the believer should be able to point out the evidence to the non-believer. What is it that the believer is seeing that confirms their belief? Can they explain it to the non-believer? And if not, is it really evidence?
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Hey HB! Glad you liked it.
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