01:11
Unknown
The physicist Richard Feynman once said that the
easiest person to fool is yourself, and as a result he argued that as a
scientist one has to be especially careful to try and find out not only what is
right about one’s theories, but what might also be wrong with them. If we all
followed this maxim of skepticism in everyday life, the world would probably be
a better place. But we don’t. Human beings are not the rational beings
Aristotle once claimed we are. A study of the world history will show that we
are subjective species, narcissistic and sometimes as selfish as Thomas Hobbes
claimed.
Ever since I became an atheist I have engaged in
countless of debates with religious people, apart from the fact that many
people are ignorant of most of the basic knowledge available in the twenty
first century, people really believe in what they think is true irrespective of
how absurd some of the notions in reality sound. They must also think the same about
my disbelief in God, they must think that I am just confused and that my
reality is flawed for whatever reason, adolescent confusion, misguidance from
the literature I read, I am an agent of the devil, all these reasons have been
used against me and my belief or lack of it. I have come to appreciate the fact
that we form our beliefs
for a variety of subjective, emotional and psychological reasons in the context
of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at
large. After forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify and rationalize them
with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments and rational
explanations. Beliefs come first; explanations for beliefs follow. So how do we
know that we are right? What basis can we use to claim that our beliefs are
correct while our opponents are mistaken? Once
we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them
through a number of powerful cognitive biases that distort our percepts to fit
belief concepts. Among them are:
Anchoring Bias. Relying too heavily on one reference
anchor or piece of information when making decisions.
Authority Bias. Valuing the opinions of an
authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about.
Belief Bias. Evaluating the strength of an argument
based on the believability of its conclusion.
Confirmation Bias. Seeking and finding confirming
evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignoring or reinterpreting
disconfirming evidence.
How can we use logic or rationality to disprove
people who don’t believe in neither, how much evidence do you need to convince
a person who beliefs in blind faith? I have come to the conclusion that no amount
will be enough, our biases reinforce our beliefs, this is the reason our
beliefs are very hard to shake off, it’s especially hard if the beliefs we hold
have been with us since childhood, they become a part of us, changing them
entails admitting that we have been wrongt and that our reality has been flawed
the whole time. The anxiety that comes with such realization can be too much
for most people to take in; repression and denial become especially useful body
defense mechanism whenever we are faced with such dilemmas.
To conclude, we can never have an entirely rational
debate against people whose beliefs of the nature contradict our own, some
people believe in science and empirical evidence before they believe in
anything, they are known as skeptics, some people find this type of life to be
full of uncertainties and anxiety, they would rather believe in something on
the basis of faith, one fact is clear, one group must be wrong, either god is
real or he/it is not, one group is definitely right and other wrong, this is
however dependent on what reality one chooses to subscribe to, so what reality
do you subscribe to? Whose right, whose wrong?....
