Believing where we cannot prove

[dreadgeek]

I saw this today at Huffington Post and when I read the part quoted below I thought I'd paste it in at length because it goes *directly* to what we're discussing here:

I spoke to Scott Roeder at least a dozen times over the course of reporting. He told me he listened to Bill O'Reilly sometimes on the radio. (Scott wasn't a guy who had cable - he worked at marginal jobs and moved apartments an awful lot.) And he liked Bill O'Reilly. But Scott had a keen interest in and hunger for learning about terrible conspiracies that lay, as he believed, just beneath the fabric of society. He went to meetings where people discussed how the Illuminati were controlling the country and the world and feeding innocent women into a satanic sex cult. He believed the fluoride in drinking water was there to render the masses more docile, which is why he wouldn't drink from a tap. He believed federal tax laws weren't laws at all - and so they needn't be followed. And he believed in the information about George Tiller fed to him through websites and literature and conversation by the most violent fringe of the pro life movement. He believed Dr. Tiller intentionally tortured babies. He believed that once, when a fetus had been delivered still breathing during one of Dr Tiller's procedures, Dr. Tiller killed it with his bare hands.

Talking about the sick things Dr. Tiller supposedly did was one of Scott's favorite topics during our conversations. After all, if you are going to murder someone, it's not enough simply to say you have a philosophical difference with him. And he presented all this to me as if it had been printed in the New York Times. He presented this information to me as if it were unimpeachable. As if he were educating me about some material that I hadn't done enough research to know about.

Bill O'Reilly is not the person who created for Scott Roeder the specific narrative that he used to create in his mind a picture of a person whom he could murder proudly. But he did help to create an environment in which Dr. George Tiller was thought of as a criminal and a murderer (whatever you think about what he was doing, it was legal). He provided a kind of moral cover and cable-sanctified legitimacy.

It's a problem that's bigger than extremist pro-life elements or Bill O'Reilly. The problem is the thriving culture of manufacturing dehumanizing lies about people you disagree with, whether they are about Dr. George Tiller, or George W. Bush. It's dangerous. It's dangerous whether you say George Bush wanted to murder Iraqi children or Barack Obama is a secret terrorist who wants to use two married gay men to kill your grandmother. And it's incredibly dangerous for people in positions of authority or power to ratify insane, dehumanizing narratives about people. That's a relatively new phenomenon. The militia movement didn't have a cable channel. Scott Roeder did.

This goes exactly to what concerned me enough to create this thread. Now, I want to make it clear that I'm not saying ANYONE in this thread has done anything talked about above but what concerns me is the habit of *mind* that allows this kind of thing to take hold and flourish. Here is the value that skepticism brings to society. Skepticism, as a habit of mind, provides a near *reflexive* questioning of the received wisdom. We are quickly becoming a society where no useful distinction is made between lies and truth.

Was Saddam Hussein's Iraq involved in the 9/11 plot? No. But people *believe* he was although anyone with Internet access could have found information that would throw that belief out the window within half an hour of research. Is the Health Care Reform bill a plot to kill grandma? No. And anyone with Internet access can download the bill, search for "death panels" and see that the language isn't in there.

As a political liberal, I am disappointed with my side because there is a space that has opened up in the American body politic for reality-based politics but we on the Left seem to show no real interest in doing the hard work of basing our politics on reality. This isn't to say that reality is the provence of the Left, rather it is to say we could MAKE it our provence (just as the Right could if they wanted to).

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

Yes and No ! LOL.
I appreciate, greatly, the terms and examples you used in your reply. Easy to read, easy to understand. I wanted to quote and respond to your whole reply but fear that I would end with a multi page jumble of idiotic questions and statements! I'm interested, but not well versed.

When responding in my first post, I haphazardly introduced why I hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence. And that basically is : what is an unsupported (evidenciary) belief today, may become a supported rule tomorrow and ultimately a basis for learning and believing yet additional unsupported ideas in the future.

I know, a big grey zone. It still doesn't answer why I believe in the hand of something greater than I.

I agree with you in that questioning absolutes is good..even though they appear irrefutable. Newtonian Physics = absolutes. I believe in them, the evidence shows why the apple falls (or in your example, doesn't) or why the car skids. But do we stop there? What if science believes there is more, yet there is no proof?

So this is another example of hanging on to 'beliefs for which there is no evidence':
Quantum Physics-Dimension. It started with three, now arguably four. Even more astounding mathematics project six postulate it could be infinite?!
While there is no hard evidence, I believe !


.

It's interesting that you should bring up extra-dimensions because string theory is a near-perfect case-study in how the scientific process works out. Everyone I know who has read up on string theory finds it beautiful and WANTS the Universe to work that way. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that string theory is *deeply*, perhaps *fatally*, flawed as a theory. Part of that vulnerability is the requirement of up to 9 extra-dimensions to make it work (in any of its millions of possible permutations).

To understand why, I first need to explain a bit about the four dimensions that we KNOW exist. Let's say we're going to meet up in downtown Portland. You need to know where I'm going to be and when I'm going to be there. Those coordinates are: Let's meet on the Second floor of Powell's books at the corner of Broadway and 10th at 4:00 PM. Those are the four dimensions. The X coordinate is Broadway, the Y coordinate is 10th, the Second floor is the Z coordinate. These are the three-dimensions that people are all familiar with. 4:00 PM is the fourth dimension which is Time.
If you have the XYZ and T coordinates then you and I can agree where and when an event (our meeting) will take place. What's more ANYONE given those coordinates can know where the event will take place (thus making it invariant).

String theory, in order to work, requires that there be between 6 and 9 extra-dimensions that are all curled up into incredibly small, very complex shapes using what's called Calabai-Yau topologies OR they are extremely large dimensions called 'branes' (for membranes). The problem with this is that, depending upon who you ask, those dimensions are either completely undetectable (although you can demonstrate how they would work mathematically) or they require such huge amounts of energy to penetrate that it will be a VERY long time before we are ever able to build a device that will penetrate them. (To give you a sense of scale, the LHC in Europe is a collider with a 17 mile circumference. A collider that could potentially probe these curled up dimensions would need to be the circumference of the solar system! Taking the Oort Cloud as the absolute outer edge of the solar system at 18 *trillion* miles (the radius) the circumference of the solar system is approximately 113 *trillion* miles! Needless to say we would have to be a much more sophisticated space-faring civilization in order to build such a device.)

Herein, then, lies the problem with string theory. If it can't be falsified then it isn't science. It may be mathematically elegant but it isn't *science*.

From my way of thinking any statement about the world in the form of "X exists" or "X works this way" should have implications. For example, the statement Barack Obama is the 44 President of the United States has the implication that he was NOT the 43rd President and that George Bush is NOT the current President of the United States. If it could be shown that George Bush IS still President then that would, by definition, mean that Barack Obama is not the President. I think that almost any statement we make about the world that involves the collective reality we all share should have implications. A world where there is a secret Illuminati controlling everything should look *different* than one where there isn't one. If there's no way to determine either way then we should always default to the least convoluted explanation, following Occam's Razor.



Cheers
Aj

[Boots13]

There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.

So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?

But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.

[Boots13]

And I think what I'm saying in my "laymens" terms is also expressed in your scientific approach.
And that is,
"If there's no way to determine either way then we should always default to the least convoluted explanation, following Occam's Razor.
"
A consistant approach to maintaining civility, order, and perhaps consistancy in our method of relating a belief to the masses...

But what about religion ? Or Spirituality....how would this apply?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.

So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?

But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.

Interesting. Well, I have a hypothesis about intuition and what it is. Now, as my starting place let me claim my bias: I look at human beings as evolved animals (because all the evidence points to us being exactly that). Thus not only did evolution give us stereoscopic color-vision (useful for when we were chimp-like animals living in trees) but also gave us our mental facilities. Intuition, I submit to you, is the brain's way of making on-the-spot decisions in the face of imperfect information. To see this, take yourself out of your familiar setting and imagine that you are one of our paleolithic ancestors (homo habilis) eking out a life at the edge of the African savannah. Survival requires you to forage for food across a pretty wide territory some of it out on the open savannah. So there you and your foraging party are, moving across the grassland and you hear a rustling in the grass far off to your right side. Is it a lion, a jackal, or just the wind? If you wait around to find out, it's probably too late to do anything with the information. So you make an *intuitive* leap that it's a lion and respond correctly. Now, here's where evolutionary logic kicks in. (And yes, nature really does work this way) If you run and it turns out you were wrong about it being a threat, you've burned some calories that could've been used for foraging but that's a very small price to pay given that if you didn't run and were wrong that it *wasn't* a lion, then your reproductive fitness would very quickly drop to zero while *greatly* enhancing the lion's fitness (in as much as it gets to eat for another day). Given this nature would favor a system that makes snaps decisions, in the face of imperfect information, even IF there were false positives (determining that there's a lion when there isn't one) over a system that either doesn't make snap decisions (deliberately weighing all options all the time) or one that was more prone to false negatives (determining that there's no lion when there is one). I'd be willing to bet that what we call intuition is a system for making workable-enough decisions on the fly.

As far as your second question that's a bit more of a sticky wicket. In science nothing is ever proven forever. Anything in science--the atomic model, Relativistic Gravity, evolutionary biology, any of it--could be overthrown tomorrow on better information. However, it's very much unlikely to happen because those things I've listed above are very robust (meaning that they have been tested and passed and then tested again in a different area and passed again). The problem with non-evidence based ideas is that there's no way to disprove them.

To give you a contrast, we'll look at a field of study near and dear to my heart; evolutionary biology. I LOVE this theory. I would say it is one of the deepest, most elegant in all of science. Best. Theory. Ever. Hands down. Yet, I could come up with three or four things, off the top of my head, that would definitively demonstrate that evolution through natural selection was false. This isn't the same as saying that it IS false, just that it's possible to set up conditions under which it would be false.

Here they are:

1. If there were no means of inheritance, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work since it depends upon offspring being similar, although not identical, to their parents.
2. If there were no variation within a population, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work. Natural selection requires that there be variation within a population that is heritable in order for nature to have something to 'favor'.
3. If there hadn't been enough time for evolution to work. Evolution is a very slow process. If the Earth were younger than it is by one or two orders of magnitude then there wouldn't be enough time for life as complex as us to evolve.*
4. If we found a large number of late-stage mammals (post Dinosaur mammals) in an early stage fossil layer (say pre-Cambrian) then evolutionary biology would be in serious trouble. ONE rabbit fossil in the pre-Cambrian era isn't a problem. Millions of rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian era is a problem since they shouldn't be there.

There are others, of course, but you should get the idea. My question is this: what kind of similar list could one draw up for homeopathy or astrology or what-have-you? Ideally, such a falsification list would be drawn up by those who believe in homeopathy or astrology and then they would go out and seek to find evidence for or against. That's how science works. You explicitly state the problems in your hypothesis or theory and how you have addressed them.

Lastly, because the Universe is a unified whole whatever one purports to be true should fit within that unified whole. By this I mean that, for instance, if your pet hypothesis violates the conversation of mass or conservation of energy or entropy then it's *wrong*, it's not the Universe that has it wrong. (If it isn't wrong then clear off your mantle because if anyone ever proves that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is wrong, that person is guaranteed a Nobel prize) So if your belief is supposed to be some kind of field, it should be subject to the inverse square law because every other field is. If it's based upon an energy then it should, under certain circumstances, behave like a field and there should be some way of detecting it, at least in principle.

Cheers
Aj

*The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. One order of magnitude would be 450 million years old. Two orders of magnitude would be 45 million years old. Three orders of magnitude would be 4.5 million years old. Four orders is 450,000 years. Five orders of magnitude is 45,000 years old. Six orders of magnitude is within the age that Young Earth Creationists believe the Earth to be. Anything more than 1 magnitude off with the age of the Earth and there might be *life* but it would be pretty simple life. Keep in mind that life didn't get started until about 500 million years after the Earth had formed and cooled a bit. Life was then pretty much bacteria until the Cambrian era which was a few billion years later! So the history of life on Earth, in short is first 500 million years, nothing. Then very simple, bacterial and archae life for the next 3.5 billion years. Then the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago and then life becomes var more varied and interesting.

[dreadgeek]

So in Britain a group of skeptics are trying to get one of big chain pharmacies, Boots', to stop carrying homeopathic remedies because, well, not to put too fine a point on it but homeopathy is a load of hokum.

This from the organization's web site:

Following on from his 'law of similars', Hahnemann proposed he could improve the effect of his 'like-cures-like treatments' by repeatedly diluting them in water. The more dilute the remedy, Hahnemann decided, the stronger it will become. Thus was born his 'Law of Infinitesimals'.

Taking a single drop of caffeine and diluting in ninety-nine drops of water creates what is known to homeopaths as one 'centesimal'. One drop of this centesimal added to another ninety-nine drops of water produces a two-centesimal, written as 2C. This 2C caffeine potion is 99.99% water and just 0.01% caffeine. At 3C the dilution is 0.0001% caffeine, at 4C it's 0.000001% caffeine, and so on. Homeopathic remedies are commonly sold at 6C (0.000 000 000 1%) and even 30C (0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1%) dilutions, which homeopaths will often drip onto little balls of sugar to sell.

When these numbers are written out, it's easy to see how absurd they are. At 12C you pass what is known as the Avogadro Limit*, the point at which there is likely nothing of your original substance left.

By the time you reach 30C, you have more chance of winning the lottery five weeks running than you have of finding a single caffeine molecule in your homeopathic sleeping draft. It's just ordinary water, dripped onto ordinary sugar.

*Avagadro's number is 6.022137 × 10^23. It’s the number of atoms or molecules of a substance in a number of grams of that substance equal to its atomic mass. So 1 gram of elemental hydrogen or 12 grams of carbon12 will have Avagadro’s number of atoms. This amount is also called a mole – so a mole of anything has Avagadro’s number of elementary particles – a mole of water has Avagadro’s number of water molecules.

http://www.1023.org.uk/what-is-homeopathy.php
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1536

Cheers
Aj

[Bit]

Hi Aj! Because your focus is on society, rather than on individuals, I'm answering your questions that way; also, I'm assuming, given the main thrust of your following posts, that you are basically talking about the religious beliefs which have so strongly influenced laws in the US.

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

1) Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence?

They were originally designed to support the power structure. If the power structure changes, the beliefs will fade out of our policies and laws. We've seen this over the centuries. The stranglehold that religious institutions had on the daily lives of the people was lessened as the governments in Europe took more power to themselves. It was foreshadowed by the Roman church's treatment of the Knights Templar after King Stephen threatened to invade Rome with an army big enough to crush any resistance to his will. It was hugely moved forward when King Henry created the Church of England. It continued with Martin Luther's Reformation.

The stranglehold was finally dealt a death blow by the US Revolutionary War and subsequent independence; as far as I know, we pioneered government without church involvement.

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

2) Why is it considered *fair* for evidence-based beliefs to be held to a different standard than non-evidentiary beliefs?*

The trouble is that old ideas die hard--and VERY slowly. For five thousand years, government and religion have been joined at the hip; it has seemed quite natural to continue the habit of governing in accordance with religious ideas even without church members doing the actual governing. So we have today a nation specifically founded to be NON-religious which is actually governed by religious laws. The laws have the weight of tradition behind them now. People accept them without demanding evidence because "that's the way it's always been."

It doesn't occur to most people that it is NOT the way it's always been.

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

3) If one subscribes to a non-evidentiary belief is there ANYTHING that could dissuade one from believing it?

Over the course of my lifetime--51 years--this nation has changed in ways that were incomprehensible to my grandparents' generation. As the people have moved away from living by religious ideals, so has the government... even if we have had to drag it kicking and screaming behind us.

Over the course of my lifetime--such a short amount of time!--we've seen these beliefs, among others, officially discarded:

• women and children are rightly the personal property of men
• people of different skin colors may not marry each other
• women must stay with abusive men
• men must support women after they are divorced
• only women are fit to raise, care for, or teach children
• women who are pregnant may not work outside the home
• sex outside marriage is illegal

I'm sure you can think of MANY more; these are just the most obvious.

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

4) How does one tell the difference between 'good' non-evidentiary beliefs (say psychic powers) and malign ones (say racism or Pat Robertson's latest utterances).

Why Aj, I'm stunned. One can tell the difference so easily! Which one grants the believer more power? If it strengthens the government's position or if it keeps the Senator in office, then yes, that's the "good" one.

Really, now, for a skeptic you're not very cynical. Leave it to a person of faith to fill in the gap. *cheeky grin*

But then--and I speak seriously here--I don't believe that public figures who either make money or gain power from espousing religious ideals actually BELIEVE what they say. My neighbor might believe it, or the guy down the street from you; any ordinary person might truly believe in religious ideals--but those who use them to make a cushy life for themselves?

Nah. I'm not buying it.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Bit

Really, now, for a skeptic you're not very cynical. Leave it to a person of faith to fill in the gap. *cheeky grin*

But then--and I speak seriously here--I don't believe that public figures who either make money or gain power from espousing religious ideals actually BELIEVE what they say. My neighbor might believe it, or the guy down the street from you; any ordinary person might truly believe in religious ideals--but those who use them to make a cushy life for themselves?

Nah. I'm not buying it.
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You know, I've tried very hard not to be too cynical because one of the criticisms that skeptics get is that we're so cynical.

You know it's interesting that you should mention the cynicism. I HOPE that most of these folks espousing these things ARE, in fact, cynical because if they're cynically using religion to further their own material ends they can be stopped--hell, they'll stop themselves while not letting their followers *know* what's going on. It's the true believers that bother me. A cynic using anything to get over will not drive the car over the cliff. He might *talk* about driving over the cliff but before the car *actually* gets to the cliff he'll stop and find a good reason not to keep going. The True Believer, however, will keep going and there is no force on Earth that will stop them.

The cynic may *talk* about 'protecting marriage' but he's very unlikely to actually vote to make homosexuality illegal. The true believer, on the other hand, is not only happy to vote to make homosexuality illegal but looks forward to being the instrument of justice himself.

And you *know* that my question of 'how do you tell the 'good' beliefs from the 'bad' beliefs' is my own little koan to encourage people to think about it because--and this might just be my cynicism--it seems to me that we don't take the power of ideas seriously enough.

Cheers
Aj

[Bit]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

And you *know* that my question of 'how do you tell the 'good' beliefs from the 'bad' beliefs' is my own little koan to encourage people to think about it because--and this might just be my cynicism--it seems to me that we don't take the power of ideas seriously enough.

LOL, I would call that analysis, rather than cynicism.

I guess I really am WAY more cynical than you are. I think if the Cynical Leader does a poll that tells him he'll gain approval ratings, he WILL drive the car off the cliff, no matter what the issue might be. And if being seen as the "People's Instrument of Justice" will get her into office, she WILL lead the witch-hunt personally. I don't think any of them would stop short.

Yanno, it's kinda odd balancing cynicism with optimism. Normally I'm a glass-half-full kind of person--and indeed, right now I think the scenarios which scare you will NOT happen--but hooo boy, I don't ever allow myself to be optimistic about government officials or religious leaders.

[Boots13]

Forgive my absence, its been a long work week.

Your opinions and your scientific support for "hanging onto beliefs for which there is no evidence" are a great read. And I cannot explain to you why I am stuck on this, your first question, other than to say either I have a short attention span or I enjoy seeing where you go with my inquiries (both?).

I understand that numbers and research can prove or disprove theory (depending on ones angle). That scientific support is the "real evidence".
But science doesn't control, define, predict, or influence EVERYTHING, does it? Surely not EVERYTHING is logical, symmetrical, or prone to physical order.

At some point in our personal, scientific, mathematic lives, wouldn't one have to have a leap of faith in a belief (or theory) to evolve that instinct?
By the way, your opinion on instinct was interesting in your correlation to flight/fight response to stimuli. But what about singular event, or that nuance that says "it's there" (or not, depending on the angle).

And how do we begin to accept those things which remain undefinable (tangible?) as random events or "nuance" or unpredictable repetition if we have to apply a number (or evidence) to the possibility of its existence?

Surely there must be some area in which your (our) butt is hanging in the wind because of an unsupported, undefined, unproven belief.
And if its not a grounded belief, or instinct, or God; if its not dimension or time continuum, then surely it must be Chaos ! And perhaps chaos is the loophole in ""hanging onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

[Medusa]

Saw this article on Huffington Post just now and thought it was interesting:

What Scientists Think about Religion:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine..._b_611905.html


There was another article directly below this one:
The End of the War Between Religion and Science: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak..._b_620133.html