What I'm thinking about these days is why we believe what we believe. Why do some people stick with the belief system that they've had since they were children, while others strike out on their own? Why do we feel comforted by the familiarity of ritual and stability, while at the same time yearning for newness and the perils of uncertainty? I think that it all comes down to believing what we *need* to believe at a particular time in our lives. If that means believing what your parents believe when you first start out, then maybe that's the best way to begin. But if you're really looking, really paying attention to the world around you and engaging in it, then those beliefs are going to change. There's no belief system in the world, religious, political, or scientific, that isn't going to evolve and transmogrify itself between your youth and your adulthood. At least, that's the way it should be.
There are lots of folks, I think, who have firmly set up the boundaries of what they and what they don't believe (or have had the boundaries set up for them), what is right and what is wrong, and will never consider, even for a moment, that they might need to think about it a slightly different way. These people are the obstacles that others -- those whose ideas and feelings about the world and the people in it are flexible, and are always searching for better answers -- need to stumble over and around, as we all try to find that elegant solution to the mysteries of everything. Many people believe what only they see. I've been one of these people for a long time. But I recently read a book by Rob Reid, a satirical sci-fi novel called Year Zero, that made a point that really stuck with me. He pointed out that, even though humans insist on believing only what they see, our visual perception is severely limited to a narrow cone directly in front of our eyes, across a stupefyingly slim band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Why, then, do we even pretend that we can experience even a fraction of what's really going on around us?
So that leaves room for us to construct a worldview that involves a lot of the unseen. The strangest thing, though, is the way that our minds can actually make us see and experience parts of our worldview that aren't really there. My main man Carl Sagan once brought up an interesting point: if UFOs, medieval saints, and Greek gods are really real, why do/did they only appear in visions to people who believed in them? If Zeus and Dionysus truly existed, they would still be appearing to people today like they did in acient Greece. And UFOs should have been appearing to humanity over and over again since the beginning of recorded history – not just since WWII, when flying military craft first became prominent in peoples’ minds.
My point, though, is that the human mind is surprisingly selective in determining and reinforcing its own truth. I'm reminded of the Fox sisters, three siblings in the mid-nineteenth century who basically founded the modern Spiritualist movement by claiming to be mediums. The catch, though, is that after they became famous for holding séances to commune with the beyond, and convincing thousands in the truth of what they were doing, they confessed that it was all a hoax. They held demonstrations to show exactly how they perpetrated the lie, and people *still* *believed* that the sisters really were talking to ghosts. Of course, the controversy still rages, but the fact remains that even if you consider the evidence both for and against the Fox sisters really having clairvoyant abilities as being equal, many people still choose to believe the vastly more unlikely of the two options, belief over skepticism.
A more modern interpretation of this schism is the US moon landing in 1969. There is still a very vocal faction of the US population (strangely, it seems that the only significant group that doubts we landed on the moon is here within the US itself) that thinks it was all an elaborate hoax, possibly under the direction of Stanley Kubrick, whose film 2001 had wowed audiences with its near-perfect outer space effects the year before. This group has continually argued the finer points of the photographic evidence, from the angle of certain shadows to photo exposure that blots out stars, to the way astronauts will bounce and flags will sway in micro-gravity. Despite the simple explanations that seem to discount all of these claims -- not to mention the fact that the 1969 moons landing was the first of *six* televised landings that would have had to be similarly faked -- some still insist that it was all a ruse... another belief that overwhelming evidence against it refuses to dissolve, and in most cases even seems to intensify the skeptic's faith.
So why do we believe what we believe? What makes the most logical, rational people have utter faith in something they cannot experience for themselves, whether it be a particular religion, or a particular science? I think the answer, elegantly enough, comes down to our feelings of comfort and aesthetics.
If life sometimes feels utterly random, with words and deeds having little to no effect on its fairness or rightness, that's because it *is* random, for the most part. Illness and misfortune have no regard for what we want or how good a person we are. The only ability that matters is how to deal with the random things that happen to us, and persevere and adapt to circumstances as they arise. Being as intelligent as we are, and with the curse of "memento mori" being, like it or not, the biggest single factor in human psychology, we search for order out of chaos. It's the reason we've been able to construct civilizations and everything in them. We strive to understand, we figure out how to manipulate what we've learned, and build knowledge upon knowledge. It's how a person who completely distrusts the scientific establishment can still routinely use *quantum tunneling* (a phenomenon that we can use only because we kind of understand the inherent weirdness of atomic structure) every time they use their smartphone. We look for patterns, even when we don't think we are. The randomness of the universe continually works against that. But remember these two mottos I came up with:
"Simplicity is chaos seen at a distance."
-Aaron Drummond
"Chaos is simplicity seen at a distance."
-Aaron Drummond
Aesthetics is the other part of this equation. We believe what we believe, in large part, because it *feels* right. Think about string theory, for example. Whether you believe it, and whether it turns out to be right or not, string theory is *beautiful* in its main idea, which is that all matter is merely super-tiny loops of energy, vibrating like the strings of a violin. Different kinds of matter vibrates at different frequencies, turning the entire universe into a vast symphony of "notes" colliding, interacting, harmonizing with itself in eleven-dimensional space. Now, that's an elegant idea (science author Brian Greene didn't call one of his books on the subject "The Elegant Universe" for nothing), regardless of the fact that when it was thought up, there was virtually no way for anything about it to be tested. The entire basis of the scientific method is creating a theory to match physical evidence, and this idea of the most basic structure of the universe started out with no way to test it! But it gained traction anyway. And why? Because it taps into a deep emotional well that all humans have, which is our attachment to music. The idea of string theory is so welded to the idea of music that we can't help but romanticize it. I'm not saying if the theory is right or wrong, but however it turns out, it gained its initial power through that connection already present in our minds. Of course, if it proves to be right, the question will be whether it seemed right and elegant to us because we are intrinsically wired for sound, so to speak, so steeped in music from even before our birth that it was all but inevitable.
It's this powerful cocktail, the need for comfort, order, and beauty that drive us to believe what we believe. Who can blame us if, sometimes, we head down wrong paths of belief, looking for a solution that feels right at the time? I think as long as we keep looking, letting our experiences point us in the right direction but not to entirely close our minds to other possibilities, we can't help but to continue learning and growing our entire lives.
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