William K. Clifford, when criticizing people for believing without sufficient evidence, touches a topic near and dear to my heart. Aside from religion, that is. Always a big place in my heart for religion. But the near and dear thing to my heart is social science! Clifford argues that it is morally wrong to believe sans substantial evidence. It seems to me, at least, that he did not make it clear what amounts to sufficient evidence — he seems to speak of sufficiency rather arbitrarily — but his premises are loaded with psychological and sociological concepts. Again, religion is a sociological concept, but, dear voice in my head, quit interrupting me as I try to explain what I mean.
Clifford writes of what psychologists might called a confirmation bias. A person has an unfounded belief, but whenever the belief appears to be confirmed, he retains that apparently confirming event in his mind to strengthen his belief while discarding the events that do not seem to confirm his bias. Going back to the discussion of dreams in class, we see the same thing. People have lots of dreams about a lot of things, but most of these do not resemble future events very closely. But if a person believes in dream prophesying and happens to have a dream that is resembled to a recognizable degree in a future waking event, then he will tally it up as evidence that he really can see the future through dreaming! Likewise, social psychologists, and criminologists (I consider these scientists social psychologists) often speak of personal narratives. A personal narrative is someone’s life story that he tells himself, to make sense of his frantic life. He might frame himself as a bad person, and whenever he makes a faux pas or a gaffe — no matter how trivial to those around him — he might, in this example, chalk it up as more evidence of his “badness”. To get back to Cliffod’s Ethics of Beliefs, a person with a set belief will look to (probably un- or sub-consciously) support that belief, even with dubious evidence.
But these beliefs often do not exist in a vacuum. The social milieu is saturated with social mores, values, conventions, etc. These social factors will affect a person’s beliefs, and these beliefs, in turn, will offer comfort to the believer by pre-designating a role for him to act. In the case of faith (not to be confused with a case for faith, which a simple typo could have led me my having said), a person can be guided in making decisions based on his faith, a la (not Allah; watch those fingers, Dustin!) Dennett’s idea in Breaking the Spell.
Belief can be good. I suppose I could say that I “believe” in electrons. Not because I’ve ever seen one, but because my computer works, as does my microwave (if there were a God, I would thank him that, because contains the messiness of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli better than the stove top), as does the lamp shining next to me. And I’ve been zapped when petting the dog earlier in the morning as I groggily shuffle my feet to the bathroom. While Clifford says all of us, not just experts, are morally obligated to believe based off sufficient evidence, I do trust physicists and chemists when they tell me that electrons are real, even though I have not done any experiments on them since high school science.
If a society were to have individuals believe for no good reason, then that society would break down. That’s what I get from Clifford. We’d have a “den of thieves” he says. Or we’d elect Sarah Palin. The comforting power that science and reason give us over our worlds cannot ethically (I almost typed ‘on good faith’!) be taken away by belief on insufficient grounds. That, says Clifford, would be a “stolen pleasure.” Amen.
Pascal’s wager is a bad bet! Live your life as if there is a Christian God whether you have reason to or not, says Pascal, because if you fail to live your life in such a way, then you risk losing an eternal afterlife of all goodness! Pascal states that if there is a God, then he is beyond all understanding, yada yada yada, so it would be silly to even try to justify your belief in him, except for realizing what’s at stake. Do you want to live this finite life any darn way you please, or to live it in such a way that will please God who will reward you with an infinite life? Well, if we have no affinity with God, if we cannot know him, then who can claim to know what this eternal afterlife with him would be like? And if we have no reason to believe in him, and if we see no effects of him on our world or universe, then what are the chances that he really exists? “I did not need to consider the God hypothesis” said Laplace to Napoleon. Why? Because his model of the universe worked perfectly well without God, and our modern models work even better without a God!
He, God, is a superfluous, extraneous, unnecessary variable that is still thrown into our worldview for no good reason. Yes, there could be some sort of God, not a personal God as the Christian God is usually depicted, but maybe one with whom we can have no affinity. But, considering that he’s never been detected, the chances that he exists are next to nil. We could alter our lifestyles just to appease a God that has a .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance of existing, but don’t try betting on those odds in Vegas!
I should add an idea that I read from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins said something like this: Suppose there is a god that you’ve lived your life trying to please, you die, and you wake up in the afterlife. . . only to find out you’ve prayed to the wrong god! And suppose this is a mean, vindictive god. You might say, “Oops!” It’s a valid point because there are and have been lots of Gods.
“If there weren’t a God, man would have had to invent one,” said Voltaire. The WikiaPhilosophy site has a page (http://atheism.wikia.com/wiki/How_many_gods%3F) where they use two simple formulas for estimating how many gods mankind has created. The numbers of gods from the formulas are 28 million and 102 trillion. I have much more salient worries than possibly regretting not worshiping a God that, in all likelihood, doesn’t exist, for a life dedicated to worshiping an imaginary friend would be true foolishness! — stultitiam verus?
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