Good and Bad Reasons for Believing

Has it really been almost a week without a blogpost? You know what that means: I’m out of the running for the Bloggy McBlog Award for Most Pathologically Prolific Self-Expression Despite Deadlines and Actual Work. Drat.

But this page inspired me. It’s an essay by Richard Dawkins to his 10-year-old daughter.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called “tradition,” “authority,” and “revelation.”

I like that he’s mentioned ‘revelation’ specifically. Let’s skip to that.

If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been “revealed” to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling “revelation.”

That description is not a straw man. It is part and parcel of what Latter-day Saints expect to get out of the religious experience, and it is a key reason for believing people to hold the beliefs they do. It’s also the hardest to counter. People have a natural tendency to believe their own experiences, and it’s very difficult to disbelieve your experience when it runs counter to fact. This tendency kept me believing in counterfactual things for absolutely years.

The essay is everything I wanted to say to my kids about evidence (and some things I already have).