I found this very interesting article by T. M. Luhrmann in todays edition of The New York Times (I've highlighted a few parts I 've found most interesting):
MOST of us
find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on
climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their
sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want
to say. “It seems weird to deny them.”
And yet a
broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and
factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process
evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a
religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are
motivated differently, based on what they conclude. On what grounds do scholars
make such claims?
First of
all, they have noticed that the very language people use changes when they talk
about religious beings, and the changes mean that they think about their
realness differently. You do not say, “I believe that my dog is alive.” The
fact is so obvious it is not worth stating. You simply talk in ways that
presume the dog’s aliveness — you say she’s adorable or hungry or in need of a
walk. But to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is alive” signals that you know
that other people might not think so. It also asserts reverence and piety. We
seem to regard religious beliefs and factual beliefs with what the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen calls different “cognitive
attitudes.”
Second,
these scholars have remarked that when people consider the truth of a religious
belief, what the belief does for their lives matters more than, well, the
facts. We evaluate factual beliefs often with perceptual evidence. If I believe
that the dog is in the study but I find her in the kitchen, I change my belief.
We evaluate religious beliefs more with our sense of destiny, purpose and the
way we think the world should be. One study found that over 70 percent of people
who left a religious cult did so because of a conflict of values. They did not
complain that the leader’s views were mistaken. They believed that he was a bad
person.
Third,
these scholars have found that religious and factual beliefs play different
roles in interpreting the same events. Religious beliefs explain why, rather
than how. People who understand readily that diseases are caused by natural
processes might still attribute sickness at a particular time to demons, or
healing to an act of God. The psychologist Cristine H.
Legare and her colleagues recently demonstrated that people use both
natural and supernatural explanations in this interdependent way across many
cultures. They tell a story, as recounted by Tracy Kidder’s book on the anthropologist and physician Paul
Farmer, about a woman who had taken her tuberculosis medication and been cured
— and who then told Dr. Farmer that she was going to get back at the person who
had used sorcery to make her ill. “But if you believe that,” he cried, “why did
you take your medicines?” In response to the great doctor she replied, in
essence, “Honey, are you incapable of complexity?”
Moreover,
people’s reliance on supernatural explanations increases as they age. It may be
tempting to think that children are more likely than adults to reach out to
magic to explain something, and that they increasingly put that mind-set to the
side as they grow up, but the reverse is true. It’s the young kids who seem
skeptical when researchers ask them about gods and ancestors, and the adults
who seem clear and firm. It seems that supernatural ideas do things for adults
they do not yet do for children.
Finally,
scholars have determined that people don’t use rational, instrumental reasoning
when they deal with religious beliefs. The anthropologist Scott Atran and his
colleagues have shown that sacred values are immune to the normal cost-benefit
trade-offs that govern other dimensions of our lives. Sacred values are
insensitive to quantity (one cartoon can be a profound insult). They don’t
respond to material incentives (if you offer people money to give up something
that represents their sacred value, and they often become more intractable in
their refusal). Sacred values may even have different neural signatures in the
brain.
The danger
point seems to be when people feel themselves to be completely fused with a
group defined by its sacred value. When Mr. Atran and his colleagues surveyed
young men in two Moroccan neighborhoods associated with militant jihad (one of
them home to five men who helped plot the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and then
blew themselves up), they found that those who described themselves as closest
to their friends and who upheld Shariah law were also more likely to say that
they would suffer grievous harm to defend Shariah law. These people become what
Mr. Atran calls “devoted actors” who are unconditionally committed to their
sacred value, and they are willing to die for it.
One of the
interesting things about sacred values, however, is that they are both general
(“I am a true Christian”) and particular (“I believe that abortion is murder”).
It is possible that this is the key to effective negotiation, because the
ambiguity allows the sacred value to be reframed without losing its essential
truth. Mr. Atran and his colleague Jeremy Ginges argued in a 2012 essay in Science that Jerusalem could be
reimagined not as a place but as a portal to heaven. If it were, they
suggested, just getting access to the portal, rather than owning it, might
suffice.
Or then
again, it might not. The recent elections in Israel are a daunting reminder of
how tough the challenge is. Still, these new ideas about religious belief should
shape the way people negotiate about ownership of the land, just as they should
shape the way we think about climate change deniers and vaccine avoiders.
People aren’t dumb in not recognizing the facts. They are using a reasoning
process that responds to moral arguments more than scientific ones, and we
should understand that when we engage."
Comments?
Personally, I would like to see an experiment that scans the brain while the person is making a factual statement: 'I believe my dog is alive'; if there's a difference in brain activity or area of the brain activated when saying: "I believe Jesus is alive".
Eden
