Everybody must have watched Sienfield at one time or another. Kadizzle ran across a quote from George, " It's true if you believe it". Looking around the world we live in it is amazing how many people use that as the standard for reality and what is true. How much of what we believe is simply not true? Look at the stuff that has been floated around as truth. People used to believe flies came out of nowhere. People had no idea that flies came from maggots.
Below is a letter Richard Dawkins. I may have put it on here before, but it is one of my favorite essays in the world and it is so important that we think about how we think. Until you examine yourself, and how you think, you cannot understand how others think. If Kadizzle had infinite cash he would have this letter published in every newspaper in the country.
To my dearest daughter,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is
important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we
know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like
tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun
and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball
whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?
The answer to these questions is ‘evidence’.
Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling,
smelling….) that something is true. Astronauts have traveled far enough
from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes
our eyes need help. The ‘evening star’ looks like a bright twinkle in
the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball –
the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or
hearing or feeling…) is called an observation.
Often evidence isn’t just observation on its own, but observation
always lies at the back of it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody
(except the murderer and the dead person!) actually observed it. But
detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all
point towards a particular suspect. If a person’s fingerprints match
those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It
doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined
up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a
whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into
place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists – the specialists in discovering what is true about the
world and the universe – often work like detectives. They make a guess
(called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to
themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This
is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we
can predict that a traveler, going on and on in the same direction,
should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor
says that you have measles he doesn’t take one look at you and see
measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have
measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought
to see… Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with
his eyes (have you got spots?), his hands (is your forehead hot?), and
his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way?). Only then does he
make his decision and say, ‘I diagnose that the child has measles.’
Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays,
which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.
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’.
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because
they’d been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been
brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. The
man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they
believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by ‘tradition’.
Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just
trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in
turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, ‘We
Hindus believe so and so.’ ‘We Muslims believe such and such.’ ‘We
Christians believe something else.’ Of course, since they all believed
different things, they couldn’t all be right. The man with the
microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn’t even try to
get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn’t
the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs
came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed
down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books
handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from
almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like
the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down
over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem
special. People believe things simply because people have believed the
same thing over centuries. That’s tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story
was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story
was. If you make up a story that isn’t true, handing it down over any
number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England,
but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There
are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and
the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish
religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and
there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe
even slightly different things from each other often go to war over
their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty
good reasons – evidence – for believing what they believe. But
actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different
traditions.
Let’s talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe
that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn’t die but
was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree,
saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don’t
talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don’t call her
the ‘Queen of Heaven’. The tradition that Mary’s body was lifted into
Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when
she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at
all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn’t invented
until about six centuries after Jesus’s time. At first it was just made
up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But,
over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take
it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many
generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it
seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic
belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in
1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary’s
death.
I’ll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it
in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons
for believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it
because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman
Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people
believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of
the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called
Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder,
purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally
told that they had to believe that Mary’s body shot off to Heaven, what
I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe
it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true!
Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true
and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he
was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you
believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has
ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If
people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results
could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven’t seen the evidence
ourselves and we have to take somebody else’s word for it. I haven’t
with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of
186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the
speed of light. This looks like ‘authority’. But actually it is much
better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen
the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence
whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests
claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary’s body
zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called
‘revelation’. 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’. It
isn’t only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious
people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things
that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and
you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’
Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I
have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he
is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d
know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for
believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have
inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be
right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite
feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way
to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart
has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real
evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside,
otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’.
But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that
somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who
loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they
all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that
priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside
feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and
kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves
them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to
be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling
that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn’t
even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside
feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust
them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you
ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have
a ‘hunch’ about an idea that just ‘feels’ right. In itself, this is
not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason
for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a
particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the
time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are
supported by evidence.
I promised that I’d come back to tradition, and look at it in another
way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us.
All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in
the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good
at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at
surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at
surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to
be good at surviving in a world full of … other people. Most of us
don’t hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other
people who have bought it from yet other people. We ‘swim’ through a
‘sea of people’. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people
need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the
sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult
things to learn. Like language.
You speak English but your friend speaks German. You each speak the
language that fits you to ‘swim about’ in your own separate ‘people
sea’. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In
England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these
words is more correct, or more truer than the other. Both are simply
handed down. In order to be good at ‘swimming about in their people
sea’, children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots
of other things about their own people; and this means that they have
to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional
information. (Remember that traditional information just means things
that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The
child’s brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the
child can’t be expected to sort out good and useful traditional
information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional
information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living
virgins.
It’s a pity, but it can’t help being the case, that because children
have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to
believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right
or wrong. Lots of what grown-ups tell them is true and based on
evidence or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or
even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too.
Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they
tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets
itself strongly believed – even if its completely untrue and there never
was any reason to believe it in the first place – it can go on forever.
Could this be what happened with religions? Belief that there is a god
or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that
Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief
that wine turns into blood – not one of these beliefs is backed up by
any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this
is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to
believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they
were told different things when they were children. Muslim children
are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up
utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even
within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church
of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy
Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the
others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same
kind of reason as you speak English and someone speaks German.
Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to
speak. But it can’t be true that different religions are right in their
own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things
are true. Mary can’t be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in
Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do
anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time
somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself:
‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of
evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of
tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you
that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is
there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope
you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
Your loving,
Daddy
