Good And Bad Reasons For Believing by Richard Dawkins

Good And Bad Reasons For Believing by Richard Dawkins
Source: http://bit.ly/INRuZ
Dear Juliet,
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 are very far away? And how
do we know that 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 travelled far enough from 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 an 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 victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather
together lots or other observations which may all point toward 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 realise that they 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 traveller, going on
and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he
started.When a doctor says that you have the 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 has measles I ought to see...... Then
he runs through the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you
got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and 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 fifty children. These children were invited because they had been
brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as
Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or 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 right and 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 for the moment. I simply want to
ask where their beliefs come 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 the 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 a number of centuries doesn't
make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but
this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other
branches such as 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 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 in
to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like
anybody else. These other religions don't talk about 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 an old one. The bible says nothing on how 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' 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 and official Roman
Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But
the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six
hundred 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 in 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 the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this
country 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 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 other people say. The present
pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they
have. If people follow this 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 a 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, 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 titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a 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 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 Ann-Kathrin 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 true 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 the
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 it is completely untrue and
there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on
forever.
Could this be what has 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 because they were told to believe
them when 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 are all utterly
covinced 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 Ann-Kathrin
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 Catholic Southern Ireland 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