Bred to Believe.
We all love magic. We love Harry Potter. We entertain ourselves with tales of mythical beasts and the locations in which they can be found. We pay money to see men in capes and top hats (or, in the case of Criss Angel, skinny jeans, a bandana, a leather jacket, and chains) do things that are literally incredible and then we walk away believing that they might just be “the real deal.”
We tell our children fairy tales and even fool them into believing in women with wands and wings, who trade currency for discarded teeth under the guise of night. We also teach them about a particularly jolly, oversized home-invader who, despite all odds, manages to fly all across the world to deposit gifts into the homes of every child in exchange for milk, cookies, and good behavior. We believe in talking snakes and virgin-births and reanimations, and prayer, and miracles, and angels, and demons, and ghosts. The list goes on. And on.
We even love magic so much that we tend to squint it into our daily, mundane lives where it doesn’t belong. We see patterns where there exists only coincidence. Luck, astrology, psychic connections, superstition, numerology, communication with the dead, reincarnation; these are just a few of the pseudoscientific ideas that keep people enraptured and tiptoeing around ladders, shakers of salt, black cats, and people born in the month of September.
Some of the ideas above are things that we simply like to entertain only because it would make life so much more, well, magical. Who wouldn’t love to climb atop a winged horse and take to the skies? Who wouldn’t love to be walking past our favorite lake in Scotland and see a living dinosaur swimming through it in broad daylight? Alas, most of us know there’s no tooth fairy, and that the spectacles we see the likes of Penn & Teller perform are simply clever illusions that rely heavily on perspective. Some of the other ideas on that list, though, are things that people actually believe in, and in fact take quite seriously.
The question remains: What keeps us clinging to ideas for which there is currently no tangible, credible, scientific, or historic evidence? People just seem to delight in the mystical and the supernatural. We simply have a propensity toward magical thinking. Why do we believe?
Obviously, some ideas — life after death, heaven, reincarnation, miracles, prayer — offer comfort that can make unpleasant situations bearable and even filled with hope and promise. They can make us feel like we have some control over our wildly out-of-control lives. Many people simply want to believe, but the truth is actually probably much deeper than that. So, in a world where we fly planes and shoot rockets and satellites and space stations into geosynchronous orbit, based on our knowledge of physics and mathematics, why do people still entertain such objectively silly and magical ideas?
Undoubtedly, the most plausible explanation I’ve heard was delivered by author and historian of science Michael Shermer. Shermer posits that belief is actually our default state. It actually goes against our nature to be skeptical.
Whether or not you believe in the evolution of the human race, you must recognize that, at one point in time, early in the development of our species, we were not yet removed from the “survival of the fittest” paradigm that still governs all other wildlife. Before the walls of our kingdoms were constructed, before our metal cities came to ascend, Homo sapiens had not yet removed themselves from the dangers of the wild, and being hunted and eaten by any number of carnivorous predators was still a very real threat. Like all other animals in the wild, we were locked in a constant struggle for survival. Those with the traits that improved their chances for survival were the ones who passed on those favorable traits to their offspring.
Before we continue, we should go on a brief tangent to acquaint ourselves with Type I and Type II errors. This will become important in a minute…
When testing a hypothesis, it is possible to make one of two possible errors. A Type I error (false positive) occurs when you believe a pattern exists when it doesn’t. A Type II error (false negative) occurs when you do not believe in a pattern that does exist. This is quite abstract, so we will apply it to the context of an early human in a struggle for survival.
In the plains of Africa, the tall grass makes it hard to see what’s around you. Behind you, you hear a rustle in the grass. That rustle in the grass could be one of two things; it could be a dangerous predator, or, it could be the wind. You could choose to run away or, you could choose to do nothing depending on what you believe the source of the sound to be. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out to be the wind, that’s a Type I error (false positive), but you still get to live. On the other hand, a Type II error (false negative) would occur when you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind but it turns out to be a dangerous predator. When that happens, you become lunch.
As we can see from the thought experiment, “fitness” favored those who made Type I errors, while those who made Type II errors became food. We would all then be descendants of people who made Type I errors. Those who make Type II errors mostly did not live to tell you about it. What does this mean? This means we have a default state of believing in patterns where they don’t necessarily exist. We’ve been bred to believe in something even when there’s no cause to believe. Skepticism and doubt don’t come naturally to us. When we were in the wild, we didn’t have time to weigh the evidence and think critically. We either ran, or we became food. To be skeptical was to be dead, but to be credulous was an advantage.
Fast forward to the modern day…
We live in a modern world, in our modern homes. It has been thousands of years since we were truly subjected to the scrutiny and discrimination of survival of the fittest. As a result, we still have the brains of the early humans in the plains of Africa. We still believe by default. We still don’t question, and we still dispense with skepticism in favor of gut instinct and blind belief. It’s how we were able to survive this long: by believing every rustle in the grass was a predator. It’s how we survived, and it’s how we still believe in things like magic and ghosts and luck and superstition. We see patterns all through our daily lives and the primitive brain, which has been bred to believe, sees meaning, sees magic, and sees miracles when, in reality, there’s nothing there.
Here’s the bit of good news in all of this: We can do better. We don’t have to worry about being eaten by lions and tigers and bears (with the exception of those of us who enjoy an occasional camping trip). We can realize that we don’t have to be bound anymore by our primitive brains that have been wired by natural selection, not for logic or common sense, but for safety and speed. Today, we can afford to ask questions and weigh evidence. We no longer have to make snap decisions that hold us hostage to belief. In fact, the world would be a vastly different (and better) place if we all dispensed with our magical thinking and adopted a more 21st Century human approach. If we choose to think a little more critically, and if we take the time to actually look into the grass, we might find that the patterns that we allow ourselves to be ruled by turn out to be nothing more than just a gust of wind.
