What is it that makes us believers?

by Bart Farkas
Wednesday January 09, 2008

As most regular readers of my column (if there are any) have probably already guessed, I am a skeptic.

Skeptic is one of those strange words that automatically produce a negative image in people’s minds; indeed most think ‘skeptic’ is synonymous with ‘cynic’. Being a skeptic, however, just means that you require hard proof of something before you believe in it or support it.

Many people don’t like hard facts since they tend to be rather dull. I would say that magical thinking in general is highly compelling to us all and ironically some recent scientific studies suggest that the need to believe in magical things might actually be there as an evolutionary advantage!

Let’s face it, the ideas of aliens visiting us, ghosts trying to communicate with us, odd medical treatments defying science and curing people, or even that Bigfoot is lurking in the woods of Banff National Park are all highly appealing thoughts. Heck, in my youth I wanted to believe in Tarot cards, ghosts, psychic detectives – the whole enchilada. As I went to school and learned about physics, chemistry, and the world around us I started to doubt that these phenomenon could be based in reality, which was (believe me) a disappointment.

After being honest with myself and accepting that I would have to eat some crow, I started looking carefully at the real data behind such things as dowsing, reading tea leaves and near death experiences.

Once I looked objectively at the data, it became clear that this stuff exists in the minds of believers, but not in the real measurable world. Believe me, if there was a dowser who could actually do his or her thing under basic scientific conditions, I’d be thrilled because the entire scientific world would be turned upside down, a new paradigm would be opened up, a Nobel Prize would be forthcoming and the $1 Million Paranormal Challenge cash would go to this person.

The first reason magical beliefs continue to exist is it feels good to believe in them. It’s a sort of mental stimulation when one thinks there is something magical out there that can’t be explained that is going to show ‘them’ that they’ve been wrong all along.

It’s pleasing to believe that you know of some alternative medical practice that, while irreproducible in science, miraculously heals people while tens of thousands of physicians worldwide ignore it. These things don’t have to be medical, they could even be knowledge of a ‘magnetic’ hill where cars in neutral roll UP hill instead of down. Magic!

The second reason is that once a person buys into many of these beliefs their ego prevents them from deviating from this line of thinking. This is especially true if fundamental religious beliefs tie into these belief systems. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not knocking religion, but in the case of faith healing (I’m talking about the televangelist type of money-grubbing stuff) there is a familiar thread of magical thinking involved.

Some people are so entrenched in their belief in, say, Bigfoot that they literally cannot escape from it. If they’ve put in a decade worth of vacations scouring western B.C. looking for Bigfoot camps then it’s going to be darned hard for that person to come out and admit that there’s no real evidence for the beast, especially since such an admission would be to admit wasting a decade of their life in a futile search.

Do skeptics suffer from the same problem? Are they so married to reality that if proof of something magical came along they’d refuse to believe it? I’m sure there are some, but hard scientific proof should always change a skeptic’s mind, and a few weeks back I mentioned the H. pylori stomach ulcer issue as a prime example.

It is my hope that folks can balance magical beliefs and reality in such a way that they don’t lose money to charlatans or con artists bent on taking advantage of those prone to certain beliefs. After all, if a belief doesn’t hurt anyone, it really doesn’t matter what anyone believes; it’s just unfortunate some beliefs do, in fact, have the capability of injuring both financially and physically.