Category Archives: Fact-Based Thinking

Changing Minds

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beliefs-behaviors-resultsBeliefs drive behaviors and behaviors produce real-world results. If beliefs are mistaken, those results are probably suspect. To improve results we must ensure our beliefs are valid.

But can we atheists ever convince any believer that they are wrong to put their faith in fantasies? Indeed, can anyone ever even change anyone’s mind about anything? Most people would answer this question with a resounding no! The prevailing view is that no matter what evidence or logic you put forth, people are unwilling, even incapable, of ever changing their opinion about anything – let alone their deeply held beliefs.

Do you think that is at least somewhat true? If so, let’s test it by seeing if I can change your mind about changing your mind.

You almost certainly believe that your own mind can be changed. You are probably confident that if you are presented with reasonable proof you will adjust your beliefs accordingly. Well like you, everyone else believes the very same thing about themselves. Either you are the only one with this capacity while everyone else is deluded, or you are as deluded as everyone else, or everyone else is actually quite capable of changing their minds just like you.

I’m pretty confident it’s the last option. One proof is simply that we are here. We could not have survived the gauntlet of evolution without a tremendous ability to adjust our beliefs in response to new information. It is unreasonable to think that we could have adapted to a rapidly changing world without that innate capacity. And it is consistent and reasonable to assume that this malleability cannot inherently differentiate between religious beliefs and beliefs about anything else.

Another proof is that we actually see beliefs change all around us all the time. Our beliefs have been and are being continually shaped, even transformed, by sales and marketing, education, culture, indoctrination, religion, brainwashing, media, personal experiences, life events, new information, and a host of other influences. Indeed, beliefs are some of our most fluid of ideas because they are not fettered by physical constraints. Missionaries prove this every day.

Sure, you are quick to say. It’s easy to adopt beliefs, but once formed it’s virtually impossible to eliminate them. But religion itself disproves that idea too. The mere fact that organized religion must expend such an incredible amount of resources to instill and maintain their fantasies acknowledges the inherent fragility and vulnerability of even the most deeply held beliefs.

Still, it is understandable that one might come to the conclusion that beliefs are impervious to reason. Most of us personally never seem to succeed in convincing anyone of anything. Whenever we try, whenever we put forth what we think is a clearly indisputable rational argument, we seem to be talking to a brick wall.

No doubt it is quite difficult to change minds. But that doesn’t make the effort futile. Consider that dating is one particular form of persuasion. For many of us it’s frustratingly difficult to find a date let alone true love. We can’t seem to convince anyone we’re worth dating and so we conclude that dating itself is hopeless. But people all around us do it all the time and we can too. And as with dating, there well-known techniques that have proven to work extremely well in the art of persuasion in general. These include establishing trust, reframing the debate, making it personal, making it their idea, systematically dismantling rationalizations, and moving the other party along in small incremental steps.

So we should not be discouraged if our efforts to evangelize atheism do not seem to yield perceptible results. Our collective efforts do matter. Sure, they are unlikely to be rewarded with some “come to atheism” epiphany. But we must trust that every little drip, drip, drip of reason erodes away at the brittle sandstone upon which religion is constructed and does make a real difference even if we don’t often see it.

And as my final proof, do you feel even a bit more optimistic about your chances of having a real impact on individuals and on society? If so, I have changed your mind at least a bit. If not, that only proves that I failed to make my case or that you cannot perceive how your thinking has been influenced. Either way, I rest my case.

This article written by me was first published in the New York City Atheists July Newsletter and I reprint it here with their kind permission. NYCA holds monthly meetings with great speakers on topics of general interest as well as a large number of more focused meetings and events. Even if you don’t live in NYC, you can still find tons of resources on their website (found here).

The Polling Crisis

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poll-box“Election polling is in near crisis, and we pollsters know. Two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it.”

 “In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody’s guess.”

This is a quote from a recent NYT opinion article by Cliff Zukin entitled “What’s the Matter With Polling?” If you pay for access to the NYT website, the link is here (NYT Article).  In short, the author points out that the polling industry is in crisis. It has become hugely more expensive, if not essentially infeasible, to do reliable polling anymore. Trends including the disappearance of land-lines and growth of the Internet have converged to undermine what little reliability polls used to have. The main takeaway is that polling “science” is really bad and is only getting worse and pollsters have no idea how to make it better.

The author focuses primarily on the growing financial and logistical challenges for the polling companies. Since pollsters must make a huge number of calls to obtain even a remotely valid sampling of reliable data, the cost of doing accurate polling has become extremely high – even prohibitively high.

However I prefer to focus on the problems that this situation creates for rational governance. Even good polls have undesirable consequences. Their mere existence creates an almost irresistible compulsion for politicians to pander to poll results, saying whatever the numbers tell them that likely voters want to hear. Even if the polls are accurate, this may not be the best way to govern – or even to campaign. But if polls have become woefully inaccurate to boot, and yet we continue to pander to them, then we have taken what was already a problematic approach to governance and made it far, far worse.

One specific problem I’d like to focus upon more deeply is the self-fulfilling prophesies that these polls create. If the polls tell us that, for example, Bernie Sanders cannot possibly win, then those polls influence huge numbers of people to respond by not voting for Bernie Sanders – creating a self-fulfilling feedback loop. And what if those admittedly unreliable polls were simply wrong? What if perhaps they were even disingenuously promoted as a stealth strategy by a big money Clinton campaign (theoretically) for exactly that purpose?

Maybe we’re better off without any polls. Good riddance, I say. Maybe we’re better off if politicians campaign and govern according to actual scientific data and humanistic ethical principles, not according to polling. Maybe we voters are far better off if we remain uninfluenced by polls as well.

Whoa there, you say. If you have read my book “Belief in Science and the Science of Belief” (found here) you know that a fundamental principle I champion is that decisions based on facts are inherently better than decisions based on beliefs. If that is the case, aren’t polling facts important information to consider in campaigns and in governance?

Yes but I’m also suggesting that polls aren’t the best facts to use and that they push all the air out of the space for actual, more important and more reliable facts to sufficiently drive political campaigns and decision-making.

Poll any group of alcoholics and the data will likely show that they want more alcohol. As antithetically “paternal” as this may sound to some, a government must provide what society needs, not necessarily what people want. Private corporations can be driven by market research to provide exactly what their customers want (when not unethical or illegal). But a government simply cannot make policy based primarily on polls if they are there to serve the common good.

Now if even accurate polling can create unhealthy pressures for governance, imagine the consequences if we continue to listen to polls that have now become even less reliable. Now we are making decisions that impact the lives of people and the life of the planet that are primarily based not merely on polling data but on really bad polling data.

I say again, good riddance to polls. My hope is that we turn this crisis into opportunity. This is our chance not to merely improve polling methodologies, but to start to weigh polling data far lower in our decisions and instead find ways to make policy decisions based more upon the best objective science and rational decision-making possible. I hope that our emphasis on “what people polled want” is permanently diminished and replaced by more indirect and sophisticated methods of data mining to understand what they actually need and what will best serve humanity and planet Earth in the long-term.

From Belief to Delusion

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When I wrote my 2008 book Belief in Science and the Science of Belief (here on Amazon), I intentionally treated belief as just, well – belief. I intentionally softened any characterizations that might seem excessively inflammatory and personal. But in this more intimate setting amongst friends like you, we can ask whether the word belief is far too weak and benign, even inaccurate, to describe many of the assertions of the Religious Right.

Remember the formal debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on creationism? Ham challenged Nye to debate the topic and the notable exchange took place on February 4th, 2014. You can find the debate online if you missed it (here on YouTube). If you are old enough, you might know Bill Nye as the amiable “Science Guy” from his highly-regarded science show that ran from 1993 through 1998. Mr. Nye continues to be a passionate advocate and popularist of science.

Creation Museum

“Learning” at the Creation Museum

His opponent, Mr. Ham, was and is the President of the Answers in Genesis Ministry and is a tireless evangelist preaching young Earth creationism – mainly targeting kids. Mr. Ham is a key principal behind the Creation “Museum” (website) – a Biblical-themed amusement park that you may have glimpsed in the film Religulous by Bill Maher.

As I listened to the specious and frankly ludicrous arguments put forth with such conviction by Mr. Ham (see here), I could not help but wonder whether belief is far too mealy-mouthed a word for what Ham and those like him suffer from. Is not delusion is a far more accurate word to describe his kind of thinking? And if so, is it really helpful to be so very reluctant to call it what it is?

Now, before the psychologists amongst you get all up in arms that I’m diagnosing my fellow human beings, let me assure you that I use the word delusional purely in a lay sense, not as any kind of clinical diagnosis. But just because the word has particular meaning in clinical settings, does not mean we are not allowed to use it in a more general sense. We don’t need a judge to certify certain criminal activity as criminal and we don’t need a priest to proclaim certain behaviors as evil. We are perfectly free to do so as well.

For a fair and impartial definition of delusion we can most conveniently start with Wikipedia (go to link), which defines it as follows:

“A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, or other effects of perception.”

That definition establishes a very clear distinction between belief and delusion, one which is easily recognizable at least at the extremes. A belief is simply an unsupported conclusion based on insufficient or incorrect information. A delusion is a belief that persists regardless of any amount of evidence to the contrary.

In the case of Ken Ham, his creationist views go far beyond a mistaken belief based on false or incomplete information. He maintains his unalterable convictions despite incomparably superior evidence to the contrary. No doubt, he would argue that the evidence for evolution is not actually superior, but any delusional person would similarly deny all evidence contrary to their delusion. Any objectively rational person could not help but conclude that the evidence for evolution goes far beyond merely superior to overwhelming and that the convoluted arguments that Ham puts forth to deny this evidence are utterly irrational.

According to Wikipedia again, delusions are further subcategorized into four distinct groups. One of these, the “Bizarre Delusion,” is defined as follows:

“A delusion that is very strange and completely implausible; an example of a bizarre delusion would be that aliens have removed the reporting person’s brain.”

I contend that the thinking of Ken Ham and other evolution deniers should be fairly and accurately categorized as a Bizarre Delusion. Their creationist views are certainly “completely implausible” and it would be considered “very strange” if they were not so commonplace. It is important to recognize that they have studied this a lot, and do not simply hold a completely uninformed and clueless belief in creation like presumably say, Rick Perry. And they are evidently not just lying about their belief like at least some other Conservative politicians. They are truly delusional.

Words matter and they should be used accurately. In principle, if a more accurate word is available it should be used. It seems undeniable that Bizarre Delusion is a far more appropriate word than belief to describe the thinking of Ham and those who share his delusions. But words also have power, and we should avoid words that convey implications or elicit reactions we would like to avoid. So even if the bizarre thinking of Ham and others like him is in fact delusional by definition, what value is there in labeling it as such? Doesn’t that just necessarily alienate those you would like to bring around to a less delusional way of thinking?

Even considering those possible undesirable side-effects, the word belief is neither accurate nor helpful in describing these delusions. It is not merely polite and non-confrontational but it actively helps enable these delusions. It suggests that such delusional thinking is harmless and even reasonable and acceptable when sheltered under the protective umbrella of other more rational beliefs. But delusions are seldom harmless and never reasonable or acceptable. Calling this kind of delusional thinking “belief” gives it more legitimacy than it deserves. If we were to consistently refer to this kind of thinking as delusions rather than as beliefs, we would more accurately communicate the true nature and real-world implications of these tangibly harmful assertions.

Certainly using the word delusion instead of belief would elicit a much more visceral response by opponents and allies alike, but I for one would welcome that reaction. I say call a delusion a delusion and stand by the implicit assertion that such delusional thinking goes way beyond mere belief and that it is irrational, unacceptable, and harmful. Calling a delusion a delusion may be just the hit of reality that these deluded people need, or at least those influenced by them need, to honestly reconsider the soundness of their reasoning. At the very least, it may give some people, politicians in particular, some hesitation in associating themselves with these delusional ideas.

So the next time someone espouses delusionary thinking, consider calling it out (nicely) as delusion. Instead of responding with the customary “I respect your beliefs but I don’t share them,” you might say something more provocative like “sorry but I can’t give any credence to such delusions.” If the other party questions how you dare characterize their sincere, heartfelt belief as a delusion, you should be able to give them a very clear and compelling justification for your use of that word. Or just refer them to Wikipedia.

But do not overuse it. Although one could arguably call any belief in god delusional, to do so would only dilute its effectiveness. There is a wide grey spectrum between belief and delusion. Reserve the label of delusional to those like Ken Ham who are clearly at the delusional end of the spectrum.

Here is an extra credit homework question for you. If Ken Ham has clearly slipped from belief into delusion, how far has he slid down the slope from delusion to insanity?