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PART I: THE POWER OF BELIEF

"Believing is the most mental thing we do." -- Bertrand Russell

Our heads are chockablock with beliefs, beliefs about ourselves, our families, our friends; beliefs about our society and peoples around the world; beliefs about what things are and how things work; beliefs about politics, religion, and the environment. Beliefs provide a moral compass, guide our relationships, and motivate our behaviors in affairs large and small. Our thoughts and feelings, our actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is — for we never know reality directly — but to the world as we believe it to be. Because of our beliefs, we brush our teeth or don’t bother; we vote for Jennifer and not for John; we eat certain foods and avoid others; we worship one deity or another or none at all; and we rely on scientific medicine or homeopathy to cure our ills. Beliefs propel us to work tirelessly toward a desired goal or to abandon all hope and sink into despair; they lead us to worry when we need not, or to relax when to do so is unwise. Faulty beliefs — arising from misapprehension about the cause of a disease, misperception of an enemy’s actions, misunderstanding of a lover’s motives, misconceptions about which, if any, gods are real — lead to inappropriate, maladaptive, and sometimes fatal actions.

Beliefs have inspired humans to conquer diseases, to explore unchartered lands, to construct beautiful edifices, and to look beyond their personal needs and work for the welfare of others, fighting for equality, defending freedom, helping the sick, and assisting the poor. Beliefs have also led to war, terrorism, suicide, martyrdom, and human sacrifice to appease the gods. Nothing speaks to the ultimate power of belief more than the willingness to give up one’s life because of it, because of a belief to die for.

PART II: THE BELIEF ENGINE

"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is." -- Bhagavad Gita, 500 BCE

Many beliefs are shared by everyone in a society. For example, we all believe that humans and other animals need food and water to survive. But many beliefs stand in dramatic opposition to one another. Consider the origin of our planet: Do you believe, along with the vast majority of modern scientists, that the universe came into existence approximately 14 billion years ago, bursting out of nothingness in a Big Bang? Or do you believe, as do many fundamentalist Christians, that the universe was created only a few thousand years ago, shaped directly by the hand of an invisible, all-seeing, all-knowing supernatural being? Or do you manage to have your cake and eat it too, believing that the universe was created through a Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, but a Bang detonated by . . . well, an invisible, all-seeing, all-knowing supernatural being?

How is it that reasonably intelligent people growing up in roughly the same cultural milieux, attending the same schools and exposed to the same media, come to harbor with great conviction such widely different beliefs? And why do you believe as you do? Where is your evidence? If you are a Fundamentalist Christian, the answer is easy: The Bible tells you so, and that is evidence enough for you. On the other hand, if you believe that the universe began with a Big Bang 14 billion years ago, it is unlikely that you have directly examined and understood the scientific data that support this belief. Unless you are an astrophysicist, your belief no doubt also relies upon authority, in this case the secular authority of scientists.

Of course, most of our beliefs do not involve such heady matters as the beginnings of the universe, but even many of those that are more prosaic were not hammered into being on the anvil of rational enquiry. We like to think that we consciously choose to believe one thing and not another, and while some beliefs are indeed based on a logical analysis of available information, most come into being without much awareness or consideration of actual evidence. They develop, often spontaneously and involuntarily, through a combination of a number of mental processes, many of which are nonconscious.

There is nothing fundamentally different about the nature of beliefs that we consider rational and those we deem irrational. Belief in fairies, ghosts, or leprechauns can be held as strongly as beliefs about more mundane matters, and believers will cite evidence in support of such beliefs. We are all likely to have at least some beliefs that others might judge as foolish, but we are adept at finding justification for them. We can point to the paucity of evidence supporting other people’s “irrational” beliefs, but, truth be known, we rarely have good supporting evidence for most of our own. As psychologist Patrick Boyer points out,

"It is a hallmark of genuine belief that we generally care little for its origin, for the ways in which it became a denizen of our mental household. For instance, most of us believe that salt is white and steel is tough, but we do not generally know how we acquired these beliefs; nor do we care."

Even though we might like to think that we choose our beliefs, we all know that we cannot arbitrarily choose to believe just anything or change a belief simply on a personal whim. Psychologist and philosopher William James made this point in 1897:

"Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln’s existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure’s magazine are all of someone else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things but we are absolutely impotent to believe them."

Where do our beliefs come from? They are generated and maintained through a complex and generally automatic process in our brains that I call the Belief Engine. This metaphor is in reference to Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine,” the immense, steam-powered precursor of the modern computer that he conceived in the early nineteenth century. It was intended to generate solutions to complex algebraic equations based on numerical data entered through punch cards. (Unfortunately, Babbage was unable to raise sufficient funding, and so it was never completed.)

Our brains act somewhat analogously to this analytical engine, albeit in a much more sophisticated manner. The Belief Engine chugs away in the background, taking in information from the world outside, scrutinizing its source, checking its compatibility with existing beliefs, subjecting it at times to logical analysis, and then effortlessly generating new beliefs and maintaining or modifying old ones. Most often, this occurs without the awareness of the “operator” — you or me. And, like a computer, our Belief-Engine brains comprise both hardware and software. We come into this world equipped with the basic hardware, although it continues to develop further over a number of years after birth. The “software,” the programming, comes through interaction with our environment (parents, teachers, siblings, friends, the media, and the experiences of everyday life) and through the development of the thinking skills that we acquire as we grow up.

In order to understand the nature and importance of beliefs in our lives, it is first necessary to understand how they are generated and maintained. There are a number of important aspects to the Belief Engine, including perceiving, remembering, learning and feeling, and thinking. These processes are explored in the next four chapters.

CHAPTER III: BELIEF STABILITY AND CHANGE

"Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, no science and no art. Whatever beliefs you hold, it’s hard to imagine life without them. Beliefs, more than anything else, are what make us human." -- Graham Lawton

To understand why people do the things they do, we must understand the beliefs that underlie their actions. The chapters in this section focus on how beliefs are formed and cultivated, building on the processes of perception, memory, learning, thinking, and feeling; on how some beliefs resist change while others submit to contradictory information; and on how beliefs can motivate people to achieve difficult goals, even to the extent of sacrificing their own lives in the effort. 

PART IV: KNOWING OURSELVES

While we may accept that our perceptions and memories of the outside world might suffer from distortion and even wishful thinking at times, and while we may acknowledge that our beliefs can at times be skewed by the cognitive biases that affect us all, we all like to think that we know ourselves with some accuracy. We assume that our beliefs about our bodies, although possibly distorted at times by self-esteem issues, are fairly accurate. We know if we are good at sports, or are afraid of the dark, or have a missing limb. We know when we are healthy or feeling ill. And we know when we are dreaming and we know when we’re awake.

Or do we? The chapters in this section examine the extent to which our beliefs about our bodies, our minds, and our well-being sometimes stray significantly from reality.

PART V: BELIEF IN A WORLD BEYOND

The preceding chapters have explored the many vulnerabilities of perception, memory, contemplation, and reality testing. At times, our beliefs fall into error because we cannot tell the difference between what is occurring only inside our heads and what is happening in the world around us. At other times, our experiences are shaped by our beliefs and desires, leading us to experience what we expect or hope to experience rather than what is real.

The chapters in this next section explore beliefs associated with magic, superstition, religion, and the paranormal through examination of how they reflect our constructed representations of reality.

PART VI: VETTING BELIEF

"Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used." -- Carl Sagan

Previous chapters have detailed how vulnerable is our thinking to distortion and error and how at times our beliefs are based only in fantasy. Yet imagination also has an important role to play in our lives, and we would be much the poorer were we to suppress it. What is vital is the ability to distinguish imagination from reality, and, in order to do so reliably, we need to be able to think critically.