What to Believe?
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
February 1, 2004
Jane Thickstun

Reading 1

Today’s first reading is an essay called “The Copernican Revolution and Other Irritating Changes” by Christopher Buice.  It’s taken from his meditation manual called Roller Skating as a Spiritual Discipline.

            “Is that it?”  This was my brother Bill’s response upon seeing me for the first time as a newborn baby fresh from the hospital.  Apparently Mom and Dad had given me quite a buildup.  “Won’t it be nice to have a little brother to play with?”  Bill took one look at the blob in a blanket and decided he was unimpressed.

            From day one I was a disappointment to my brother.  It’s hardly surprising.  It’s not easy becoming the big brother.  One minute you are the star of the show, the center of attention.  Then the baby arrives and demands room in the spotlight.  Suddenly you are displaced.  Your parents have to divide their attention between you and the newcomer to the house.  It is easy to begin to resent the new baby.  I had dislodged my brother from his familiar place in the larger scheme of things.

            No one likes to discover that he/she is not the center of the universe.  No one likes to be displaced.  Just think about what happened to Copernicus.  In 1543 Copernicus began to argue that the earth was not the center of the solar system.  Based on astronomical observations and mathematical theory, he developed the idea that it was the earth that revolved around the sun, not the sun that revolved around the earth.  No one appreciated him very much for his efforts.  Nor did Galileo win many fans when he tried to spread these ideas.  Galileo was tried for heresy and forced to recant.  It was not until 1992 that the Catholic Church admitted it had made a mistake by condemning him.  Talk about slow progress!

            Sooner or later each one of us is forced to acknowledge that we are not the center of the cosmos.  We inhabit a world with other people, plants and animals.  We dwell in a universe with other stars, planets and galaxies.  At some point we are challenged to grow beyond our self-centeredness.  This process is sometimes painful.  Whoever helps us learn this lesson usually doesn’t win any popularity contests.  The day I was born I became the bearer of unwelcome news to my brother.  I, on the other hand, did not have a younger sibling to teach me this truth.  Suffice it to say that my four elder siblings had ways of keeping me humble.

Reading 2

Today’s second reading is an essay called “Honey, They’re Catholics” by Meg Barnhouse.  It’s taken from her meditation manual called Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal.

            You couldn’t really call my childhood church fundamentalist; we just had strong ideas about how things should be done.  It was a conservative Scotch-Irish denomination called the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.  We sang psalms instead of hymns, because hymns weren’t from the Bible, therefore they were not divinely inspired.

            We weren’t supposed to call the first day of the week “Sunday.”  We called it “Sabbath.”  On Sabbath, we were not allowed to do anything but go to Sabbath school in the morning, followed by church, with church again in the evening.  We could eat, nap, or memorize Bible verses during the times when we weren’t at church.  There was to be no bike riding, swimming, listening to music, or going out with friends.  We ate a lot, napped a lot, and memorized tons of Bible verses.

            All this was meant to make us spiritual.  What it did was make us legalistic.  We were great at following the letter of the law.  We could set the alarm for midnight Sunday, and at 12:01, we’d play records and dance for a minute before tumbling back into bed.  We found loopholes.  We discovered that if you change your terminology, you can get by with more. 

            On our way to church, when we saw children on bicycles or headed to the lake with towels and rafts piled in the back of their parents’ station wagons, we would whine, “Mama, those children get to ride bikes on Sabbath, and those children get to go to the lake.”  My mother would say, “Honey, they’re Catholics.”

            I wanted to be a Catholic when I grew up.  There was something definitely exotic about them.  One of my aunts married one, and the whole family, when discussing her situation, would whisper, “Well, you know, she married a Catholic.”

            This called for more research.  The conversation I remember best was one I had with my cousin Rebecca in the bushes beside her daddy’s horse pasture.  I had white shoe polish dabbed all over a poison ivy rash, which my mother said worked the same as calamine lotion.

            “They have these big wafers they have to eat,” Rebecca said, her eyes large and her voice portentous, “and the worse they’ve acted that week the worse those wafers taste.”  That didn’t sound good.  If that were true, those kids deserved to swim on Sabbath.  Then again, that portentous tone of voice was the same one Rebecca used when she told me, “If you sit under a plum tree, and it’s the full moon, and you lick a frog– you’ll die.”

            Rebecca was my hero.  One day when her older brothers had been teasing her beyond bearing, she went into the house and got their bug collection from their room.  She make some chocolate chip cookie dough, ground up all the bugs, added them to the cookies and chocolate chips, and called the boys in for a feast.  She watched as they ate every one. 

            Rebecca was entertaining and inspiring, but not, perhaps, an entirely reliable source of information.  I’m sure she is better now, as a grown-up and an attorney.  Most of my cousins, raised on the letter of the law, have become attorneys.  I have grown up still researching Catholics, Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, Republicans, and other people who were tantalizing mysteries in my North Carolina childhood.  I’m working out my own beliefs now, and it’s harder than I thought.  I’m almost certain, though, that the thing about the frog and the plum tree is not right.

Sermon

            A while back, I was having a conversation with someone who I thought I knew, and then I heard him saying “I don’t believe Man descended from Ape.”  I said, “You’re kidding, right?”  He wasn’t.  I had always thought that people who didn’t believe in evolution were conservative Christians, specifically biblical literalists.  Those who take the Bible as literal truth, including the stories of the creation of the world in the book of Genesis.  I knew this guy wasn’t religious at least not in that way, and so it never occurred to me that he could reject the scientific truth that we all learn in school.  It really threw me for a loop. 

            Then I was visiting my old friend this summer who I’ve known since we were ten.  Her husband is a doctor, who I’d only met one other time.  We were having dinner and somehow the topic came up.  Assuming I was among like-minded people, I made a comment something like “can you believe how many people these days don’t believe in evolution?”  My friend’s husband proceeded to give me a long lecture, most of which was unintelligible and all of it delivered in a patronizing, arrogant tone, but the gist was that he was arguing against evolution.  This threw me for a loop too, that a medical doctor could maintain that position.  How is it possible?

            I knew a man who denied that the Holocaust happened, thought it was a made-up story about six million Jews being killed by the Nazis.  He is a German who moved to the States in the 50's as a teenager, and holds onto his German heritage with a strong accent and a pride in German nationalism. 

            I have a cousin, whom I love dearly, who practices astrology, and even helps organize large, national astrology conferences.  She believes that the arrangement of the stars and the planets in the sky has a direct effect on what happens in our lives, and can plot an elaborate horoscope based on the time and place, as well as the date you were born.

            The topic for today’s sermon was given to me by the top bidder at last spring’s Serendipity Auction.  For those who are new, this is our service auction, a big fundraiser we do every year in the late spring.  It’s a fun event where people offer all kinds of things from dinners to time in vacation spots to babysitting to things they have made.  Last night we had a Cajun dance party here that was an offering by Marlene and Jerry Hickman at the auction.  Lots of folks came, and we had a great time!

            So the topic was given to me.  What I was given by Dick von Korff, who bought the sermon this year, was actually a question, and the question is: “why do people believe in concepts for which there is no evidence and reject things for which there is not only evidence but evidence they can see for themselves?” 

            I’ve done some research and found that people believe all kinds of things that don’t have the kind of evidence that would pass a scientist’s test, or in some cases, even the test of common sense.  I’ve been having fun with a book called “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer. 

            Some of the weird things people believe in are UFO sightings and alien abductions.  Some people believe in ghosts, or demons, or magicians.  Some people believe the Holocaust never happened, in spite of all the evidence.  Even a belief in an afterlife has no evidence to support it, though many people believe in it.  Some people believe a child can be born to a virgin.  Some believe they can communicate with the dead.  Some people may even believe that the worse Catholic children act during the week, the worse those wafers taste in the Sunday morning Mass.  Some may even believe that if you sit under a plum tree, and it’s the full moon, and you lick a frog– you’ll die.

            But perhaps the most widespread and pernicious belief for which there’s no evidence except a story in a book is the belief that the world was created in six days by a supernatural god, just as it is described in the Book of Genesis.  Maybe, as I’m starting to suspect, you don’t have to be a biblical literalist to reject evolution, but I don’t know what they would put in its place if not the bible story.  The pressure on school boards across the country is to give at least equal time to evolution’s rival theory, “creation science.”  Actually, so-called “creation science,” which really isn’t science at all, would not be called a theory by its proponents, who challenge the validity of evolution by saying “it’s only a theory.”  But this challenge only reveals a misunderstanding about science and how it works.

            In science, it’s the process that matter far more than the results.  The results, the answers, are always subject to change as new information is found and new understanding is achieved.  Newtonian physics stood for a long time as the way to explain the physical universe.  The center of Newton’s physics is the law of gravity.  But then along came Einstein who found that there were a few odd circumstances that Newton’s physics failed to explain adequately.  So Einstein came up with his famous theory of Relativity to account for those circumstances. (I hope the scientists in the room will forgive my drastic oversimplification.)

            Our explanations of how the world works are always being tweaked, even stood on end or thrown out, as our collective understanding grows through application of the scientific method.  You remember the scientific method?  I think I learned it in elementary school.  It was deemed Very Important by my teachers.  It consisted of four steps, which Shermer’s book nicely brings back to memory.  The first step is Induction, or forming a hypothesis by drawing general conclusions from existing data.  The second step is Deduction, which is making specific predictions based on the hypothesis.  Then comes Observation, where scientists gather data, looking for things that will confirm their hypothesis or disprove it.  The final step is Verification, where scientists test their predictions against the data they have gathered.  A theory is a hypothesis that has been confirmed by the evidence.  It counts as truth, at least until other evidence comes along that might put it into question. 

            We run into trouble any time “a truth becomes more important than the search for truth, when the final results of inquiry become more important than the process of inquiry.” (Shermer, p. 114) Doubt and skepticism play an important in increasing our knowledge.  As Shermer says, “Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method. . . . all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions.”  (p. 16) As we said earlier in the responsive reading, “Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth.” Real truth is not shaken by testing, but made stronger, more secure.

            Science has a distinctive feature that sets it apart from other systems that seek truth, including religion and pseudoscience.  This feature is the fact that science is progressive.  As Shermer says, “Scientific progress is the cumulative growth of a system of knowledge over time, in which useful features are retained and nonuseful features are abandoned, based on the rejection or confirmation of testable knowledge.” (p. 31)

            For instance, I studied philosophy, and in philosophy it is still considered relevant to read texts that go back to ancient Greece.  Plato and Aristotle are still considered essential reading in that field. But science textbooks are out of date if they are ten years old.  That’s because science is progressive; its body of knowledge accumulates and grows on what has been learned by others.

            Science only attempts to understand what can be observed in the natural world; what can be measured.  It depends on evidence to determine truth. 

            Are there realms of reality inaccessible to science?  Of course.  For example, I believe that a mystical experience can reveal a view of reality that is in a very real way true.  But it’s still not true in the same way that a scientific truth is.  Most importantly, it can’t be verified.  My mystical experience might reveal a different truth than your mystical experience, or they might be the same, but there’s no way we can ever really even know.  The way to truth through mystical experience is not a way that can be shared by all, the way that looking at the physical evidence can.  While I believe that such experience is invaluable for finding meaning in individual lives, it can’t be used as a standard for establishing truth that is the same for all.

            Likewise, reliance on authority can’t establish truth the way science can either.  A while back, the editor of the Midland Daily News had an editorial where he claimed that people couldn’t agree on the issue of homosexuality, so he was going to find his truth in a higher authority than that of human beings.  He claimed to find resolution of the issue in the fact that God himself, the ultimate authority, declared homosexuality to be wrong in his best-selling book, the bible.  But it doesn’t matter who the authority is if the truth can’t stand up to testing against evidence.

            So why do people believe things for which there is no evidence?  And why do they reject things for which there is plenty of evidence?

            One reason is because it is comforting to believe certain things.  Carl Sagan suggests in his book The Demon Haunted World, that “at the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also) is the idea that wishing makes it so.” (p. 14) Shermer says that “life is contingent and filled with uncertainties. . . . Under the pressure of reality, we become credulous.  We seek reassuring certainties from fortune-tellers and palm-readers, astrologers and psychics.” (p. 5) Who here has never thought it would be nice to see a dead loved one again, and at least wished it could be so?  Who hasn’t read the fortune that comes in the cookie at a Chinese restaurant and wondered if it might be true?  Who hasn’t observed that every time they wear a certain outfit, good things happen, and wonder if there might not be a correlation?  And who hasn’t experienced a serendipitous event and wondered if it might be more than just coincidence?  If it helps someone get through life to believe something that might not be true, as long as it is harmless, who are we to judge?  What is wrong is to insist that everybody else must believe as we do, no matter what it is we believe.

            The other main reason people believe things against the evidence is that we’ve evolved to be that way.  Shermer says, “we evolved to be skilled, pattern-seeking, causal-finding creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns . . . left behind the most offspring.  We are their descendants.  The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not.  Unfortunately our brains are not always good at determining the difference.  The reason is that discovering a meaningless pattern . . . usually does no harm and may even do some good in reducing anxiety in uncertain situations.  So we are left with two types of thinking errors: believing a falsehood and rejecting a truth.  Since these errors will not necessarily get us killed, they persist.”  (p. xxiv)

            In a recent issue of the UU World, there was an article on Fundamentalism by Davidson Loehr.  He makes the point that all fundamentalists, whether Christian, Muslim, or whatever, share the same characteristics.  They all have rigid rules, men are on top, there is only one right set of beliefs, one right set of roles, and they resist what is modern.  Loehr suggests that the reason these fundamentalists from various religions have the same agenda is that the agenda preceded the religions.  He suggests that their behaviors are familiar because we’ve seen them in the animal world.  He says, “These men are acting the role of ‘alpha males’ who define the boundaries of their group’s territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group.  These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. . . . Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children; there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group.  The in-group is protected; outsiders are expelled or fought.”  According to Loehr, the fact that unrelated fundamentalisms are essentially identical rules out coincidence and is best accounted for as part of the common evolutionary heritage of our species.  He says, “What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species.”  (p. 37) Loehr considers it ironic that the behaviors trace back to a time before bibles, before even language, before people had concepts of gods to authorize their behavior.  I consider it ironic that his plausible explanation uses evolution to explain beliefs and behaviors of people who don’t believe in evolution.

            So we are most likely inclined by thousands and thousands of years of development to seek reassuring certainty without regard to evidence.  The use of the scientific method and the recognition of its value is brand new in that scope of time. 

            But we are not bound by our biological programming.  There are other forces both within us and among us that help us transcend our biological heritage.  Comfort can be found as well in the fact that our knowledge of the universe is always increasing, that science is progressive.  We can find hope in the knowledge that we can make the world a better place by providing comfort for others, by placing a vision of the good for all above a need to defend our view of the world.

            “Hope Springs Eternal” is a phrase that Shermer says expresses his conviction that “humans are, by nature, a forward-looking species always seeking greater levels of happiness and satisfaction.  Unfortunately, the corollary is that humans are all too often unwilling to grasp at unrealistic promises of a better life or to believe that a better life can only be attained by clinging to intolerance and ignorance, by lessening the lives of others.  And sometimes, by focusing on a life to come, we miss what we have in this life.  It is a different source of hope, but it is hope nonetheless: hope that human intelligence, combined with compassion, can solve our myriad problems and enhance the quality of each life; hope that historical progress continues on its march toward greater freedoms and acceptance for all humans; and hope that reason and science as well as love and empathy can help us understand our universe, our world, and ourselves.”  (P. 278)

            Like when a new little brother takes our place as the family’s darling baby, science forces us to acknowledge that we are not the center of the cosmos.  This process is sometimes painful.  But another way to look at it is that science helps us to grow by showing us the sometimes painful truth that we as individuals, and even we as human beings in general are just a small part of an immense, complex, beautiful, interdependent web of existence.  Let us take comfort in the fact that science offers a method we can trust for discovering truth and let find hope in the ability of human beings to grow in understanding and in compassion.