What is Faith?

Okay, so this doesn’t sound like a science essay. But I assure you it does fit in with science. I want to share a story that I heard on Krista Tippett’s On Being, an NPR show, on September 24 of this year. I retell this story from memory, since I do not have time to listen to the whole podcast over again, but you can hear it at this link.

Dr. Guy Consolmagno is the current Vatican Astronomer, at the Vatican Observatory, and Dr. George Coyne is the recently retired astronomer. Now, whoa. You may not have known there even was a Vatican Observatory. Wasn’t this the church that condemned Galileo for believing the Earth was not the center of the universe, and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake? Well, it took a while for the Vatican to catch up with science, but in 1891 Pope Leo XIII founded the Vatican Observatory. (Now you know what the URL suffix “.va” stands for.) Instead of resisting science, the Catholic church decided to pursue it.

Dr. Coyne told a story of speaking at a convention of astronomers one time. He was wearing his priestly vestments. Then someone in the audience asked him, “Father,” not Dr. Coyne or George, “What does it feel like to go to work each day with the realization that you already know all of the answers?” Coyne’s response was swift and sure. He tore off his robe (I assume he was clothed underneath, and not in Mormon magical undergarments) and let everyone know that faith is not about knowing the answers, but about the assurance that the universe can be, as each day and year passes, better and better understood: our efforts at research will be rewarded. Even if we never understand it fully.

That is a way of describing the fundamental faith that all scientists have. And it is a leap of faith: there is no logical reason to believe that our brains, which evolved to maximize the fitness of genes and individuals, should have any way of understanding the universe. We evolved intelligence because it gave us a better ability to survive and to form associations with or to dominate other human beings. It evolved as a tool for evolutionary success, in the pursuit of which rationalization was just as good as reason. What our minds tell us need not be true, except in the matter of telling us where the edge of the cliff, or the next meal, is; it can be total fantasy, and natural selection favors it, so long as it allows us to form associations and to dominate others. I consider it an astonishing thing that our brains just happen to be suited for understanding the universe also. Even though very few people can actually understand dark energy or superstrings, at least we can understand the reasoning.

Keep the faith, brethren. We can understand the world, despite the political and religious and economic forces of hatred and unreason that try to keep us from doing so.

Are We All Deluded?

Sam Kean’s new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain As Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery, is a gold mine of stories about the weird things that our brains can make us do, everything from cortical blindness to alien hand and walking dead syndromes. In people with cortical blindness, the eyes and optic nerves work fine, but the portion of the brain that consciously interprets vision is impaired. The brain has a whole separate set of nerves that process the emotional response to vision, however; people with cortical blindness can therefore smile in response to another person’s smile even though they cannot consciously see it. In alien hand syndrome, a person cannot recognize their own hand—usually the left one—as being part of his or her own body; and in walking dead syndrome, the person cannot recognize the body itself as his or her own.

Perhaps most important, although not the most interesting story in the book, was the experiment that demonstrated that our brain’s conscious decision to do something occurred after the subjects had begun to do the action. That is, the brain’s decision was actually a post-hoc rationalization. This calls into question the entire concept of free will. It appears that we choose to do something only after our subconscious minds have decided to do that thing. Of course, this does not mean we have no conscious control over ourselves. Our conscious minds can prevent us from doing the things we have started to do; that is, however much free will is called into question, self-control is certainly real. As the author says, we may not have free will, but we have free won’t. Also, our conscious minds can create a general pattern of thought that, while it may not control every individual action, certainly influences our general behavior.

The main point of all these fascinating stories is, in the author’s own words: “But if the history of neuroscience proves anything, it’s that any circuit for any mental attribute—up to and including our sense of being alive—can fail, if just the right spots [of the brain] suffer damage…your actions, your desires to act, and your conviction of having acted can all be decoupled and manipulated.”

I have, through reading this book, come to understand myself better. Temporal lobe epilepsy includes the experience of auras that are religious in their effects and intensity—religious delusions. While religion does not consist only of delusion, it has been stimulated by delusion. Famous religious figures, such as the Apostle Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc, and writers such as Dostoevsky to whom religion was of overwhelming importance, showed symptoms of epilepsy. Though I do not have epilepsy, I have some symptoms that suggest my right temporal lobe might be hyperactive in something of the same way as certain epileptics. For example, throughout my life I have had experiences of religious ecstasy. I also have to take an anticonvulsant medication that is prescribed, in higher dosage, to epileptics. And I have a mild case of polygraphia—the compulsion to write everything down, all day every day—that some epileptics also have. Finally, there might be a genetic basis for this; my paternal grandfather was religiously crazy. Somehow just knowing this makes me feel more comfortable inside my skin.

Kean’s book, like the books of Mary Roach, show that the best modern science writing is based on stories and are written to be fun. Filled with fragments and imprecise language, this book would make some science editors howl, but is exactly the kind of book that would make anyone want to learn more about science. This is the kind of science book that I have not yet written myself.

The feeling I bring away from Kean’s book is liberation. I feel no need to blame myself for feeling or believing things that may be outrageous, nor do I have to blame others for theirs. What we need to do is to override anything outrageous that our minds manufacture. The idea that we choose our beliefs rationally seems to be entirely wrong, even though reasoning is a contributing factor. As a scientist and educator, I feel liberation, because I do not need to actually convince or convert anyone to my way of thinking. What I need to continue doing is to provide information and opportunity that will allow my students and my readers to convert their thinking, should that prove possible. If I continue to provide information about the world and its history, humans and their history, and continue provoking new thoughts, I have done my entire job.

The Evolved Human Mind

In our species, intelligence is the most important adaptation. But our intelligence is not logical; it is an emotional intelligence, as any fan of Spock on Star Trek knows. Despite the amazing capacities of human minds, our evolutionary legacy has limited them in a way that may make us unable to respond adequately to our current crises such as climate and economic collapse. Here are some examples. You can probably think of a lot more.

First, our minds have an almost unlimited capacity for self-deception. We see what we expect to see, and if reality and expectation do not mesh, we accept the resulting cognitive dissonance. Even when we can look ahead and see that our resources are running out, we can hardly bring ourselves to conserve those resources. We will become frugal only after disaster has struck. I thought of this as I drove past a tract of huge houses, built in Tulsa during the housing bubble. Block after block of them. This is what the buyers wanted, and they deceived themselves that the national, and their personal, economies could grow forever. Realtors would rather sell one big house than three small houses—less work for the same money. Nothing but a crash will get people to become frugal. The good news is that, once the crash has occurred, people are pretty good at frugality. We may not, however, have a long enough transition period to reorder our lives into a contented frugality.

Second, our minds continually readjust to current circumstances. This is the “shifting baselines” phenomenon. My generation is probably the last one to be richer than the preceding generation; people of my daughter’s generation cannot expect the kind of riches their families had while they were growing up, and cannot expect to find jobs even if they are qualified. The mindset has shifted to something more like survival, and we are all beginning to feel that this is normal. We have already almost forgotten about a world in which we could just go buy things on credit and count on personal finances to slowly pay off the debt.

Third, our minds are social; we will not act until society changes. Despite the clear evidence that humans are causing global warming, and despite the fact that most Americans (and even more citizens of other countries) know this to be true, societal inertia has prevented meaningful change. It will, as I said above, take a crash to get a society to live frugally. A frugal life (we have to start thinking of this as a good word) is the best, perhaps the only, way to reduce our carbon emissions and disruptive climate collapse.

These mental characteristics worked fine in the Stone Age; but we must transcend them today. Is this even possible?

This essay will also appear on my website.