• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 469 0

us intuitively accept is that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and belief: as intelligence goes up belief in superstition or magic goes down. This, in fact, turns out not to be the case, especially as you move up the IQ spectrum. In professions in which everyone is above average in IQ (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and so forth), there is no relationship between intelligence and success because at that level other variables come into play that determine career outcomes (ambition, time allocation, social skills, networking, luck, and so on). Similarly, when people encounter claims that they know little about (which is most claims for most of us), intelligence is usually not a factor in belief, with one exception: once people commit to a belief, the smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

Most people, most of the time, arrive at their beliefs for a host of reasons involving personality and temperament, family dynamics and cultural background, parents and siblings, peer groups and teachers, education and books, mentors and heroes, and various life experiences, very few of which have anything at all to do with intelligence. The Enlightenment ideal of Homo rationalis has us sitting down before a table of facts, weighing them in the balance pro and con, and then employing logic and reason to determine which set of facts best supports this or that theory. This is not at all how we form beliefs. What happens is that the facts of the world are filtered by our brains through the colored lenses of worldviews, paradigms, theories, hypotheses, conjectures, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through living. We then sort through the facts and select those that confirm what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away those that contradict our beliefs.

Mr. D’Arpino’s dilemma was to understand what happened to him—not to explain it away as an artifact of life trauma or neuro-misfiring, but to restructure it as giving an outer voice to inner meaning. Dr. Collins’s conversion consisted of reconstructing his experiences into a meaningful case for belief, and his intellectual journey is an eloquent expression of the power of belief to drive reason and rationality to its ends, and vice versa. Reason’s bit is in the mouth of belief’s horse. The reins pull and direct, cajole and coax, wheedle and inveigle, but ultimately the horse will take its natural path.

3

A Skeptic’s Journey

In the cortex of our brains there is a neural network that neuroscientists call the left-hemisphere interpreter. It is, in a manner of speaking, the brain’s storytelling apparatus that reconstructs events into a logical sequence and weaves them together into a meaningful story that makes sense. The process is especially potent when it comes to biography and autobiography: once you know how a life turns out it is easy to go back and reconstruct how one arrived at that particular destination and not some other, and how this journey becomes almost inevitable once the initial conditions and final outcomes are established.

Although I have recounted in my various writings bits and pieces of autobiographical material in order to illustrate a particular point, I will narrate here how I arrived at my own religious, political, economic, and social beliefs, and along the way disclose some facts of my personal life that I’ve not written about before. With hindsight and the understanding that my own left-hemisphere interpreter is no less biased than anyone else’s in reconstructing my own remembered past, here is one skeptic’s journey.

Born Again

Over the years much has been made of the fact that I was once a born-again Christian who either lapsed (if you’re a believer) or advanced (if you’re a skeptic) into religious disbelief. Creationists have tried to pin my belief in evolution to my demise as a believer, thereby chalking up another lost soul to the evils of liberal secular