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For some reason people think that. Why do people believe

Have you ever thought about why people believe in God? In this short article we will try to understand this issue. Faith in God comes to each person in different ways, and each person has his own personal spiritual experience.

Before you start answering this question, honestly ask yourself: do you yourself believe in God? If so, why do you believe in God? If not, what are your reasons for not believing? It is very important that you be honest with yourself on this matter.

As I interacted with many believers, I realized that many of them cannot explain the reasons why they found their faith in God. But at the same time, their faith is not blind and unfounded. There is a passage that describes faith in God very well:

“Faith means that we are sure of what we hope for, it means that we believe that some things exist, although we do not see them. Because of this faith God loved the ancients” (Hebrews 11:1-2).

From this passage it is clear that, on the one hand, faith is the certainty of something. But on the other hand, the very object of faith is something invisible.

So, let's try to understand this issue and understand why people still believe in God.

People believe in God because of miracles

“Having said this, He called out with a loud voice: “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead man came out, his hands and feet were in grave clothes, and his face was covered with a piece of cloth. Jesus told them, "Release him from his grave clothes and let him go." And then many of the Jews, who came to visit Mary, and saw what Jesus had done, believed in him” (John 11:43-45).

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The connection between God and "Beavis and Butt-head"

The key to understanding the connection between God and "Beavis and Butt-head" ( Beavis and Butt-head - American animated series, approx. editions) are two young rising stars in evolutionary psychology - Marty G. Hazelton of the University of California and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University - and their incredibly original theory of error management. In my opinion, error management theory represents the greatest theoretical achievement in evolutionary psychology in the last few years.

Imagine a typical scene in "Beavis and Butt-head" - that rare case where the guys are not sitting on the couch watching the video. So Beavis and Butthead are walking down the street, and they pass a pair of young, attractive women dressed in tank tops and attractive pants. As the women pass by, one of them turns to Beavis and Butt-Head, smiles, and says, "Hi!"

And then what happens? Beavis and Butt-head freeze, all their cognitive functions (whatever they are) on hold, and they mumble, "Wow... She wants me... She wants to do this... I'm going to sleep with her..."

As funny as Beavis and Butt-head's spectacular misunderstanding is, experimental evidence suggests that their reaction is quite common among men. In a standard experiment, a man and a woman engage in spontaneous conversation for several minutes. Unbeknownst to them, observers - a man and a woman - are watching their interaction from behind a one-way mirror. After the conversation, all four (participant, participant, observer, and observer) talk about how interested the participant is in the participant in a romantic sense.

The data indicate that the male participant and the male observer often rated the participant as more romantically interested in the male participant than the participant and the female observer did. Men think that a woman flirts with a man, while women do not think so.

Whether you are a man or a woman, if you think about your life for a moment, you will quickly realize that this is a very common occurrence. A man and a woman meet and start a friendly conversation. After the conversation, the man is convinced that the woman is passionate about him and, perhaps, wants to sleep with him, while the woman had no idea about it; she was just polite and friendly. This is a common theme in many romantic comedies. Why is this happening?

Hazelton and Nettle's error management theory offers a very convincing explanation. Their theory begins with the observation that making decisions under uncertainty often leads to erroneous conclusions, but some errors are more costly in their consequences than others. For this reason, evolution must support a system of inferences that minimizes, not the total number of errors, but their total costs.

For example, in this case in the absence of comprehensive information, a man must decide whether a woman is interested in him in a romantic aspect or not. If he concludes that she is interested when she is really interested, or if he finds out that she is not when she is not really interested, then he has come to the right conclusion.

On two other occasions, however, he made an error in inference. If he concludes that she is interested, when in fact she is not, then he has made a false positive error (what statisticians call a Type I error). On the contrary, if he concludes that she is not interested when she is, in fact, interested, then he has made a false negative error (what statisticians call a "Type II" error). What are the consequences of false positives and false negatives?

If he makes the mistake of assuming she's interested when she really isn't, he'll hit on her but end up getting rejected, laughed at, and possibly slapped. If he made the mistake of believing that she was not interested, then he missed the opportunity for sex and probable reproduction. It's not bad to be rejected and ridiculed (and trust me, it is), but it's nothing compared to the lack of a real opportunity to have sex.

So, Hazelton and Nettle argue that evolution has armed men with an overestimation of women's romantic and sexual interest in them; thus, while they may make a large number of false positives (and get slapped all the time as a result), they will never miss an opportunity to have sex.

Among engineers, this is known as the "smoke detector principle". Like evolution, engineers create smoke detectors to minimize not the total number of errors, but their total cost.

The consequence of a false positive smoke detector error is that you are woken up at three in the morning by a loud alarm when there was no fire.

The result of a false negative is that you and your entire family are dead if the fire alarm doesn't go off. How frustrating it is to be woken up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, but that's nothing compared to being dead.

Therefore, engineers deliberately make smoke detectors extremely sensitive, so that they will generate many false positive alarms, but no false negative silence. Hazelton and Nettle argue that evolution, as the engineer of life, designed the male inference system in the same way.

That's why men always hit on women and make unwanted tackles all the time. But how, in the name of the Lord, does any of this relate to our faith in God? I will explain this in the next post. Trust me, there is a connection.

We are religious because we are paranoid

Even after making statistical predictions about such important factors as economic development, education, and the history of communism, societies with higher levels of intelligence tend to be more liberal, less religious, and more monogamous.

For example, the average level of intelligence in a society increases the maximum marginal tax rate (as an expression of people's willingness to invest their personal resources in the welfare of genetically unrelated people) and, as a result, partly reduces income inequality. The smarter the population, the more they pay income taxes and the more egalitarian the distribution of their income.

The average intelligence level of the population is the most significant determinant of the maximum marginal tax rate and income inequality in society. Each IQ of average intelligence increases the maximum marginal income tax rate by more than half a percent; in societies where average intelligence is 10 IQ points higher, individuals pay over 5% of their personal income in taxes.

Similarly, the average IQ in a society reduces the percentage of the population that believes in God and how important God is to people, as well as the percentage of the population who consider themselves religious. The smarter the population, the less religious it is on average.

The average level of intelligence of the population is the most important factor, which determines the level of religiosity. For example, each IQ of average intelligence reduces the share of the population that believes in God by 1.2% and the share of the population that considers themselves religious by 1.8%. By itself, average IQ explains 70% of the discrepancy about how important God is in different countries.

After all, the average level of intelligence in society reduces the level. The smarter the population, the less polygynous (and more monogamous) it is. The average intelligence value of the population is the most significant determinant of the level of polygyny in it. The average level of intelligence of the population has a more significant impact on polygyny than income inequality or even Islam.

In an earlier post, I'm suggesting that there might be something in the world that craves hereditary monarchy, as we seem to want our political leaders to be succeeded by their wives, children, and other family members.

If this is indeed the case, then it means that some form of hereditary monarchy - the transmission political power within families may be evolutionarily familiar, and representative democracy (and all other forms of government) may be .

Thus the Hypothesis would predict that smarter people are more likely to favor representative democracy and less likely to favor hereditary monarchy. At the Societal Level The hypothesis would imply that the average level of intelligence in a society would increase the level of democracy.

From this point of view, it is interesting to note that the work of the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen supports this assumption. His detailed study of 172 countries shows that the average level of intelligence in a society increases its level of democracy.

The smarter the population, the more democratic its government. This suggests that representative democracy may indeed be evolutionarily new and unnatural for humans. Again, don't do it. Unnatural does not mean bad or undesirable. It simply means that humans did not evolve to practice representative democracy.

The Moral of Statistical Analysis

After six days of an absolute ban on air travel to and from the United Kingdom, as well as most of northern Europe, the UK Civil Aviation Authority finally lifted the ban on Wednesday (21 April), resuming normal flights in UK airspace.

During the ban, some European airlines such as KLM, Air France and Lufthansa made their test flights through the volcanic ash (without passengers) and reported that it was completely safe to fly. With the airline industry as a whole reportedly losing $200 million a day, following their successful flights, these airlines urged their governments to lift the ban as early as last weekend. But the ban was not lifted for another three days.

After (and even during) the ban, many airline representatives and jilted air travelers complained that government measures to close airspace were too harsh and outdated and demanded that the measures be relaxed.

There are now rumors that some airlines and stranded passengers are suing the government for property damages. Are they right? Should the government have opened up airspace and allowed air travel much earlier than it did?

On July 22, 2005, Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by London police who mistakenly thought he was a potential Muslim suicide bomber. This event came one day after the unsuccessful attempts by four Muslim suicide bombers to detonate a bomb on the London Underground, which itself occurred two weeks after the successful bombings on the London Underground and bus on 7 July, and resulted in the death of 52 people.

London police officers mistook de Menezes for one of the suicide bombers who had failed the day before and shot him seven times in the head, suggesting that de Menezes was about to detonate a bomb on a crowded tube car. It was quickly discovered that de Menezes was not transporting any explosives and was in no way involved in the failed bombings of the previous day (the four perpetrators and their accomplices were all subsequently arrested).

The behavior of the police officers involved was examined in several official inquests, coroner's inquests and court inquests, but they were cleared of all suspicion of misconduct. And yet, still many are convinced that the police should have been held accountable for their misconduct, and some accuse the London police of racism.

Are they right? Should the police officers involved be prosecuted for the tragic death of an innocent man?

Now I'm going to do something that I've never done on this blog: say something that everyone in the world agrees on.

It would be ideal if the government and the Civil Aviation Authority never made mistakes in their decisions and decided to prevent only those flights that would have been destined to crash and allowed all others. No one would ever complain if all safe flights were not prevented, but only those that were destined to crash were prevented.

It would be ideal if the police never made mistakes in their judgment and only shot to kill those people who were about to set off a bomb in a crowded subway car and never killed anyone else, including completely innocent people. No one would ever complain if innocent people were never shot, but only those who were about to set off a bomb were killed.

And yet, we do not live in a perfect world. In the real world, people make decisions based on insufficient information. As a result, people often make errors in judgment. Not all decisions people make will be good decisions. When people make mistakes in judgment, there are always negative consequences. The best thing people can do in the imperfect real world is to minimize the negative consequences of making such mistakes.

There are two types of errors in judgment. There is a false positive error when it is assumed that the danger exists, when it does not. Further, there is a false negative error, when it is assumed that the danger does not exist, when there is one. Statisticians call the first type of errors "type I errors" and the second type of errors "type II errors". And these two types of errors often have asymmetrical negative consequences.

In the case of volcanic ash, the consequence of a Type I error that the British Civil Aviation Authority was right to make is that millions of people were stranded and airlines lost billions of dollars.

The consequence of a Type II error - mistakenly assuming it's safe to fly and allowing European airlines to run their business as usual - is that some planes will crash and hundreds of people will die.

There is no doubt which of the negative consequences is greater (among all the complaints and accusations about the ban, no one seems to notice the miraculous fact that not a single person died in this global catastrophe of historical proportions. Name another natural disaster of global a scale in which no one died).

As far as Jean Charles de Menezes is concerned, the consequence of a type I error, which the London police officers unfortunately committed, is that one innocent person died. The consequence of a Type II mistake—not shooting a suicide bomber who would then detonate a bomb in a crowded subway—is that dozens of innocent people would die.

Yet, there is no doubt which of the negative consequences is greater. People grumbled about the error in judgment that the police actually made. But can you imagine the magnitude of the complaints if the officers made a Type II error?

You can debate whether the Brazilian should be mistaken for one of the Muslim suicide bombers involved in the July 21st event, all of whom later turned out to be Africans. But there is no doubt that, as regards the system of logical reasoning, the police procedure was correct.

And here is an important moral from the statistics. You cannot reduce the chance of Type I errors and the chance of Type II errors at the same time. Any system of logical reasoning that reduces the probability of type I errors obviously increases the probability of type II errors. And any system of logical reasoning that reduces the probability of type II errors inevitably increases the probability of type I errors.

Longtime readers of this blog will recognize this as part of error management theory. As I have covered in earlier posts that introduce error management theory, this is why humans are wired to believe in God.

Why do people believe

Belief systems are powerful, ubiquitous, and enduring. Throughout my career, I have tried to understand how beliefs are born, how they are formed, what feeds them, reinforces them, challenges them, changes them, and destroys them. This book is the result of thirty years of searching for an answer to the question "How and why we believe in what we believe in all areas of our lives." In this case, I am not so much interested in why people believe in a strange or in this or that statement, as in why people believe in general. And really, why? My answer is straightforward:

Our beliefs are formed for all sorts of subjective, personal, emotional and psychological reasons in the environment created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society in general; after formation, we defend our beliefs, justify and logically substantiate them with the help of many reasonable arguments, irrefutable arguments and logical explanations. First there are beliefs, and only then - explanations of these beliefs. I call this process "faith-based realism," where our beliefs about reality depend on the beliefs we hold about them. Reality exists regardless human mind, but the ideas about it are due to the beliefs that we hold in this particular period.

The brain is the engine of beliefs. In sensory information coming through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, patterns, and then fills them with meaning. The first process I call patterning(English. patternicity) - the tendency to find meaningful patterns or patterns in data, both meaningful and non-meaningful. The second process I call agency(English. agenticity) - the tendency to imbue patterns with meaning, purpose, and activity(agency). We cannot help doing this. Our brains have evolved in such a way as to connect the dots of our world into meaningful drawings that explain why this or that event occurs. These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and beliefs shape our perceptions of reality.

When beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find supporting evidence to support those beliefs, complementing them with an emotional boost in confidence, therefore accelerating the process of argumentation and rooting, and this process of confirming beliefs with positive feedback is repeated cycle after cycle. Similarly, people sometimes form beliefs based on a single experience that has the properties of revelation and is generally unrelated to their personal background or culture in general. Far less common are those who, after carefully weighing the evidence for and against a position they already hold, or one for which a belief has yet to be formed, calculate the probability, soberly make a dispassionate decision and never return to this issue. . Such a radical change of belief is so rare in religion and politics that it becomes a sensation when it comes to a prominent figure, for example, a clergyman who converts to another religion or renounces his faith, or a politician who switches to another party or gains independence. This happens, but in general the phenomenon remains rare, like a black swan. Much more often a cardinal change of beliefs occurs in science, but not as often as one might expect, guided by an idealized image of the sublime " scientific method”, taking into account only the facts. The reason is that scientists are also human beings, equally affected by emotions, forming and reinforcing beliefs under the influence of cognitive bias.

The process of "faith-based realism" is modeled on what the philosophy of science calls "model-dependent realism" as introduced by Cambridge University cosmologist Stephen Hawking and mathematician and science popularizer Leonard Mlodinov in their book The Higher Design ( The Grand Design). In it, the authors explain that since no single model is able to explain reality, we are entitled to use different models for different aspects of the world. At the heart of model-dependent realism “is the idea that our brain interprets the input received by our senses by building a model of the world around us. When such a model can successfully explain certain events, we tend to attribute to it, as well as to its constituent elements and concepts, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which the same physical situation can be modeled using different fundamentals and concepts. If two such physical theories or models predict the same events with a reasonable degree of accuracy, one of them cannot be considered more real than the other; moreover, we are free to use whatever model we deem most appropriate.”

A cardinal change of beliefs is so rare in religion and politics that it becomes a sensation.

I will go even further in arguing that even these different models in physics and cosmology that scientists use to explain, say, light as a particle and light as a wave are beliefs in themselves. Combined with higher-order physical, mathematical, and cosmological theories, they form whole worldviews related to nature, therefore, belief-based realism is higher-order model-dependent realism. In addition, our brains endow beliefs with value. There are good evolutionary reasons why we form beliefs and regard them as good or bad. I will deal with these issues in the chapter on political beliefs, but for now I will say only that the tribal tendencies that have developed in us lead us to unite with like-minded people, those members of our group who think like us, and to resist those who hold different beliefs. Thus, when we hear about someone else's beliefs that differ from ours, we are naturally inclined to dismiss them as absurd, evil, or both. This desire makes it difficult to change views despite new evidence.

In fact, not only scientific models, but all models of the world are the basis of our beliefs, and belief-based realism means that we cannot escape this epistemological trap. However, we can use the tools of science to test whether a particular model or belief about reality is consistent with observations made not only by ourselves but also by other people. Although there is no Archimedean point of reference outside of ourselves, a point from which we can see the Truth relating to Reality, science is the best tool ever devised for accommodating approximate truths concerning conventional realities. Thus, faith-based realism is not epistemological relativism, where all truths are equal and the reality of each deserves respect. The universe really began with the Big Bang, the age of the Earth is actually calculated in billions of years, evolution really took place, and anyone who believes otherwise is actually delusional. Even though the Ptolemaic geocentric system fits observations just as well as the Copernican heliocentric system (at least in the time of Copernicus), it would never occur to anyone today to consider these models to be equal, because, thanks to additional lines of evidence, we know that heliocentrism is more accurate. corresponds to reality than geocentrism, although we cannot claim that it is the Absolute Truth concerning Reality.

With this in mind, the evidence I have presented in this book shows how dependent our beliefs are on a variety of subjective, personal, emotional and psychological factors that turn our idea of reality into a "witch mirror", "full of superstition and deceit", in the caustic phrase of Francis Bacon. . We begin the story with anecdotes from life, testimonies from the stories of the faith of three people. The first of these is the story of a man whom you have never heard of, but who many decades ago, one early morning, experienced events so profound and fateful that he began to search for higher meaning in space. The second story is about a man you have most likely heard of, as he is one of the greatest scientists of our era, but he also experienced a fateful event early in the morning, thanks to which he established himself in the decision to make a religious "leap of faith." The third story is about how I myself went from a believer to a skeptic, and what I learned that eventually led to the professional scientific study of belief systems.

The scientific method is the best tool ever invented for connecting our beliefs to reality.

From narrative evidence, we move on to the structure of belief systems, how they are formed, developed, reinforced, changed, and disappeared. Let's look at this process first in general terms using two theoretical constructs, patterning and agency, and then we will delve into the issue of the development of these cognitive processes, and also see what purpose they served in the life of our ancestors and serve in our present life. Then we will deal with the brain - up to the neurophysiology of the structure of the belief system at the level of a single neuron, and then, ascending, we will restore the process of formation of beliefs by the brain. After that, we will study the operation of the belief system in relation to belief in religion, afterlife, God, aliens, conspiracies, politics, economics, ideology, and then learn how a host of cognitive processes assure us that our beliefs are true. In the final chapters, we will talk about how we know that some of our beliefs are plausible, determine which patterns are true and which are false, which factors are real and which are not, how science acts as a device for the final identification of patterns, providing us with some degree of freedom within belief-based realism and some measurable progress despite psychological traps.

This text is an introductory piece. From the book Difficult People. How to set up a good relationship with conflict people by Helen McGrath

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From the book Introduction to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis for the Uninitiated author Bern Eric

3. Why do people dream? Now it is not difficult for the reader to understand what a dream is. This is an attempt to relieve the tension of the Eid by hallucinating the fulfillment of some desire. The id is constantly striving for satisfaction both in reality and in a dream. In his waking hours to his direct expression

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Why are people different? From time immemorial, people think differently, act differently, and succeed in different ways. And therefore, sooner or later, the question arises: why are people different, why are some of them smarter or more decent, and is there something that makes them like that once and for all?

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Why People Believe Belief systems are powerful, ubiquitous, and enduring. Throughout my career, I have tried to understand how beliefs are born, how they are formed, what feeds them, reinforces them, challenges them, changes them, and destroys them. This book is the result of thirty

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Why do people believe in conspiracies Why do people believe in highly unlikely conspiracies? I think it's because their pattern-detecting filters are wide open, so any patterns are recognized as true, and potentially false patterns are not screened out.

Tell me, is there a god?
-Not.
-When will it be?
From jokes

Once, at methodological seminars at our academic institute in the 1980s, a doctor of biological sciences, I will call him by the initials E.L., began his speeches with shocking: "As you know, there is a God!"

So I'll start with shocking. As you know, there is no God in nature. Not Orthodox, not Uniate, not Catholic, not Protestant, not Calvinist, not Anglican, not Shia, not Sunni, not Jewish, not, I'm sorry, Chinese.

Dear reader! If you are a believer, do not rush to close the page with indignation! A little patience. I'm just going to explain that God exists, but as genetic knowledge, and that the belief in the existence of God is rooted deep in the subconscious of people from their first breath at birth. But, unfortunately, it does not exist in nature, just as there are no ghouls, Baba Yaga, Santa Claus, not to mention the god Ra, the goddess Astarte, Zeus, Jupiter, Perun, etc. And certainly there is no God in churches, cathedrals, monasteries, mosques, synagogues and other "charitable" institutions that claim to be especially close to God.

A human baby is born completely helpless. He will not survive even a few hours without outside help. Unlike young animals, which literally immediately or very soon after birth are able to move independently, see and search for a source of food, a human newborn can, and for a relatively long time, up to a year or more, only breathe, suck milk, and get rid of the products of digestion. Even a newborn can cry. And it's all. The first thing a newborn baby does is start breathing on its own and immediately start crying. Why does he begin to breathe - clearly. He lost the supply of oxygen from the mother's body. Why is he crying? And then, that he - still in fact a completely unconscious living lump with a wandering look and involuntary movements of the limbs - "knows" initially at the genetic level that there is someone outside of him who will respond to this cry, warm, feed, wash, protect. No normal person can calmly and indifferently ignore the crying of a child. Numerous stories of "Mowgli" show that animals cannot do this either. And the child uses this means for the first few years of his life, until he becomes a conscious being. The instinct to cry is one of the most basic human instincts. We add that the instinctive desire to cry in stressful situations remains for a long time even in adults. It is in this property and primordial knowledge that the roots and nutrient medium religious faith into god. It is possible, perhaps with some degree of exaggeration, to say that the crying of a child is an instinctive prayer. This means that people actually do not just believe in God, but initially, subconsciously know that God - someone outside of them, who will personally protect them, feed them and save them from all dangers - exists. It is quite possible, therefore, that, as some researchers have noted, there is an area in the human brain responsible for religious feeling.

This instinct in children continues in the instinctive "faith in the adult." Without this instinct, children will not survive and learn nothing. Children don't have to experiment with fire to learn that they can get burned. They will be told by mom or dad or grandparents or another adult in whose care they are. When children grow up, they learn from their parents, from other adults that there is an Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim Shiite, Muslim Sunni, Jewish, or some other god (where they came from, this is a separate conversation, we will not digress). But in the same way, they can suddenly lose faith in this if another authoritative adult tells them that there is no god. And they will not experience any trauma from this, just as they do not experience any trauma when they are told that Santa Claus is a fairy tale and that dad bought them a New Year's gift. My wife recalls that as a child she had a very pious nanny, and until the age of 7 she believed in God. One day her friend Valya said in the yard that there is no God. In horror, she ran to her mother to ask what Valya would do for it. But in the first grade, at one of the first lessons, the school teacher Lidia Fedorovna said that there is no God, and that's it. Since then my wife has been an atheist.

But the instinctive belief in the existence of God is not yet a religion. Religion is a form of social organization. There is no doubt that the modern world religions as social institutions originate in a slave society. They even retain many of his attributes. It is enough to recall the paraphernalia and phraseology of Orthodox Christianity: believers are servants of God, church hierarchs are masters, and so on. In those distant times, this natural primordial instinctive predisposition of people to believe in an otherworldly omnipotent being, along with an innate property to blindly trust an older and stronger one, naturally turned into an instrument of their subordination and social organization. And the basis of people's adherence to a particular religion is, apparently, another "basic" instinct, the herd instinct. The ancestors of modern Homo Sapience lived in packs. Homo Sapience lived, and many still live, in tribes, and the herd instinct was an important genetically inherited property for the survival of offspring. The fact that this herd instinct has not disappeared and is preserved in the human psyche, I think, does not need special proof. We are not at all as far removed in our basic instincts from our primate ancestors as we might think.
The phrase "herd instinct" has a negative connotation in Russian. Therefore, modern "culturologists" have come up with a luxurious euphemism for him: "national self-identification." Remember, gentlemen, how much massacre it has caused and continues to cause, how many human destinies it has broken and continues to break in the vastness of the former Soviet Union the mental virus of "national self-identification" that spread epidemically in the late 1980s simultaneously with the epidemic of the mental virus of religiosity!

In these years, cases have also become widespread when adults who were previously non-believers suddenly become devout believers (I, of course, do not mean the cases characteristic of the Russian-speaking emigrant environment in the USA, Germany, Israel, and not uncommon in Russia itself). when it is caused by purely mercantile considerations). What should be the position of atheists, who realize that the most convincing reasonable arguments that the God preached by religions is an illusion may not be heard, simply because people can lock their minds to subconsciously unwanted information?

Of course, one cannot dispute the right of people to believe what they want, as long as it does not affect the interests of other people. You can not forbid them and unite in groups and public associations in accordance with this faith. The root of the atheistic worldview is not forbidden religious beliefs, but in a categorical rejection of religions as social institutions, a rejection based on the realization that the idea of God they represent is a lie used to master the souls of people, and that the fundamental goal of churchmen is not to serve people, not to store and disseminate moral and ethical norms and spiritual heritage civilization, which they cynically claim without any reason, but self-preservation and reproduction of religious institutions and infrastructure through privatization, moral enslavement and exploitation of the flock.

The humanistic duty of atheists is to try to use the still available opportunities to open people's eyes and free them from the mental virus infection spread by churchmen and from mental slavery, and often quite real slavish submission to religious preachers and church hierarchs. We cannot leave unanswered the constant massive brainwashing they subject us all to from television screens, radio and from the pages of newspapers and books in last years with the servilely enthusiastic shameful participation of the literary and artistic beau monde, then persistent and obsessive zombification, the most recent example of which is the recent campaign for the funeral of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Perhaps people are predisposed - genetically and from infancy - to believe in powerful otherworldly beings - gods and angels. But to no lesser extent, people genetically prefer the truth to lies, they prefer to know what really exists and what does not. Otherwise, the human race would not have continued, that's for sure.

Religion was born under the furry foreheads of our ancestors somewhere in the Middle Paleolithic. Science as a method appeared later - that in Ancient Greece. But, like all our other qualities, both did not come down to us on a cloud, but inherited from animal ancestors. Actually there is no religion and science in animals. But they have what both religion and science have grown out of: faith, knowledge, and also the need for both.

At first, animals needed objective knowledge to increase their control over their environment. The processed facts add up to experience, and the more it is, the better the animal is adapted, the easier its life and the more successful reproduction.

Faith appears later, approximately at the same level of mental evolution as figurative thinking. The dog barks at the noise outside the door because he believes that this noise is not just for nothing, there is someone behind him who needs to be barked at. And it gives her the illusion of control. Just an illusion, but enough to reduce the stress of an incomprehensible and potentially dangerous situation. And the lower the stress level, the easier life and more successful reproduction.

The benefits of knowledge are obvious. But there is a lot of it from faith:

Faith saves time and brain resources when making decisions. In nature, the one who decides not so much correctly as quickly decides well.

Faith sees behind random phenomena some force that created them and tries to influence this force. This saves from the development of learned helplessness. When everything is bad and nothing can be changed, you can hold on to illusions and rituals like a straw, and this imaginary straw really supports.

Faith improves our ability to understand each other. The alien soul of darkness, all our ideas about the inner world of another are only guesses, phantom facts. But nevertheless, they help us build real relationships, make friends and influence people. that the better a person has developed empathy and the ability to understand someone else's psyche, the more he has a tendency to this or that kind of religiosity. It seems that relationships with imaginary friends work as a training ground for honing your soul-reading skills.

Finally, faith turns our existential anxiety into fear. Great replacement, right? True, excellent. Animals already have a fear of death. Hence the well-known farewell and burial rituals of elephants, monkeys, and dolphins, and ethologist Mark Bekoff, in The Emotional Life of Animals, describes such behavior even in llamas, foxes, and wolves. Great empaths - dogs - are afraid of the death of the owner. Koko about her beloved kitten hit by a car: “Bad. Sad. Sleep, kitty ”(R.I.P., Coco. Us too).

According to the famous psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, we have anxiety of non-existence and pre-conceptual knowledge of death from birth. It becomes conceptual at the age of five, when we first realize that we are going to die. For good. Someday, and I'm gone. At all. Horror! According to Heidegger, horror is an extreme level of anxiety, at which it is impossible to single out the object that causes it. While a person is in this state, he is not capable of any action. Anxiety paralyzes will and activity because it is not separated from my self. But if it is turned into fear, he will be isolated from me and controlled. Not by me, but by someone else. With whom, as our Machiavellian intellect believes, it is certainly possible to negotiate.

Science is uncompromising, but religion is always the art of negotiation. Well, death is an opportunity you can't refuse. But is it possible to negotiate terms? Any religion accepts the fact that you will die, but complements it with the promise that under certain conditions, everything will not end there.

The hope of immortality is our way of controlling the fear of death. Irrational, illusory, but no other has yet been invented. Science is busy, and we need it right now.

Life, with its existential problems and general unsettling spontaneity, stresses us, and there are only two remedies for this - control and predictability. Real or illusory - for the psyche is not so important.

The scientists placed two groups of rats in an awkward position: they were tied up, lying on their backs, and there was nothing they could do about it. But one at the same time could gnaw a wooden stick, and the other could not. Guess which group recovered faster from stress? In gnawing a stick, as in any ritual, there is no rational meaning. But there is value in reducing stress. Experiments on animals and people show that imaginary control of the situation calms just like the real one. And if you can't see the difference, why pay more?

That is why there are no atheists in the trenches under fire, and even in an airplane during turbulence there are fewer of them than ten minutes ago. Religion provides a way out of a hopeless situation. Yes, you painted it on the wall yourself. But for your health, this is better than none.

But if faith is such a useful thing, why is it now so scolded by scientists, educators and others good people with a good education?

After all, it wasn't always like that. When the craving for faith and knowledge, combined with the accumulative mechanism of culture, gave rise to religion and science, for the time being they lived peacefully. Shaman healers. Priests-astronomers. Monk geneticist. Books were written in monasteries, universities spun off from abbeys, and it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. But the powerful socio-cultural institutions that gradually grew up on the basis of faith and knowledge became isolated and moved from cooperative to competitive relations.

And by the beginning of the 21st century, their conflict had reached a historical maximum. Yes, once scientists were burned at the stake, but the Middle Ages, in principle, burned. It was a normal way of resolving issues, and scientists passed on a common basis. But when, in the 21st century, supporters of religion and science arrange real cockfights, mother's believers and mother's atheists go wall to wall on the Internet, and scientists and priests throw droppings and banana skins in public debates, this is no longer quite normal. Moreover, the feelings of the participants are so intertwined and mutually offended that the devil himself will not understand who believes in what, who knows what and who is ready to cut each other's throats for what. For truth? For influencing the audience? For the victory of your concept over the concept of the enemy? Whatever it is, the result is the next unpleasant thing.

Knowledge and faith are the main natural ways of regulating stress. We need both of them, because knowledge works in conditions of sufficient information, and faith - in conditions of insufficient information.

But public opinion insists on a choice: no, my friend, either you are with us on the side of light, or with them on the side of darkness. And we have to choose.

A difficult choice situation triggers a well-known effect of cognitive dissonance: having chosen one, we immediately begin to devalue the rejected option.

Chicken or fish?

Uh-uh... Well... Probably fish... Yes, fish! Useful fish. And what about the chicken? It doesn't even contain phosphorus.

It's not scary that a person chose a religion, it's scary that a false dichotomy imposed by society makes him devalue the alternative: "What's your science, it doesn't know anything, only problems from it." And this can deprive him of much of what science could give him, but will not give, because she herself stands in the pose: “Stop believing here or get out.”

Although no one is forced to choose between their basic needs. We are entitled to both. On the knowledge to reduce stress with real facts. And on faith to do it when the facts are not enough.

But to maintain adequacy, we must separate the phantom facts from the real ones. And this is where the main problem lies.

In the new issue of "Everything is like animals" we are conducting a simple experiment illustrating the relationship of faith and knowledge in a single head. I modestly hope that for someone it will clarify something and maybe even slightly reduce the number of senseless showdowns that flooded TVs and the Internet. After all, in order to get rid of prejudices, and not to strengthen them or replace them with others, you just need to carefully add knowledge to each individual head. And they themselves will force out everything superfluous. Believe me, there is no other way to achieve this.

Physiologist, Nobel laureate in medicine

23.08.2020

Psychologist's advice

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