I spoke a little bit yesterday about how some are more loyal to a group than to God. They let society be the highest authority of what is right and what is wrong, or of what can be believed and what is preposterous. I’d like to delve a little deeper on this matter, examining the reasons for this “popularity ideology,” and how it gives people reason to stop believing in God.

Abbreviated Learning)

A major contributing factor to this is that people tend to optimize their learning by relying heavily on their trust in an authority. We do not all look through telescopes or microscopes to discover what can be found there, we just accept what we have been told by those that have.

And this predisposition to trust isn’t a flaw in us, either. It is an essential characteristic for us to progress as a race. Taking things on authority allows us to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” depending on the discoveries that came before us to be valid so that we can build something greater on top of them. Research and discovery is conducted at the outer limits of the human understanding, pushing the boundaries further than they’ve ever been pushed before. Were it otherwise, and each of us had to individually reinvent the wheel, our progress would be limited to only the things that can be accomplished in a single life-time.

While building on past work without a full context can result in catastrophic errors, and occasionally has done so, the net result has clearly been positive. We move forward and improve more often than we stumble and fall backward.

But what is the point of all this? Simply that we should recognize that we have this built-in instinct to believe anything claimed by another person, so long as they seem rational and decent. We hear what they say, and we try to update our model of the world with that new information so that we can save the time it would take for us to verify it on our own. As already discussed, this is a good thing in many cases, but clearly it also creates the potential for us to be manipulated from time-to-time.

A War of Ideas)

If a seemingly-rational person teaches a principle that does not perfectly align with the beliefs that we held before, we tend to stretch and rotate our convictions to make the new one fit also. If we cannot make the old fit with the new, because the two are in direct contradiction, we will find ourselves divided, which is both logically and emotionally painful. Sooner or later, one conviction will give way to the other, if only to restore our inner equilibrium.

All too often, the decision of which side to align oneself with has less to do with the strength of the arguments, and more to do with social pressure. It is far easier to turn one’s back on a passive object, like the Bible, than the people who are actively arguing against proper theology. It is easier because the Bible’s arguments can be shut out by just refusing to read its passages, whereas the messages of society crowd in on us no matter what we do. We feel much more obligated to give some sort of response to the challenge of other people than to faceless books. Thus, just to restore a sense of logical consistency, we might very well discard the old faith, abandon the texts it comes from, and replace it with the philosophy espoused by the incessant babbling.

So what is Reason #3 for Disbelief? Allowing our convictions to be overrun by our instinct to adopt the views and opinions of other people. This mostly represents the rational side of social pressure, but obviously there is an emotional side to it also. Tomorrow we will examine that.