Why We Believe What We Believe

Alternate Title: Why Belief In The Flying Spaghetti Monster (aka Pastafarianism) Isn't All That Unreasonable

Belief is a funny thing when you think about it. We believe what we are exposed to, what we experience, what we are told, and what we understand to be true. As Christof in the movie The Truman Show so succinctly put it, "We accept the reality of the world in which we live." To put it another way, we believe what we think is reality, and we will continue to believe such until there is a reason for us to change our belief.

In a way, I imagine we can apply Newton's First Law of Motion to our mental movement: "Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it." Likewise, every person in a state of belief tends to remain in that state of belief unless an external force is applied to it. In psychology, one hears a lot about cognitive dissonance. This is the notion that we will regularly come into contact with some thing or some idea that challenges our mental processes. When this happens, we must find a way to overcome the dissonance. We use many different methods to do so, but they all boil down to this: we find a way of adjusting what we know to what we have experienced, and move forward. Sometimes we choose to ignore the challenge, and move on as if it never happened. Sometimes we are completely disabused of our former notions and create new ones. Ideally, though, we find a way of merging the concepts to represent our better understanding of the world around us.

As an educator, it is my job to challenge my students' thinking. I would be doing them a disservice if I simply allowed them to carry on believing what they believe without making any attempt to challenge them to understand why they believe it. Near the end of this school year, I had a student tell me that a primary responsibility of a United States citizen is to not kill other people. I asked him why. He said something about it being illegal. So I asked him, "If killing was not illegal, would you kill?" He was horrified at the thought. It took him a while, but he finally said something along the lines of "killing is just wrong" to which I responded, "So there is something inside that tells you that killing is wrong, regardless of what other people say." He paused and then said, "Yeah, I guess so." He was 11-years-old and it was the end of the day, so I figured we could leave it at that. But I use this as a great example of what happens when we pause to think about why we believe what we believe.

If you grow up believing that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and there is never anything to challenge this belief, then it is reasonable for you to believe in it. As a non-believer of Pastafarianism, though, I am going to find your beliefs odd. And as a believer of a different worldview, I will probably do something to challenge your thinking to see if you will convert to my beliefs. Is this wrong? No, not at all. What if you don't accept the challenge, and you continue to believe in the FSM? Is it wrong for me to keep trying to convert you to my way of thinking? Now we come to a great dilemma. Some people will say yes. Some will say no. Personally, I think that if someone has no interest, no reason for changing their beliefs, then I am simply wasting both my time and his/her time trying to get that person to change. I am happy to continue to discuss our divergent views, but I am not going to keep pushing. To me, there are more important things to do in this life than to try to convince everyone that I am right. Unless, of course, it is my job to get you to change your ideas.

When I am being paid to convince somebody that something is true, I prefer the methods of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher who made the first push for teachers to move away from the blank-slate method of teaching. He was the one who said, "Hey guys, these kids know stuff! Let's take what they know, share what we know, and help them find their own way to knowledge!" (Not exactly, but that's how I interpret his methods.) This is in harmony with Elbert Hubbard, who once stated that "the object of teaching a child is to enable them to get along without their teacher." Now, I will admit that the grammatical structure is a bit odd. He probably should have started talking about the object of teaching children, not just a child. But I digress.

We should not simply dismiss somebody's beliefs because they are not the same as ours. We should seek to overcome cognitive dissonance by challenging our own thoughts. We will gain much more knowledge and understanding of the world as we take time to do a bit of navel-gazing and try to understand why we believe what we believe. Then we can worry about whether or not our Pastafarian friends are in danger of hell-fire. But not until then.