There’s two ways to end up believing something.

The officially approved method is, of course, science and reason. Collect facts, make deductions, test theories, integrate the results into a comprehensive worldview, and act according to those principles.

That works great for empirical truth. Religion only gets in trouble when it tries to argue with the results of this method. If you want to be able to make accurate and actionable predictions about the world, or you want to pursue verifiable answers to objective questions, science and reason are the way to go.

But only a fool would be so deluded as to think they acquired all their beliefs that way. Most of what we believe is not the result of reasoned deduction with a neatly worked out sequence of logic backing it up.

We are not logical creatures. There is no such thing. Even computer programs reflect the emotions and intentions of their creators and users. Should we ever achieve true Turing test passing AI, perhaps we will be able to say said entity is logical.

But we most definitely are not.

Thus, there is the other path of belief formation, the human path, which involves a combination of many forces, including consistency with other existing beliefs, the accumulation of intuitive deductions about the world derived from life experience, and the emotional needs of the believer.

Most beliefs, therefore, are the solution to an equation with many interacting variables, of which logic is only one.

The most emotionally charged issues will require the strongest solutions, and it is usually from those issues that necessary belief derives.

These are things the individual needs to believe because said belief solved an enormous conflict for them by replacing directionless doubt with belief and purpose, and thus became a very important, even foundational part of their entire worldview.

These beliefs are not open to reasoned debate because they are too integral to the structure of the believer’s psyche to be risked. The person will go on believing it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, because said belief is so deeply entrenched that to change it would be to throw onseself into the necessary chaos and doubt it takes to entirely reshape one’s psyche.

And our minds naturally resist that, in the same way that the pyramids of Egypt naturally resist falling over. Maintaining this kind of structural integrity is a basic, base-line function of the human mind, without which mental stability would be impossible. We need to solidify and cement key, core beliefs in order to grow up at all, let alone grapple with the world and all its complexities and chaos.

Now some of you might be thinking unkind thoughts about the sorts of people who harbor such unreasoned and unreasonable beliefs, but I guarantee that you have them too. Every human being operates on certain fundamental assumptions about the world that are buried so deep in their operating system that they are completely invisible unless something challenges them, and then the response will be primal, not rational.

The purest form of necessary belief is that which falls under the category of “faith”. Faith is by definition unreasoned – nobody needs faith in order to believe the sun will come up tomorrow and coffee will continue to taste good.

Faith is only invoked when there is no rational answer, or at the very least, no rational answer which suits the individual. This is where emotional need comes into play. Being pre-reason, so to speak, faith operates almost entirely on powerful emotional symbols that fill the terrifying gap in the person’s knowledge and allows them to function in a world that can be cruel, arbitrary, and horrifying.

The most extreme example of this phenomenon comes from the religious experience. They vary in expression, of course, but they all come down to the mind simply inventing the solution it needs,  bypassing the slow and cumbersome reasoning mind entirely.

It takes a powerful conflict to trigger this kind of resolution. Despite what some may think, the human mind does not allow modifications to its more traditionally arrived upon belief system easily. Again, this is an issue of stability.

Like a spark jumping a gap when the charges on either side are strong enough, the human mind transcends and creates whatever it needs out of whole cloth. And because the need addressed is so powerful, at no point does the new belief pass through the test of reason. It it created and believed without question.

And of course, you will never reason someone out of such a belief.

Interestingly, these transcendent moments of epiphany are the only solution to a sufficiently entrenched inner conflict. Despite what the voices of reason (or at least, a certain narrowly constricted stuffed and mounted kind of reason) might want you to believe, some problems can only be solved with faith, or at least epiphany, and those who are incapable of it will be spiritually conflicted, perhaps to the point of depression.

A reason-limited mind might be smarter, but it isn’t happier. Said mind can be quite powerful in its grasp of what is really going on, but without the ability to synthesize its own medicine in the form of leaps of faith, there is no guarantee that one’s soul will get all its needs in order to survive.

It’s a little like self-starvation.

Said rationality based mind avoids inner conflict by intellectualization. It studies itself, thus subduing hot emotion with cold, detached reason. Emotions are neutered, conflicts are frozen, and something a lot like living can proceed.

But the basic conflict – the base level cognitive dissonance – remains unresolved. No conflict = no conflict resolution. These unresolved errors accumulate in the mind and take up more and more of the mind’s resources as the mind tries to resolve the conflict but is blocked by supposed reason.

And all because of a fear of believing something that isn’t “true”.

So once again I ask the question : would you rather be right, or happy?

And yes. On some level, you will have to choose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.