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[Phys-L] A Letter to Juliet from Richard Dawkins Part 1



Good And Bad Reasons For Believing
Richard Dawkins

Dear Juliet,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is
important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that
we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look
like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like
the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a
smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means
actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something
is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with
their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The
"evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a
telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we
call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or
feeling..... ) is called an observation.

Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation
always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody
(except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But
detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may
all point toward a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints
match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it.
It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's
joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can
think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that
they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the
world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a
guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say
to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so.
This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really
round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same
direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When
a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at
you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you
may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought
to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests
them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead
hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only
then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child
has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood
tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much
cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But
now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for
believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for
believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and
"revelation."

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited
because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some
had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus,
or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child,
asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what
I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection
with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and
grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either.
They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims
believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."

Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't
all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite
right and proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out
their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to
make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come
from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down
from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed
down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from
almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like
the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down
over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them
seem special. People believe things simply because people have
believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story
was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original
story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down
over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England,
but this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There
are other branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and
the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish
religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and
there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe
even slightly different things from each other go to war over their
disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty
good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But
actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe
that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die
but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions
disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other
religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they
don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body
was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on
how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the
Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't
invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it
was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was
made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people
started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed
down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the
more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and
official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I
was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than
it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death.

I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it
in another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons
for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it
because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the
Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and
people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one
branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men
with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are
prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway
country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally
told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven,
what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to
believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be
true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his
life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why,
just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said
any more than you believe everything that other people say. The
present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the
number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as
slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines,
diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence
ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't,
with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of
186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the
speed of light. This looks like "authority." But actually, it is much
better than authority, because the people who wrote the books have
seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the
evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even
the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about
Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.
[continued in part 2]


Brian Whatcott Altus OK Eureka!
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