The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called
"revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that
Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that
it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed
for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became
more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a
feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though
there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling
"revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots
of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing
the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and
you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it
happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is
dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me
that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you,
because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good
reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We
all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out
to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have
opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right?
The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or
hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen
or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside,
otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves
me." But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that
somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody
who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence,
and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the
feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to
back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the
voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that someone loves them
when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to
be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling
that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't
even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside
feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you
ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can
have a "hunch'" about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself,
this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a
good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or
looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside
feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything
until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another
way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us.
All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in
the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good
at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at
surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at
surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we are built
to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other people. Most
of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it
from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We
"swim" through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to
survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with
other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of
people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You
each speak the language that fits you to "swim about" in your own
separate "people sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is
no other way . In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund.
Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other.
Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at "swimming about
in their people sea," children have to learn the language of their
own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and
this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous
amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional
information just means things that are handed down from grandparents
to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for
traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out
good and useful traditional information, like the words of a
language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing
in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children
have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to
believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false,
right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and
based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false,
silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children
believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do?
Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So,
once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is
completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the
first place - it can go on forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is
a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief
that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are
answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these
beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people
believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them
when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to
believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they
were told different things when they were children. Muslim children
are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up
utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even
within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from
Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers ,
Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly convinced that they are
right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for
exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin
speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right
language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are
right in their own countries, because different religions claim that
opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern
Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do
anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time
somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to
yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know
because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only
believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next
time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them:
"What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you
a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe
a word they say.