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August 18, 2008 at 5:57am
by thecodepounder I was listening to some older CDs this weekend–not older in the sense of the 70s (or even the 90s), but older in the sense of stuff I hadn’t listened to in a year or two. In any event, one of the CDs I listened to was John Mayer’s Continuum (iTunes link). Now, I’ve listened to this CD dozens and dozens of times. It’s a great album, but has simply fallen from my rotation, as it were.
I was struck by the song “Belief”. As I’ve said, I’ve heard this song dozens and dozens of times, and have always thought it was a good song that makes a good point, but it’s never quite resonated with me as it did this weekend. The lyrics are clear and concise and the chorus makes the point that so many struggle to put into words:
We’re never gonna win the world
We’re never gonna stop the war
We’re never gonna beat this
If belief is what we’re fighting for
Now, putting the political aspects aside (that’s a topic for another day), you see that he’s not only making a valid point, but the quintessential point. How do you get someone to change their beliefs (or, abandon those beliefs that conflict with reality)? Beats me. But, among the people I know who choose belief over reality, I don’t know many who’d be willing to give up their most passionately held beliefs just because someone tells them they shouldn’t believe “that” or that they’re beliefs are wrong… (oops, didn’t want to get into the political discussion).
Hell, one of the reasons I laughingly refer to myself as a nutjob is that, other than myself, there are very few people I know (know personally) that are willing to accept reality when reality conflicts with their “beliefs”! And many of those aren’t even willing to acknowledge reality. I don’t get it.
Personally, I find the story of Johannes Kepler inspirational (so to speak). Here’s a guy who, though a devout Christian who actually studied for the clergy, was willing to accept reality even when it conflicted with his beliefs. As Carl Sagan put it so eloquently in Cosmos:
When he [Kepler] found that his long-cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions. That is the heart of science.
So why can’t everyone do this? Well, I think Phil Plait–though not the first to make this observation–describes the problem clearly:
[I]t’s difficult to reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
— Phil Plait, “Is science faith-based?”, Bad Astronomy Blog, February 18, 2008
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