Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, Inspired By Science-Based Medicine’s Harriet Hall

I came upon this wonderful post over at Science-Based Medicine:

Neurologist Robert A. Burton, MD has written a gem of a book: On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. His thesis is that “Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.” Your certainty that you are right has nothing to do with how right you are.

Within 24 hours of the Challenger explosion, psychologist Ulric Neisser had 106 students write down how they’d heard about the disaster, where they were, what they were doing at the time, etc. Two and a half years later he asked them the same questions. 25% gave strikingly different accounts, more than half were significantly different, and only 10% had all the details correct. Even after re-reading their original accounts, most of them were confident that their false memories were true. One student commented, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.”

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The Book’s Introduction Indicates Some Students Would Rather Be Spoon-Fed The Answers Than Think For Themselves

I began reading Michael Shermer’s How We Believe. I didn’t even get to the end of chapter 1 before being taken aback.

Before Shermer converted to a religious skeptic, he spent several years as a born again Christian. Among other works, he was influenced by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. While attending Glendale College, Shermer challenged Richard Hardison, his philosophy teacher to read the book, hoping it would leave his teacher in awe. After reading the book, Hardison responded to Shermer with a two page report detailing the problems with the book. ^{[ 1 ]}

As Shermer reports this incident in chapter 1 of How We Believe, he mentions how Hardison concluded his report with the following thought:

Of all Lindsey’s statements, the one I most want to quarrel with is found in the introduction: “There are many students who are dissatisfied with being told that the sole purpose of education is the develop inquiring minds. They want to find some of the answers to their questions—solid answers, a certain direction.” I think I can offer some possible explanations for this “egregious” development. But even more, I feel impelled to propose that such a student is dead.

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Why pick on religion? We skeptics/atheists are often asked. Sure, you may not like it, but come on - what harm does it do?

It is true that religion in the right hands can do some good (or at the very least, mind its own business). However, encouraging faith over reason can lead to disastrous, if not tragic, results.

Take, for example, the case of Madeline Neumann, the 11-year old girl who passed away from a very treatable but undiagnosed form of diabetes on March 23, 2008. Why undiagnosed, you ask? It seems that Madeline’s parents put off taking her to a doctor, choosing instead to pray for their daughter.

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