Why did the believing mind evolve and possibly conquer most of the human race while the skeptical mind barely survived
By: Elia Leibovitz
The willingness and desire to believe in superstitions, or to believe in general, is related, like any other mental quality, to the structure of the brain. Just as humans genetically have the potential to learn a language, so also other spiritual qualities and abilities (of course physical as well) are related to internal patterns that are genetically built within the human brain. The widespread human phenomenon of faith indicates that the brain structure that makes a person open to this state of mind, and to superstitions in particular, is more widespread and common than the structure of the skeptical mind.
The relatively high prevalence of belief may be a result of the believing brain structure having advantages in the war for existence. As one possible answer to the question of why the believing mind evolved and perhaps conquered most of the human race while the skeptical mind barely survived, the following hypothesis may perhaps be proposed.
In the war of existence of every animal, he must guard against two types of mistakes:
1. This is the mistake that a person (or another animal) makes when he does not see or does not notice a threat to his life or safety. A mistake of not recognizing a real danger results in the extinction of the person making the mistake.
2. This is the mistake made by a person who identifies a danger that does not actually exist. Such a mistake unnecessarily limits a person's freedom of action, burdens life and harms its quality. Man lives with unnecessary stress, fears and concerns, which may indirectly also shorten his days due to the physical effects of the mental tensions. However, there is no doubt that statistically an error of the first type is more dangerous to living things than an error of the second type.
Faith, i.e. immediate acceptance of statements, rumors, ideas or descriptions of a situation, and adopting them as truths without criticism and without self-judgment, is a mechanism that reduces the danger of making mistakes of the first type. The act of faith, which of course can have different and varied contents, is the result of a mental structure that leads a person to draw conclusions based on only a little knowledge and without any delay, filtering or criticism.
At its most basic and primal level, faith appeared as a defense mechanism, where every unclear signal from the world, every bad rumor, every phenomenon that is not identified with certainty as a phenomenon with a blessing - are interpreted as a threat and a danger that must be defended against. The person of faith accepts without question almost any testimony of any kind - or anything that seems to him without any self-criticism of his own as testimony - about entities, situations and processes in the world, such as are known to him in practice, or also about those that he has not seen as examples. He immediately adopts such evidence of the treasure of things held in his eyes as his knowledge of the world, and acts and reacts accordingly. Through the mechanism of belief the danger of making a mistake of the first kind is reduced. If any scrap of information is received as information, in particular as information about danger, it is understood that information about real dangers is also included in such a process. Because of the great speed with which the information is transformed in the mind of the believing person into knowledge, the appropriate reaction of removing the danger or moving away from it is carried out without losing precious time, and the chances of survival are great.
However, it is clear that at the same time the number of errors of the second type increased. If every signal that can be interpreted as a threat is indeed received as such, and if almost no filtering is done of the abundance of rumors, signs and signals that appear to be bad omens - it is clear that man sees a great many dangers in places where they do not exist. Man makes many mistakes of the second kind.
Skepticism is a mechanism to reduce the second type of mistakes. This is a factor that suppresses the willingness to accept something as news, unless the signal that brings the said information to create the news goes through a process of criticism and testing. Skepticism prevents many cases of false alarms. The mechanism of skepticism filters and rejects many signals without which they would be received as ominous news before these signals manage to mislead the sense of knowledge in the person. It is clear, however, that the doubt mechanism delays decision-making, and when it is implemented, the adoption process as knowledge of information that carries with it a real message about the world is also delayed.
The delay in the process of turning such information into news can be very dangerous. As long as the knowledge is delayed if the information is about a real and actual threat, the person is in a situation of error of the first type. While activating the mechanism of skepticism, the person may deprive himself of his life.
Because of the fatal consequences of the doubt mechanism, natural selection has favored the structure of the brain that reduces the possibility of making a first type error. Therefore, those with a believing mind, over the course of human evolution, clearly had a higher survival rate than those with a skeptical mind.
Experimental modern science, whose spiritual father is Galileo Galilei, has introduced a new mechanism into the structure of life and evolution of the human race. The science based on skepticism is, among other things, a method of criticism of signals coming from the world and their possible interpretations. The man of science is a person who constantly questions his own knowledge and constantly puts it to the test.
The scientific method is therefore a fundamental antithesis to the very act of faith. However, the technology that develops following scientific knowledge provides external tools for testing signals. Therefore, despite the underlying skepticism, the scientific method does not increase the danger of making mistakes of the first type. Within this method, a person has the tools to examine information and apply different criteria before accepting it as news. The technological tools allow him to question, check, confirm and test signals without taking many risks in the phase of casting doubt and doing the necessary tests.
A simple and specific example of this is the possibility that modern medicine has today to suspend the treatment of a patient, such as someone injured in an accident or a person with a heart or kidney attack, by connecting them to various devices, until the completion of tests and examinations and as long as there is a substantive and critical judgment regarding the nature of the required treatment . The dramatic increase in the average lifespan of humans, from the days of Galileo in the 17th century to the present day, is clear evidence that statistically the danger of humans making mistakes of the first kind has diminished immeasurably over this period. The enormous increase in the survival capacity of the human race, despite a certain retreat in the scope of faith at that time, proves that in the last hundreds of years faith has lost its advantage in the struggle for human survival.
In the twentieth century, the relationship between the danger of the second type of error changed its direction completely. While the danger of making a mistake of the first kind has almost disappeared, the danger of making a mistake of the second kind takes on truly horrifying proportions. Humans today have many and enormous sources of power and energy at their disposal. At the end of the second millennium, even medium-sized and small countries have nuclear power, and today it would not be far-fetched that such power or other powers, similar to it in their destructive power, would be at the disposal of organizations smaller than a state, perhaps even at the disposal of individual people. When a body with such tremendous power makes a mistake of the second kind, the danger also becomes tremendous. When a person or body makes such a mistake, when he assesses or "knows" that he is under threat, when he believes that he is in existential danger, he reacts and uses the powers at his disposal to remove the danger and attack its sources.
Hence the anxiety about the increasing wave of irrationality in recent years in Israel and many other countries. In a world that is returning to being religious and washed in superstitions, skepticism is losing its power and its right to exist. Skepticism is a very new mechanism in human evolution and has not yet bought an established genetic strike in the human race. If societies and countries do not take drastic steps to preserve skepticism through extra-genetic mechanisms, such as education, studies, removing ignorance, fighting superstitions and fostering institutions that encourage skepticism such as universities, the human race may not have a resurrection. The first potential victims of a believing, non-rational and non-thinking humanity, but with almost unlimited sources of power, are of course the small and genetically weak societies such as Israel and the Jewish people. It is therefore a first-rate Jewish and Israeli interest to fight blind faith and promote in every possible way skepticism, criticism and rational thinking in the entire world, and in Israeli society in particular.
The author served as director of the Weiss Observatory at Tel Aviv University. Leibovich is one of the initiators of the skepticism conference held in January at Tel Aviv University
Published in "Haaretz", March 19.3.1999, XNUMX
