"Some Comments on Beliefs and Belief Systems"

by Robert L. Shacklett, Ph.D.

At our IONS meeting on November 1, 1998, there were about a dozen in attendance. At some point in the discussion, Suzanne suggested we go around the room and each one say a few words about what he or she believes. This was not intended to focus on religion necessarily, although the word belief is often associated primarily with religious beliefs. The ensuing discussion brought out quite a range of ideas about belief and belief systems, with each participant being quite frank and personal about this philosophical topic.

I took no notes during the evening, nor was a recorder running. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a lot to say about this topic! In fact, I have given several lectures and seminars about beliefs and would like to share just a few highlights with the IONS group.

First a definition:  A belief is a probability statement about our world. Many beliefs that we have never surface far enough to be verbalized, since they are buried in our subconscious. They often show up as habits, tendencies for action, and other patterns of behavior. But when we are asked specifically about what we believe about a certain issue, we can usually come up with some kind of statement that represents how we feel about that issue. Seldom do we have our creed verbalized and all ready to trot out when someone asks.

A probability statement means the assignment of a number between 0 and 1, or between 0% and 100% to a particular belief. The weatherman can say he believes it will rain tomorrow with a probability of 30%. A radio preacher says he believes that Jesus is coming in his lifetime and is staking his reputation on it. So he would, no doubt, assign a relatively high probability to that belief, perhaps close to 100%.

It is our own experience relative to a given issue that governs the probability we assign to a belief. Sometimes a belief is so firm for us we can simply call it knowledge, like whether the sun will rise tomorrow. We don’t fuss about how close to 100% this probability is. But at the other extreme of 0% probability, we would have to believe that something could never happen. Our common experience of unpredictability in everyday life suggests that there would be few beliefs we hold that would be assigned zero probability. Do you believe that a coconut could fall out of the sky and hit you on the head? How about some space debris? So the probability is close to zero but not exactly equal to it.

It appears as if the experience comes first and the belief follows. But I have a slightly different way of describing this relationship. I call the relation between belief and experience a circular continuum. There is a feedback relation between these two aspects of our world that works both ways. What we believe affects our experience, as well as vice-versa, the idea that experience is the cause and belief is the effect is the result of more than 3 centuries of cultural conditioning that has taught that just looking at the world has absolutely no affect on it. But 70 years ago some new ideas called quantum physics entered the picture and turned the common sense view of the world on its head. Now physics requires the consideration of both the observer and the observed as a total system.

Thousands of experiments in parapsychology have focused on psychokinesis, the effect of mind on matter. Many of such experiments have shown that the degree to which one believes the process works affects the individual’s ability in the experiment. But this has been known for centuries as evidenced in New Testament writings. In the Gospel of Matthew there are several rather direct assertions to the relation between belief and experience. The account in Mt. 9:27 is to the point: “…two blind men followed him and called, ‘Have pity on us, Son of David’…’Do you believe I can do this?’ Jesus asked them. ‘Yes, Lord,’ they told him. Then he touched their eyes and said, ‘As you believed, so it must be done to you.’ Then they could see again.”

Note the word must in the above quote. This is an accurate rendering of the imperative mode of the Greek text. It is almost as if Jesus is emphasizing the lawful aspect of this connection between belief and experience, that if one sincerely believes something they are bound to experience it.

Quite a few years ago I had a personal experience which gave me a close-up view of how the connection works. In this instance it was not so much belief or faith as it was expectation, another common synonym. I will boil the story down to its bare bones, since I don’t have space for all the frills. Edie was to meet some friends at a nearby place early one morning. I assumed she would drive there in our motor home, the only transportation we had available. Some time after she left, I casually looked out the window and didn’t see the motor home. I returned to my household chores figuring I would hear her drive in soon. When she didn’t return after some time, I looked out the window again. This time I saw the motor home sitting in its usual spot in the driveway. Later, when Edie came walking in with our friends I learned that the motor home had never left the driveway. It is impossible for me to describe the feeling I had when I realized I had looked right through that big machine and seen the house on the other side of the driveway as well as the ground underneath. My mind had given me a picture in accordance with my expectations, creating a scene complete with all the details.

This experience leaves me with the conviction that the mind is the dominant element in our experience called reality. And they show me that what we label as reality is, “in reality,” a construct we create at a higher level than the image formed on our retinas or by any of our other senses. The stream of data flooding into our sensory inputs gets filtered by the central nervous system, eventually presenting to consciousness a picture of what is “out there.” The filters are represented by what we commonly call beliefs, hopes, expectations, fears.

It is not at all surprising that belief is so often connected with religion. Belief is a higher level operation of the mind, which has its own way of making distinctions between its own levels. We find it difficult to distinguish between the mental and the spiritual in our verbal attempts to discuss these levels. And the fact that the bulk of our religious literature was generated long before the scientific era, in which the making of distinctions became more important, makes it very likely that the word believe (or its equivalent in an ancient language) pointed to this high level mental operation irrespective of whether a “religious” or “ordinary” meaning is intended. A perusal of a Bible concordance of believe or related words will bear this out.

One final illustration that mainstream science, without realizing it, has tacitly accepted the “circular continuum” idea and the influence on matter by mind lies in two well-known terms; the placebo effect and the double blind experiment. The fact that human physiology behaves differently depending on what message a person believes is well-accepted by the medical community. An inert, harmless substance – the placebo – can effect amazing results on a patient if said patient is simply told that he or she will feel better or even get well using the substance.

The testing of the effect of drugs and similar substances on human subjects has long been done using the double-blind technique, wherein neither the subject nor the experimenter knows who is getting the real pill or the placebo. The subject is blind to the kind of pill he is given because of the placebo effect. But the experimenter is kept blind to the assignments because of another reason, and this one is straight out of parapsychology – the experimenter effect. This is where the experimenter can bias the results of his experiment according to the way he wants it to come out. This would be possible even if animals are the test subjects and use of placebo makes no sense.

The physics behind the “circular continuum” has not been worked out yet, mainly because the mainstream still has trouble with concepts that involve anything outside of space, time, and matter, which seems to rule out stuff like “mind.” I mentioned above that quantum mechanics, however, seems to relate strongly to the phenomena, and physics has come up with the term non-local interaction to deal with connections which seem to be instantaneous and not affected by distance. Personally, I think the processes involved here can be modeled by physical and mathematical concepts and have published some papers describing the ideas, but the inertia of the mainstream is substantial; we will have to be patient as we wait and watch.