50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  A final point for readers to consider is that if one particular religion were really right and all others wrong, then it seems reasonable to think that this particular religion would stand apart from its rivals in some obvious way. Wouldn't there be a global rush toward this one belief that everyone could see was delivering the supernatural goods? But nothing like this has ever happened and it's not happening now. Even Christianity, the current most popular religion, is fractured into tens of thousands of contradictory versions and the majority of the world's people are non-Christians. The fact is, not one religion has ever produced sufficient evidence or compelling arguments to attract most people. Imagine if the claims of one belief system were confirmed in the real world in a way that all of us could see and know to be credible. What if one religion really did boast meaningful and unambiguous predictions that anyone could clearly see came true? What if it could point to numerous scientifically confirmed faith healings, or miracles like lost limbs regenerating in seconds, or corpses coming back to life after being dead for years? If a religion could point to answered prayers that occurred at a rate that could not be explained by chance or faulty interpretation, that religion would win out overnight. Such a religion likely would leave all its rivals in the dust and become the dominant, if not the only, remaining belief system in the world within a generation or two. Every sane person on the planet would run to it. The fact that this has not occurred is a very good indication that no one religion is obviously true or superior to all the others.

  GO DEEPER…

  Books

  Daniels, Kenneth. Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary. Duncanville, TX: Daniels, 2009.

  Dawkins, Richard, and Dave McKean. The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. New York: Free Press, 2011.

  Epstein, Greg. Good without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2010.

  Farr-Wharton, Jake. Letters to Christian Leaders. Queensland, Australia: Dangerous Little Books, 2011.

  Harris, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Vintage, 2008.

  Harrison, Guy P. 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008.

  Head, Tom, ed. Conversations with Carl Sagan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

  Loftus, John. The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.

  Prothero, Stephen. God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter. New York: HarperOne, 2007.

  Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't. New York: HarperOne, 2008.

  Wilkinson, Phillip. Myths and Legends. London: Dorling Kindersley, 2009.

  Zuckerman, Phil. Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment. New York: NYU Press, 2010.

  Other Sources

  Free Inquiry (magazine).

  Religulous (DVD), Lions Gate, 2009.

  The Non Prophets (podcast), www.nonprophetsradio.com.

  There are now tens of thousands of hominid fossils in museums around the world supporting our current knowledge of human evolution. The pattern that emerges from this vast body of hard evidence is consistent across thousands of investigations. All models, all myths involving the singular, instantaneous creation of modern humans fail in the face of this evidence.

  —Dr. Tim White

  Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

  —Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

  One of the most difficult challenges many religions face is figuring out how their supernatural claims can be aligned with the natural world in a way followers can accept as sensible. The relentless progress of discovery and science has made this increasingly difficult. There was a time, for example, when one could get away with pointing at the ball of fire in the sky and declare it to be a god. That's not so easy to do these days because science has revealed, based on evidence, that the Sun is a giant ball of fire fueled by the fusion of hydrogen and helium atoms—nothing supernatural about it. Over the last few decades or so this struggle between religious claims and the natural universe that science continues to reveal has been most visible and most contentious in the evolution-versus-creationism conflict.

  Creationism is most often defined as the religious belief that the Judeo-Christian god created the universe, Earth, and all life as described in the Genesis story. It has to be made clear, however, that while this version of creationism may get all the attention in the United States, and Europe, it is in fact only one of many. Through prehistory, history and up until today there have been many thousands of unique creation stories—none of which can be fairly judged to be superior to the others based on evidence. It is also important to note that creation stories are not scientific and were not discovered by scientific means—although many people claim otherwise. They come to us, as most believers say, by divine revelation in a book or in some other form of spiritual enlightenment.

  Creationists traditionally have claimed that Earth and all life on it are less than ten thousand years old, usually around six thousand years old. Today some creationists have retreated a bit and admit that this is obviously wrong and accept the evidence-based or scientific age of Earth, which is around 4.5 billion years. They are called “young Earth creationists” and “old Earth creationists” respectively. Many old and young Earth creationists, however, believe that their religious origin story should be taught in schools, masquerading as science. Of course this presents a problem in the United States because the Constitution forbids the government from promoting religion, and teaching the Genesis story to children in government schools is obviously the promotion of religion.

  The specific conflict with evolution comes into play since creationists claim that God created all life in just one week and in present form. According to them, there were no dinosaurs evolving into birds, no long road to a planet teeming with biodiversity, and absolutely no australopithecines evolving into modern humans. That's not how the Torah, Bible, or Koran says it happened so that's not how it happened, they declare, and evidence to the contrary be damned.

  I asked paleontologist Jack Horner, the famed dinosaur hunter who has made some of the most spectacular paleontological discoveries ever, why the acceptance of evolution continues to be a sticking point for so many people. Rather than blame parents, teachers, and preachers, Horner looks in the mirror.

  “I think it is a problem for the scientists more than those opposed to evolution,” he said. “Scientists have done a bad job in teaching people what evolution is. I think it's about time for us to figure out how to teach it to people. [Evolution] has to do with similarities. We look at the human being and we look at the ape and we can see that they share more common features with each other than they do with anything else. So, just like with a brother and a sister, we can assume that they have a common ancestor. That's really all there is to it.

  “Now the proof of evolution is the mere fact that you are different from your parents. That's all evolution is about,” Horner continued. “Charles Darwin's theory is descent with modification—and selection. If you are different from your parents, then you cannot argue with evolution. And if you can see that we can select characters [or traits] and the environment can select characters, and you can start with a wolf and end up with a Chihuahua, then you believe in selection and you can't argue with Charles Darwin's theory.”1

  While some who appreciate the value of modern science find it difficult not to give up on creationists, I try to be more understanding. In my opinion, creationism is not dependent upon a lack of intelligence. Nothing more than reason gone a bit astray combined with a little confirmation bias allow it to thrive even in very bright minds. Given the right circumstances, it can happen to just about anyone. Creationists have allowed religious belief to cloud their judgment about reality and, given the emotional attachment p
eople often have to their religion, this should not be surprising to anyone. I never assume that creationists are chronically dim because I have met too many of them who are obviously highly intelligent. The key problem is that creationists fail to recognize or choose to ignore the difference between science and pseudoscientific claims pushed by people who are not experts and have no evidence behind them. Further, most creationists have been bamboozled by appeals to their religious loyalty into seeing only an unnecessarily restrictive version of their religion and nothing else.

  Many creationists have pinned themselves under a false choice that says they must choose between their god and modern science. Of course this is not necessarily the case, as proven every day by the many millions of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, and so on who are able to accept evolution without abandoning their religion. Many religious leaders have openly stated that adhering to antiscience creationist claims is not necessary for one to be sincerely religious. You really can have your religion and keep your mind when it comes to the evolution issue. Even the late pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution was obviously true. He certainly was not suggesting that anyone had to stop believing in God in order to better align him-or herself with modern science. He was saying, correctly, that one can believe in God and accept evolution. There was, after all, a time when it was a life-threatening heresy to accept that Earth was not the center of the universe. In time believers got over it, of course, and today the location of Earth in space is not seen as a litmus test for belief in a god. So it likely will be with Darwin's theory of evolution one day. At some point in the future the obvious fact that life evolves will have no bearing on religious belief and everyone will accept it.

  A large part of the problem is that creationists misunderstand what the theory of evolution is and is not. Evolution is the description of how life changes over time, primarily because of genetic mutation and natural selection. The theory of evolution is not and has never been a declaration that no gods can possibly exist. The theory of evolution has nothing to say about gods, only that natural processes, given enough time, can bring about profound changes in life-forms and produce a richness of biodiversity such as we see here on our planet. This point has frustrated me greatly over the years, as I have interacted with creationists of various religions around the world. It seems to me that creationists do not really have a problem with evolution, even if they do understand it. They don't reject it because the theory, the fossils, and the genetic evidence fail to convince them. They refuse to accept evolution—or even give it a fair hearing—because they mistakenly believe doing so would mean they have to give up their religious belief. This is profoundly untrue. Admittedly, those who believe Earth is six thousand years old and all species were created at the same time would have to make some adjustments. In most cases, however, one can accept the findings of modern science and still keep one's religious beliefs. Religions adapt to change all the time, anyway. No matter how rigid and entrenched they may pretend to be, the reality is that religions are infinitely flexible. That's why we see tens of thousands of versions of Christianity today, for example.

  Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous Lucy fossils, says believing in a particular creation story depends on where, when, and by whom one is educated into the world. Evolution, however, is evidence-based and therefore, universal.

  “There are two very different ways to try [to] explain our human existence,” Johanson told me. “One of them is the faith-based endeavor and that depends exclusively on how one is raised. If you are raised as Hopi Indian, then you will learn the myths of creation of the Hopi Indians. You will believe that creation story is the true story. If you are raised in a tribe in South America, you will believe that story is the truth. And if you are raised as a Catholic, then you will believe that is the true answer. All of that is based on experience, how you grow up, and how you are taught. It is based on faith. We don't subject religious ideas to the same rigorous investigation as scientific issues. Regarding evolution, we are looking at the scientific evidence for how we came to be who we are today. It is a fact of the natural world that all animals, plants, and insects have gone through a process of evolution by means of natural selection. We don't look at gravity, which is a fact, and ask if it is moral or immoral. It is simply a fact.”2

  Creationism makes the extraordinary claim that a god magically created all bacteria, algae, fungi, plant, animal, and virus species instantly and in present forms. This would mean that no species have ever evolved or are evolving currently. Observation and evidence do not back this up, of course. In light of the fossil record, genetic discoveries, and real-time observations of evolving microbes, plants, and insects, creationism is not so much wrong as utterly bizarre. Once again, to be clear, this does not necessarily mean that anyone's god does not exist. But the specific creationist description of life is about as far off base as claiming the world's geologists are all wrong and Earth is actually flat. The disagreement between creationism and modern science is not even close enough for compromise, truce, or reconciliation. The sides are just too far apart for an amicable settlement. I suspect that the majority of creationists just do not realize how far out of line with the scientific evidence one has to be to hold such a position. Consider that a creationist must effectively reject all modern biology because evolution is the central theory of that entire discipline. The study and understanding of everything from microbes to whales to redwoods is fatally compromised if evolution is omitted. It would be like trying to explain libraries without ever mentioning books. It's impossible. But it's not just biology that must be sacrificed. If evolution goes, you can also forget about zoology, anthropology, comparative anatomy, marine biology, entomology, herpetology, microbiology, embryology, paleontology, and so on. And don't forget that evolution is the foundation of modern agriculture as well as vital areas of modern medical science. In order to have a good chance of working, for example, vaccines and antibiotics have to be formulated with a close eye on evolving viruses and bacteria. Furthermore, in order to believe that Earth is less than ten thousand years old, one must reject fundamental core discoveries and conclusions of geology, astronomy, cosmology, physics, and archaeology.

  Regarding the time factor, young Earth creationists would do well to pause and consider just how six thousand years compares to 4.5 billion years. Claiming that Earth six thousand years old is like saying that the distance from Earth to the Moon is a few inches. It's not just wrong, it's outrageously wrong. Contrary to creationist propaganda, there is no debate about whether or not life evolves within the scientific community. This entire creationism-versus-evolution thing is a culture/religious war, which explains why its battles are fought in courtrooms, political campaigns, and school board meetings rather than at science conferences, in laboratories, and in academic journals.

  THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD

  Overall I was a very good student through twelve years of public school in Florida. I graduated from high school with academic honors, a varsity letter in track, and no felonies on my record. I also managed perfect attendance six of those twelve years. The point is, I showed up and I paid attention most of the time. But never once in all those classes with all those teachers did I hear or read about evolution. Not once. No teacher so much as whispered to me or hinted anything about Australopithecus, Louis Leakey, or the HMS Beagle. No Neanderthals or trilobites ever crept into my curriculum. Fortunately, I was personally curious about science so I read a lot independently. I also went to a good university where I ended up learning all about the foundational theory of life that I am a part of. But what about my peers back in high school, the ones who maybe weren't as curious or never took college biology and anthropology courses? What happened to them?

  Today an alarming 40 percent of Americans believe that Earth is less than ten thousand years old and all life was created instantly in its present form.3 Statistics like that disturb paleoanthropologist Tim White. He worked with Don Johanso
n on the Lucy fossils and has made his own key discoveries in the field of human evolution, including Idaltu Man, the oldest anatomically modern human found to date. I sensed that he is both puzzled and frustrated by creationism's popularity.

  “It frightens me more than disappoints,” White said. “Understanding evolution, understanding that the biological world that includes us evolved, is essential. This is true in virtually every field of inquiry, fields as disparate as medicine, agriculture, and sociology. Education is the key to improving awareness.”4

  As important as general education is to this problem, I think that basic awareness of how evolution is integral to modern biology is the first step. I have encountered too many people who wrongly think that one can reject evolution while still being proscience. But this just isn't possible. Trying to embrace modern biology while rejecting evolution is like driving a car while rejecting rubber tires and the internal combustion engine.

  IS EVOLUTION EVIL?

  Another huge, though totally unnecessary, problem is that creationists have been misled into believing that evolution is an evil philosophy that leads to individual and social ruin. Merely teaching evolution in a high school science class, they claim, leads inevitably to drug abuse, teen pregnancy, violence, and a general collapse of morality. Somehow, this biological theory is a green light for people to run amok and knock down the pillars of civilization. Apparently it is fine to be related to Caligula and Stalin but not Neanderthals and Homo erectus. No matter how many times this is explained to me by creationists, I still struggle to understand how they can blame teaching the theory of evolution for crime and immorality. They say that it places us with the animals and thereby makes us no better than wild animals. But this makes no sense because evolution is a scientific explanation of the world around us. It's based on sound reasoning, numerous lines of evidence, and verified predictions. It just happens to be the way life works. How does learning about it give us permission to do evil and tear down civilization? This creationist charge is not only illogical but it is absolutely unproven, too. I'm pretty sure that the crime rate of the world's professional evolutionary biologists is pretty low. I'd be willing to bet that it's lower than preachers and priests. Nobody knows evolution better than the people who research it, write about it, and teach it full-time, yet the vast majority of them seem to live remarkably decent and quiet lives. I'm also guessing that the ratio of prisoners who are behind bars due to some fateful day that they picked up a Richard Dawkins book and read about evolution is probably small to nonexistent.