Evidence, and the Detachable Flying Vagina

I should like to say a few things about evidence vs. non-evidence based ways of learning what is true.  And note that this applies not just to religion, but to everything we may choose to believe or reject, such as homeopathy, ghosts, aliens, a soul the survives bodily death, political opinions, whether or not someone committed a crime, that a certain diet will help you lose weight, moon landing conspiracy theories, or who shot JFK.

We have a choice between believing only in things that we have evidence for, and believing in things that may not have any solid evidence.

I often hear it said that believing that evidence is the only way to know things, is itself a type of faith; that you can’t prove that evidence is the only valid way to know things, so you must have faith to believe that in the first place.  And this is often followed by accusations of being closed-minded because you only believe in evidence.  But this is clearly not true.  There are valid logical reasons to assume that evidence is a more reliable indicator of truth than faith.

If you choose to believe things without good evidence, then you immediately have a problem.  How do you know *which* things to believe and which not to believe?  Most of us never ask this question, because we just believe the things that our parents and/or friends and culture taught us.  Even people who have broadly rejected their parent’s beliefs are not operating in a vacuum.  If you are a Pagan, did you think of that entirely on your own?  Or did you read about it first or have a Pagan friend?  This is human nature, and we are all subject to it.  Nobody alive, myself included, has not let their beliefs be shaped by their culture.

Let’s take two people, call them person A and person B.  They have never met each other and live on opposite sides of the planet.  Using evidence, Person A can learn things that are true and not true about the world.  And Person B can independently learn the same things.  Even if Persons A and B both die and their culture is destroyed and all it’s knowledge lost for thousands of years, eventually a new civilization will arise.  And when that civilization matures enough to begin basing their ideas on evidence, there will be a person C who comes to exactly the same conclusions of his predecessors.  The crucial fact is that they can work completely independently of each other and come to exactly the same conclusions.  There are numerous examples of nearly simultaneous discoveries by scientists.  Darwin, for example, nearly got scooped on the publication of his theory by Alfred Wallace.  This would indicate that seeking evidence is a reliable method of ascertaining the truth.

Now let’s consider non-evidence based beliefs.  Why did the ancient Hawaiians believe in the goddess Kapo, who had a detachable flying vagina?  Because their culture taught them to.  Why didn’t they instead believe in Ganesha, the elephant headed god of the Hindus?

Why did the Chumash Indians believe that they were created on an island off of the coast of California, and that their god made them a rainbow bridge so they could walk across to the mainland?  Why did they believe that Dolphins were people who fell off that bridge and were transformed by their god?  Why didn’t they believe in the Garden of Eden and talking snakes?  The answer is that nobody ever told them about Adam and Eve.

The lesson to be gleaned from this, is that if you are willing to believe things without evidence, than you can *literally* believe anything at all.  And you have no way of knowing which beliefs are more or less valid than other beliefs.  You can only assume that out of the 100’s of billions of people who have lived on this earth past and present, you were lucky enough to be born at a time and place where you were taught the right beliefs.  Think of the staggering odds against that!