Faith and Hope

In medicine, there is a well-established phenomenon known as “the placebo effect.” The health of a person suffering from almost any ailment, including cancers and psychoses, can be measurably improved 33% of the time and even healed completely merely by convincing a patient that they are being cured. This demonstrates the very real and potent effectiveness of both faith and hope. Reinforcing an optimistic belief increases its intensity, which will actually increase its effectiveness. Increasing its effectiveness in turn increases its intensity even more! Simply believing something will happen to you will heavily increase the odds that it actually will happen to you, and believing it more will make it more likely to happen. Similarly, hoping for something to happen will inspire you to bring it about, in what is called a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Inspirational speakers make billions of dollars every year exploiting these realities by telling audiences about these realities.

Thinking something is true will make it appear true from your perspective. This is known as bias. Our senses are designed predicatively, so that we often actually see, hear, taste, etc. what we believe we are seeing, hearing, tasting, etc. This is why reliable experiments can only be done using “blind” testing and control groups. This is why it is so difficult for any human justice system to be impartial. Our lives are defined by our prejudices. What we experience today affects how we experience tomorrow.

Faith has its limits. Believing in something doesn’t make it objectively true. One’s convictions only affect and are affected by one’s own (mental and physical) realities and experiences. Another’s belief that I will be healed, for example, only affects my health insofar as they are able to convince me that their opinion has validity.

The previous sentence will have acted as a red flag to many. The power of faith is so profound, the object of that faith will be adhered to no matter how absurd it is. I am of the minority that doesn’t believe in supernatural phenomena. Harry Houdini spent the latter part of his life offering a huge reward to anyone who could perform a supernatural act, to no avail. Things perceived by us as miracles are occurrences with likelihoods which can be calculated by laws of probability. It is not only possible but inevitable that eventually someone will, for example, win the lottery. Your chances of doing so will remain the same whether you are a psychic, a prophet or an atheist. People have a lot of misconceptions regarding odds. Did you know, for example, the 5 year survival rate for prostate cancer is 98%? That means 98 of every 100 people who had gotten prostate cancer in the past five years are blathering on about how it’s a miracle they’re still alive.

A Muslim friend recently claimed we don’t believe in magic in America because the government keeps its powers hidden. He didn’t provide any evidence to support this claim, and I find it a bit ridiculous. If magic existed, our government would be stockpiling voodoo dolls instead of nuclear arms. I defy anybody who believes in miracles to actually perform one.

Several blind tests have demonstrated remote prayer to have no effect whatsoever. While believers will insist this is incorrect, you won’t see any of them performing objective experiments on their own. The truth is they don’t want to know the truth. Humans are generally more comfortable believing what they want to hear than going to the trouble of researching claims for authenticity. This is in part because the powers of faith and hope are not based at all on what is believed or hoped in, but instead on how strongly any belief or hope is held. The major gripe I have with religion is that instead of encouraging others to have faith and hope, they insist others have faith in hope in the same things they have faith and hope in.