Do you not get along with people with a particular zodiac sign? Have you felt like you’re being watched behind your back? Do you avoid walking under a ladder? If you answered “yes” then even if you “believe yourself” an atheist you’re a believer.

The word “belief” comes from the German gilouben “to have in esteem” or to “love”. It was first used in religious doctrine to refer faith in God. Today some people believe in luck, in life after death, telepath, including—which doesn’t imply that they practice—freedom and democracy.

Scientists and humanists had long assumed that religious belief and superstition were a product of the context in which we grow up in. In that case, rationality would end up destroying those beliefs. However, numerous investigations suggest that belief is a strategy for survival.

Over the span of evolution our ancestors, and now we, have depended on beliefs to give meaning to an incomprehensible and dangerous world. Suppositions of how the world works, right or not, reduce uncertainty and build values and common objectives that facilitate group cohesion.

Why do we construct abstract belief systems without proof? It seems that it’s our only choice: belief. Ever since we are born, we depend on others to teach us about the world—how to live and survive—. We are educated with a language and a religion, we are taught about science and civility. We assume that those are facts about the world, but we are merely learning what to believe. Even as adults, we automatically assume that what others tell us—our mate, friend or leader—is true, particularly if the idea appeals to our fantasies, aspirations or reptilian instincts (survival, reproduction and transcendence).

When belief comes into play we lack limits. Since we cannot get out of ourselves and examine the world with another perspective, we end up “believing” almost everything we are told to make sense of “the world out there”. In Daniel Dennett’s words, we are believe-alls.

Could we live without belief? If we put aside all our beliefs, we could end up living in perpetual debt; the quantity of stress hormones segregated by our brains could produce physical atrophy. So it is preferable to assume certain suppositions as the truth for survival.

It has been suggested that there are certain genes that make us prone to having spiritual beliefs, particularly those related to serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitter systems in the brain. Evidence has also been presented that relates genetic factors with religious fundamentalism. However, genes don’t make people Muslim, Hindu or Catholic; specific beliefs are an individual decision influenced by social context and freedom of choice.

If we can choose why is it so hard to abandon old beliefs? Scientists think that we reject new beliefs because our brain has already done much work establishing what we should believe or not. In other words, our neuronal circuitry has been established. So our brain tends to reject information that doesn’t fit with the experience and previous knowledge. While we get older it is harder to modify our beliefs, due in part to the architecture of the aging brain.

Nevertheless, we can modify some of our beliefs while we move through life. Our beliefs can be static, but not necessarily be static. Every person has the biology to interrupt harmful beliefs and generate new ideas. Proof of this is more than 6 billion belief systems in the world. These new ideas, in turn, can alter neuronal circuits that govern our behavior and belief system.

In fact, curiosity and creativity help us to reinvent the world every day, for better or worse, searching for an ultimate reality we can call truth, illumination or God. Yet the truth is slippery for the human mind. It doesn’t matter how much evidence is collected, its knowledge will always be incomplete and will be influenced by context and prior beliefs.

How to build more useful beliefs for our life? What we can do is train ourselves to be more careful about what we believe. We can turn into skeptics: a person that chooses to examine carefully if their beliefs are true and maintains the will to consider both sides of an argument. Someone that doesn’t believe everything they think.

On my part, if I believe in something is that this world needs more skeptics. Allow me to finish this reflection by posing a question: Of all the beliefs you have, which one would affect you the most if you were to find out it wasn’t true?

Published in Opinión y Análisis
El Universal
November 14th, 2009