I wanted to share a couple of interesting articles about children, science, and belief. Both are from NPR.
The first is from Halloween, called “How Real is the Candy Witch?”, by Tania Lombrozo. It explores the gullibility of children, concluding in the end that they’re not really so easily fooled as we might think, and that a readiness to believe in what seems unlikely doesn’t conflict with an appreciation of evidence. The second is called “Every Child is Born a Scientist”, by Marcelo Gleiser. This one is a brief look at the radical openness of a child’s mind, where science can become “a magical portal to them, a place of wonderment and discovery.”
My response to these articles is that these attitudes are related – our ability to enjoy stories and myths is tied to our scientific openness. We have different spaces we have in our minds for “truth” and “fact”. Children in particular have a really strong ability to occupy that space between fact and fiction where “truth” can be something else, something wondrous and indeterminate. I’d love to put this together into a whole essay, but, you know – NaNoWriMo. If you find these articles interesting, I’d also suggest taking a look at Tolkien’s essay “On Fairie-Stories”, Martin Donougho’s work on what he calls the “double semantic register” of myth, and several of Richard Feynman’s essays in the collection, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
For me now, these are just going to have to remain random thoughts.
Stories & Soliloquies 
9 thoughts on “Thoughts on Science and Belief”
emi
you have such an interesting and unique blog. love your writing! XO
welltraveledwife.com
Michelle Joelle
What a sweet comment! Thank you so much for reading 🙂
jesse (@jaymop)
i love the concept that the ability to enjoy stories and myth (and thus related to our ability to use our imagination) is connected to or correlated to our ability to understand or use technology or science. Do you think that myth and story is different than zealotry or religious belief? In modern culture, religious fervor and scientific fervor are often at odds, yet a ability to access myths/stories seems linked to both.
Michelle Joelle
Great question. I think the attitudes that we have towards myth are completely different from the attitudes of religious fervor and zealotry. I’m not sure its separate from religious belief, but its definitely different from literal belief. Historically, myth occupied a third category. It wasn’t to be literally believed, but it was still able to carry truth, and in some ways be true. It didn’t need to be grounded in reality to be true, the way that literal religious belief does. Myths are living texts, that are meant to be owned and changed and retold because they have a hold on a truth that doesn’t necessarily translate into discursive knowledge the way science does and the way that religion seems to want to. Believing in a myth never used to mean that you were delusional. It was not an error to be corrected, but instead a supplemental truth. Religious zealotry is bound to details that just as precise as scientific findings, ironically.
I’m trying to think of a way that we engage in myth that’s similar, but to be honest our contemporary mindset is so geared to divide things into truths and falsehoods, facts and fictions, that its difficult. We like to concretize and categorize. The way that some people think of Santa Claus is similar – we can know he’s not “real” and yet still get excited about what Santa is going to bring us, leave cookies out, pretend we hear jingle bells, etc, even though we know he’s not a scientific reality. He’s still “real” in a way, and has real effects on the world (we learn the value of giving, or at least of buying things).
Myths essentially are a way to contain unquantifiable truths about ourselves and our society and even our world, truths which leave a space for open exploration because they aren’t bound by precision.
This is getting long, and it’s clear that I need to think about this in much greater depth to do the question justice! Thank you for reading 🙂
jesse (@jaymop)
Your comment brings to mind a number of ideas about faith that a friend of mine and I have tossed around for some time. The way in which you describe belief in myth — the disregard to concrete Truth and the understanding of a value despite the potential falsehood of the moré — is remarkably similar to how I think about faith. Faith might pertain to religion/God (and is just a small amplification away from zealotry), but my friend often likes to attribute a modern viewpoint of science to faith or belief in science (i.e. a viewpoint in which we take it for granted that some scientific concept has be rigorously proven, even without seeing the proof). In this way, your description of myth, faith in God, or the pursuit/belief of scientific proof (and not necessarily the proof itself) are all ways of understanding, cataloging, conveying the sublime or what you call ‘unquantifiable truths.’
Michelle Joelle
I’d love to spend a lot more time digging into this, because your comments are so interesting. I particularly like the connection to society’s dogmatic attitude to science. Feynman argues that its ironically a blind acceptance of science that makes us unscientific – when we start treating science like a set body of knowledge and truths, we cease to be scientific. The connection I see between science and myth (and religion, really) is in uncertainty, or a willingness to accept that uncertainty is never something we can conquer. What the three share is that they have a faith that there is something more, something that is bigger than what I alone, by my own devices, can comprehend, and then each attempt to tap into that excess in their own ways. I think where science turns dogmatic, and religion into zealotry, and myth into fiction is when we put up clear markers – this and only this is possible.
The idea that scripture ought to be taken literally is not an idea that has full theological support. There are lots of thinkers, even from Abrahamic religions that divinity to be metaphysically infinite, perfect, and utterly beyond conceptualization, such that both our attempts to do with images (stories) and with concepts (reason), taken in themselves, must necessarily fail.
I’m currently working on a paper about myth and religion that’s similarly focused, but it’s still in the form of author-focused exposition and notes. I may end up taking the abstract and attempt to flesh it out in a blog appropriate manner after I finish the long, jargony academic version, but the gist is essentially that myth allows us to think beyond the exact parameters of what we now know, beyond the cataloguing that we try to do. It puts us face to face with the incredible strangeness that we can imagine, and does two things. 1) Myth (or fantasy, taken as myth) shows us that insofar as we are sub-creators of new worlds, we are also, in part, creators of our perceptions of the world in which we live, that the world we see and live in carries as many characteristics of our own psychological and social perspectives as any world we knowingly craft. 2) It also points us to the excess of what we know in our clearly concretized world, and as such can put us in touch with some excess of reality that we try to corral with views of things as set bodies of truths. Myth can tap into a primal connection to reality that is so much bigger than us and what we experience (and so can science, at least in the paradigm for which Feynman advocates) and help us dismantle the fetters we’ve created for practical reasons and allow ourselves to be immersed in the sublime (my philosophical projects are mostly all pre-Kantian, so I never think to use this word, but it’s exactly the word I want). I just ordered a book called Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, and I’m excited about it.
I’m doing such a disservice to these ideas, and I’ve barely touched on science at all. I have thoughts in my head, but I don’t yet have the words I need to draw them out. I want to say that science requires a similar openness, and a similar sublimity, or permeability, and that even though science isn’t chasing metaphysical truths, that maybe it kind of is, and that these metaphysical things that myth and religion are chasing aren’t really super natural, but supra natural, not indetermine, but overdetermine, the last of this list which I’m borrowing from William Desmond’s God and the Between.
And that’s my attempt at addressing your wonderful comment briefly. 🙂
agrudzinsky
I share your fascination with myths, allegories, and symbolism. I love finding parallels and similarities between things. This is how we learn and understand new ideas. I think, realizing that the myth of Pandora’s box is similar to the myth of Genesis is the same mental process that makes us “see” similarities between an electron and a wave. Understanding symbols is a very practical skill if you want to find a bathroom, for example. But it’s also fun to look at the dollar bill and find all kinds of esoteric symbols on it of which most people have no idea. I wonder, how many people know what MDCCLXXVI means or how many times the number 13 can be found on the bill.
What I don’t like in today’s cultural trends is that there are people who believe in the literal truth of Creation and Noah’s Ark and people who call it all “lies” and instead regurgitate some “facts” such as “the universe came from nothing” religiously believing that they are saying something meaningful, not even thinking what ‘nothing’ can possibly mean. “Research shows” is often used in the same way as “Bible says”.
I’ve heard a good comparison that religious fundamentalists thump on the Bible laying on the table, and New Atheists thump on the table. But there is no fundamental difference between the two camps.
I also would like to share some thoughts about certainty and uncertainty, faith and doubt — sometime later. I’m a big fan of Alan Watts’ way of looking at these things. I appreciate questions more than answers. I think, most intriguing questions are asked to be thought of, but not to be answered. I like the tradition of Zen koans.
jesse (@jaymop)
yay for interesting thoughts! I’d love to see a blog formatted version of that paper someday. my initial thought on your comment is as follows: what makes religion fundamentally different from myth? The only difference that I immediately grasp is that religion is exactly like myth except that a sufficient population has elevated it to the level of dogma through shear belief — perhaps in light of our conversation thus far we could call that a kind of faith or zealotry. I should lay a disclaimer that i come at this subject from a sociological/anthropological viewpoint that tends to take this kind of viewpoint of religion.
as a total aside, it turns out that mores (i.e. the cultural practice of shared values) is a plural noun and does not have a singular form in English. I attempted to use “moré” for the singular. apparently, mores is Latin, and the singular Latin form is “mos,” but most internet opinions seem to frown on this usage for English.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mores
http://www.englishpage.net/archive/index.php/t-6916.html
Michelle Joelle
I agree, really, and often think of religion as myth (but this is something I say as a compliment, not a pejorative). Just as a quick note – religions are also meant to be internally consistent in a way that myth isn’t, and doesn’t even try to be. There are parts of religion that traffic openly in logical impossibility, but for the most part it aims to keep our logical expectations in tact.