Believe it or not

The reader added, "For some time now, I have been reading many of your essays on God and I think you may not be wrong to postulate that God does not exist. I have been attending to Bible scriptures, church services, and listening to preachers on television and, at times, radio. I am still — after 24 years — not sure God exists or the Devil exists."

Such a perspective is quite uncommon in this society, but what made this letter astonishing to me is that the writer has been paralysed from the waist down for 30 years. It is relatively easy for someone like me to be a non-theist — I am healthy, stable enough financially, and I work in a profession where scepticism makes me better at what I do. But for someone to express agnosticism after being paralysed since the age of 22, in a situation where he is dependent on the church to supply many of his needs, shows an independence of intellect that exceeds my own.

I always reply to readers’ phone calls, letters and e-mails, but I made sure to respond very promptly to this one. If anyone takes the effort to write me, I figure the least I can do is answer them but this was a case where more than ordinary effort was required, since the reader’s paralysis extends to his fingers. (He has to tie splints to them in order to type.) But I also wanted to share his letter with other readers, which required his permission. This he duly gave, although he preferred not to have his name called.

I have been puzzling for years over what makes non-believers not believe in a Supreme Being or supernatural forces or other things for which there is no good evidence. On my bookshelves, there are various books related to belief systems. I have the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Bhagavadgita, and James Frazier’s classic study of world myths, The Golden Bough; and I have books on the philosophy, psychology, and anthropology of religion. Between anthropologist David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin Cathedral, psychologist Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, sceptic activist Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil, and historian Jennifer Hecht’s Doubt, there is no argument any believer can proffer for which I don’t have a better one. Yet this has only increased my puzzlement as to why some people are capable of saying they don’t know if there’s a God (agnostics), that there is no God (atheists), or that they don’t believe there is a God (nontheists).

In all my readings, I have never come across any significant survey of non-believers. There are enough studies of believers, from social psychology and even neuropsychology, to explain why religion has historically wielded such influence in various societies. The one psychology experiment I know of which included sceptics was carried out by Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger. Brugger took a group of 20 believers and 20 sceptics and flashed images of faces and words on a screen. Some images were scrambled, some not. The results showed that believers were much more likely to see a word or face when there wasn’t one, whereas sceptics were more likely to miss a word or face when there was one.

My own speculation from this experiment is that, in the prehistoric environment we evolved in, it was probably more advantageous to see patterns where they weren’t any rather than to miss patterns when there were. But this still doesn’t explain the 14 percent of persons who do not belong to any organised religion. And a still smaller percentage are actual atheists — about one percent. But what are the factors that give rise to even that miniscule fraction? That’s what I would like to know.

The social environment certainly plays a role. In Western European countries, the percentage of persons who profess belief in organised religion is much lower than in other societies. However, no survey I have come across has checked these same persons’ beliefs in other non-provable phenomena, such as ghosts or clairvoyance or a good deal from TSTT. So it is not clear that the level of non-belief is significantly lower in developed nations — in Trinidad, I know one professed atheist who believes in mystical healing energies.

To this day, then, I have not been able to figure out what makes a non-believer not believe. It is not intelligence, because there are enough intellectually competent persons who are believers to make this argument weak. It is not social conscience, since there are many more believers who are socially active than non-believers. It is not class — although non-believers are more likely to be middle-class, you find them among the working-class as well.

Ironically, the factor I find most distinguishes non-believers from believers is the sense of right and wrong. Non-believers often derive their moral values from rational processes, which means that they cannot be convinced that obvious evils are ever right. Whereas, just a few weeks ago, a middle-aged Jehovah’s Witness woman told me that it was all right for children to be stoned to death for disobeying their parents if that was the law of the land.

Non-believers’ moral concerns tend to centre around poverty, official corruption, criminal violence. Believers’ moral concerns centre around fornication, homosexuality, and abortion.

In the final analysis, my curiosity about why people believe or not is purely intellectual. But my heart’s concern is how such beliefs affect our society — and I know enough about religion to know that it is one factor that keeps our country in a backward state.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com