What do you believe, even if you cannot prove?

(Hat tip to Robert Sawyer) The Edge Foundation asked 120 scientists, thinkers, and futurists “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” SF fans will notice  Gregory Benford, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling on the list.

The question is actually asking about hunches: what it is you believe that has not yet been proved, though it soon may well be?

I have not read each and every response, but none of the ones I did read contained a lawyerly thought, which is: before I answer the question, what is your standard of proof? Are we talking apodictic proof, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or merely a preponderance of evidence?

Of interest to me, even if not really on the topic, was this: the philosopher must note the difference between provability and truth.

Had they asked me, I would have answered that the rules of logic and the scientific method are true, but are not open to proof. Whatever cannot be doubted also, unfortunately, cannot be proved.

“Proof” in science is when two mutually exclusive explanations can predict the results, and one explanation can be ruled out if a given result obtains. “Proof” in logic is when valid deductions come from true axioms.

No possible experiment can be set up to see whether or not we live in a universe where the experimental method is true. If we lived in a universe–let us say we are all sleeping in the Matrix or deceived by the Demiurge of Descartes–where experimental results were unrelated to truth, no experiment could detect that. In such a universe, the consistency of experiments so far in our experience could be coincidence or deception, something that happens to be the case without necessarily being the case.

Likewise for logic. If a skeptic does not believe the law of non-contradiction, how is one to prove to him that it does? In order to set up a proof in formal logic, the rules are a given.

There are numberless things that are true but are not open to proof, some large, some small. Some cannot be proved merely because the machinery of proof is not in place, as in detective stories when the negatives are burnt. Some cannot be proved because they deal with matters that cannot be reproduced before the eyes of witnesses, such as certain metaphysical axioms. It is true beyond any reasonable doubt, for example, that tomorrow time will continue to run from past to future at one second per second: but I cannot prove it.

I cannot prove that justice exists, albeit nothing is more obvious when it has been denied you. Even my three year old knows the difference between saying: “I want that!” and “It’s not fair!”—The former is a reference to a subjective desire only, the latter has no meaning outside a reference to an external, that is, real, standard of comparison.

I cannot prove to you the sun will rise tomorrow, or that my self-awareness exists. Perhaps a telepath could detect what the experience of my self-awareness feels like to me, but then the medium he uses for his ESP is as open to doubt as eyesight or sound waves. (after all, there may be mirages to confuse the telepath in the same way atmospheric distortions confuse the eye above a desert: embarrassed telepaths of the future will be pointing at post boxes and lumber yards, vowing that there are thoughts and ideas issuing from these areas, when actually it is psychic reflections from the heavy-side layer picking up the thoughts of Mrs. Vinolent Mugwump of Tenafly, New Jersey.)

For that matter, I cannot even prove, within the narrow confines of this comments box, that I am not a dog with a keyboard.

No, the relation between proof and truth is a negative one. We know that things which have been finally disproved are not accurate. Phlogiston theory is not accurate, as it predicts outcomes not confirmed by experiment; the Ptolemy model is not accurate, as it assumes entities beyond what is needed, such as epicycles; the Newtonian model is not accurate, as it does not predict something a model with greater predictive ability, Relativity, does predict, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.

(But, in these cases, of course, the inaccurate model is perfectly accurate and useful in any circumstances where the specialized cases do not appear: Newton is accurate for any billiard game played under normal gravity and below the speed of light; Ptolemy can be used for navigation on the Earth’s surface reliably.) 

In terms of religious or philosophical material, of course, the inability to cross examine ghosts in a witness box or have saints perform miracles before television cameras leaves the matter very much in dispute.

Personally, I think the unreliability of religious eyewitnesses has been exaggerated for partisan purposes. We have no historical authority, for example, which says Thomas a Becket was murdered in the Cathedral of Canterbury, which does not also mention a knight’s wife who prayed to his ghost two days later and received a miraculous cure, or that a man blind for years was cured by this saint.  The chroniclers who wrote the matter down for us found the one as reliable as the other. I am not saying a reasonable skeptic cannot doubt that the cures of St. Thomas existed; I am merely saying a reasonable skeptic can also doubt (and why not?) that the murder occurred. No reliable eyewitnesses are still alive to contradict the matter.

There are cuckolds who believe in the faithfulness of their wives with far less evidence than this; there are ball teams who believe that they will win the pennant this year; there are, somehow, impossibly, still committed Marxists in this world, even though no doctrine can be shown false more easily and simply than this crackpot millennialism.

There are people who believe, without proof, that capital punishment deters crime; and people who believe, without proof, that it does not. There are people who believe, without proof, that aborticide kills an innocent human child who has a right to live; and people who believe, without proof, that it does not.

That OJ Simpson was found not guilty of a grotesque murder by a jury of his peers is a matter of fact; as far as the law is concerned, the case is closed and his guilt has not been proved: in the case of double jeopardy, the machinery for gathering and examining proof is shut down after a case is closed, even if a wrong verdict might have been reached, because the American Constitution fears, and has grounds for to fear, endless re-examination of a re-opened case would be used as an instrument of oppression. This does not prevent reasonable people from having a belief about this case, and it is reasonable for them to be firm and vocal in their opinions.    

Proof means very little in these cases. Either we are dealing with metaphysical or legal propositions, which by their nature are not open to proof; or cases where the machinery of evidence is unavailable or has been shut down; or cases where the proof is ambiguous.

Religion has been singled out to the great exception to the principle that one should believe a proposition only insofar as proof can support it. This is nonsense. The humility that is silent on every question not open to proof is an exception, not the rule. The exception applies to physics. Everything else in real life is believed because it seems true, not because it has subjected to elaborite and artificial proof processes.

The majority of propositions by which people live their lives are accepted with a level of certainty not sustained by proof, everything from the paternity of their children (how many fathers checked the baby’s DNA?) to the honesty of the reports they read in the press to the wisdom and morality of war and peace, capital punishment or abortion, women’s rights or race relations or global warming, or any other hotly-debated topic.

I know more people who have seen ghosts than who have seen sharks: nonetheless I hold it to be far more reasonable to believe in sharks than to believe in ghosts. I would venture to say even a healthy proportion of religious folk would agree with me. This is a belief not open to proof: I cannot proof that it is unreasonable to believe in ghosts, this is merely a proposition I take on the authority of the general consensus of the people and age in which I was born.

What is really going on with religion is that, in matters of faith and doctrine, it requires an act of will to believe propositions not open to proof. That they are not open to proof may be due to a fallen nature, something we have brought on ourselves or in which we continue due to a corruption of the will. A prelapsarian man would not doubt his clear intuitions from an immediate God.

In our case, we are like a man who checks himself freely into a sanitarium for the insane: he takes on faith, he accepts on the authority of friends and family, that his judgment is distorted by madness, or his perception by hallucination. In such a case, the insane man has no choice but to accept matters on authority: because the sane thing for a sane man to do it not to trust his own judgment.

Christianity proposes, fundamentally, only two basic propositions. The first is the doctrine of the Fall, which says that man is innately and radically wicked. This first doctrine is pessimistic and cynical beyond the imagination of a Schopenhauer or a Diogenes. A person might believe that all men are kind and beautiful and good, but such a person cannot really call himself a skeptic. Of all religious doctrines, it is the only one with clear, even overwhelming, empirical evidence.  

The second is the doctrine of the Redemption, which says that anyone, regardless of merit or demerit, can be saved from sin and death, can become the Son of God and inherit the kingdom of Heaven, and live forever in such bliss as cannot be imagined or described. This doctrine is optimistic beyond the imagination of Leibniz. The main obstacle to believing it… is that it is too good to be true. Like any discussion of infinite or ultimate realities, it is not open to proof at all: no matter how many times the Hindu has been reincarnated, that his next death will not be his final is still a matter of faith. No matter how many blessing a man receives in life, or what prophecies he hears about life after death or the fate of the universe, it cannot be proved to him that the future, or the future world, will be one thing as opposed to another any more than it can be proved the sun will rise tomorrow or that his wife is faithful. He believes it because it does not seem reasonable to doubt.

The much maligned faith of the faithful is not merely the gullibility Voltaire and his epigones would have you take on faith he says it is. My experience is that secularists are more gullible, in general, than religious folk—perhaps I have met too many Marxists to believe in the skepticism of the skeptics, or people who think some quota will stop race hatred, or that the next election will usher in the utopia. I cannot tell you how many people take their newspapers on faith, when they know newspapermen are mortal, men who tell lies for pay, but scoff that I take the Bible on faith, when I have firm reason to believe the authors thereof were inspired men, serious enough in what they believed, some of them, to die for it.

No, the faith of the faithful is that act of the will which refuses to consent to unreasonable doubt, irrational doubt, doubts that have no roots and are supported by nothing.

Such doubt as these do not come from the awake and clear-headed ponderings of philosophers on some ethereal mountain peak, high above the ordinary concerns of man. Such doubt as these come when you are alone and weary and walking in a graveyard and you walk between two crooked, dripping trees; and a spiderweb touches your face and vanishes.  

Even a man who talked to an angel has doubts of this kind; even Christ on the cross had doubts. We are not talking about the hard-headed skepticism of a someone from Missouri, who says ‘Show Me’: we are talking about the soft-headed skepticism of someone who believes what is basically a conspiracy theory: that inanimate natural processes distort our reasoning to give all humans (alone out of all the life on the planet) a universal predisposition toward religion, that priests invented all rites and doctrines cynically to exploit that predisposition, that martyrs died in order to assist this deception of the gullible, that the vast majority of men for all of time are gullible fools, fools, self-deluded fools.

The only miracle in the atheistic view of the universe is the ongoing miracle that historical figures of such renown and mental power, expert and excellent in all other fields of endeavor, should continue to believe such an obvious fraud and imposition on their credulity. That is one miracle they cannot explain without resort to unconvincing ad hoc explanations. It is something they believe without proof.