Faith in Faith

Cutting the Stone, Hieronymus Bosch.  Source: Wikimedia

Religion, the content of it, is rarely a scientific subject. What is believed can range from the serene to the bizarre and disgusting. When followed to their logical conclusion, religions are exclusive of others, and the crimes that have been commited in their name are too numerous to count. It is, all in all, a quagmire of dead-ends and an infinite, yes transcendental source of conflicting convictions. And it is not just the established religions that pose this problem, for where they dwindle, a host of pseudoscientific garbage floats up and sticks. There is without doubt something inside men that makes them believe and thus the existene of religion, the act of believing is a completely natural, observable phenomenon that lends itself effortlessly to scientific study.

One of the authors dealing with the questions of why belief — regardless of how many degrees it is separated from reality — remains so commonplace is Daniel Dennett in his book "Breaking the Spell". Among the pages was buried something that could have the potential to explain why so many prefer witchdoctors and soothsayers in favor of modern medicine, for it takes but a glimpse to recognize that issues of health lend themselves to all manner of superstitions in the blink of an eye (with maybe morality being similarily feebleminded in this regard). What I am referring to is a short article(1) by Nicholas Humphrey and John Skoyles, that asks a very simple question: how does placebo work?

The theory goes roughly so: humans (and other anmals) have a host of options to self-heal — everyone's had a fever —, but they all come with associated costs, which need to be weighed against expected benefits and the situation changes greatly depending on various risk assesments, availability of food and so on and so forth. Emprirically, I can attest that during times of great stress, my body seems to postpone reactions to illness until such time that it is safe to do so. This might be anecdotal, but no doubt it would be wiser to have a runny nose than risk a high fever, that is energetically expensive, when food is scarse. Or throwing up and consequently being weak of dehydration is not the best of options when the sabre-toothed tiger is on the hunt.

These decisions are not made consciously, but made they still are, by what the authors call the gubernator medicatrix (And I here bow my head to N. Wiener for altogether different reasons), a subsystem that has evolved to make those decisions, very cautiously bringing us from there to here over the millenia. The thing is — while we cannot talk to the helmsman, we cannot choose to take over the management of our natural defences, there is a way to access those corridors of power. And this is where belief enters the picture for we can, sometimes literally, pray to him, and as opposed to entities out and above us, he listens.

The governor is not a transcendental machine, it bases its decisions on risk assesments on the available data. It has developed to operate in much harsher conditions, at this day and age, rarely does the driving force of natural selection, the fearsome sabre-toothed tiger, frequent our neighborhood no more. But being very old, he is somewhat ignorant of this fact. Thus while it should be safe to deploy our natural defences most of the time, the conservative governor simply has no access to this knowledge, for it dwells in the dark ages and stubbornly refuses to switch the switch for example when the time of the year is such that food has traditionaly bee scarse (read about the wonderful summer/winter experiment with hamsters from Humphreys paper) . If we can influence him to see things in a more favourable light, then he will make a different decision. The way to talk to the governor is — as said — by praying, or meditating, or playing with crystals and channeling the energies 4th dimension, by tripping on shrooms and talking to dead ancestors — whatever act you need to put up to make you believe things are gong to be A-OK. Yes, visiting a doctor can work just as well, if evidence-based medicine is what you believe in.

Placebo works by belief. Not in placebo per se, but in whatever our chosen witchdoctor tells us. We trick, we fool and we cheat, and it gives results. Now does placebo actually work is an entirely different question and a quick glance tells me that results vary and more studies are needed. But there are situations where we can not, within established science, conduct certain tests and can not therefore know for certain Take for example cancer — how do you conduct a blind test for that, ethically. And hamsters don't count, because for all we know, their belief systems are somewhat less developed.

So in conclusion, because information about environment can be crucial to trigger proper reaction to infections and utilize the self-healing capacity humans possess, and because the ancient gubernator medicatrix is too pessimistic for our modern and relatively safe world, belief can trick it into being less cautios and in turn really do make us heal. And this is a good idea, because it makes no claims to the supernatural and lends itself to criticism, while also hitting home the idea that those who practise a religion are not stupid, for what chance has our conscious mind against millions of years of survival instincts. Few, if any.


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1. Humphrey, N. Skoyles, J. "The evolutionary psychology of healing: a human success story." Current Biology, Sept 10, vol 22. no. 17. Free PDF version at: http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2012Healing.pdf