The Believer’s Brain – Jean Carolyn Marcel

I often find myself engaged in conversations with people of various belief systems, asking them to explain specifically what their beliefs are and how they know these beliefs to be true. Rarely do I get them to go so far as to actually answer my questions, but once in a while their responses can be quite entertaining. I have thought for some time that these encounters could make for interesting reading, so I’d like to start a new occasional segment I will call “The Believer’s Brain”.

Case in point: a conversation I had with a christian recently on a friend’s facebook page. Unfortunately the christian, Jean Carolyn Marcel, deleted all of her comments, so the only direct quotes I have from her are those which I quoted as part of my replies to her and one comment I happened to copy as I noticed she was deleting her comments. For the rest of her comments I will attempt, to the best of my ability, to recreate her general ideas, if not her exact words.

A bit of background, this conversation took place on the comment thread of a video posted by a friend. The video is one I’m actually going to post another time, so I won’t go into it here, other than to say it was whole unrelated to the conversation.

Jean’s first comment seemed odd as it was off topic from the video (the topic being evolution) and her comment made reference to god and heaven. Unfortunately I don’t have her exact wording (I believe it was something to the effect that god helps those who want to go to heaven), but my reply to her was an attempt to briefly question her assumptions from her comment.

You assume quite a bit with the existence of a god or gods.
You also assume that a “heaven” exists.

Where is your evidence for these claims?

She then gave another two short replies. Again I don’t have the exact wording as the result of her deleting all of her own comments before I thought to save them; however I do know she asked me for “proof” that god does not exist and asked me the question “What do you gain?”, which I did not understand. My reply was fairly standard, bringing up the concept of Burden of Proof and the fallacy of trying to Prove A Negative.

I don’t have “proof” that you don’t have a dragon in your garage, but in the absence of evidence FOR a dragon, I live my life with the lack of belief in such creatures.

With any claim, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. In this case you make the claim of a god or gods, and a “heaven”. Without evidence to back up these claims, they are essentially meaningless.

It is sometimes to subtle for certain people to grasp, but the default position is that the world is as it seems from our (meaning humanity, not you and me) current best understanding of it. For that position to be challenged there must be evidence to show something unexplained by the current theories or in contradiction to the current theories. In the case of “god”, our current understanding of the universe does not have a “need” for a god or gods to explain what we observe.

Now this is not a “proof” that god does not exist, in fact proving a negative is typically understood as being impossible, but it shows clearly that the burden of proof is on those making the claim of a god or gods to show evidence supporting those claims.

As for “what do I gain”; I’m not sure what you mean here.

Luckily for me, her next comment I copied word for word as part of my next reply to her. As you’ll see, she fails to acknowledge anything that has come before, which is a standard tactic of those out to push an agenda without actually engaging in a true debate of ideas (her words quoted in black, mine in blue).

“Why does it rattle your cage for me to believe”
All unsupportable beliefs are a symptom of a lack of critical thinking. This type of thinking leads to things like flying planes into buildings, shooting doctors because of disagreeing with their profession, allowing children to die of preventable diseases, genital mutilation, etc…
These are all things that I believe the world would be better off without. And they are all based off belief in a god or gods.

“I believe you have a choice and if you don’t ..then don’t”
A choice? In what exactly? You believe that people can CHOOSE what to believe? While we can choose what evidence to expose ourselves to, the beliefs themselves are not chosen, they are a result of our experiences and knowledge.

“we shall see; if I’m wrong i will have lost nothing.”
Pascal’s Wager? Wow. I did not realize people still tried to use this pathetic old argument that even Pascal himself said was not proof of anything.
Let’s go with the simplest possible way to refute this “argument”. Let’s say there is a god, and this god will send to hell those who believe in a false god, but will NOT send to hell those who believe in no god. You’ve just lost. Pascal’s wager is based upon the false assumption that the only two options are you are right, or there is no god. It fails to take into account the thousands of other gods that others believe in (or have believed in) and the infinite number of potential gods that nobody has yet to think of.
But let’s say there is no god, what have you lost then. Well you’ve devoted time, energy and presumably money to a cause that is false. You’ve wasted resources that could have gone to better use for humanity. To me, that is a major loss for not just you, but society.
and you can also view it this way: it doesn’t matter which god you believe in, you have to realize that far more people in the world do not believe in the same one as you. So even if you’re correct, couldn’t the time, money and effort of all of those who believe in the false gods be going to a more worthy cause?

In short, Pascal’s Wager is not a good attempt to persuade anybody of anything.

“I would bet you beleive in breathing …Air? can you see it?”
In some cities, yes. But even though I can’t see it in my own city (luckily the pollution here is not too bad) it can be measured quite accurately. Despite the common held misconception, air is something. Or to be more accurate, it is many things. And each of these things that makes up air can be measured, tested, and studied.
Which is more than can be said for any definition of god I’ve encountered in my lifetime.

By this time she was engaging a few other people at the same time, although she was equally frustrating to all of us, with her repeated failure to acknowledge the direct responses to her “points” and her repeating claims that have already been dealt with.

“This is reported by doctors [here she is referring to death bed confessions]……My belief is not insurance, it’s real [somebody else compared her use of Pascal’s wager to buying insurance]…I have many reason’s to beleive, personal experience.. I am not stupid enough to think I can fool God…….My statment is to you who think I’m wrong. why do you care if I’m wrong and I don’t think am…but I have nothing to loose according to YOU…where has ; you have everything to loose.
You just want to argue..the statement was , can you see air? It’s kind of interesting that you can believe all of this just happened….So I’m not going to continue this conversation…….It’s your choice, and I really don’t care about your rambling because and I don’t have to defend my self…….
I’m not your typical Christian……..Go ahead an jump in hell.”

Since most of her comments were directed at others, and some of the showed clearly that she ignored my long response to her, at this point I decided to keep the rest of my replies brief (because why waste a lot of time if it’s not going to even be read, right).

I just spent a couple hundred words describing why Pascal’s Wager fails and why we, as atheists, care about religion, and the knowledge of air vs the belief in god. And then you bring those same points up again as if they have not already been dealt with.

Not only are you EXACTLY the typical christian ,you’re using all the typical christian cliches, including ignoring any evidence to the contrary of your preconceived beliefs.

Again she replied showing that she had not read (or comprehended) my long post, and again she brought up the idea of how do we know air exists if we can’t see it. My reply was simple and direct:

I already responded to your air comment. If you’d bother to read my reply you would clearly see that your example falls apart.

It was around this time she stopped responding, and in fact deleted all of her comments on the thread. Unfortunately I never got actual answers from Jean, but her comments said more about her and her beliefs and how she came to them, than actual answers to my questions could ever have done.

So while this conversation was actually shorter than most of my posts on religion, I think it was non-the-less an interesting look into “The Believer’s Brain”.