Believing you are right even when you're not

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things . . . it doesn’t frighten me.


Richard Feynman

Dogmatism is not an attitude found only in believers. Secularists can be dogmatic as well. I have just finished Robert A. Burton's On Being Certain: Believing you are right even when you're not. Burton is a neurologist who has studied the feeling of being certain. Quick summary from the back cover: "An increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning.In other words, the feeling of knowing happens to us: we cannot make it happen."
 
Lest you think that this is somehow a put-down of the feeling of certainty, know that Burton is not dismissive of the "primitive areas of the brain," and that the book is not a polemic against belief, but rather what seems to me a very even-handed and eye-opening exploration of what happens when we are certain about anything - whether the belief in question is "I remember where my friend's house is," "I know what happened when the accident occurred," "I believe in God," or "There is no God." He notes that Richard Dawkins' "near-evangelical effort to convince the faithful of the folly of their convictions has the same zealous ring as those missionaries who feel it is their duty to convince the heathen."
 
But it's not all about religious or political belief - mostly fascinating stuff exploring hunches, intuition, the fact that we are blind to much more than we realize - a great read!
 
(Actually, the idea that you can't reason your way to belief, or talk yourself into belief fits in very well with the Christian concept of prevenient grace.)