Free The End of Faith by Sam Harris Page A

multiplication table12
     x 7 = ? All of us have had moments when 84 just didn't sound quite right. At such times,
     we may be forced to perform some additional calculations before we can again be said to
     believe that 12x7 = 84. Or consider what it is like to fall into doubt over a familiar
     person's name (“Is his name really ]eff1 Is that what I call him?”). It is clear that even very well-worn beliefs can occasionally
     fail to achieve credibility in the
    present. Such failures of truth testing have important implications, to which we now turn.
    A Matter of True and False
    Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old friends. You leave the
     table briefly to use the restroom, and upon your return you hear one of your friends
     whisper, “Just be quiet. He can't know about any of this.”
    What are you to make of this statement? Everything turns on whether you believe that you
     are the “he” in question. If you are a woman, and therefore excluded by this choice of
     pronoun, you would probably feel nothing but curiosity. Upon retaking your seat, you might
     even whisper, “Who are you guys talking about?” If you are a man, on the other hand,
     things have just gotten interesting. What secret could your friends be keeping from you?
     If your birth- day is just a few weeks away, you might assume that a surprise party has
     been planned in your honor. If not, more Shakespearean possi- bilities await your
     consideration.
    Given your prior cognitive commitments, and the contextual cues in which the utterance was
     spoken, some credence-granting circuit inside your brain will begin to test a variety of
     possibilities. You will study your friends' faces. Are their expressions compatible with
     the more nefarious interpretations of this statement that are now occur- ring to you? Has
     one of your friends just confessed to sleeping with your wife? When could this have
     happened? There has always been a certain chemistry between them. . . . Suffice it to say
     that whichever interpretation of these events becomes a matter of belief for you will have
     important personal and social consequences.
    At present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the level of the brain, to say
     that a person believes or disbelieves a given propositionand yet it is upon this
     difference that all subsequent cognitive and behavioral commitments turn. To believe a
     proposi-
    tion we must endorse, and thereby become behaviorally susceptible to, its representational
     content. There are good reasons to think that this process happens quite automaticallyand,
     indeed, that the mere comprehension of an idea may be tantamount to believing it, if only
     for a moment. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza thought that belief and comprehension were
     identical, while disbelief required a subsequent act of rejection. Some very interesting
     work in psychol- ogy bears this out.24 It seems rather likely that understanding a proposition is analogous to perceiving an
     object in physical space. Our default setting may be to accept appearances as reality
     until they prove to be otherwise. This would explain why merely enter- taining the
     possibility of a friend's betrayal may have set your heart racing a moment ago.
    Whether belief formation is a passive or an active process, it is clear that we
     continuously monitor spoken utterances (both our own and those of others) for logical and
     factual errors. The failure to find such errors allows us to live by the logic of what
     would otherwise be empty phrases. Of course, even the change of a single word can mean the
     difference between complaisance and death-defying feats: if your child comes to you in the
     middle of the night saying, “Daddy, there's an elephant in the hall,” you might escort him
     back to bed toting an imaginary gun; if he had said, “Daddy, there's a man in the hall,” you would probably be inclined to carry a real