While listening to a radio report on the South Korean reaction to the death of Kim Jong Il, I heard an interview of an old man saying something about how he believed that some spirits in the hills were going to cause some bad event to happen. The interviewer took it in stride as if the man were describing what he ate for breakfast. Some people believe in spirits, there’s nothing to react to. Many people believe in things that can’t be proven, or even explained very well. But I was struck. Why did this man believe such things? No sooner has I asked myself the question, when the answer came to me: because he could. It was as if everyone has a budget for how much thought or time they can devote to belief in things they can’t possibly prove to anyone else, or provide evidence for. Some people have more room in their budget for nonsense than others. In my own life, I make a living trying to drill down into “objective reality”, which I’ll admit, is a slippery problematic statement that neds more qualificatio, more on that later. But let’s just say it’s the kind of stuff that only exists if everyone agrees it exists under critical scrutiny and experimentation via the scientific method. I can’t depend on spirits, or invoke theories unless they can survive immense scrutiny by people that are much smarter than me. On the other hand, I know people who make a living being slippery with tantalizing but impossible to prove explanations for how the world works. What is the cost for believing in things that are impossible to prove?
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