It is hard not to see our species as being defined by this fatal flaw! In particular the claims and beliefs of organized religion – which should have been dismissed a long time ago – that have lead to centuries of religious strife that resulted  in countless of  lives lost for no reason other than the competition between such beliefs and the vested interest that the various religious denominations had acquired in them.

Gullibility can be even deadlier – to the point of voluntary self destruction – as in the case of religious cult membership, one tragic example being the  dead by suicide of more than 900 Americans, members of the People Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18th, 1978,  at the urging of their demented  leader the “Reverend” Jim Jones.

Then, a more recent example that even the most bizarre and unsubstantiated  beliefs can have deadly consequences for those that accept them as absolute truth happened in  1997, when members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth, a spaceship would be travelling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective, that it didn’t show the spaceship following the comet. A short time later, believing that they would be rescued once they had shed their “earthly containers” (their bodies), all 39 members killed themselves. (from a July 2020 article in the The Atlantic)

Today the practice of blindly believing the unsubstantiated is running rampant on the internet. Donald J. Trump supporters take note: he lost the election by more than 7 million validated votes. But since you believe that DJT would have been the obvious person to vote for, more or less guaranteeing a landslide victory, you have difficulty believing he lost the election. So when you hear claims that the election was rigged, you will want to believe that, even when there is no factual evidence in support of it.

This is an epistemological problem, and some will refer to this as examples of cognitive dissonance,  defined as the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings. Once we form an opinion on a particular topic, we refuse to believe anything contrary to our beliefs; even going as far as to reject factual information to rationalize our own opinion.

The question is, how did our species  get as far as it has with this obvious flaw – something I consider an absolutely critical flaw, and responsible for much of the evil  that people have inflicted onto themselves and others over the centuries.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. (Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662)

However, the way I see it is that the way most people accept the existence of a God is along the lines of believing  something far less profound, e.g., believing that the earth is round. One accepts this to be a true fact about the world since it fits in with what you have been told about the world,  from the time you heard it first mentioned, from what you heard at school or from what you have read about it.  As such, accepting the truth of such a belief and  most other beliefs one holds as true is a function of coherence with other beliefs that seem to support it, giving you no reason to examine it critically or ever doubt it for that matter.

I’m willing to concede however that  – when people say they believe in God – they might be expressing more than just something that they have always accepted as true, such as the belief that the earth is round. What may be referred to as “spiritual beliefs” are the results of having a sense or an awareness that one is part of something larger and more profound than oneself while being unable to cite the specific reason for believing this to be a true belief about themselves and the world.  An example of that might be what Einstein wrote about in a  November 9, 1930 New York Times Magazine article  titled Religion and Science  in the context of what he referred to as “a third stage of religious experience”:

I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

Beliefs based on such feelings  may have some intrinsic credibility based on the phenomenological nature of our everyday experiences, when one is led to expect a greater context for them beyond the immediacy of the present moment and whatever else one might bring to bear on them. It is within this expectation or awareness that one might ascribe to the possibility of a deity existing, especially when one is told from day one that there is such a thing as an all-powerful being named God, and being at the receiving end of a process I call “religious brainwashing” at the hands of some authoritarian religious institution that does not allow its core dogmas to be challenged.

Given this line of reasoning, you could say that the belief in God merely fills the void in one’s belief system that resulted from sensing the larger whole of one’s existence without being able to articulate exactly what that is.