Hi, There, Pigeon!

One of my required courses as an undergrad Education major at the University of Akron was Psychology. I must confess that listening to Dr. Popplestone lecture was not one of the more exciting things that happened in my academic career. I got a D in that course because I found other things to hold my attention. Nevertheless, the good doctor did capture my attention one day with his description of the experiments of B. F. Skinner.

In a nutshell, for the unenlightened, Skinner discovered that he could induce superstitious behavior in pigeons by rewarding responses to stimuli that had nothing to do with a situation. The pigeon would associate the appearance of food with whatever behavior it was performing at the moment. The essence of the experiment was a demonstration that superstitious behavior was caused by linking correlation with causation.

It was in my post-graduate courses that I was provided with the opportunity to distinguish between experimental and quasi-experimental design. I was also provided with the understanding that science is an exercise in the reduction of uncertainty, and that in a true scientific endeavor, it is never possible to prove a hypothesis (or a theory, of which a hypothesis is a subset), but that true certainty only arrives with the disproval of a null hypothesis.

To explain that logic, understand that to prove that something “always is true”, it is necessary to test it an infinite number of times without failure. One failure in the testing destroys the concept of “always is true”. The ability to trust the results resides in the probability of the next experiment also concluding true — a wondrous exercise of faith in the theory, but which never concludes with absolute proof.

However, if one sets out to prove that something “always is false”, even though every experiment fails there is always the uncertainty that the next one will not — a true result destroys the theory — which engenders the real “scientific” attitude of skepticism that drove the Enlightenment. One failure to prove falsity results in an absolute surety that the idea of “always is false” is in itself false.

That may seem a bit like a dog chasing it’s own tail, but in reality most experiments end up with a set of mixed outcomes. There may have been a flaw in the experimental design, or an invalid set of inputs, or some other quirk that distorted the outcome. That leads to the concept of degrees of certainty, in which an experimenter may say that the null hypothesis was rejected at say, a confidence level of 5%. That is to say, the hypothesis is true up to a point, and the individual may choose his level of risk with it.

Thus the entire purpose of science is centered around “randomness” or “chance”; the user of the experimental results has the opportunity to decide if a certain action is worth the associated risk. Human nature, however, abhors uncertainty; we would rather have the weather witch tell us that it will not rain today (so we can place the blame if we get wet) rather than that there is a 50% chance of rain, in which case getting wet is our own fault.

Suppose, though, that we notice that it always rains after certain birds sing a particular series of notes. Without any other inputs, we might conclude that the singing of the birds causes it to rain. While we, as “scientific” people might scoff at that conclusion as being superstitious, it might be an entirely logical one to a less sophisticated or educated population. Similarly, if almost every time a policemen enters our neighborhood someone is killed, we might conclude that our chance of dying increases with the appearance of a policeman. When fear or trauma become factors in our decision-making, rationality declines and we tend to associate the factor with the greatest correlation as the cause of the event, ignoring any other factors which might be in play (such as hostility to authority, drug abuse, or other criminal activity).

As humans, we also find it easy to be lead by those who have established themselves as “authorities” with regard to various disciplines. Thus when an “authority” proclaims that he has found a correlation between the amount of man-made smoke in the air and an increase in average temperature, he can easily announce that he has “proven” that people cause climate change and that by modifying our behavior according to his prescription, we can change it in a different direction. That other factors such as solar radiation, tectonic movement, or position within the galaxy (yes, Dorothy, we aren’t in Kansas anymore — we are millions of miles away from the Kansas we were in this time last year and the part of our galaxy we are in now may have a different temperature than the part we were in last year!) could instead cause such climate change is uncomfortable because they are beyond our control. It is a hallmark of superstitious belief that people can choose freely to obliterate the cause of a frightening situation; the Salem witchcraft trials come to mind.

While science and the scientific method(s) have some obvious usefulness within our culture, allowing us to exercise our curiosity and design inventions which advance the good of humanity, they never provide certainty. Further, they never answer the questions about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. They never provide absolute truth, and with it, absolute reality. Those items have always been the province of metaphysics, and particularly, of religion. In the attempt to reconcile science and religion, there has always been a thrust toward elevating the humanity of men and the humanizing of deity. Wherever belief in causation has surfaced, man has tended to create his god in his own image, and the more sophisticated a culture becomes, the more urbane and sophisticated it’s god becomes until at some point, the deity is no longer needed and humanism triumphs. Unfortunately, without some superstition, humanism lacks any sense of certainty.

For myself, the specter of being a pigeon at the mercy of fate (or karma, as neophyte Humanists, Hindus and Buddhists might term it) is so unsettling that I would rather be in the hands of the Almighty God of Heaven, as described in the Hebrew Bible — a Being so all-powerful and all-knowing and good and righteous and holy that no matter what happens in my life, it is intended for good. A God who is just, but whose mercy endures forever. A God who is true, and who never fails to keep His word. A God whose love is so vast that He, the only immortal being, devised a plan whereby He could pay the penalty for my sins by dying in my place. A God so righteous that death could not hold Him, and He was raised from death so that I could be confident in the rightness of His plan and the surety of His promise.

So keep your randomness, your chance, your choices, your fate — whatever brand of uncertainty your superstition entertains. We are all superstitious, every one of us. Go ahead and be scientific. Phrase your basic beliefs as null hypotheses, test them and live with your insecurity, if you can do so without insanity. As for me, I will trust in the Eternal God of Israel, who keeps His covenant with His chosen people forever.