Why People Believe in the Thruth?
Essay by review • December 12, 2010 • Essay • 532 Words (3 Pages) • 1,262 Views
Why people believe in the truth?
In order for our early ancestors to help secure their existence, it was necessary for them to be able to live together in groups. On their own, they would have struggled to survive. By living in a (somewhat) coherent group, they would have been able to produce more goods and ideas than a bunch of individuals on their own ever could.
In order for our ancestors to be able to live in groups, they needed an ideology (or a set of rules) for how the group was going to function. After all, if everyone just ran around and did whatever they wanted to, the group would not function very effectively.
In order for them to be able to create an effective ideology, they needed to believe in the concept of truth. They needed to believe that there was "a way things are supposed to be".
In order for our earliest ancestors to believe that they knew "the way things are supposed to be", they needed to feel much more knowledgeable than they really were. After all, their concept of reality was quite limited.
In order to make the world appear to be much simpler than it really is, the thought process limits our perceptual ability and thus makes the world appear to be populated by distinct entities; the world appears to be full of distinctly separate "things" which can be known or understood.
The advancements made possible by science have improved our observational abilities to the point where we can now begin to understand just how limited our everyday concept of reality really is. We now have the opportunity to recognize that the world only appears to be full of distinct entities (like books, rocks, people, etcĂ'...).
We only appear to be distinctly separate entities because our mind needs to simplify reality for us in order to make us feel much smarter than we really are. The universe is actually a seamless whole that is beyond our comprehension, but our mind bails us out and makes the universe appear to be much simpler and easier to understand than it really is.
We can see the illusion of intelligence created by the thought process by the simple fact that our ancestors were quite confident in ideas that are now considered to be quite naive (Earth is flat, doctors can heal people by draining their blood, powered flight is impossible, etc.).
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