Religious Beliefs Are Not a Mental Illness

I’ve been meaning to write this for some time. I’ve heard the banter from both sides, especially in forums, that atheism is a mental illness or that christianity is a mental illness. Both sides are wrong, religious beliefs are not mental illnesses. There are two types of claims that I have stumbled across and heard: first is that X belief causes mental illness, and second that X belief is a mental illness.

The first one is something that I ran across on Conservapedia, where they attempt to link depression and other mental illnesses to atheism. They attempt to link it to Nietzsche’s later insanity to his atheist beliefs. Similar ideas are bantered about by atheists. A quick troll through some forums came up with similar questions of whether “delusional” religious beliefs can cause mental illness. The common thread that I’ve pieced together is that both sides think that the other is suffering from some delusion and that delusion precipitates the development of a mental illness. This is just wrong headed, holding a belief despite evidence to the contrary does not cause a disease in the brain.

The second one is that atheism/theism is a mental illness. One argument is that religious beliefs produce mentally ill behaviors. People think that God is talking to them, that there are OCD like behaviors in rituals, and that they hold delusional beliefs. The opposite is said for atheists, where it is assumed that they too hold delusional beliefs and will not give them up in the face of evidence. Conservapedia also attempts to link higher rates of suicide to atheism. So essentially, both sides think that the other is deluded ergo mentally ill.

It was also suggested on youtube that one might describe religion as a mental illness without a mental abnormality, rather there are cognitive or behavioral attributes that are similar to mental illness. That is, they act as though they were mentally ill because they have delusional beliefs. I’ll talk a little later about this, but I believe that this type of discussion is based on the mistake between a sincerely held belief and a delusional belief. I’ll talk a little more about it below.

So at the core of both sides arguing, there is this notion of delusion. So what is a delusion disorder? The DSM-IV TSR lists 6 different types of delusional disorders.

• Erotomanic: delusion that another person is in love with the individual, quite frequently a famous person. The individual may breach the law as he/she tries to obsessively make contact with the desired person.
• Grandiose: delusion of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity or believes himself/herself to be a famous person, claiming the actual person is an impostor or an impersonator.
• Jealous: delusion that the individual’s sexual partner is unfaithful when it is untrue. The patient may follow the partner, check text messages, emails, phone calls etc. in an attempt to find “evidence” of the infidelity.
• Persecutory: the belief that the person (or someone to whom the person is close) is being malevolently treated in some way. The patient may believe that he/she has been drugged, spied-on, harassed and so on and may seek “justice” by making police reports, taking court action or even acting violently.
• Somatic: delusions that the person has some physical defect or general medical condition
• Mixed: delusions with characteristics of more than one of the above types but with no one theme predominating.

None of these obviously fits religion or atheism. One might be religious and believe that they are unreasonably persecuted, but that’s because of a mental illness in addition to a religion. The bare fact of it is that modern psychiatry does not recognize either atheism or theism as a mental illness. But what about delusions in general. Do religious beliefs count as delusions?

Delusions were defined by Karl Jaspers as a belief with three criteria:

1. Certainty
2. Incorrigibility to evidence to the contrary
3. Impossibility of falsity of belief

Religious beliefs and atheist beliefs do not seem to fit this mold very well at all. Extremists might fit, but I’m concerned with religion in general and what it demands. Atheists rarely hold their view to be incorrigible to evidence or impossibility of their belief being false. That’s a generalization that I make anecdotally, but if one heads on over to the Friendly Atheist, you’ll find many atheists that do not hold their belief with certainty. So a sizable chunk of atheists are not delusional.

Now what about the counter part, theism and the demands of faith. One might find that faith requires one to believe without evidence, but that is almost never the case for most theists. Speaking from when I used to be a Christian, I didn’t believe blindly, I had the Bible for my evidence. And I think that it’s a fair description of most theists that they believe what they believe based upon some religious text to serve as evidence. Furthermore, I rarely find theists that hold their beliefs with absolute certainty. That’s the role of faith, that one doesn’t have certainty in one’s position. Faith fills in the gap that evidence leaves. One can criticize the ability for faith to make this inductive leap, but that doesn’t change the fact that in reality, very few people who believe in a deity believe with absolute certainty. Rather, it might be said that there was a bad inference made, but that’s a question for philosophy of science and epistemology, not of psychiatry and delusions.

And that brings me to the difference between what I’ve experienced as delusions and my previously held religious beliefs. My religious beliefs were sincerely held beliefs, but they were not incorrigible (as evidenced by my deconversion to atheism). I was sure about the beliefs being true, but only in the way that one believes that the sun will rise tomorrow. Faith acted as a sort of induction that resulted in belief much like regularities in nature provide the ground for induction to the existence of things like atoms.

My psychotic delusions are of a different beast. They do interpret evidence into a confabulated belief that resists any other evidence and instead reinterprets the evidence as supporting the delusion. But I can also recognize my delusion as a delusion and yet still not be able to shake it. That cognitive dissonance is something that I could not experience while holding religious beliefs. So the phenomenology in my experience is quite different. And there’s also a sort of ineffable difference between when I have a delusion and what my religious beliefs were. I can’t quite put it into words, but when one has experienced delusions, one can really point out that they are phenomenologically different from religious beliefs.

So that’s me throwing my hat into the ring of religion versus atheism. I think that neither qualifies as a mental illness and that it is an affront to the reality of mental illness to use the term so loosely. In general, it gets my blood boiling to hear the term mental illness used so cavalierly. Mental illness is a disease in the brain. Simply holding a sincere belief concerning atheism or theism and stubbornly refusing to change it does not count as a mental illness or a delusion.

And now I’m going to nap, either the zyprexa or the lithium is making me sleepy.

Philosophy and the Journey to Atheism

I guess I’ll share a little bit of how philosophy has influenced my life.

For background purposes, I go to a college that stresses analytic philosophy. This is a school of philosophy that grew out of mathematicians and logicians and stresses logical coherence and clarification of concepts, very much along the lines of Wittgenstein. There are, of course, other forms of analytic philosophy and there is no general form of it beyond the fact that it’s generally the philosophy of english speaking countries as opposed to continental philosophy which includes existentialism, deconstructionism, and others along those lines.

This stress on consistency and evidence in the use of clarification is what brought me to atheism. Above all else was the striving for consistency in the way that I view evidence and infer from it. By consistency I mean that I treat all similar bodies of evidence in a similar manner. In the case of other religions that I rejected, I noticed that I demanded a large body of evidence from them in order for me to ever believe them. Miracles could be explained in alternate naturalistic ways. Claims to prophethood is something that seems to be relatively common, so it’s not a claim that genuinely comes from actually being a prophet (since I thought there was only one prophet, Jesus). Quite simply, I rejected other faiths because I required a significant body of evidence to believe their claims, but then I noticed that I did not require the same amount from my own beliefs, despite the similar bodies of evidence.

I also noticed that it didn’t approach my common sense epistemology. If someone were to approach me with a book, in which it claims to be the truth in terms of claims about the afterlife, miracles, fantastic claims about history, I would require quite a bit of archeological evidence and some pretty powerful arguments within it about the truth of its claims. Just as I learned to do with any philosophical text. But for some reason, at the time, I noticed that I didn’t apply this scrutiny to the Bible. I treated it as exceptional, but I didn’t have an argument for why it is exceptional. I allowed for the possibility that it was, but I couldn’t find any arguments for why it was special.

Some of the special arguments were appeals to moral authorship. But philosophy generally rejects this with many good reasons. Ones that I couldn’t argue against. Another was biblical foreknowledge, but learning about history showed me that many ancient civilizations were very advanced, so it wasn’t unique. And over time, I began to believe that it wasn’t unique. Thus I became a relatively weak form of atheist, which is that I cannot decide between religions, so I would choose none of them.

And that was enough at the time, to simply find it nonunique so it isn’t a positive option above all others. In bayesian terms, the probability that it is right is no higher than any others, so no choice can be made.

I later came to apply this same bayesian analysis to the concept of gods in general. Where the characteristics and the number of gods could also not be shown to be more or less probable than alternative hypotheses. And then, faced with an alternative hypothesis of naturalism that was confirmed in a way that I could see, while the number of gods I could conceive of I could not see how they were directly supported over and above naturalism; I adopted a parsimony argument, that gods overcomplicated the evidence, that I should only support what is directly supported by observational evidence, which are naturalistic probabilities.

Philosophy influenced me at every step of the way by pointing out how to argue, different arguments, what constituted an argument, and a logical background for claims. The biggest contributor to my understanding of the world is definitely owed to David Hume, whose arguments against the existence of God are generally used even today by pop atheist books. Philosophy also stressed consistency as a primary goal as opposed to feelings. Combined with being bipolar, I now deemphasize feelings about things to a great degree since I can become delusional.

Now, working in philosophy of science, I realize that evidential support is incredibly complex and it’s reasonable to even doubt scientific accomplishments. Works by people like Nancy Cartwright and Bas van Fraassen, showed me how it’s difficult to even demonstrate the existence of hard to observe phenomena like atoms. So now I’m even more skeptical of the existence of a God since I have enough problems trying to argue for things.

And that’s my basic transition to atheism through philosophy’s influence. It’s relatively mild, without a lot of pomp and rejection. Just slow sober reflection and an emphasis on consistency along with reading philosophy. The combination of these made it very difficult to believe, and so I stopped. I guess you could call me more of an agnostic than an atheist, but I don’t care for labels. I behave as though there is no god, and that is enough. Beyond that is quibbling about semantics about my beliefs that I’d divine no discernible difference in my life. I guess I’m a pragmatist in that way, and a Wittgensteinian.

A beef I have with the new atheist movement

I have a beef with the new atheist movement. This is not to say that I’m on the side of people like Chris Mooney, who I think is just pandering away his beliefs to remain popular. And I’m not going to say that it’s the tone either. There are plenty of atheists who have a perfectly respectable tone, and to be stick up for one’s beliefs is something that all religions have done, so it’s perfectly reasonable that atheists should also stand up.

My beef with them is that their arguments can’t be taken seriously. I can barely read Richard Dawkins because he’s really just rehashing arguments made by David Hume, only in a less rigorous manner. Same with Christopher Hitchens. I usually put down their books after they essentially turn into a literary rant about either the problem of evil or that religion often makes some pretty far out claims.

Then there’s Sam Harris. Who thinks that science can pretty much provide a foundation for morality. Forget the derivation of is from ought that he neglects to argue against, all that his neural scans show is a reflection of current morals and current moral reasoning. Then he adds in a dash of utilitarianism and voila, he’s supposed to be a genius.

PZ Myers is also pretty bad in his arguments. Again, it’s the bad god + weird claims argument. He has some more, but it never goes anywhere further than simply ridicule.

The difficulty that I have with reading these books and authors is that they don’t take religious claims seriously and that there are serious arguments out there that are beyond the sophistication of the usual new atheist crowd’s knowledge base. Take for instance the fine tuning argument. It says that there are an infinite number (or at least a great number) of combinations that physical constants could take, but in our case the physical constants appear to fit just right for life.

Most arguments against this is that of the anthropic principle. That it this cannot be used as evidence since if they were not right, then we wouldn’t be around to observe these other constants. But this merely dismisses the point by saying “I don’t know, and neither can you” so the event doesn’t require any explanation. This is one way to go about it, but I’ll turn to Elliot Sober for another scenario similar to the fine tuning argument.

Enter the Firing Squad Scenario:

A prisoner is lined up in front of 12 marksmen to be shot. After firing 12 shots apiece, the prisoner is still alive and all 144 shots missed him. Now he remarks that this event does not require any explanation because if he was killed, then he wouldn’t be around to observe it. However, there is still something to be explained, why is it that he is still alive, standing in front of 12 marksmen. Two explanations can be given: 1) there was collusion and the marksmen all conspired to miss, 2) it was an accident that they all missed.

The explanation for this in probabilities is that the probability of a firing squad sparing a victim, given that the victim survives, is greater than the bare probability that the firing squad spares its victims. Thus, in the above case, the prisoner can indeed make the inference that there was collusion among the firing squad members to spare him. Looks like the anthropic principle does not work here! In fact, it appears to be the opposite since the victim can make the inference. So a simple dismissal using the anthropic principle is not fine grained enough to work in all instances. Hence it is not really the best argument out there. In arguing with someone, one must make sure that the principle argument that one uses can be generalized to other cases and still work.

However, using the probability form that we just saw up above; can we say that the probability of an intelligent designer existing given that the constants are right is greater than the bare probability of an intelligent designer existing? We cannot. The reason being is that Pr(intelligent designer exists) doesn’t have any data to provide a value for it. So the inequality that would allow us to make a choice: Pr(Intelligent designer exists | constants are right) > Pr(Intelligent designer exists), cannot be established. Through simple probabilities we can see that in the case of the fine tuning argument, there cannot be an inference made, while in the case of firing squad inference, we can say that there was collusion since we have data to back up Pr(Firing squads collude).

The argument is a little more involved, requires a little knowledge of probabilities, but it gets the inferences right, which is more than can be said by the bare anthropic principle. And this summarizes my beef with the new atheist movement: they ignore better arguments. This doesn’t necessarily mean that atheists win hands down, but if you’re going to make claims against the vast majority of people, at least get some better arguments in hand or else you’ll be dismissed by more intelligent people. This is especially important since most new atheists pride themselves on being more rational. If you’re going to be more rational, read some philosophy, not a biologist’s rehash of enlightenment materials.

 

References:

Sober, Eilliot http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/design%20argument%2011%202004.pdf

 

The Flow of Evidence in Atheism

One could write a book on the way evidence is related to atheism and theism, but today I’ll focus on likelihoodist relationships between observation and hypothesis.

Likelihoodism is an epistemological position that is comparative at its core as a probabilistic means of weighing evidence. But it’s quite different from it’s cousin, Bayesianism, in its way of understanding probabilities.

Kosher probabilities are values between and including 0 and 1, with 0 being no possibility, .5 being a 50-50 chance, and 1 being absolute certainty. Bayesianism is an attempt to provide objective probabilities to hypothesis through support by observation (there is also subjective Bayesianism, but that’s another story). To get an objective probability, one has a probability function: P, an hypothesis H, and observations O. The relationship between these two is given as P(H|O)=P(O|H)P(H)/P(O). Which reads as the probability of H given O is equal to the likelihood of O given H times the probability that H is true, over the probability of O occurring. This is a mathematical relationship that is very well grounded in set theory, so don’t get smart about its validity.

But Bayesianism runs into its problems. One of its famous problems is how to assign a value to P(H) without observation. Think of it this way, what is the probability that the general theory of relativity is true, sans observation? It’s tricky, likelihoodists don’t like it.

Instead, what they focus on is the objective relationship between an observation and its probability given an hypothesis; P(O|H). Thus, one looks at how probable it is that light will bend around stars, given GTR. This method also has its problems, but here is not the best place to explore epistemology at this point. If you want to learn more, check out this short paper by Elliott Sober: http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/BAYES%20handout%202010.pdf.

Likelihoodism also compares hypotheses differently than Bayesianism. Rather than having some absolute probability, one compares the likelihood of each observation based upon the hypothesis through a ratio: P(O|H1)/P(O|H2). If the ratio is greater than 1, then the one can say that the evidence favors H1, if lower than 1, then the evidence favors H2. This is super brief in its exposition, but hopefully you get the main thrust of it as a comparative method that weighs not which is true or false, but which one is better supported by evidence.

So then let’s look at miracles. If we look at some rough statistics from cancer.gov, we can take a fairly deadly cancer pancreatic cancer, which has a survival rate of 5%. Now let’s be generous and say that god intervenes in say 1 in a 100 times. That’s a pretty active god. We let H1 be that treatment worked, and H2 that god intervened, and finally O is that you survive. Our ratio is then 0.05/0.01 = 5. The naturalistic explanation has five times the support than the miracle based on. In other cancers, the evidential support is even greater, unless god intervenes more often in more curable cancers. In which case he’s kinda dickish.

However, what separates likelihoodism from the usual common sense epistemology is that in every survival case, H2 (the god hypothesis) is confirmed to some degree. The conceptual shift occurs not in saying that god is not confirmed, but that other theories are better confirmed. Thus, one bypasses the usual humdrum argument that atheists are simply ignoring the evidence for god’s existence. Here, the atheist can take the evidence as positive confirmation for god’s existence, but say that his non-existence is more strongly confirmed with the exact same evidence. Makes your head spin, yes, but that’s because of the failure of the uniqueness theorem (which says that a given body of evidence supports at most one proposition about that evidence). In doing so, it meets the theist half way, yes, their theories are confirmed, but that’s only half the story. With alternative hypotheses, there may be a better confirmed on in the bunch and that one is the one we should adopt. Theists aren’t necessarily making a bad inference, but they are making a bad comparison, which in this case is ignoring what the evidence can tell you.

But now we can go even further than this, we can also test if the hypothesis even makes a difference. To do this, we simply need to see that P(O|H)>P(O), that is, an hypothesis is favored if it makes the observation more likely than the observation of it happening alone. To set up something to test the efficacy of god, one could observe the survival rates of someone of another faith, set that as P(O) and then test whether a given religion H makes the survival rates increase. Or one could really find the efficacy of god in testing the survival rates of faith healing groups versus science. See, god hypotheses are testable!

A cursory look through google didn’t turn up any data on the first hypothesis, but faith healing is notoriously bad. Even intercessory prayer looked bad according to the outcomes by the STEP study. The failure of faith healing gives a strong evidence against P(O|H)>P(O). Whereas the STEP study shows that prayer doesn’t increase the observation of survival over the normal observation of survival. Look, real world testing of these hypotheses shows them to not to be false, but ill confirmed compared to alternative explanations. That is the important distinction that likelihoodism forces on us.

What makes liklihoodism an important tool of analysis is two fold. First is that certain claims about god are in fact testable, he’s not just some will o the wisp. Second, it breaks with the standard problem of evil argument in not looking at all the negative instances of god’s intervention, but allowing some positive instances to confirm it, but not as much as physicalist theories. This also makes them criticizable as irrational, not in lue of them making bad inferences (which allows us to sidestep definitions of good inference which is particularly difficult when uniqueness fails), but in ignoring rational alternatives.

Atheism and Dealing With Mental Illness

It’s a write off day for me, feeling tired and antisocial. But I feel compelled to write.

So I’ll write on my experience of my diagnosis with bipolar and atheism. It’s an issue that will probably come up again in later posts. Dealing with bipolar is not the first experience I’ve had with a major life crisis. When I was younger, I was chronically ill and had chronic migraines. Everyday I had a migraine. At the time, I was quite religious. It’s fascinating to me now about the different response I’ve had to being diagnosed with bipolar than I had with chronic migraines (I got better from that one).

When I was diagnosed with bipolar back in late January, it came as quite a shock. At the time I thought that I had an anxiety disorder and some depression, which most people get over. Bipolar means that you cope. But I’ve reacted quickly and have made some quick progress. But I’ve noticed that it’s peculiar to have no religious lens to look through when dealing with this particular diagnosis.

When I was younger, I believed that god had a plan for me, that I was special, and that I was loved. And that helped me cope to some degree. This time around, I didn’t have any of that to help me. But I’ve done better this time. Maybe it’s being older, but I think it’s also because I’m a lot less religious.

I’ll focus this time on just how I’ve coped without the “special plan” belief.

The belief that I used to hold was that god had a special plan for me. And while I didn’t know that plan, there was one. It comforted me because it made my diagnosis seem less negative. God would make sure that it turned out for the better. It felt great since I didn’t have to worry at all about the negative aspects of my life, god would take care of it for me.

I lack that belief now. So when I was diagnosed, I didn’t believe that it was part of a special plan, it was just a crap fact about my mind. It explained a lot about me, but that doesn’t really help ease the reality of the diagnosis. So what did I do? I accepted the fact as part of life. Just as I accepted the fact that I was going to have migraines everyday for the rest of my life.

But acceptance in this case was a completely different beast. When I was younger, I passively accepted it and tried to forget about it. I pushed my reality to the side as it was just an element in god’s bigger plan for me. This time, since there was no bigger plan, I had to be more active. I had to come up with creative solutions to a problem that I would have to face daily for the rest of my life.

Reality impressed itself on my life and it wasn’t going to go away, I had to fix it. If I wanted to get better, I couldn’t rely on god, I had to find the solutions on my own. I had to confront it. And that’s what I did. That need to fix something and the reassurance of my psychologist that it was manageable, along with the correct pharmaceuticals, gave me a bit of energy to learn more about the world that I lived in. These non religious ideas gave me more hope than I ever got from religion, and it was hope that gave me directions on how to fix the things I wanted to be rid of.

Looking back, if I had the same mindset that I did when I was younger, I might have died. My acceptance would have been too passive. I would have hoped to get better, but hope is not enough and is never a panacea for serious issues. Hope requires direction to be effective, otherwise it’s just wishful thinking. And while it might be said that one might benefit by figuring out “what god has in store for you”, that still leaves the passive airbrushing of reality. It still ignores the reality that something serious has happened and that requires some grave reflection. Without god, one can still be optimistic about the future and turn the diagnosis into something positive, but one cannot ignore the negative realities. To do so would be in denial. And that’s what “god’s plan” often results in, in forgetting the negative aspects.

In this denial, untempered religion is no different in this way than the “always think positively” groups. Instead of soberly reflecting on the facts, it just gives hope with no direction. The real help comes from elsewhere, through your own action and through the help of your support group. All the real gains you make are by assessing the details of reality that are unique to you. It is not helped through thinking happy thoughts. And this is a crucial problem I have with the god’s plan mentality. All the real gains you make are through other reality based psychology and analysis.

This is what makes me irritated at times. The gains that are made are through things beyond religion, they’re made through experimentally verified practices. They’re made through sober reflection of reality. To think of these things as god’s plan or to think positively about these things, that’s just to be in denial (as I was about migraines). Furthermore, it cheapens the hard work that psychiatrists and psychologists put into my life to be in denial or to think that this random undirected hope is what is actually helping. It demeans them as being subsidiary, rather than the primary reason that I got better. And that’s a real tragedy, to diminish their work as caring human beings.