On Religion, Superstition, and the Purpose of SayNay.org

Seventy thousand years ago, human beings were practicing religious rituals in Southern Africa. The people of the middle stone age, in what is now Botswana, appear to have created an altar to provide sacrifices to a python. Full story here.

While the exact nature of their practices are still unknown and the origin and evolution of their rites are likely lost to history, we can safely assume that at no time did a snake-god approach an African shaman and outline the step-by-step instructions for performing the ritual in the cave. So, how do rituals like this form?

Early man had very few tools to understand his world. With limited technology and without written language, an individual's understanding of the world was limited to what was told to him by those in his clan and what he could observe and analyze for himself. With such a limited undertanding of the world around him, and a strong desire to understand more, coincidences could be misinterpreted as causation. A hunter kills a python, and the next day he suffers an accidental death. Maybe the people of the village make the connection the first time or maybe it takes a few similar coincidences, but without a broader understanding of the world, the people of that village could easily develop beliefs about the python.

This sort of superstition is, of course, not limited to Man's early history. Consider the wide array of sports-related superstition. Baseball pitchers who don't change their socks when they are on a winning streak and gamblers who won't watch a game they have bet on for fear of influencing the outcome. For another example, observe the behavior of pedestrians at crosswalks. Many of them seem to truly believe that pushing the crosswalk button over and over again will really make the signal change faster. It's easy to imagine how this superstition formed. Once or twice that person observed the button being pushed repeatedly, or tried it himself, just before the signal changed. But we know, because the people who make and configure the crosswalk signal systems tell us, that pressing the button once is sufficient, and pressing it more than once does nothing more that pressing it once.

These sort of superstitions and rituals are, of course, a long way from becoming religious ceremonies akin to making sacrifices to a god, but they do demonstrate how beliefs can form. For early humans, with limited tools to explain their universe, their beliefs were their best source of understanding.

Science, religion, and philosopy are all divisions of the same human search for knowledge, which has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years and may even predate Homo sapiens. These divisions, however, are much more modern, and have diverged to the point where their common origin is almost forgotten. In the days of early man, there were no rules governing the search for knowledge - there was only the search itself. So, the early Botswanan's can be forgiven for believing in a python god. They had no better explanation for the world, and if they had a competing explanation, they would not have the tools to properly decide which explanation was more appropriate.

This is no longer the case. We are no longer at the mercy of our shamans' explanations of natural phenomena. Our understanding of the universe is unimaginably larger than that of the ancient python worshippers. We now have the tools, in the form of the scientific process, to test explanations for validity. But, many continue to eschew the modern methods of science and reason in favor of the ancient methods of superstition. This has created a conflict between those who follow the rules of rational, empirical, scientific thought and those who follow superstitious faiths.

In recent times, the irrational side of the conflict has adopted some of the language of science and begun to present what they consider "evidence" for their side and against the other. This evidence is usually not valid science and rarely holds up to close scrutiny, but it is spread and repeated as if it was scientific.

The internet has provided on open forum for this debate and, unfortunately, helped disseminate the bad science presented as "evidence" against many scientifically accepted facts and theories. SayNay.org is a resource for the other side. We will provide the valid science that counters the common (and not so common) arguments raised by the followers of superstition. We believe that it does not require advanced science education to grasp scientific concepts and we will attempt to make the science as accessible as possible.

And we will try to keep our posts shorter than this one.