I think it’s fair to say that at some point an investigating skeptic has to pose the question, “Why did you believe that?” It’s a fair question and should be asked in an honest and respectful tone: understanding why someone interpreted some phenomena in the way they did can be crucial in solving the mystery. After all, our beliefs shape what we expect to see. I think it’s also fair to say that people who believe they’ve experienced something paranormal or supernatural believe that they have good reasons for believing, but what does it really mean to have good reasons to believe something, and how can we best determine whether those reasons are, in fact, good? Let’s consider a recent case. 

According to several news sites, the villagers of Vennelavalasa entered a self-imposed lockdown on April 18 that lasted for eight days, believing that several villagers had died as the result of either evil spirits, witches, or flesh-eating demons known as Pishacha. Measures were taken after the advice of an “ijjodu,” or sorcerer, claimed the “mysterious” deaths of four villagers in a single month were the acts of an “evil spirit” plaguing the village. India Today notes that “According to the locals, some people in the village have been suffering from fever for the last few days,” making the deaths a little less mysterious in my opinion. 

One of the villagers, Savara Easwararao, was quoted by The New Indian Express as explaining “We are supposed to perform special rituals in our village on New Moon days as per our traditions and customs. However, they were not being held for the past few years. At least four persons died in our village in the past one month. They did not have any health issues. We suspect that some evil spirit might be haunting the village.” A villager named Parthasarthy, however, told Asia News International “We got the witches from Vijaynagaram village. During Corona time we locked ourselves to stay safe. In a similar way, we locked the village now to get rid of evil spirits.” India Today reports that the village elders of Vennelavalasa consulted with priests from the neighboring state of Odisha and the Vizianagaram district, deciding that a lockdown of the village was called for; the road leading to the village was closed and fences erected to prevent entry. The government-run school and Anganwadi (a type of rural child care center) were closed because outsiders were forbidden to enter. Additionally, at the instruction of the priests, “lemons were planted in four directions of the village.” 

Local authorities were caught off guard by the lockdown and alarmed by the refusal of villagers to allow entry for government workers. Srikakulum Superintendent of Police GR Radhika said “The villagers performed some rituals for two days and locked themselves inside the village. They restricted themselves from going outside of the village till they performed the rituals and said it was mandatory,” and she told Asia News International “We went to the village and provided counselling to the villagers. We have warned them against engaging in such superstitions.” Krishna Prasad, the Sarubujjili police sub-inspector, visited the village on Tuesday, April 19, and explained “We are not against their customs and traditions. But preventing outsiders, especially government officials, from entering the village is an offence. I hope they will soon abjure such superstitions.” New Indian Express claims Prasad was responsible for negotiating the reopening of the secretariat and the school the next day. 

The villagers of Vennelavalasa certainly believed they had good reasons for doing what they did. The villagers who died were otherwise healthy with no apparent problems, and given the cultural and religious context informing what the villagers assume to be true, wasn’t it reasonable for them to believe that evil spirits were responsible even if it wasn’t the case? We can see the line of reasoning at work when Savara claims that because the villagers hadn’t been performing their New Moon rituals for the past several years, therefore, evil spirits had come to haunt their village. If incurring the wrath of evil spirits is a consequence of not performing the rituals, then Savara had good reason to believe that evil spirits were responsible. Right? 

We must be careful in what sense we are using words such as “rational” or “reasonable.” It’s not uncommon for these words to be used synonymously with one another and used interchangeably with “logical,” but depending on how they’re used they can mean very different things. Beliefs may be reasonable in the sense of “being in accordance with reason,” but they may also be reasonable in the sense of being “based on or using good judgment.” If we understand “being in accordance with reason” to mean logical, then a belief is based on a conclusion derived from premises and is logical if and only if the conclusion derives from the premises. If I believe in z, it is because z necessarily proceeds from x and y. It doesn’t matter whether x and y actually are true; logic does not dictate what is true or false, merely, what would have to be the case for the conclusion to be valid. However, if we understand “based on or using good judgment” to mean that someone has good reasons, then we’re no longer concerned just with whether or not the conclusion follows from the premises, we’re concerned with whether or not we have good reasons for accepting the premises in the first place.

Superstitious beliefs are usually considered to be irrational because there is no evident causal connection between the outcome and the actions that are believed to magically influence that outcome. Superstitious beliefs are maintained often for personal or cultural reasons; they are accepted as givens and resistant to interrogation or change. If we think about it logically, the proposition “I believe x is true” is not the same as saying “I have good reasons for believing x is true.” In the case of the villagers of Vennelavalasa, simply believing evil spirits exist because it’s part of their culture or religion would not be a good reason for believing evil spirits exist. I’m not saying that’s the justification the villagers gave; I’m merely saying that if that was their reason, it wouldn’t be a good one.

A belief such as evil spirits being responsible for making people sick entails making an empirical claim: that is, based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. Empirical claims require evidence, not just theoretical reasoning, for justification. Because empirical claims are claims made about the real world, drawing the wrong conclusions based on our beliefs can have serious consequences. In this case, it just happened to be the case that the actions the villagers took lined up with good medical practice. What if the priests had called for the sick to be exiled from the village, a practice common in ancient times for conditions such as leprosy? Or what if the priests had ordered the sick be stoned, burned, or hanged? What if the villagers were sick, but not dead yet? If evil spirits weren’t really to blame, or if the ritual practices the other villagers engaged in to drive away the evil spirits didn’t work, the sick villagers would still die. With stakes as high as that, we really want to have good reasons for believing the things we do.

So, in this case, how would we determine whether we had good reasons for believing evil spirits cause illness? What we are looking for is epistemic justification (from the Greek word for knowledge episteme) for this belief. Not surprisingly, epistemic justification is a contentious issue among philosophers; there is no consensus about what it means to justifiably believe something. With respect to science, there are four models for establishing epistemic justification: induction, abduction, Bayesianism, and the Hypothetico-Deductive method. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, and discussing each in any detail would be an article all its own. What all methods have in common is that any belief that entails empirical claims must be subject to empirical testing, revision, and—if need be—rejection. Scientific beliefs, regardless of how they are reached, are provisional models for understanding the world, not the final and unalterable word on any matter.

Returning to our example with the villagers of Vennelavalasa, because they were making an empirical claim (i.e., that evil spirits had caused the deaths of four villagers) that claim should’ve been tested empirically before being accepted as provisionally true, not accepted as a matter of faith or even likelihood. How did they know that evil spirits exist in the first place? How did they know the evil spirits were responsible for illness in this case and not a biological pathogen? How could they have tested their claim? Even if it was the case that the villagers who died were previously healthy, and even if it was the case that doctors could not discern a cause of death, it still wouldn’t mean that evil spirits were responsible. It may have been logical for the villagers to conclude this, they may have had reasons for doing so, but their reasons were not good ones if we accept science as the way of knowing best suited to answering questions of an empirical nature. 

Scientific knowledge means having belief based on both reason and empirical evidence. Beliefs of an empirical nature cannot be justified solely on reason alone; we must demonstrate, consistently and reliably, that our conclusions are not false. As Stuart Vyse, behavioral scientist, fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and author of the book The Uses of Delusion, why it’s not always rational to be rational, explained “What we want is to be both rational and successful. Achieving our goals and survival are the ultimate tests.” Rationality, logical consistency, is just one criterion by which we should evaluate empirical beliefs, but if we want to know whether empirical beliefs are true or not, if we understand truth to mean some correspondence to objective reality, then the rigorous methodology of the scientific method, however we understand that, seems our best bet. 

Source: 

Vyse, Stuart. April 23, 2022. Personal correspondence.