I look up and see a cloud whose outline looks like a rabbit. Another cloud looks like it could be Mt Rushmore. Yesterday, I was looking at a bathroom tile, and I could have sworn it depicted Lt. Worf from Star Trek. That’s pareidolia – the mind imposing a particular pattern on noise.
Apophenia is a related phenomenon that more often occurs among people who have severe mental illness – schizophrenia and related conditions. A person with apophenia experiences misinterpretations of ordinary sensory inputs rendering those inputs as delusions. These tend to be self-referential.
For the rest of us, the most common form of misinterpretation is confirmation bias – accepting information that seems to confirm what we already believe and simply ignoring information that contradicts those beliefs.
Those who know me know that I am a secular humanist whose spirituality is a wonder in the Universe, Nature, Science, and Math. I subscribe to no religion. I do not follow Jesus Christ, Mohamed, or any other religious figure. And I find it offensive that some of the faithful think that I am lost or misguided because of that. Such sentiments are condescending at best and insulting at worst.
Today, I read a FB post that declared that because a class of glycoproteins called laminins have a cruciate structure that this is somehow evidence of the divine – Jesus Christ, specifically. Laminin molecules are essential for the formation of basement membranes – a scaffolding outside cells that holds everything together. Laminins occur in all advanced living things. If laminins declare the glory of Jesus Christ, does that mean that my cats need to accept him as their savior – asking for a non-believer?
Later, another FB post in my feed insisted that life begins at the moment of conception because the fertilized egg releases a certain kind of light. Okay, let’s stop here. When a sperm fertilizes an egg, certain biochemical processes are initiated. These may indeed change the optical properties of the egg as new proteins are manufactured inside the egg. That’s not the same as producing light. The visual interpretation fails to consider that we can see the phenomenon of fertilization only because it is being illuminated/trans-illuminated by an external light source that is part of the micro-camera used to record the event.
Science is not a fantasy. It is an honest attempt to understand the nature of reality. One can’t go sifting through science facts to find things that one can interpret in a way that confirms one’s religious beliefs or other preconceived notions. In fact, the purpose of the scientific method is to disprove our established notions – preconceived or otherwise. Science is constantly trying to challenge what we think is true in order to gain a still deeper understanding of Nature.
So, if you are a believer, good for you. I respect your faith in the unprovable, but please don’t prostitute science to confirm your beliefs. That, in my view, is arrogant and disrespectful of the divine. Only committing murder in the name of Jesus or Mohamed or any other religious figure would be worse.
Oh, wait!