Imagine that you have just boarded a flight and occupied your seat beside your co-passenger. You can feel that your fellow passenger is really anxious and his anxiousness getting worse with every passing moment. The plane has not even taken off yet.
You asked him in concern, ‘Sir, is everything OK?’.
He did even not bother to reply you and you started looking out the window as a means of minding your own business. After a while, he slowly mumbled the words ‘Planes crash now and then! This plane might crash. We won’t land safely!’. You understood clearly that he is making up stuff in his mind and told him reassuringly, “Well, everything about this plane has been tested and verified by professionals, So don’t worry. We are going to have a safe trip.”
He asked, “How do you know for sure?”
You said, “I am not sure, but lets say that 1 plane out of ten billion planes crashes and so statistically it is less likely that it crashes!”
He asked, ” What makes you believe that this plane is not that one in the billionth?”
You have no real answer for this question, and started wondering “Maybe it is a good thing that we have the ability to believe in whatever we want to!”. By that point you started looking for the air hostess to request for a change of seat. You realized that sometimes the most rational thing a human can do is to have a little faith in the eventual good.
The point of this post is not to make you believe in God or in some Zingo despite the lack of evidence. It is simply to highlight the truth that as humans we are not as evidence based as we believe ourselves to be. We believe in what we want to believe to make the reality more bearable for us. Sometimes if you do not believe/hope against all the odds that eventually everything is going to be alright, you are making your life a living nightmare.
Chaitanya 