I believe in reincarnation. I believe in near-death experiences, and in an “afterlife.” I believe in God. I believe in spirits. I believe in telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance. I believe in the power of intuition. I believe that love is a major force in the universe. I keep an open mind about UFOs and Bigfoot and psychic healing.

Now, if you’re anything like me, after reading these statements you’d be thinking, “Boy, this guy’s wiped. I can’t believe he’s at Stanford.” You’d judge me as really gullible, and probably with a lot of wishy-washy ideas in his head like, “Love is the only thing that matters.” (Which may be true, by the way, depending on how you interpret that statement.) So I should probably qualify all of the above with this: I also believe in scientific advances, in technological innovation, in reading between the lines and not taking things at face value. I believe that the Christian God is a construct of human minds, that near-death experiences are heavily influenced by one’s religious belief system, that intuition can be faulty, that UFOs and Bigfoot and psychic healing probably aren’t real in the sense that popular culture understands them, that a lot of people get their money taken by frauds, and that selfishness, hatred, and bureaucracy are also major forces in our human societies. (Why those three? I don’t know, I just picked them at random. But chances are they are three of the Nine Hells.)

The difference between my beliefs, and anyone else’s beliefs, is simply that: The beliefs themselves. From those spring the idea that something is true and something else is not, that a certain concept has far more value than another. Beliefs do not exist in a vacuum; they’re supported by data and personal experience. Everyone is an amateur scientist, with theories and experiments to back up their hypotheses.

The difficulty is defining what is real and what passes as evidence. Therein lies the crucial bias. If one believes, with no evidence to back that claim, that reality consists of nothing but what can be sensed — what one can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste — then one will be prejudiced against idea to the contrary. Thus, it’s almost always the case that, the burden of proof is on those with conflicting beliefs. Problem is, how do you prove an intangible by tangible means?

Lest you think I’m grasping at straws here, let me point to a legitimate scientific field I’m learning about right now in a Human Biology class: paleoanthropology. What paleoanthropologists do is study old skeletons, artifacts, etc. to try to determine what our ancestors were like and what they did. They have no direct evidence for claims like, “Early humans were primarily scavengers.” Everything has to be deduced from haphazardly thrown millennia-old leftovers of our forebears, and all too often the fossil record is frustratingly scant. Yet popular culture embraces the idea of the Neanderthal, of the early hunter-gatherer, of the idea that we descended from apes (the idiotic ultraconservative Christians in my home state of Kansas notwithstanding — and yes, I am aware of my apparent hypocrisy, but honestly, they’re living with a genuinely obsolete belief, in my opinion!).

Generalize this to any set of conflicting belief systems. Wherever there is ambiguity in a belief system, that system is ripe for exploitation and criticism by opposing beliefs. Western medicine, for example, is full of holes. Miracles and NDEs notwithstanding, what explains mundane findings like the discovery that acupuncture points actually exist in a scientifically verifiable way?

Criticism and exploration of multiple possibilities are key in any healthy, growing belief system. But some beliefs get overprotected and undercriticized. Such as the assumption that we live only one life; the assumption that telepathy is rare; the assumption that dreams are nothing more than randomly firing neurons. A common piece of evidence for telepathy or precognition, for instance, is the fact that many people have gotten a call from a friend just as they were thinking about that person. This example is heavily criticized by skeptics because it’s a random occurrence: How many times have you thought about someone and not had them call you? A quite valid argument, in my opinion. But what if you were dreaming about someone in a specific situation, and later they told you about that situation? Or what if you dreamed of an event that had not happened yet, and it came true?

Hmm … Maybe I’m taking this all too far. I’m arguing with ghosts here. But my point is not to argue; it’s to ask that those who hold certain assumptions which they’ve never questioned to question those assumptions. Those who dismiss the paranormal are too often dismissing certain naive believers, and specific shallow ideas. Go deeper. Pretend for an instant that reincarnation, telepathy, and the afterlife exist not in a vacuum, not just as floaters in an otherwise rational world, but within a system in which it does make rational sense. Extend these ideas that courtesy, at least; consider it an exercise. It may not rock your world … But it might just give it a little nudge.