This article is titled No Belief by Robert Anton Wilson.

No Belief.

This remark was made in these very words by John Gribbon,

physics editor of New Science magazine in a BBC TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers.

It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic Church that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must believe something or other.

That if one is not a Theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist.

And if one does not think capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in socialism.

And if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not X, or the reverse of X.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any

sort or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes the less there is left to think about

and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything

and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards,

where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbon and the majority of physicists today, and it is known in physics as the Copenhagen interpretation, because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Neels Boer and his coworkers between

1926 and 1928. The Copenhagen interpretation is sometimes called model

agnosticism and says that any grid we use to organize our

experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused

with the world itself.

Albert Kervitzky tried to popularize this outside physics

with the slogan,

The map is not the territory.

Alan Watt, a talented Oriental philosopher, restated it more vividly as

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