Why do normal people believe ridiculous things?
Why, indeed, do normal people
believe ridiculous things? We have heard much from John Loftus about the OTF –
the Outsider Test for Faith – which essentially illustrates that religion is a
(geographical) accident of birth. It claims that if believers used the same
critical powers they use to assess, and dismiss, other religions and their
claims, then they are obliged to turn those critical faculties on their own. If
they did, John would claim, then they would surely end up dismissing the claims
of their own religion (this is a simplistic view of the OTF, no doubt).
What is interesting to me here is
not so much the fact that people do
special plead their own religion in this way (though that is incredibly
interesting and important in itself), but how this comes about. I will put
forward a theory which is fairly well accepted anecdotally, and see what you
think. I will use an example which I experienced the other night which should
show the theory with clarity.
So the other night, at an
informal philosophy group meeting, one new member of our group professed to
being a Christian (of sorts). She believed, it turned out, in the biblical
accounts of Noah’s Ark.
Before I continue, I am going to look at Noah’s Flood critically in order to
show that it can easily be dismissed with the sort of fairly average critical
abilities we use every day to assess and delineate the ridiculous from the
plausible:
1) Omni-God did it because we were a sinful world. We
still are; therefore, it didn't work.
2) The account is a reworking of Tablet XI of the
Gilgamesh, written some 1000 years before the Bible. Some verses are verbatim,
or close to.
3) If the deluge destroyed all, why do we have the
writings and journals of people before, during and after the deluge?
4) There is internal contradiction from the spliced
accounts – 2 of each or 7?
5) 8 people looking after the world’s biggest zoo is
ridiculous.
6) The ark is physically bigger than a wooden vessel can
be made, apparently by 50%.
7) Clearly the gathering of all the animals is impossible
- micro-organisisms, polar bears, penguins, condors, glow-worms (how did they
get there?)
8) Ark 's
reported dimensions would have to be considerably larger to fit the animals.
9) Population of 8 could not rebound in the fashion
claimed. Simply not possible.
10) Rainfall
would have to be 6 inches per minute. Again, not possible. A category 5
hurricane gives 6 inches per hour which is impossible to sustain over 40 days.
11) The
weight of the water would have disastrous consequences on the earth's crust,
emitting noxious gases and eruptions, leading to potentially, a boiling sea! In
all probability, it would have imploded in some way.
12) There
is no geological evidence for any of this.
13) There
are reefs that have been undisturbed in the world for 100,000 years. These
would have been crushed and destroyed. They were not.
14) Lots
more evidence of fossil, radiometrics and isotopes etc. mean that the flood
clearly never happened.
15) How
the hell did Noah actually get all the animals on the ark without them trying
to eat each other / the family etc?
16) Asexual
animals and hermaphrodites not accounted for
17) Ventilation
/ food / faeces problems on ark
18) Carnivores?
19) DNA
pool? no trace of this through DNA analysis (ie we know we came from Africa )
20) All
sea fish would have died from influx of fresh water.
21) All
plants that do not rely on the seeds of Noah to survive would die. There are
many plants that reproduce in many ways other than seeds.
22) Explaining
it away as a local flood is contradictory to genesis, and would also not kill
all the humans who were so evil. Liquids find their own level, and so a local
flood of that magnitude and description is physically impossible.
I could go on (I have a list
about the flood as long as my arm) – you get the idea.
So we have a situation where at
least some, possibly many, Christians believe the flood myth to be factually
true. Why is this? Why and how do they fall short of fulfilling the OTF? The
arguments here are hardly incredibly in depth or out-of reach to the average
individual. Getting all of the animals of the world to the ark is enough to
dismiss it.
There are two reasons for this:
1)
they do not question such claims
2) they do question the claims, but settle for siding with
the more embedded, less consequential claim for their worldview, due to
cognitive dissonance.
Both of these phenomena are as a
result of childhood education, of cultural memories as I will show.
As anyone who works in education
can tell you, children are gullible. I have stood in front of thirty 10 year-old
children and have told them, in all seriousness, that I am the most intelligent
person in the world. They believed me unquestioningly. It was scary. They
actually thought I knew everything there is to know.
So we have a situation where,
from birth up through all their formative years, children, both at home and at
(certain) schools, are fed cultural myths such as Noah’s Flood as factual
stories. The problem here is critical, terminal often. What is happening is
that children are fed improbable and implausible stories before they are taught
how to rationalise and how to sort the implausible from the plausible, the
patently ridiculous from the scientifically verified. These children are at the
most educationally vulnerable point in their lives. And who are the people they
trust the most? Who are the elders in their lives whose truths they take on
unquestioningly? Their parents and grandparents, and their teachers and
schools. The children have no hope of being able to decipher whether such truth
claims (as in Noah’s Flood) are probable or not. They don’t even think to question such claims.
It is only after these cultural
memories are embedded that children learn about life, about science, about how
to tell a lie from a truth, about the notion that you can’t trust everyone,
even those close to you.
Forward-wind five, ten, fifteen,
twenty years and to a lady in a pub talking philosophy and religion. I say to
her, “Do you believe in the flood myth of the Chinese [where I explain such
claims] or the creation myths of the Aborigines [likewise]?”
Of course, the answer is an
almost derisory “no”.
“Why? Why the special pleading
for your Christian myth? I can personally see no difference between the two.”
I explain many of the above
points to which she says, “Oh, I didn’t realise” or some such similar apology.
When asked why she believed that myth
over the others, she had no answer, and realised that. She left that night with
a few more questions than she came with. What was doubly amazing is that she
claimed not to have read the Bible for many years since it had been “shoved
down her throat” as an adolescent. So here we have a “Christian” believing wild
myths without even properly understanding the Bible, and at the same time
dismissing, out of hand, other very similar claims.
The point is, is that people often
don’t question received stories told
as fact from their childhood. They use the future critical faculties they pick
up on other religions, but as the OTF argument goes, they do not apply them to
their own embedded, culturally inherited stories. These myths, whether Noah,
the 10 plagues, the Genesis Creation, the Tower of Babel or Matthew 27, bypass
the vetting process by point of fact of being embedded before the process was
learnt. It is like a computer with viruses which eventually gets a virus
scanner. But the virus scanner can only pick up new viruses which come onto the
system, rather than already existing ones. Those pre-existing viruses last the
life of the computer. Unless it has a motherboard break-down, goes to the shop,
and gets refitted with new, decent software. In short, it has a mid-life
crisis.
The second option is also
prevalent. Many Christians do learn to be critical and do apply that vetting
process to their embedded learning. However, cognitive dissonance means that
the disharmony of having an embedded story and associated worldview with also
having evidence against both of these triggers procedures in the mind which
seek to harmonise these conflicting beliefs.
What happens, of course, as we
all know, is that the stronger, more desired belief wins out. Not on account of
the strength of the evidence, mind you, but on account of the desire for it to
be true. The theist ends up discounting the evidence out of hand, or creating
wildly ad hoc reasons as to how the evidence can fit in with so-called biblical
“facts”. I have been involved in such discussions with theists who offer the
most incredible harmonisations and reasons as to how the flood myth could be
true. All they do is destroy their epistemological credibility whilst producing
some of the most amusing mental contortions known to intelligent man.
Obviously, there are difficult
questions for the theist who actually discounts such myths (as symbolic or
similar). It is a potentially slippery slope as to discerning what is myth,
what is allegory and what actually happened in the Bible.
This childhood indoctrination
(since that is what it is), a theist might respond, is merely a genetic
fallacy. By knowing how something comes about, it does not necessarily discount
its truth value. No, not necessarily. But it does illustrate double standards,
and it does illustrate how the case for the historicity of such accounts is
built on very shaky cognitive foundations.
And it does tell us why normal
people believe ridicuolous things.
This post was written by Jonathan MS Pearce
This post was written by Jonathan MS Pearce
1 comments:
What do you suppose separates those of us who realized as kids that we didn't really buy into the religious beliefs of our parents and the culture we were born into, from those who persist through their adult lives in believing nonsense in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? How can so many lack the level of introspection it takes to think about these things and consider the plausibility, or lack thereof, of the myths? Why did the indoctrination not take hold with some of us? Perhaps the indoctrination wasn't thorough enough. In my own case, my mother is religious and tried to raise me to be, but my father showed little interest, and though the society in which I was raised is ostensibly christian, it is secular and religion doesn't have as high a profile as in some other areas. It is all around us nevertheless, and those of us who are openly atheistic remain a minority.
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