Why We Believe Lies (a chapter from a half-finished book called The Stupid Switch)

Why is it that we believe lies?

There are various explanations. When I was young, I assumed that it was stupidity, but then I found out that some of the things I had believed were lies, so of course I instantly abandoned the stupidity hypothesis. Besides, there are so many clearly intelligent people who run around buying into so many blatantly stupid arguments. Something more must be at work. (And a good thing, too, because if it were just a matter of natural brainpower there wouldn’t be much we could do about it.) ...continue reading...

Barriers to Clear Thinking

The Church has traditionally given a few basic explanations, some of which go as back as far as Paul. The first is ignorance. “How can they believe,” asks Paul, “in Someone of whom they haven’t heard?” (Romans 10:14). For example, we can hardly expect undergraduate religion majors to be aware of the discovery of portions of 1 Timothy and of Mark’s gospel in Cave 7 of Qumran. Nor do we expect them to have enough of an understanding of the principles of papyrology to be able to see the glaring deficiencies in such desperately tendentious analyses as (if memory serves) Graham Stanton’s.[1] For that matter, since they are religion majors, we oughtn’t really expect them to have received any decent training in historical method at all, even to the point of reading a basic text such as David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies. It is therefore only to be expected that they will buy into some of the sillier doctrines that pass for scholarship in various seminaries and Departments of Religion. Assuming they are honest, a wider acquaintance with recent findings and some exposure to the methodologies of professional papyrologists, archaeologists, classicists and historians will do wonders.

But of course that’s only if they’re honest, which brings us to the second major cause of self-deception: good, old-fashioned sin. “They will gather around themselves teachers who will tell them what their itching ears wish to hear” (2 Timothy 4:24). We are naturally gifted at finding excuses to gratify our pride and our concupiscence. Aristotle’s definition of man as “the rational animal” may be virtually correct, but if we want the actual definition a far more apt description would be “the rationalizing animal.”[2]

Now in attributing much self-deception to ignorance and sinfulness, I doubt that I have said anything new to most Christian readers. Unfortunately many Christians, some of whom are active in evangelism, assume that these are the only two reasons. They therefore take their friends aside and explain their version of the truths of Christianity, assuming that mere ignorance has kept their friends outside of the fold. When many of those friends persist in their unbelief (or in their allegiance to the wrong Christian denomination), the evangelist leaps to the conclusion that the problem is sinful rebellion. I believe this to be a profound error.[3]

It is an error I myself have made, as those who remember me from my undergraduate days will no doubt readily attest. In those days I knew logic and theology pretty well, but I didn’t understand people at all. Plus I was an arrogant jerk. Fortunately, sixteen years of marriage, to a godly woman with tremendous natural powers of empathy fortified by a psychology degree from Rice, have had their effect (though I am still not much of a prospect for the priesthood or other counseling professions). But I think that before explaining where in general my younger self and others like that self have erred, I would like to start with a specific illustration.

The word feminist has acquired bad connotations, even among women who in most respects support the basic elements of the feminist agenda. The reason, of course, is that the term has been so polluted by the one or two percent of women who constitute the feminist lunatic fringe, that most reasonable women are no more willing to be associated with “feminists” than are most reasonable gun-totin' Texans to be associated with “the militia.” Well, Princeton had its fair share (which is still a small share, of course) of the sort of feminists who have ruined the term for the rest of the fair sex, and they used to drive me absolutely insane.[4]

But then, several years ago, I happened across a document whose authors are lost in the mist of my memory (at the time I didn’t expect ever to be writing any books about quarrels between disagreeing parties of lesbian feminists, so, regrettably, I didn’t keep the reference). For the benefit of those who are less than perfectly au courant with the hot topics of discussion within the lesbian community, I should perhaps explain that the advent of in vitro fertilization brought to the fore the question of whether lesbian couples should bear, as opposed to adopt, children. Many considered the new technology a boon of the first order (surely I needn’t explain why). But there were others, including the authors of this document, who were thoroughly opposed to the idea. These two (I think) women felt so strongly about it that they put together a long list of reasons that lesbian couples should not conceive. All but one of those reasons has long since departed from my mind, but that one burned itself into my memory in letters of fire.

Lesbian couples should not conceive, claimed the authors, because there was a fifty-fifty chance that the child would be a boy. And if it was a boy, they continued, “the odds are overwhelming, no matter what you do, that he will grow up to rape and abuse women.”[5]

To this day I can hardly even type the words without tears. The depth of the pain behind that statement – the emotional crippling that such a belief betrays, including the complete inability to have any sort of healthy relationship with half the human race – how can it even be imagined? What unspeakableness must have been visited on these two of God’s beloved, and on all those others who can find such a statement anything but grotesquely, nightmarishly absurd? How can one feel anything but bottomless pity?

At that moment feminism, even in its most outlandish and vitriolic forms, lost all power to enrage me. I owe an eternal debt to those women, for it was through them that God opened my eyes to the fact that there are literally millions of people in the world who believe stupid things not because those people are stupid, not because they are ignorant, not primarily because they are stubbornly rebellious against their God, but simply because they are in pain.

We are sinful people, some of us to the point of depravity, and so we hurt each other, sometimes unspeakably. For many of us, the lies we believe are the only things that make our pain tolerable. Any psychologist knows that to strip away a patient’s lies without first equipping the patient with the healing and strength needed to face the truth is cruel and potentially even life-threatening. When a lie has us enslaved, only the truth can set us free. But sometimes even the truth does not set us free. Sometimes it literally drives us to suicide.

We must understand that when we force some particular truth upon another person, we may be ripping the crutches away from a cripple. What happens when we go kick a crutch out of the hands of a man with a broken leg? He falls; he aggravates the injury; he gets himself another crutch; and he takes pains to make sure he has nothing to do with us in the future. If, on the other hand, we heal the broken leg so that he can walk without the crutch, the odds are pretty good he’ll throw away the crutch of his own accord. Until the leg is healed we can, if we wish, say that he is “enslaved to a crutch.” But it is not the crutch that enslaves him; it is the fracture in his leg. A depressing number of brutally aggressive Christian evangelists go around attacking cripples’ crutches without the slightest regard for their crippled limbs, and when the cripples retreat in rage and hostility the evangelists wag their heads over the cripples’ hardness of heart and solemnly shake the dust off their self-righteous sandals. Indeed, of the nine fruits of the spirit, I fear the one most neglected by American Christians is gentleness.[6]

Nor should we forget that most of us are numbered among the cripples, usually without realizing it ourselves. We know that God is the Great Physician, but perhaps we are not accustomed to bearing in mind that he is also the Great Psychiatrist. God knows, of course, every nook and cranny of our hearts, and He could at any time set us down and say, “Now, here are all the places you’re messed up.” But He is in no hurry, and He is perfectly well aware of the need to give us strength to bear the truth before giving us the truth. No doubt He could perform a miracle of instantaneous healing and give us all the strength in the world to bear all the truth in the world in no time flat. Plainly, however, He does not ordinarily choose to do so. He stands ever ready to give us the truth we need as soon as we can bear it – and not all our impatience can force Him to give us that truth a day before He deems it time.

As long as we live in a painful world, then, lies will be believed. When our credulity is a result of our pain, the way to wisdom will involve healing as much as, and in fact usually much more than, reason and education.

We turn finally to one more force that impels us to folly, namely, fear of the unknown. Each of us has certain core beliefs that we have built into the very heart of who we are. When a particular belief has nestled in so close to our heart that it is part of us, and then somebody attacks that belief, we do not react with curiosity or academic interest. When those beliefs are under attack, we ourselves are under attack, for those beliefs are part of who we are, and if we lose them, we cannot predict what traumatic changes we may undergo. Our response is therefore instinctively defensive. Now, what exactly that response looks like is different for different people. Some of us are overwhelmed by the urge to shout down the other person; others are enraged; others feel panic-stricken and want to leave the room; still others find themselves fighting back tears. You may feel physically ill; you may feel yourself gritting your teeth; you may find it hard to breath – whatever it is, you need to know the signs. (In my case, for example, whenever I suddenly find that my lower lip is quivering uncontrollably, I know one of my buttons has been pushed.)

We must be able to recognize when we have gone into defensive mode, for four critical reasons.

In the first place, when we are in that mode we are not seeking to understand alternative viewpoints or to evaluate the possibility that we are wrong – we are trying to fight off a threat. Unless we make a conscious and strenuous effort to force ourselves to come to terms with that possibility, unless we deliberately choose to drive ourselves to vulnerability, we will not change our minds.

In the second place, false core beliefs can be absolutely crippling. False core beliefs keep us in bondage to chronic sins, and they stand as barriers between us and the joy God longs to give us. When we defend false core beliefs, we reforge our own shackles.

In the third place, unquestionably some of our core beliefs are wrong.

But the fourth reason is the most subtle. A significant number of our core beliefs are things that we don’t even know we believe. In fact, it’s common for our core beliefs to be buried so deeply that, if asked, “Do you believe thus-and-such?” we would in all honesty respond, “No, of course not.” The day will probably arrive when suddenly, for no apparent reason, we find ourselves in the middle of a core-belief-defense reaction. When that happens, it is crucial to recognize the reaction for what it is, so that we can examine ourselves to uncover the lurking core belief that triggered the reaction.[7]

The battle to love the Lord our God with all our mind, then, is a battle against ignorance, a battle against sin, a battle against our wounds and heartaches, and a battle against some of our deepest fears. It is not a war for the faint of heart – but neither is it a war we can afford not to fight.

Why Should I Believe That?

“Always be prepared,” advised Peter, “to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”[8] Here are some suggestions you might try:

“Because it makes me feel better; it’s a crutch.” This is always a convincing one. Makes folks want to run right out and sign up for your belief. Or how about, “Because I’ve been conditioned to by the prejudices of my culture.”

Trying to be serious, I would say that we put forth such explanations all the time – but always as explanations for our opponents’ (presumably false) beliefs, rather than for our own, with one exception that I’ll come to in a moment. Such an “answer” is not an answer at all. It is an attack.

You might hear the first one, for example, when some Jesse Ventura wannabe is pronouncing Christianity a crutch for Christians, primarily because it makes him feel better to think there’s nothing really valid in all those inconvenient moral demands that Christianity makes. As for the second, the reason that conservatives believe that homosexuality is a sin, is because they have been brainwashed into believing it by a hate-filled, patriarchal, homophobic society – at least according to some theologians on the far left. One never hears those same theologians, however, observe that their belief that women have a “right” to be priests is much more easily related to the agenda and buzzwords of the late twentieth century secular American left than to any specifically Christian documents or traditions.

You see, other people indulge in wishful thinking, but not us. Other people’s opinions (especially the ones that disagree with us) are often the result of their cultural myopia; but our opinions are always based on the application of our clearly superior intellect to clear and indisputable evidence.

Let’s be serious here. Obviously, if we really want to convince somebody that our belief is true, then we give as our reason some variant of the statement, “I believe it because the facts show that it’s true.” Even if we’re making a cynical appeal to self-interest or cultural chauvinism, we usually whitewash the appeal to make it appear to be an argument from the facts. In short, we use logical arguments – maybe they’re good arguments; maybe they’re bad arguments; but logical arguments they are, just the same.

In one area, and one area only, do we hear people freely and even proudly admitting that they have chosen their beliefs either because those beliefs make them feel better or else because they’ve been culturally conditioned to believe them. And that is in the area of religion. When I tell you that I have worked out a set of religious beliefs that “works for me,” what I usually mean is, “These beliefs make me feel comfortable and at peace.” When a Star Trek character defends a seemingly foolish decision on the grounds that she is “being true to her culture,” rather than with any appeal to reason or to moral philosophy, she is behaving like a true modern-day American.

I referred some time ago to the collegiate agnostic’s mantra that “there is no absolute truth in religion,” which never in history ever kept such an agnostic from, say, demonstrating angrily in support of divestment from South Africa (or whatever the cause du jour might be), as though it were actually true to say that racism is evil. It is important to understand what that cliché is really intended to establish. In ordinary matters we would ridicule any people who thought that they could reasonably ignore facts in order to cling to beliefs just because they made them feel better. In ordinary matters we would not (unless we are particularly extreme academic leftists) feel that saying, “This is how my culture has taught me to believe,” could provide justification for continuing in a stupid or evil belief, such as that female circumcision is a good thing. In ordinary matters we would agree that the facts should determine our beliefs.

But when we say, “There is no absolute truth in religion,” what often we are really saying is, “There aren’t any facts available to determine my beliefs and therefore there’s nothing wrong with my choosing my beliefs to suit my emotions or my culture.” Of course saying, “I believe this because it feels good,” or, “I believe this because I’m Jewish,” isn’t nearly as convincing as, “I believe this because it is substantiated by the facts.” But the person who denies that truth has any place in religion is not trying to convince anybody. He’s just trying to keep people from trying to convince him. His mind is comfortably made up. The last thing he wants is to have potentially inconvenient facts come sailing in and throwing all those core beliefs into question.

On American college campuses this fiat by which religious thought is excused from the intellectual responsibility expected in all other kinds of thought, is so firmly established as to be considered self-evident and closed to further discussion. If you challenge it, you are by definition “narrow-minded.” The condition can reach truly comic dimensions. At Princeton I had a Jewish friend who converted to Christianity solely because historical evidence convinced her of Christianity’s truth. Some time later the school paper did an article on people who had undergone religious conversions as undergraduates, and they profiled Amy. She explained quite clearly that she was proud of her Jewish heritage and intended to raise her children to be equally proud of their Jewish ancestors, and that she had converted to Christianity solely because the evidence led her to a belief in the Resurrection, and hence to the conclusion that Jesus was not merely Jewish, but the Messiah as well. The next issue held a sputtering, full-page attack written by the president of Princeton’s B’nai B’rith, expressing at great length his disgust that Amy had turned her back on her heritage, spit on her family and culture, et cetera, et cetera. At no point in his entire rant did he ever show the slightest comprehension that Amy had made her decision about whether to believe that Jesus was the Messiah based on fact and evidence rather than on her racial identity. Apparently, he simply could not conceive of religious belief chosen on the basis of fact rather than cultural allegiance.

And yet I’m sure that if you had tried to tell that young gentleman that southeastern Oklahoma Christian fundamentalists’ belief in seven-day creation should be respected because they were honoring the traditions of their redneck culture, he would have written you off as insane. For that isn’t religion, where your choice ought to be determined by cultural allegiance. It’s science, where your choice ought to be determined by fact.

I contend that the only reason to think that intellectual laziness is more acceptable in religious matters than in any other arena, is wish-fulfillment. At least, if you want to justify intellectual laziness in matters religious, you can’t do it by saying, “There’s no absolute truth in religion.” You have to show that there’s no absolute truth in religion – by showing that the facts support your contention. In short, you have to show that it’s true that there’s no absolute truth in religion, in the sense that you run no serious risks when you choose to believe whatever your emotions or family want you to believe, without concerning yourself about whether the facts support you. And that takes you, once again, back into logical arguments. In the end, if you aren’t willing to take the trouble to use good arguments and discard bad ones, no matter what the topic – even if the topic is religion – then you are resigning yourself to a lifetime of being a fool.

So how can we tell bad arguments from good? In brief, by understanding the basic structure of a sound logical argument.

Logical Arguments

Logical arguments have four parts: the conclusion, which is what we’re trying to prove; the terms, which are the words and phrases we use to communicate our meaning; the premises, which are the facts that we and our opponent agree are true to begin with; and the logic, which is the connection between the premises and the conclusion. When an argument goes bad, it does so either because the terms are unclear and misleading, or because the premises are false, or because the logic is invalid. If the terms are unambiguous and the premises are true and the logic is valid then the conclusion has to be admitted.

I could have constructed the rest of this book so that there was a separate part of the book devoted to each of these three elements; indeed, that was the original plan, and that’s how I constructed the first class I taught on the subject. But looking back on that class and the lessons I learned from it, I’ve decided to take a very different tack.

In Part II we do investigate the quality of our reasoning, i.e., our logic. However, there is very little of what one would traditionally find in Logic 101. The truth is that most logical arguments are actually patently stupid arguments. We only find them convincing because something within us wants to be convinced, which is why when two people are arguing, each one thinks the other’s arguments are stupid – and usually they’re both right. Therefore Part II does not bother to explain the parts of a syllogism or why an undistributed middle term is a bad thing or what the Latin phrase argumentum ad baculam means.[9] Instead the focus is on what causes us to “flick the Stupid Switch” and suddenly lose our ability to tell that a particular argument is silly. It closes with presenting first a short-term and then a long-term approach to getting the Stupid Switch off and keeping it off.

It’s not that I don’t think Logic 101 isn’t important; maybe someday I’ll write a book about that, too. And you could write a book about clarity in terminology, and certainly somebody should write a book about choosing your authorities wisely and handling the appeal to authority rationally (especially in the context of religious thought where people claim to be getting their ideas from some authoritative Holy Writ). But if you have to choose between knowing the names of the fallacies and knowing how the Stupid Switch works, I think you’re much better off concentrating on the Stupid Switch first. Of course you’re best off to understand all the different aspects of clear thought. But the Stupid Switch is where you ought to start.

The bulk of the book, then, is about the Stupid Switch and how to get it under control. And most of that material is about how to get our own Stupid Switches turned off and kept off. At the end of the book, however, we’ll turn our attention to the very ticklish question of what to do about our friends’ and loved ones’ Stupid Switches. When people we love have their Stupid Switches well and truly engaged, what can we do about it?

Thus Part III takes a little while to look at the ministry of persuasion, and on that note we’ll close the book.

Notes

[1] My memory may be doing Mr. Stanton a disservice in telling me that certain silly arguments against the Marcan hypothesis for the 7Q5 fragment, including the hilarious one having to do with the width of the letters, come from his book Gospel Truth. It’s been a while, and I got rid of a bunch of my more arcane theological texts in the last move. (When you are a family of ten, no one person gets to put very much stuff in the moving van.) If Mr. Stanton is not the man in question, then I humbly apologize, and I will be grateful to any reader who can straighten me out on this point.

[2] Here I’m using the medieval meanings of virtual and actual, wherein virtual means roughly “when it’s working as designed” and actual means “how it’s working now.” To steal Peter Kreeft’s untoppable illustration (from A Summa of the Summa), a duck swimming on a pond is virtually flying, actually swimming and potentially roasted. (A duck, you see, is a “flying animal” even when it happens to have taken a break for a dip in the pond.)

[3] Specifically, an example of the fallacy of bifurcation, for those who have studied logic.

[4] Sorry about that “fair sex” bit; couldn’t resist.

[5] I genuinely believe the quotation is close to being accurately word-for-word, though I won’t be able to confirm it until some generous and alert reader directs me to its source.

[6] See Galatians 5:22-23.

[7] For this reason, I have chosen to take my examples from real theological and political controversies, and from time to time I have chosen to use deliberately provocative language. Please understand that I am not trying to change your mind. This book is not about what you believe. It’s about why you’ve come to believe it. Feel free to be a Democrat, a Republican, a Communist, a pew-jumping Pentecostal, a bells-and-smells Catholic, a practicing lesbian, a deer-hunting redneck – for the purposes of this book I do not care. So when I take a shot at some belief you hold dear, and you feel yourself rising up in fury, stop and take an inventory of your emotional and physical systems, say to yourself, “So this is how I act when a core belief is threatened,” and then keep on reading. I have my beliefs, of course, and it’s not like they’re a secret; I’ll explain them at exhausting length to anyone foolish enough to inquire about them. But for this book they are irrelevant. You can’t even be sure I hold all the positions I defend; in order to push everyone’s button at least once, I’ve had to drag myself all over the intellectual map, including into some places I wouldn’t ordinarily go. And remember that even if I prove the reason you’ve had for believing something is a silly reason, it doesn’t mean your belief is false; it’s perfectly possible to believe something true for a silly reason.

[8] 1 Peter 3:15.

[9] But since I’ve mentioned it, I’ll not be so unkind as to not tell you now. Examples of the argumentum ad baculam (“appeal to the big stick”) would be, “If you don’t say I’m right then I’ll beat you up,” or, only slightly less subtly, “Well, if you’re so smart, maybe I should just let you pay for your own college education.”