Having made a study for over a decade about the shortcomings of people’s cognitive habits, it’s an obvious question: How does that play out when it comes to religion? Do people tend to make the standard errors in thinking on religious topics, too? Or do they somehow tend to do better when it comes to religion? Or worse?
Well, I can tell you this much so far: They don’t tend to do better when it comes to religion than they do in their casual daily reasoning about secular things. This much, I can demonstrate by simply walking through the things they publish and examining the numbers and types of errors made. But more troubling still is this: They may actually tend to do worse when it comes to religion, precisely because the way that so many practice their religion, when religious topics arise, they’re not actually thinking about it at all, but are merely reciting memorized sayings to themselves. That’s a different process from thinking. It’s largely a conditioned response—a trained habit: When this comes up, say that to yourself. When this question arises, tell yourself that answer. When someone makes this observation, you answer with this other observation. When someone mentions this life problem, you recite the trite saying we’re also supposed to say to ourselves in response to it.
Again, this kind of mental activity is not thinking really, but a shortcut that cognitive scientists generally refer to as heuristics. As it turns out, there’s other stuff you can do with your mind–other than actual thinking—other than posing problems and analyzing how things are and examining potential interpretations of a situation, etc. These kinds of things do require thinking (which requires slow and deliberate, high-energy-burn mental processes), whereas other types of mental activity I’m talking about can be done almost instantaneously, and do not require any high-energy burn or original work in the mind.
When it comes to religion, my observation is that for a great many, they are so deeply conditioned in what to believe—in how to answer this question—or in how to reply to that statement—or in what do say to yourself or someone else when this or that happens—that relatively few have developed a habit of doing actual algorithmic and reflective thinking about things for themselves. Rather–and this is not good news–they tend to reply with these heuristic responses that are instantaneous shortcuts to thinking, and that don’t require more than a second of mental attention. It’s about as close to mindlessness as one can get for an activity that happens in the mind.
Now, let me stop right here to state for the record that the systems in our brain that carry out these heuristic shortcuts were designed by none other than God himself! They are not there as the result of some mental deformity. Nor are they there as the result of some curse on mankind at the event commonly referred to as “The Fall”. No, they are part of God’s wonderful design for the human mind. They are not the whole of that design, mind you, but only part of it. And therein lies the problem.
The rest of our mental faculties—those “slow” processes of algorithmic and reflective thinking that deal with analysis and problem solving and executive function and diligent, evidence/weighing decision making—these faculties are quite underdeveloped in most of us, as in our culture at large. The individual tends toward “cognitive miserliness”, where the will is lacking to “spend” the energy (do the work) necessary to get good at such thinking. And meanwhile, living in a society made up of a high number of such cognitive misers doesn’t help us to rise above it ourselves. When you live in a heuristics-rich/thinking-poor society, any good and robust thinking you end up doing is likely to be done despite the habits of those around you, and not because of them.
In a religion such as we can discern from the Bible texts, you have an all-wise, all-knowing God whose moral and cognitive excellence inspires humans to think and operate on a higher level. The excellence of God inspires the human (potentially) to be more like his Creator–to make more of himself by trying–to make better and fuller use of the faculties he was given by the nature of what kind of being he was created to be.
But what should we expect to see in a religious camp that is not duly impressed with the high cognitive/moral example of God? Would we expect to see many members rising above the dull societal average for thinking and morality in order to be more like a God that does not impress them much?
I would not.
And isn’t that what we tend to see across the churches, generally speaking?
I think it is.
As I write this, I have in mind a recent post about being thrust into the spotlight at jury duty. (I wish you’d take a couple of minutes to read it now.) It’s about how most of us don’t deliberately make much of ourselves cognitively, and about how interesting it is when we’re suddenly on the hot seat with important questions being put to us.
This happens in religion, too. Having never been trained in the best practices of thinking and philosophy, in religion, we can find ourselves in conversations that are “above our pay grade”, so to speak—discussing topics we don’t know much about. But even so, if we’re good at self-observation (which is slightly harder than observing others accurately), we may well catch ourselves merely saying stuff—not because we have analyzed the situation and know what is right to say—but because we have got stuff memorized, and we have got ourselves a habit of saying stuff like this in situations like these. And out it comes, with no referee present to call it fair or foul. We’ve just said it, and there it is. And questions like the following (about what we’ve just said) may or may not ever see the light of day:
- Do I really believe what I just said?
- How do I know that?
- Do I know that?
- Why did it say it so confidently, if I’m not really sure?
- Whoever taught me to say that thing—where did he or she learn it from?
- Could I prove what I just said if someone called me on it?
- Have I ever listed my doubts or questions about what I just said?
- Have I ever gone diligently through those doubts and questions to see if they can be answered well?
- What if I were wrong about this?
- Should I retract my statement?
Now, I believe that these questions are the sort generally involved in “giving careful thought” to ourselves, and “examining” ourselves, which practice the Bible commends in several places.
Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.
Proverbs 4:26–niv
Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways.
Haggai 1:5–NIV
Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?
2 Corinthians 13:5–NIV
Interestingly, we frequently see others say things that they have not duly vetted first—things they have not given careful thought to, nor examined, nor tested first. (It’s easier to see it when they do it than when we do it ourselves.) The more we observe this—and take the time to make note of it and the typical behaviors that accompany it—the more likely we might be to notice when we do it ourselves.
I can attest that these sorts of errors are very common in our casual lives. I think that most of us are not well equipped to avoid them, and that even if we were to set out for some unusual occasion to write a short essay on some religious topic over a long weekend, we would not be in good enough cognitive shape to do it well. We have so many bad mental habits that are common in our culture, that we cannot perceive every one of them when it shows up in our argumentation. Sure, some of them we will spot right away, just as we might spot some of our grammatical or spelling errors. But a lot of where we go wrong is in things about which we simply have not yet learned better. So the error we are making is, to us, sound thinking, and is not in need to analysis or correction. We will not spot it because we don’t know how–and because we don’t have enough general knowledge of the scriptures to know when our views are at odds with the various teachings there.
Some years ago, I began wishing for a grant to fund a study in which I’d analyze episodes of talk show hosts for fact, logic, and sourcing—to score them on how they did on whichever sample episode was chosen for the project. I thought it would be a fascinating study to see how often bad logic is used—or how often error is put forth as fact, and so forth. And I now have in mind to do similar work, based on religious primers put forth by various organizations–where I take their official introductory videos and analyze them for they quality of their mental work. After some brief sampling (and years of pondering such things), I imagine that we’d discover that the standard fare is in quite rough shape, and that a large percentage of what is put forth in religious instruction is in need of considerable correction itself.
And I’m talking about facts, as well as about the kind of reasoning that is used in support of the things we think ought to be taught as fact. I think that if we were to get ourselves into this sort of analytical mode, we’d end up finding much cause for concern the state of things. But not many people seem to be very comfortable staying in that analytical mode. They don’t like seeing the mess–and don’t want to admit to the extent of it. It is emotionally easier for them to sweep it under the rug, and to pretend that it’s probably not all that important in the overall scheme of things. And this can make mindless church activity even all the more attractive as an escape of sorts.
And that kind of mindless behavior seems quite common. And it would also seem quite “normal”—except to someone who has a high appreciation for the fact that God and Jesus and the apostles and prophets are not like that. They would see it as messed up. Twisted. Irresponsible.
And it is.
Our memorized, memish sayings that we automatically repeat to others and to ourselves—the faculty for this was created by God. But it is mean to be managed well, such that we don’t train ourselves to repeat dumb junk to ourselves and others, as we so often do. It’s an amazingly useful tool to always have good and wise and righteous and useful sayings on the tips of our tongues. But when quality control has been compromised, and it’s turned out that the stuff that’s always on the mind is trite and shallow and foolish, then we’re not making good use of those mental faculties God gave us. This is why the Bible has those exhortations about examining oneself and giving careful thought to one’s ways. Without that, we’re doomed to end up saying dumb junk to ourselves and to others. And from there, it snowballs into a messy religion—which is quite what we are seeing today in our society.
And I suppose it has always been like this, for Jesus himself noted quite famously that there is indeed a narrow gate and a wide one, and that many will travel the latter. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that the wide gate will ever be untraveled by the masses. No, it seems to be the message of the Bible that it’s always the few, and not the many, who will get things right.
I write this post, therefore, to encourage those few who may be bewildered about the sad cognitive/moral state of things at church. I’d encourage you to remember that church is not the Savior, but Jesus is. Church is not the Creator. It is not the Image. It is not the “way”. No, Jesus is. If righteous, diligent, honest thinking doesn’t happen to be the standard at your church, it’s still the standard in Jesus’ mind—and you can still adopt it, even if you can’t find a church that wants it, too. You can still train yourself to be godly by use of the scriptures, even if it should happen that you can’t find a fellowship of like-minded believers in your town.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2–NIV
Many, who think they’re doing a good thing, merely train themselves in the hearsay of church, rather than training themselves how to think the thoughts that God and Jesus think. And having chosen the wrong standard, they have cut themselves off from the source of all good thinking. They have followed the churches away from God and Jesus, and are in no position to figure that out until they begin to study and think through the scriptures for themselves. And upon doing that, they are discovering a whole new world, so far beyond the run-of-the-mill cognitive life of the average joe, for they are tapping into the mind of God, where they can learn at their own risk—whether well or poorly—to think God’s thoughts to whatever extent humans are capable of that.
And let me encourage you with this: Whatever may be the limits of all that, they run much further than many at church will ever realize.
