Jack Pelham

I’ve been studying cognitive science for the last three years or so, trying to understand why it’s so hard for people to correct their beliefs when those beliefs are demonstrated to be wrong.  It is fairly obvious from the research that there are three particular reasons that people get things wrong:

1. They just weren’t thinking.  That is, they were being a “cognitive miser”, reluctant to “spend” any effort on their thinking unless forced to.
2. They didn’t know how to do the kind of thinking necessary to come up with the right answer or decision.  This usually means a failure to grasp the basics of logic or probability.
3. They were employing a corrupted way of thinking.  A corrupted scheme of thinking is called a “cognitive bias”.  It’s like a small computer program that kicks in at certain times and that spits out decisions that are guaranteed to be wrong in certain situations.  For example, Billy was once robbed by two Italians, and afterward, he adopted a cognitive bias that says “All Italians are thieves.”  This bias kicks in every time Billy sees or hears about an Italian.  Every once in a while, Billy happens to be right about a particular Italian, but since not Italians are thieves, we can see that Billy will frequently be wrong when using this bias.  He either knows, or should know, that it is inaccurate, but he keeps it in his mind anyway.

Continue reading →

Before we get started talking about church revivals, let’s establish just how common a thing it is in our culture.

If you do a Google search for [church revival], you get 192,000,000 returns.  (In case you aren’t familiar with this sort of search, that’s a lot.  To put it in perspective, if you search [NFL], you get 330,000,000 returns, and if you search [Iraq war], you get 61,600,000.)  Suffice it to say, therefore, that the idea of churches needing some sort of revival is a very common idea in our culture.  Indeed, there are over 31,000 web pages with the words “revival” (or “revive”) and “church” in the page name!  Meanwhile, Amazon.com shows over 15,000 returns on a book search on the terms: [church revival].  So let’s face it, church revival is a big business. Continue reading →

In my previous post, I talked about how:

1. We have to actually read the Bible to know what’s in it.
2. Jesus seems to have thought that people’s misunderstandings were worth correcting, so we are to be in the habit of correcting ourselves by our further study.
3. We have to deliberately process what we read in order to get it right.
4. We have to crosscheck what we read in order to understand when one passage alludes to information found elsewhere, such as with the parables or apocalyptic literature.

All this was concerning how it’s hard work to know the Bible—much harder than many assume.

But it gets worse.  Here are yet a few more difficulties the devoted Bible student faces. Continue reading →

Jesus was talking to some from a religious faction (Sadducees)  one day and he told them a most instructive thing:

Matthew 22:29 But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.

They were wrong about something because they did not know the scriptures.  They could have had the right answer, but apparently, they had chosen not to go find it in the scriptures.  Immediately after telling them they are wrong, Jesus explains the right answer to them, alluding to previous writings.

Their ignorance did not keep them from having an answer, mind you.  Indeed, they had an answer, but it was “wrong”, said Jesus.  And that “wrong” answer was worthy of correction; this we can tell because Jesus took the time to correct it.

So let’s review:  They didn’t have to be wrong, but they had neglected to learn all the available information on the topic before settling on a (flawed) model of understanding, and this was worthy of correction in Jesus’ mind.

Does this have any implications for us?  We’ll come back to that.

In his epistle to the Roman Christians, Paul seems to be correcting some misconceptions held by his audience.  In his explanation of what they are missing, he appeals thus:

Romans 11:2b  Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he appeals to God against Israel?

Now, we have every reason to believe that the Roman Christians were good guys, not like those mean ol’ Sadducees, yet still, Paul was explaining to them something they could have already learned for themselves had they cared to do the research.

Jesus was criticized by the Pharisees for something they didn’t know enough about.  Look at his response:

Matthew 12:3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: ⁴ how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? ⁵ Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?

This one’s even more interesting because, if you know anything about the Pharisees, you know that they had read these passages.  Obviously, though, they had never fully processed what they had read (perhaps because they did not like what it said?).  So once again, they could have known better, but had either neglected to “do the math” or to make themselves believe the answers.  So here they were leveling an erroneous criticism.

There are many passages of this sort in the Bible.  (You can see a few more of them here if you like.)

There are lots of players in religion; lots of people who want to be involved.  Yet it seems quite easy to make cognitive (thinking) errors about the facts of religion.  Why is that?  Why isn’t it easier?  Why didn’t God create a way for us to all have a fuller and more convenient knowledge of the facts?

It gets worse.

When Jesus came to the Earth as the Son of Man, he spoke to people in parables.  A parable is a story that teaches us about something other than the story itself.  For instance, the parable of the mustard seed wasn’t really about mustard seeds at all, but about reliance upon God and what a good return on investment can be expected from it.  Well, this muddies the waters considerably for the casualist, because with parables, it becomes practically impossible for the cognitive miser to understand Jesus.  (“Cognitive miser” is the term that cognitive scientists use to describe our stinginess with our thinking.)

Consider this:

Matthew 13:34  All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. ³⁵ This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet:

Interestingly, even though he was uttering what had been “hidden”, but was still not spelling it out in the most direct and clear terms.  We are told elsewhere, however, that he told his own disciples everything in plain language, unlike how he spoke to the crowds:

Mark 4:34  With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. ³⁴ He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

Is it just a coincidence that his own disciples had signed up for the full course, and not just the passerby version?  I think not.  Their intense interest was rewarded by a much fuller understanding; they were much less likely to get things wrong than were the casual listeners in the crowds.

You and I, however, are not among those whose honor it was to sit at Jesus’ feet.  He is not here to “explain everything” to us and to answer our questions.  If we want to know, we’re going to have to find out from what is in the Bible—and if it’s not in there, we’re just going to have to do without.

UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF THE MATERIAL

We may have lots of questions, but the inconvenient truth of the matter is that a great many of our questions are not answered conveniently in the Bible.  Sure, some things are easy to pick up, such as where Jesus says that we should not make a show of our good deeds.  Other things, though, require much research if we are to understand them accurately.  For example, when Jesus refers to himself as the “Son of Man”, we cannot possibly comprehend how loaded that statement is unless we have searched out all the “son of man” language in the Bible in order to understand how it was used and what it meant.  Or when he speaks of “this perverse generation”, how are we to know what he had in mind unless we have searched all the scriptures to find out what it might have been?

“But who has the time for that?”

I’m glad you asked.  A devout student has the time for that.  Others do not.  The Bible itself divides people into two groups:  those who will work to understand, and those who don’t care that much.

There is no Bible for cognitive misers.  There is no Bible for lazy people.  There is no “Bible for Dummies”, as we might expect to find in the bookstore.  (Yes, there is a book called “The Bible for Dummies”, but it can’t begin to explain all these things.)  There is no Bible that magically imparts the full information of the scriptures in convenient form.  It was not written that way.  It was written in a rich mixture of history and metaphor, parable and poem, narrative and vision.  It’s almost as if the idea were to keep the cognitive miser in the dark.  It’s as if God intentionally makes it hard for the casual reader to get things right.

And that brings us to the epidemic of error regarding the scriptures.  When we have thousands of opposing camps—each one claiming to have a better take on things than the rest—we can rest assured that most of us are wrong about a great many things.  And wrong we are—yet we may never know it this side of that dreaded appointment with God, for so many of us tell ourselves again and again that we have got it more or less figured out, and that if we were wrong about any of it, we’d surely know we were wrong!

This is what the church corporations tend to do.  They whittle it down for us into a convenient packet of information, and then they assure us that we needn’t bother ourselves to learn much beyond what they repeat again and again for us.  This catering to convenience and “belonging” has led us to a great many misunderstandings of scripture.  Their constant assurance that our continued attendance is more or less all we need to work at is a surefire way to keep the cognitive miser a cognitive miser—satiated, incurious, self-assured, complacent, and wrong about a great many things.

People of that sort, however, do not have a special Bible of their own; they have the same one that the rest of us have—all 1,000+ pages of it.  Funny, all of us (who believe) claim that the Bible is a treasure from God, yet a great many people dispense with the lion’s share of the texts, counting them unworthy of their apt attention.

And what is the consequence of this?

The consequence is that they are wrong about a great many things.  And further, they are wrong about being wrong.  What I mean is that Jesus, as we have seen, believed that errors were to be corrected, but the average modern Christian has managed to live with his or her errors, not lifting a finger to correct a thing.  Indeed, the average Christian may do so little reading as to rarely come across any signal that his erroneous understanding of this or that is in fact erroneous.

If we have no interest in learning the whole of the Bible, we demonstrate what terrible “disciples” we would be.  Nearly all of us remember that one-liner from Jeremiah 29:30, “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.“  Many, however, seem to hope that God is not really the sort to mean such things.  They hope that God will count their spirit of convenience as a spirit of diligence, and their ignorance as knowledge.  They hope he will count their wrong answers as right ones, without they, themselves, having to lift a finger to learn or to correct anything.

Any why not hope for such things?  Without regular time in the texts to warn them against such ideas, why not believe it?  Why not imagine God to be exactly what would be the most convenient for the cognitive miser?

Well, if you know the scriptures, you know why not.  And once again, we see how the scriptures tend to make the differences between people fairly obvious.  If those of us who diligently study still have many things to learn and to correct, those who don’t study are hopeless in the Bible sense of that word.  Thus do they invent the hope that God is not as he says he is, and they build entire church organizations around that hope.

Read Part II here.

There is the Bible, and then there is one’s interpretation of the Bible.  Because we are so prone to cognitive error, these two are quite often not the same.  None of us are inspired and/or infallible in our ability to interpret, so we must diligently maintain a clear distinction in our minds between the model presented by the actual facts of the Bible and the model that exists in our minds as the result of our interpretation of the Bible.

It is interesting to see which of the two is given the greater importance by any given reader.  Many assert that the texts could not be possibly be wrong.  Meanwhile, there are some who have come to believe that their own interpretation of the texts could not possibly be wrong.  The latter make it their habit to default to their standing interpretations all the time, even when the actual words of the texts are put forth in contradiction thereunto.

They will never see it this way, but at that point they are setting up a scenario in which either the texts or their interpretations are right, but not both.   People of functional humility do the same thing, of course, but they are willing to be wrong in their interpretations, and to correct themselves accordingly.  Those of corrupt mind, however, will default to their standing interpretations and ignore the texts when the two disagree.  In this they show us the truth about themselves:  that they do not really care about the facts after all, but only about their own established beliefs.  They have replaced the original religion–in part, at least–with one of their own invention.  And even so, they have done it in the name of God.

This is ironic, for a person of that sort could simply forgo the Bible altogether and declare that his own imagination is its superior.  Indeed, I wish they would do this, rather than to keep muddying the waters for us honest seekers of the truth by claiming that their model is indeed the Bible’s model.  But alas, their actions are not mine to choose.  Not even God intervenes to make them stop it.  If I understand the Bible, however, he will most certainly raise the issue with them later—when they have no further chance to reform themselves.

The fool picks out and settles on doctrines without examining the whole of the Bible with regard to the subject at hand.  He overestimates his knowledge and his manner of reasoning.  He does not continue to work the Bible as he would a puzzle with many pieces, for he simply does not care to see it all put together.  Rather, he is content to snatch up a piece that he thinks he likes, and then to insist on telling us all what it means.  He cannot possibly know whether he has got it right or not, for he refuses the rest of the information.  Yet he is adamant all the same.

Ironically, he claims all along that the whole Bible is delivered to us by none other than God himself.  Yet while he scorns us about the importance of his one piece of the puzzle, he himself ignores the hundreds of pieces he has not yet begun to put into their proper places.  He is utterly incurious about the rest, and will even tell you when pressed that they are unimportant inasmuch as they are not “core”, not “essential”, or do not constitute a “salvation issue”.

His religion, therefore, is a monument to his own self assurance, and the actual facts of the Bible are of no use to him outside of their availability to be commandeered for the purpose of suiting himself in the name of God.

Feigning certainty as to a part when one is ignorant of the whole is a fool’s errand.

Regarding the Bible, here are three rules of study that most manage to resist quite successfully:

1. Let us constrain ourselves to get out of the Bible nothing more than what was put there by its authors.
2. Let us diligently get it ALL out—leaving nothing to assumption, glossing over nothing, neglecting nothing, dismissing nothing as unimportant. (Indeed, how can we KNOW it’s unimportant until we have learned what it means?)
3. Let us responsibly count all our understanding of it as merely provisional until we have sorted and rectified the whole of it.  (For who knows how a new discovery might undermine an earlier assumption?)

Such deliberacy in study is no casual undertaking. Quite a difference Continue reading →