When Prevention Is Worse than the Cure

I have tried this summer to be very true to the spirit of G.K. Chesterton and have attempted, perhaps highly imperfectly, to look at his work in context. Today, I’m going to be writing about Eugenics and Other Evils, and the passage I’m going to talk about really should be considered in the framework of a discussion on eugenics. I have written about these types of issues before on this website, so I hope you will forgive me if I take a little bit of a deviation today. I think the philosophical point he is making about eugenics obviously applies to his greater arguments in opposition to eugenics, but they also have a broader application in other areas that I want to take a look at today.

Chesterton had strong views on the issue of preventative medicine. In our modern day, we obviously vaccinate ourselves against everything, and I don’t think that vaccines were what Chesterton was necessarily talking about when he began to talk about this issue. He would have contended that it is good to avoid pain whenever we can. However, there are times when the only way to prevent something is actually more problematic than the prevention itself.

“This is the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine. Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man's head is not better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to cure it.”[1]

Of course, one would never have a headache in the first place without a head, but obviously things would not work out so well without a head. In this case, the prevention would stop a bad thing, that headache, from happening, but when viewed from a higher perspective, the net effect would actually be negative. It is indeed better to have life with the potential to have a headache at some point than it is to never have life at all in the first place.

Chesterton is even so bold as to suggest that life with a headache, an unpleasant experience to be sure, is substantially better than having no life at all on account of preventing the headache through decapitation. You can see his argument against eugenics shining through here, and I think it is rather self-evident, but that is not where I am going to go today.

He goes on to conclude that there are many situations where prevention causes greater problems. “Prevention means being an invalid for life, with the extra exasperation of being quite well.”[2] When something has been prevented, these steps are being taken to purportedly make life better in the future. You can imagine a fictional encounter where you walk up to a person who is missing his or her head. You feel bad for this person because they appear to be missing something that is really important, and you can imagine how frustrating it would be to hear them justify their own condition by saying, “I am better off than you because I do not get headaches anymore.”

Besides the anatomical concern as to how this person would be saying anything to you without a head, this is clearly a case where the prevention would be worse than even doing nothing at all. It is better to live with a headache than it is to live without a head. This is common sense, but sadly, it is not.

America Today 

This may seem to be a little bit abstract, so I want to bring this into a much more real-life example. If we think about the United States of America right now, there are a lot of people who are not happy with the way things are going. They are not happy with our political climate, and they are not happy with our current social situation. They raise a variety of concerns, and I am not going to make it the purpose of this specific piece to evaluate the relative merits of policies pursued by our government right now or advocated for by other people. Rather, the situation itself is more of what I am interested in right now where you have a great degree of polarization and a great degree of tension as a result of our partisan moment.

To use the terms of Chesterton above, this is indeed our disease. Polarization and the utter lack of civility plaguing both political parties is one great illness that we have contracted. There are others that invade our bodies simultaneously, but to understand the illustration of Chesterton, we need to establish the fact that there is a disease that we have.

Since the beginning of our great country, people have had divergent opinions. Almost immediately, you had the Federalists and Democratic Republicans going at it. It is really no surprise that when you get a bunch of people together and allow them to express their opinions, you get opinions that are occasionally polarized. That is not necessarily a problem in and of itself.

The disease comes when you combine that polarization with a lack of civility. We find ourselves in a situation where disagreement implies hatred. If you think that hatred is too strong of a word to use in this situation, I quite frankly don’t think you are paying attention to some factions of the left and the right. Surely there are plenty of fair-minded people in the middle, and I would like to hope that you and I are each in that group, but I cannot believe the vitriol we hear on a daily basis. There is a vocal portion of our country that does not understand how to disagree without hating the other person. I will not say that they are a majority, but they are very loud, and they are the voices that commentators like to hold up as illustrative of the irrationality of the other side. This type of toxic climate is the disease that is polluting the body of the United States of America.

Let’s take a moment to consider how we end up with this type of disease in our society. Largely, polarization comes about because we have the ability to disagree. Fundamentally, the reason that we can have such strong disagreements is a symptom of a society that is allowed to come to different conclusions. If we want to prevent polarization, then there is a very simple way to do that. We can simply take away the voice of the people. After all, if no one is allowed to have an opinion or express that opinion, we have indeed solved the problem. You can’t have uncivil discourse if you don’t have discourse in the first place.

All of that being said, is this prevention a good thing? I don’t know that it is. I think that if we follow this path too closely, you end up with the Soviet Union or North Korea. There was not much polarization in these societies because people would either get in line with the vision of the government or they were forcibly silenced. Perhaps you could say that polarization exists because of these divergent opinions, and there is some degree of truth to that, but you do not see the manifestations of this polarization because it was crushed.

The Soviet Union obviously fell, and North Korea is certainly not a picture of a thriving society in any sense of the term. Therefore, at least in my mind, it makes me wonder if the prevention of the problem of polarization is actually worth it. They may not have had to deal with all of the problems that we see in our country today. It is a lot easier to crush the dissidents with a brutal force of the government than it is to try to address the disease itself which is the combination of polarization and incivility. However, if we have to choose one or the other, I don’t know that this type of prevention is what we want. We don’t want to impose a forced acceptance of the government on people, but if we give people the freedom, we have to figure out the cure. After all, we cannot prevent polarization itself without coercion.

The Cure

Maybe then the cure lies in civility itself. After all, polarization is going to happen in a society where people are free to have their own opinions. Polar opposites are going to develop. Some people are going to be on the left while others are going to be on the right. Some people are going to be somewhere in the middle, and some may not even want to be a part of the system at all. As they are allowed to express their opinions and are not pushed to conform to the preference of the government, people are going to have different beliefs.

What we do not need to do in that process is devolve into hatred. It does not have to accompany disagreement. People can have civil dialogue and learn from each other. Even more than that, people can be persuaded to change their minds based on an intelligent case put forward by a reasonable interlocutor. These types of things can happen, and they have happened through the centuries. There is no reason to believe that this cannot be the cure, and it seems to me that it would be a great deal better than the prevention of polarization.

I know that this may not seem to be rocket science, and it probably should not seem that way to me either. It is pretty basic. Freedom of opinion is a good thing, and the ability to express that opinion is something that I think we should all be able to agree on. We do not want to live under threat of being sent to Siberia because of our political persuasions. As Americans, I think we agree with that by and large. Therefore, when we complain about the terrible political climate we find ourselves in, I think we have to accept that we cannot change human diversity. People are going to have different opinions, and some of those opinions are quite frankly going to seem abhorrent. There are plenty of things that some people believe that I could never subscribe to myself. We’re going to be polarized on certain issues.

Polarization is not always a horrendous thing though. We can still hold together a society despite disagreement if we can do so in such a way that we avoid the root of the problem which is the incivility. Rather than fall into name-calling, we need to cure the disease.

I know that some of you are going to disagree with this. I have heard plenty of people argue that civility is not actually a good thing and only serves as a tool to further the oppression of those who are disenfranchised. However, I would like to disagree with that in extraordinarily strong terms. Diversity of opinion and polarization are going to exist if we want our freedom, so the best way to deal with that problem is to be civil. We only exacerbate the problem through incivility. The only other alternative I see is to strip away freedom of opinion altogether and descend into a totalitarian regime. If you feel that way, I encourage you to evaluate history. You will not be better off. Freedom is a wonderful thing, and many people have fought for it. Let’s not lose it through faulty prevention when we should rather be working for the cure of civility.

As Christians, we are in a very unique position to help in this process. As followers of Jesus Christ, we have an example of one who disagreed vehemently with the religious leaders of His day, but He did not fall into hatred. With that example in our minds continually, we can push into the world and use our freedom for good. We can use our freedom to make a difference and be part of the solution.

[1] G. K. Chesterton. Eugenics and Other Evils (New York: Cassell & Company, 1922), Kindle Locations 631-632, Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid., Kindle Location 634.

Reaching for Stories While Holding on to Facts

Why is it that we all seem to be drawn into a story? Around the world, people spend billions of dollars every year buying books or going to the movies. We don’t just do that because we like to own pieces of paper bound together or watch lights and colors flashing on the screen. We do it because those pieces of paper or those images come together and create a story. They come together and create a form of reality. Albeit, it is not truly reality, but we are allowed to imagine what might be. We are able to think about what the world might be like if we were in a certain situation or had to overcome a variety of difficult obstacles.

Story gives us what has classically been understood as romance. It is not so much related to love as we often times associate romance with today, but it can also be understood as a sense of excitement or almost mystery that stems out of the ordinary circumstances. It is something that we often times looking in our own lives. Most of us wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, eat dinner, relax, go to bed and repeat. We fall into routines, and there really isn’t very much mystery, excitement or shall we say romance to what we do. Therefore, because we are lacking in our own lives, we want to find a way to insert romance back in. That is what stories can do. They give us something that we are lacking in our ordinary lives. We are missing romance, so we try to find it wherever we can.

Paganism

G.K. Chesterton also recognized this void in our lives that people have been trying to fill in a variety of ways. In The Everlasting Man, he explored the idea of paganism. Obviously, paganism was representative of the attempt that men had made to find a way to God. Because they wanted to fill in that lack of romance, they started making stories that would answer the many questions that they had about the world around them. They wanted a world that was full of meaning, and they understood that the meaning had to come from without. It had to be injected into our world. That meaning would provide the romance. It would provide the excitement and mystery that made ordinary life worth living. Otherwise, it would just be as mechanistic as I described before. We would end up in a routine that had no mystery whatsoever, and after that, without this insertion of meaning, we find no romance at all. Therefore, if we can’t find it, we have to create it because we want it. It is very much like economics. There is a demand, so someone or something is going to supply that demand.

For some reason though, stories created by the human mind seemed insufficient. There was still a longing that Chesterton argued paganism could not satisfy. “To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.”

Romance and Truth United

This is a significant difference. Sometimes stories are not sufficient to fulfill this longing because they are not true. It is wonderful to hear that Will Robinson was saved from danger by an alien robot in Lost in Space, and by watching that story, I can certainly find some romance, but I fundamentally realize that that story is insufficient. If I was to frame my worldview on the values portrayed by a Netflix series, fortunately, it might work out okay. That series certainly embraced the value of family, courage, loyalty and trust. It frowned upon the vices of selfishness and sneakiness. A worldview built on these values does not seem like it would be such a terrible thing, but philosophically, I still understand that this is a Netflix series. It is something that is made by men and women. As a result, I know that it is fictional, and it does not provide the answers I need as a human who not only naturally desires story but also desires truth.

We require this unity. It is not just enough to have a story, but it needs to be a story that corresponds with reality. It needs to be a story that ultimately makes sense of the world as we know it. Chesterton explained that without this unity of romance and truth, “The picture-makers would have remained forever painting the portrait of nobody. The sages would have remained for ever adding up numerals that came to nothing.”[2] Without the truth, any picture is ultimately meaningless. The portrait of a person is a very little use if it does not point to a real person. Doing mathematics doesn’t make a lot of sense unless we come to the answer. That is the entire purpose of mathematics after all.

Therefore, a story is not sufficient, but it is also a necessary part of any worldview. In the field of apologetics, I have seen it happen far too often where Christianity is reduced to simply a series of propositional arguments. Those arguments are true, but without a story, people do not find this romance. They do not find this satisfactory fulfillment of the desire that have, and the tragedy of the entire thing, as Chesterton points out in this passage, is that Christianity is indeed the only thing that can satisfactorily bring together romance and truth.

Insufficient Attempts 

After all, think of all of the qualifications. Every world religion, like many of the pagan religions that Chesterton referred to, did a good job providing romance. They provided a sense of meaning and a framework for understanding why the world was the way it was. However, they had a very important flaw according to Chesterton. “That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character.”[3] Without truth, the story really does not mean all that much. After all, what does it really matter to me what happens in a fictional story? I cannot build my entire worldview on something that is not true. After all, all worldviews have to operate in the domain of reality, and within that domain, a worldview with any other reference point beyond concrete reality is going to fail. It was not make sense or fit into the world, and our philosophical desire to discover truth is going to remain unsatisfied.

On the other side of the coin, consider our modern-day obsession with materialism. There is ultimately no story or sense of romance from this perspective, but they claim to have possession of truth. In fact, more extreme forms of materialism that embrace determinism strip even free will from reality have absolutely no romance despite the fact that they believe that this is truly the way the world is.

How can there be a sense of excitement, mystery or story if all the parts are already in motion inevitably? There is no reason to be excited or no sense in wondering about anything because there is no way to avoid the powerful reins of determinism. The problem is of course that we have this innate desire to want story. Like Chesterton aptly noted, that is why religions have been so prevalent in practically every time and place. If we don’t have one, we create one because we want to have that overarching narrative that puts our entire world into focus and provides a level of understanding. For the deterministic materialist, that story does not and cannot exist. For materialists who might embrace free will, they have a little bit more to play with because they can at least appeal to people being able to define their own purposes. At least there is some kind of romance in that view, but even that romance is insufficient.

As I suggested before, a story is only good in so far as it aligns with reality. I am pretty convinced that for anyone who tries to come up with their own set of purposes that explain everything about the way the world is, there are going to be some spots where their own perspective is insufficient. Their own perspective will not be able to provide a comprehensive explanation of the way the world is, and that story is going to not fulfill that desire. Contrary to popular belief, no person has comprehensively developed a theory of everything. Of course, what else would you expect from finite human beings?

Therefore, this is where the materialists start playing games. Their worldview does not allow for sufficient stories, but they either claim they do not need them or kind of look the other way and ignore any insufficiency. The first problem is that, practically speaking, those who say they do not need any type of story or meaning tend to try to find it anyway. They want it, but they will not admit they do. For an imaginative example of this, you should read Rebekah Valerius’ recent contribution to the summer 2018 edition of An Unexpected Journal where she retells the myth of Arachne with a professor who espouses the worldview of Richard Dawkins. Those who said they do not need meaning often times still have a fundamental belief in something that demonstrates they do have this need.

On the other hand, there are obviously people who just ignore insufficiencies. Materialism does not provide a story, but there are people who will just kind of avoid the topic and try to move on. They probably realize their worldview is insufficient, but they like it and therefore do not want to admit that there is something insufficient about it. Every religious group has these types of people who will refuse to be convinced no matter where the evidence points. Materialists are no different in that regard.

Conclusion

Therefore, to come back to where I started this article, we are indeed drawn to story, but we are similarly drawn to truth. We want romance at the same time as we want to know the way the world truly is. We can try to run away from either of these human tendencies. We can deny that we need story or deny that truth even exists. We can deny that we want something more than mechanistic determinism, and we can deny that some things are undeniably false. Of course we can take all of these positions, but Chesterton suggests that all of them are insufficient. The only way to be truly human and to embrace that which we were created for, in the image of God, is to bring together these tendencies. We want to compartmentalize, but we ought not do that. Anything short of embracing Christianity will leave you with an untrue story or meaningless facts that do not fit into a greater picture. Like Chesterton said of Christianity, “It does not imprison us in a dream of destiny or a consciousness of the universal delusion. It opens to us not only incredible heavens but what seems to some an equally incredible earth, and makes it credible.”[4]

This type of sufficiency could not be achieved by paganism, and it cannot be achieved by materialism. Only in the Christian worldview is one able to find a way to bring together a desire for story and the story that just happens to be true.

[1] G K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (No city: Wilder Publications, Inc, no date), 211, Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid., 212.

[3] Ibid., 211.

[4] Ibid., 212.

Why Are Religiosity and Intelligence Negatively Correlated?

It has become a popular stereotype in modern America that religious people are the enemies of reason, the opponents of science or the defenders of the irrational. For instance, consider this headline from the Scientific American in 2012, “Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief.” The article actually does go on to conclude that perhaps science and religion are not at odds all the time, but when you meet with this kind of headline, it is clear that they were trying to tap into a certain stereotype that would get people like me to click on the article.

Or, consider this research done by Miron Zuckerman of the University of Rochester who found, “a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity.” He suggests three reasons as to why this may be the case. “First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.” Again, the implication of this study is rather clear. If people are intelligent, the conclusion is that they do not need religion. Somehow, religious belief and intelligence are at odds.

Chesterton's Response

It is interesting to read this research in conjunction with G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Even a century ago, he realized the tactics that many secularists were using in the battle to make religious people appear unreasonable, irrational and worthy of dismissal. He wrote, “Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.”[1]

A little bit of simple religious literacy reinforces Chesterton’s point. When you read Thomas Aquinas, there is no doubt that he sought to try to bring together faith and reason. He knew that both of them were worthwhile and true, so he wanted to understand how they interacted. Many early scientists happened to be Christians as well. They believed that the universe was created by God, and because of that belief, they were able to develop things like the scientific method. Because of the existence of an intelligent Creator, it was reasonable for scientists to expect that the universe had an underlying degree of rationality.

It is certainly not the case that faith and reason have to be at odds despite what the research says, but the research does indeed say something. Clearly, correlation does not imply causation, but we cannot just reject this research because we don’t like it. After all, not many of us think like Chesterton. Very few people have ever had the intellectual power of Aquinas. Maybe faith and intelligence are at odds for most people, and even though there are outliers who show that they do not have to be at odds, in general, maybe there is this tension between faith and intelligence that exists for the average person like you or me.

Contra Zuckerman 

I want to take the three conclusions from Zuckerman's study and evaluate them through the lens of Chesterton and The Everlasting Man. It seems to me that he provides answers for each of these contentions as to why more intelligent people happen to be less religious. I hope by exposing these weaknesses, perhaps it will suggest that these reasons are insufficient, and perhaps there is another reason or set of reasons that explain why this correlation seems to exist.

First, Zuckerman’s first contention is that perhaps intelligent people are less likely to conform and therefore are less susceptible to religious dogma. I have to be honest. This one kind of makes me laugh because in 21st-century America, it is a lot easier to conform to our overarching culture rather than conform to a belief in traditional Christianity. As Chesterton said, “The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things.”[2] Throughout human history, there has always been this tendency to worship. A vast majority of cultures around the world have always embraced some kind of belief in the supernatural. Obviously, not all of them were as developed as others. Some were in fact quite simple while others, like Christianity, have developed a vast intellectual tradition with all kinds of nuance and complexity. However, there is this seemingly natural tendency for people to have some type of religious belief.

Therefore, in our contemporary moment, it may certainly looks like people are moving away from a belief in religion, but they are replacing religion with an ideology that serves a very similar purpose without a belief in the supernatural embedded. Because they have this desire to worship something, they move on to what Chesterton would refer to as unnatural. Even when they reject religion, they find something else to fill in that spot, and I would argue that it is much more popular today to conform to the dogma of secularism than it is to conform to the dogma of religion. Therefore, this first supposed explanation does not really make sense to me. It seems to me that traditional Christians are the rebels who are going against the grain of our modern culture. We are arguing for the supernatural in our world that is increasingly moving away from that belief. We are actually the freer thinkers who are willing to move away from the dogma.

Zuckerman’s second potential explanation for the negative relationship between intelligence and religiosity is that nonreligious people tend to be more analytical as opposed to intuitive. Intelligent people tend to be more analytic, so these traits seem to move together. This is also what the first article I mentioned from the Scientific American talks about.

Chesterton would presumably defend the value of intuition while not rejecting the importance of analysis. “When the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified.”[3] I know that some of you are going to have a great deal of difficulty with the fact that Chesterton refers to an imaginative experiment. Experiments are supposed to be entirely objective, done in isolation and ultimately able to be measured and evaluated. Certainly, nothing in the imagination can meet those criteria, but I think that is the point.

We are very quick to dismiss knowledge that this always been intrinsic to the human experience because we reduce experience to subjectivity. Why has man always made offerings to some type of supernatural? They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do, and after they did it, they understood that it felt right. Therefore, the experiment was verified. It would be just as easy to imagine a situation where someone poured out a certain offering, and it didn’t feel right or didn’t feel like anything. In that case, the experiment would have failed.

We have divorced to the intuition from knowledge, and that is why we end up with people like Zuckerman who draw this differentiation between intuitive personalities and analytic personalities. Certainly, some of us may lean in one direction or the other in terms of what kind of knowledge makes the most sense to us, but rather than having a differentiation between faith and reason, I think Zuckerman himself is actually drawing a false differentiation. Intuition is not valued enough in these types of tests that favor analytic personalities to begin with in their design. Therefore, intuitive people appear to be less intelligent than analytic people, but that just does not seem to be true, and Chesterton would argue for the importance of valuing intuition.

Finally, Zuckerman argues, “several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence.” Basically, he is arguing that religion is a crutch that does indeed provide benefits, but intelligent people might not need those benefits. The funny thing about this supposition is that I think Chesterton would argue that this is not surprising at all and actually might support this finding. “In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.”[4]

I think that Chesterton would argue that modern man is indeed on a search for all of these characteristics, and he tries to find them wherever he can. Therefore, some people are going to find self-regulation for example in religion while others will find that they are not going to really need to find that because they already have a great deal of self-regulation naturally. However, he moves on to really hammer the final point that provides the differentiation, and it is not based on intelligence.

“The pagans had dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in their own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others through the gate of horn.”[5]

Everyone dreams about certain things, and it comes back to what I think Chesterton would argue against each of these three points. There is a certain degree of naturalness to religiosity. It is not necessarily related to intelligence but related to human nature. Therefore, no one is denying this negative relationship between intelligence and religiosity, but I think that it is quite possible to conclude that the three suggested reasons brought forward by Zuckerman are insufficient.

An Alternative Explanation 

Of course, the challenge is to then figure out perhaps a better reason. As I have said on this website before, it is not enough to just tear down bad ideas, it is much more productive if we can put better ones in their place.

I think that we have to reframe the issue. I suggested that it is kind of ironic to talk about intelligent people resisting religious dogma because Christianity in particular is not lifted up as the intellectual powerhouse of our modern era. Therefore, I don’t know that it takes intelligence to resist a minority position that doesn’t really control very many institutions in our country. I don’t know that the lack of religiosity necessarily shows a failure to conform but rather an embrace of the philosophy that has been projected by particularly our educational institutions.

Some people want to put the blame on colleges and universities, but Daniel Cox mentions over at FiveThirtyEight that most people actually lose their religion prior to adulthood if they are going to lose it. That does not surprise me. Let me first be clear that I do not oppose public education. I am a product of it, and I never had any problems with any educational discrimination or anything like that because of my Christian faith. Some people have stories, but I do not have any.

That being said, I can affirm that my public education presented me with a worldview without the presence of any God. I don’t believe that this is always a matter of point-blank hostility, but it is simply a fact of the way the institution is. I learned my religious views at home and at church, and I understood how the two of them could complement each other. When we learned the names of the planets in school, I learned about the heavens declaring the glory of God at home or at church. Again, it was not a matter of hostility for me, but I can see how easy it would be for people who do not have any type of religious worldview taught in their home to unsurprisingly emerge from our educational system without any type of religious framework. I can’t say that it is the fault of the institution of public education, but it is specifically designed to be secular in nature. That is simply a fact, and it operates based on the assumptions that it has been programmed to operate with.

Then, we need to think specifically about our situation in the United States, and there is a trend according to Pew Research that the religiously unaffiliated are continuing to rise as a percentage of our population. In 2016, 23% of the United States population would describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. This is significant if my prior hypothesis is correct. The children coming out of these households would certainly not have the religious values taught at home that I did, so everything they learn would be entirely secular.

It will be very hard for this population to break out of the dogma that is taught to them at home and at school, and they are an ever increasing percentage of our population. Cox points out only 41% of millennials attend the weekly religious service while 62% of baby boomers do. Clearly, the trend is not going to change anytime soon.

Let’s bring it all back around it then. We have an increasing percentage of the population that is not religious. A slight minority of millennials and a slight majority of baby boomers attend weekly religious services. If that is true, then a very large percentage of our population is receiving an entirely secular educational experience. They do not have the home exposure to religion, and, by design, they do not receive religion in the public education system that a vast majority of children in the United States are part of. They are embracing what they are taught and exposed to. They are not freethinkers necessarily; they are products of the system that generated them.

The final piece of the puzzle then is that the ones who are the best at absorbing the system are the ones that continue to absorb the system well and advance within the system. They advance to the best institutions of higher learning which therefore allow them to not only become further reinforced in their belief in secularism, but they provide further reinforcement to the institution itself and the perception of what intelligence is.

Therefore, when you hear talk about religious people being unintelligent, I think a better explanation than any of the three Zuckerman suggested is that we have a system of institutions that encourages a secular worldview, and those who are more intelligent thrive in the system. More intelligent people tend to be more successful in terms of academic achievement and therefore time with in this institution. However, they also become more heavily influenced by this secular system, and without the counterbalance that homes have traditionally provided to a hypothetically religion-neutral, secular education, they are just going to secularism.

[1] G K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (No city: Wilder Publications, Inc, no date), 84, Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid., 85.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 86.

[5] Ibid., 87.

Why All Gunshots Are Not Created Equal: A Look at Confirmation Bias

It seems to be quite clear to me at least that we all have a tendency to see whatever it is that we want to see. If I really like Ben Shapiro (which I do), I am going to have a tendency to favor his interpretation of a particular event. If I really do not like Ben Shapiro (many people do not), they are going to have that same tendency in the opposite direction to disagree with his interpretation of a particular event. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and it is a powerful force in all areas of our lives. We know certain things, and that prior knowledge colors our perception of future events. We want future events to continue reinforcing our own particular worldview, and because of that, we force them into a narrative that they may or may not support.

Obviously, confirmation bias does not always lead to problematic places. If I like Ben Shapiro based on my past impression of him and therefore am predisposed to agree with him in the future, if it turns out that he is right about the future event, then my bias did not cause any problem. Perhaps I ultimately agree with him more strongly than I ought to, but if he is right, then there’s no dilemma about me coming to the right conclusion.

The problem emerges for those who do not like him and have an opposing worldview. If he is right, his interpretation of a situation collides with the people of an opposite persuasion who would be predisposed to disbelieve what he says. This is not confirming their worldview, so they have a degree of tension. They cannot simultaneously affirm what he says is true while holding on to their own worldview. If confirmation bias is active, then most likely, these people are going to ignore Shapiro when he is right. That is the typical response to contradictory information when we allow our confirmation bias to get in the way.

Avoiding Confirmation Bias

There is another option however. We are able to modify our own worldview to include this new piece of information. Hypothetically, let’s say that there is a person who has never agreed with Ben Shapiro in his life. This guy is a perfect candidate to succumb to his confirmation bias and just ignore Shapiro’s commentary this time. However, he may be able to expand his worldview to include the fact. While he certainly would by no means be considered a Ben Shapiro supporter, his commitment to truth and recognizing the truth no matter where it comes from overcomes the degree to which his perspective is distorted by confirmation bias.

That is the hard part for every one of us. We get so attached to our ideas and are so heavily impacted by our confirmation bias, and we reject things that we really should not reject. That’s the problem. Obviously, we want to reject that which is false, but we end up rejecting things that are actually true and are only false in our worldview which was incorrect.

Chesterton's Take

I was thinking about this idea of confirmation bias while I was reading Manalive by G.K. Chesterton. The entire premise of this book is that a rather mysterious man, Innocent Smith, comes to town and starts doing crazy things. He quite frankly seems to be insane, and as a result, ends up being put on trial to justify his actions. What appeared to everyone else as crazy was actually done for a good purpose. Upon explanation, everything made a lot more sense, but when viewed from the wrong perspective, Smith himself appeared to be a menace to society.

While he is being defended near the end of the book, it becomes evident that our confirmation bias can cause us to read certain things into a situation that are actually not there in the first place. “There is nothing wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not mean to hit him and know you won't. It is no more wrong than throwing a pebble at the sea— less, for you do occasionally hit the sea.”[1] This example may seem to be ridiculous, but firing a pistol with no chance of hitting anything is not even reckless endangerment. It is not reckless because clearly, the shooter has full control of his faculties. He is not trying to shoot anyone and is specifically making the decision to miss. It is similarly not endangerment. The shooter knows that he is not going to hit anyone. Some may obviously question whether or not anyone can truly know they are not going to shoot someone in real life, but keep in mind that this is a thought experiment here talking about fictional characters. Don’t lose the point that Chesterton is trying to convey them by getting wrapped up in the fact that Innocent Smith is a perfect shot who is good enough to know when he is going to hit and when he is going to miss with 100% accuracy.

Chesterton’s main contention here is that we always make assumptions that shooting a firearm is going to be bad. We assume that someone must have nefarious purposes for doing so, but there can be multiple motivations for pulling the trigger, and some of them might not be bad whatsoever. Think about the difference between firing a pistol to hunt for food and firing a pistol to murder someone. Fundamentally, they may very well be the same action, but one has terrible consequences while the other does not. What would be inappropriate would be to automatically conclude that every pistol shot is either good or bad. If our worldview assumes that every shot is bad, we are going to get awfully upset at a huge population of hunters (and some people certainly do, but that is beside the point). On the other hand, if our worldview assumes that every shot is good, we will be in the uncomfortable position of assuming that a lot of violent acts are good.

The problem comes when we preemptively make assumptions about discrete, individual actions. Chesterton goes on to say, “You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being seen going) into a pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think there is something squalid and commonplace about such a connection. You are mistaken.”[2] The associations that we make are the problem as we try to understand what the problem actually is or if perhaps there was even a problem in the first place.

I intentionally opened up this article by discussing a rather controversial political commentator. Like I said, I do happen to agree with a lot of what Ben Shapiro says, but many people do not. They may not like him because he is conservative, defends Judeo-Christian values, supports Israel or a plethora of other reasons. However, confirmation bias becomes a problem when they automatically reject Shapiro’s position on Judeo-Christian values because they disagree with his position on Israel.

Just like each individual shot fired from a pistol, some can be used for good purposes while others can be used for evil. Shapiro might be right about some things and wrong about others, but his rightness or wrongness about one issue has very little impact on his rightness or wrongness about another. He might be wrong about Israel and right about Judeo-Christian values. It could be just the opposite. He might be wrong about both, or he might be wrong about neither. Any of those situations are potentially possible, and as people who are committed to seeking truth, we need to do what we can to try and find out which situation is true.

Addressing Objections

This is a problem on a few levels that we have to address. For one thing, it takes a lot of time to go through this process. I think that is why it is so easy for us to fall into this tendency towards caving to confirmation bias. It is a lot easier for me to listen to Ben Shapiro, hear him talk about abortion, like his position (which I definitely do) and automatically conclude that everything he says must be right. After all, if he is right about something that is so important, why can’t I trust him on everything else?

The reason is simple according to Chesterton. We cannot assume association. Things very well may be associated, but they very well might not be. To make the assumption that Ben Shapiro is right about everything because he is right about one topic is foolhardy. However, it is a lot easier because I only have to evaluate him based on one issue. That is the temptation of course, but it is one we have to avoid.

There is even a Biblical precedent for this type of healthy skepticism. In the book of Acts, we hear about the Christians in Berea. “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11, NIV). They were checking the Scripture every day. They didn’t just assume that Paul was right on the seventh day because he was right on the first six. They remained diligent because it mattered. In the same way, for us, truth matters. We cannot get lazy or complacent based on reputation or preconceived notions.

The second objection I imagine that you might have to this rejection of association is that it feels a little bit too much like David Hume. For those of us in the Christian community, he is kind of like that odd kid in high school who you don’t want to get too close to because you know that you’re going to get in trouble if you do. Hume of course rejected cause and effect which is slightly different than rejecting association. Chesterton did not deny cause and effect (although in Orthodoxy, he certainly did hypothesize about a world that was not bound by that law), but in this passage he is outright rejecting making conclusions about certain things based on conclusions about related things. Consequently, we want to make conclusions between like things rather than about different albeit related things. If you feel like Chesterton is getting a little bit too close to an outright rejection of cause and effect, do not fear. He is not condemning us to radical doubt. Rather, he is just reminding us that we don’t want to jump to conclusions about anything based on the evidence about potentially related but not identical causes. Again, each gunshot needs to be evaluated based on its own merits and its own intentions. It doesn’t matter very much about other, similar gunshots.

Ultimately, confirmation bias is a dangerous thing, but G.K. Chesterton provides an important counterbalance to our world that is so heavily influenced by confirmation bias that we don’t even realize it is influencing us anymore. We need to remember, no matter how time-consuming or difficult it may be, to continually evaluate ideas on their own merits. Because, at the end of the day, any one of us can be wrong. Any human ideas may fall short. I think we all experientially understand that. No one is perfect, so it is ridiculous for us to assume that our own worldview is perfect. We may have things wrong.

Fear Not! I'm not Abandoning Christianity

I know this may make my particularly Christian audience nervous. After all, am I suggesting that our Christian worldview is somehow deficient? By no means. In fact, I am so confident in its sufficiency that I think it can stand up to all the questioning we can throw at it. We don’t need to simply succumb to our confirmation bias and just disregard pieces of evidence that don’t seem to be compatible with the Christian worldview. We don’t need to be intellectually lazy. Instead, we can ask the hard questions and do our homework. I have yet to find a way in which the Christian worldview does not correspond with reality. However, there are things that I may not understand, and I would be lying to you if I said I understood everything about God perfectly. I do not. Therefore, even this process of challenging my own worldview can help me in my faith and help me understand the ways of God better.

Let me give you a brief example that may help illustrate my point. For most of my life, when I thought about the difficult parts of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus talks about gouging out your own eye or cutting off your own hand, I will admit that I took this passage pretty figuratively. I thought Jesus was largely exaggerating to prove a point. However, I really did not find this to be consistent with the way I understand the rest of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. You can see the tension here resulting from my confirmation bias. I had a particular interpretation in my mind, but my general theological rules began to interfere with that. I could ignore my general theological rules in this context and succumb to my confirmation bias. Since it didn’t fit into my framework of understanding this verse, I could just look the other way and ignore the problem.

I had to evaluate these verses on their own merits. I didn’t just want to assume either understanding was automatically right. I ultimately came around to changing my theological understanding of these verses as a matter of fact. I do think that Jesus was being quite serious. If the only sin in your life was caused by your eyes, it would be an awful lot better to be blind than to be condemned. This is a quite literal truth, but as Christians, we understand this is not the end of the story, and this gets back to a larger understanding of the Sermon on the Mount. Without Jesus Christ, we are hopeless. This audience had no hope based on their own merits, so Jesus was quite right. Because of their sin, they were headed to a very dark place, so it was vital to do whatever they could to avoid sin even if it meant something drastic. That is why the Gospel is good news after all. We do not need to worry about our own merits. God’s grace covers our sin the moment we accept that free gift. Without Jesus Christ, we would have to take drastic measures, and they would ultimately fail. This is not an exaggeration. Without Jesus Christ, we literally ought to do everything we can to avoid sin that would lead to damnation and separation from God even if it seems drastic or unbelievable. Separation from God is that big of a deal.

This is just a brief overview, but you can see how my thought process avoided confirmation bias. I didn’t assume that my prior understanding was correct and automatically reject this new piece of information that perhaps I ought to understand the Sermon on the Mount in a coherent way. I took this piece of information and tried to determine how I could fit them together in the way that most reflected reality. As a result, I had to change my interpretation, and I accepted a fact that did not fit in my worldview before. However, I think my worldview makes more sense now, and that is a good thing.

I was only able to come to this point because I rejected confirmation bias. It is that important if you want to actually think critically about your worldview. Maybe that is why confirmation bias has become so prevalent in 2018. People do not want to think and rather want to feel comfortable in their own ideas.

[1] G. K. Chesterton, Manalive (Stockbridge, GA: Jim Henry III, 1993), Project Gutenberg, Kindle Locations 2160-2161.

[2] Ibid., Kindle Locations 2166-2167.

The Man Who Was Thursday and the Problem of Evil

The problem of evil presents a greater apologetic challenge to the Christian faith than any other. It is a hard thing to wrap your head around. How is it that God, who is by nature, all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing, could allow evil to exist in the world? It is pretty easy to affirm any two of those three characteristics at the same time and understand how evil exists.

Consider if God was only morally perfect and all-powerful, but He was not all-knowing. In that situation, evil could clearly exist, and perhaps God simply was not aware of it. That dodges the problem of evil.

If God was morally perfect and all-knowing but not omnipotent, He may know about evil and want to stop it, but it may be too strong. Again, that avoids the problem.

If God is all-knowing and omnipotent but not all-good, then there is no reason to expect that you might want to eliminate all evil. Without moral perfection, there would certainly be no expectation that he would eliminate evil and therefore no problem of evil.

The Christian faith cannot accept only two of those three characteristics though. Our God is indeed morally perfect, all-knowing and all-powerful. Therefore, we have to deal with the problem of evil. Other religions might not have to. When you think about the ancient Greeks, their pantheon of gods didn’t have any of these characteristics. Their gods did morally questionable things all the time, none of them were omnipotent as there always at war with each other and it was possible to deceive them implying they were not omniscient. Of course there is no problem of evil when you cannot expect your deities to do anything about evil.

The Christian faith must answer this question, and G.K. Chesterton attempted to do so at the end of The Man Who Was Thursday. If you haven’t read the book, here is a very brief summary that will contain spoilers. The protagonist, Syme, is an undercover detective who is assigned to infiltrate an anarchist conspiracy. He joins the group by unseating a fellow contender named Gregory and consequently embarks on a mission to prevent an assassination. Needless to say, he encounters multiple obstacles on this journey, and at the end of the story, it turns out that Sunday, the chief anarchist, is also the one who had originally assigned Syme to join the anarchists in the first place in order to take it down. I understand from people who know a lot more about Chesterton than I do that there is a great deal of discussion as to what Sunday really represents, but Syme asked him questions at the end of the book that sound an awful lot like Job speaking to God about why he had to go through so many difficult times. Sunday’s answer applies to the real world problem of evil as well.

The Argument 

Gregory begins the final dialogue by accusing Syme and Sunday of being too happy. “The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—“[1]

This sounds very much like Satan’s accusation of Job. Of course it was easy for Job to be faithful because God had blessed him with family, wealth and general safety. We hear this accusation today as well. I have had people tell me that essentially they have personal disputes with God. They allege that God will a lot to answer for if He is real because of all the difficult situations they had to go through. That spirit of rebellion is embedded in this attack from Gregory.

The Third-Party Defense 

Syme immediately objects to this characterization and launches into a theodicy of his own. “Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie! No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’”[2]

He hypothesizes that perhaps the reason for so much evil is that those who ultimately stand for what is right and need to be able to say that they did not receive any preferential treatment. Gregory is saying that Syme had an easy life, and he knows that that is untrue. This entire story documents the trials and tribulations Syme had to persevere through. Therefore, he supposes that perhaps the entire reason that he had to go through all of this suffering was so that he could stand up to the charge of Gregory. Gregory would not be the only one to lay claim to the virtues of bravery and courage because he was the anarchist. It would be problematic if the rebel was the only one who could espouse good virtues; those who embrace order necessarily needed to be able to lay claim to the same virtues.

At this point, everyone understands that Sunday was the architect behind everything that took place. As a result, all of the struggles that Syme had to handle were a direct consequence of the situation that Sunday had put him in. In terms of theodicy, this is quite a bit like the situation that some would say God is in. How is it the case that God could put people in situations that cause them so much pain? Syme’s response is quite similar to what has been referred to as a soul-making theodicy.

In other words, God allows trials to come into our lives because they help us develop into better people. There are virtues that can only be cultivated sometimes by experiencing difficulty. Consider the value of courage. It has no value if it is never tested in a situation where one would need it. We don’t know we have it until we actually need it. Consider the value of sympathy. We could never develop our sympathy if they were never other people that we had to be sympathetic towards, and the only reason they need sympathy is if there is some difficulty they are experiencing.

The Answer 

This idea of a soul-making theodicy is not Sunday’s response to the accusation. In fact, he never responds to Gregory’s charge whatsoever. His only response comes to a direct question from Syme when he is asked if he has ever suffered.

“As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?’”[3]

This reference directly ties to the narrative dictated in Mark 10:37-40 (NIV).

“They replied, ‘Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.’ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said. ‘Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?’ ‘We can,’ they answered. Jesus said to them, ‘You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.’”

The implication is obvious. Sunday does understand suffering, and anyone who is going to follow him had to be prepared to do the same. Much in the way that Jesus Christ understood human suffering, Sunday understood the suffering of Syme.

This doesn’t seem to be a straightforward affirmation of a soul-making theodicy though. Otherwise, he could have simply agreed that all of the suffering was to help Syme develop certain character traits. He only answers by asking a question. He asks if Syme can drink of the same cup that he did. That certainly points to the fact that anything that Syme had experienced up until that point was insufficient. He may have gone through suffering, but Sunday essentially challenges him by asking if he was prepared to do what Sunday himself had already done.

Is the Problem a Problem?

In this response lies the answer to the question of evil in the world. Has anyone ever experienced suffering in the way that Jesus Christ did on the cross? Has anyone had that experience of taking on all the sin of the world? The answer to those questions has to be negative. None of us have ever had the experience of being the morally perfect victim punished for a crime that we didn’t commit.

Therefore, we undoubtedly can drink our own cup that very well can be full of suffering, but our cup pales in comparison to the one that Jesus Himself handled for you and for me. What right do we have to than complain about anything? We can say that God doesn’t understand, but in reality, it is the other way around. Our human minds cannot comprehend the degree to which Jesus Christ suffered on the cross for each one of us. We cannot comprehend what it must have felt like to have the weight of all of the sin of all of humanity of all time on our shoulders.

Soul-making therefore doesn’t seem to be the chief way that Chesterton attempts to explain the problem of evil. If it was, then it seems like Sunday would have simply agreed with Syme and moved on. However, that was not how the answered the question. Instead, he treated him very much like God treated Job. Until you are in the position of God Himself, your perspective on suffering is insufficient. God never really told Job why everything was happening to him in the way that it did, but He practically reminded him that He was God and that should be enough.

The problem of evil is undoubtedly a problem for the Christian, but it is only a problem for those who are determined to understand every reason. Chesterton does not seem to be as concerned with providing some type of absolute reason. He doesn’t ultimately assume that God must be allowing things to happen for the development of one’s soul. He doesn’t want to put God in the box which is a theme that is prominent throughout all of Chesterton’s written work. He preferred to be in wonder of how God worked.

Interestingly, this is not the product of pure anti-intellectualism or something much more nefarious like that. Rather, Chesterton understood his place in the universe, and even when we think we understand God perfectly, we very well might not. Our conceptions can only put God in the box, so we do our best to understand all that we can, and from what I understand, Chesterton defends a variation of the free will defense in other works. However, that being said, humility is a large part of understanding the problem of evil. We try to understand why God might allow certain things to happen, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, Chesterton’s corrective through The Man Who Was Thursday reminds us to focus on what is truly important. Our suffering pales in comparison to what God Himself willingly entered into, and that ought to tell us something about the problem of evil. God is with us even in the dark times and therefore the problem of evil fails based on the character of God.

[1] G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2011), 156, Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid., 157.

[3] Ibid., 157-158.