CFE Villa-Landa

Thank you for your helpful responses to my last query about why people hang onto religious beliefs. I have read the books that were recommended and while they are helpful on why religion is so sticky and the (psychological) usefulness of religious belief, they don't really explain to me how and why some people manage to be what seems to me extremely intellectually dishonest in their beliefs. I am thinking in particular about scientists holding academic posts and similar people who also profess to hold religious beliefs in the face of the evidence. Does anyone know of a book specifically attacking this position?

Tom Sawyer

When I took psychology courses in college, I came across a term called cognitive dissonance. It basicaly refers to a mental conflict or anxiety when ones beliefs into conflict with one's actions or with one's observations.

When a person has this internal conflict, he attempts to resolve it. This is done in one of two ways - either changing ones beliefs or assuming that the observations are flawed. More often than not, people choose the second option. This is because most people are not willing to admit that they were wrong about things that are important to them. If a person's faith is one of the main cornerstones of his life (as is often the case), then things that call that faith into question can either be seen as legitimate reasons why that faith may be wrong, or as bad and/or misinterpreted data since there is obviously a problem with it because it goes against what his faith says. Again, most people choose the second option.

It's not a question of them being intentionally dishonest, but more one of viewing things through a narrow filter. This causes them to reinterpret data based on what they want to see, not what is actually there. Everyone does this to a greater or lesser degree and one of the goals of science to to structure the search for information in such a way so that this effect is minimized as much as possible. When searching in this way causes more results that conflict with one's beliefs, certain steps are "missed", perhaps unintentionally to get the results that one wants to see. However, it is obvious to anyone who knows how to employ the scientific method that this is done which is why experiments that seem to confirm young earth creationism and flod geology, for example, are dismissed by the scientific community at large since the people looking at these experiments can easily see how flawed they are. People who solely want confirmation of their beliefs, however, see only the confirmatory results and ignore, perhaps unintentionally, the flawed methods used to obtain those results.

Edit:

I don't know any good books on the subject of cognitive dissonance, but if you do a Google search on it, there's a lot of good articles about it on the web.

fwh

Cognitive dissonance affects everyone, religious and atheist. It would be disengenious ,in my opinion, to say that any one belief system can escape its clutches. Fascinating concept. Thanks peteyh for introducing per this discussion.

CFE Villa-Landa

Thanks for the responses. I am following up some references on cognitive dissonance. But it still seems to me to be morally wrong not simply to believe things oneself without justification or evidence, but to go further and to encourage other people to believe the same things too, which is what many religious believers do. I have read William Clifford on this topic and have not yet seen a good rebuttal of his arguments. If people believe in the supernatural without serious evidence, how can we trust their judgement on anything else?

callmejay

As the kid from American Beauty said, "Never underestimate the power of denial." Believing something that you don't want to believe requires MUCH more evidence than believing something you do want to believe. I notice it in myself whenever someone says something bad but plausible about someone/something I care about. I fight the idea much more strongly than if I didn't care about the someone/something.

Koyaanisqatsi

Let's not forget in the offing that when you're talking about "religion" you're also talking largely about cult indoctrination techniques (of which cognitive dissonance is a major factor).

What happens is, you're inculcated into believing the same things your parents believe and your friends believe and your social environment largely believes and told to believe on faith alone.

Because you don't want to accept that your parents and friends and social environment would do anything to deliberately deceive you (which is the case, however indirectly that deception is manifest), cognitive dissonance kicks in and your mind simply compartmentalizes that section of your mind, efffectively removing it from the same kind of scrutiny that you would normally apply to it.

It actually makes a perverted sort of sense when you really break it down, since it is in the same category as Santa and the like; i.e., childhood mythology.

The cognitive dissonace (the disconnect) comes into play, however, when you grow out of childhood, yet the myths remain as absolutes. You can't reconcile how the most important people in your life continue to maintain the validity of such obvious fictions, so you (as others pointed out) deny that they are fictional and continue to maintain the compartmentalization so that you can effectively analyze everything else with a rational disposition.

When it comes to your beliefs, however (i.e., the compartment where theism lies), there is a conditioned response to simply short circuit any applied reasoning.

Indeed, the first thing cults like christianity instill in their members is the absence of reasoning from the question, so that the mind simply bypasses that little tidbit whenever referring to the beliefs.

It's nothing more than operant conditioning and it works horrifically well, as history proves again and again and again.

Thus, someone can actually kill in the name of God. Indeed, that's its primary purpose; to short circuit normal cognitive functions so that the cult "lives" in a different area of the brain, if you will.

It's insidious and rampant and accounts for 98% of the world's problems, but then, that's precisely what it was designed to do right from the start, IMO.

Cult mythology is designed to control its members and nothing more. It does this by falsely providing a lie of hope that is interpreted by the cult member as "true."

It's not rocket science. Why do you think christian cult dogma has Jesus say, "suffer the children unto me?"

The exact same tactic was employed by Hitler (and other similar faux deities) to tremendous effect; indeed, it is still prevalent today and can be employed anytime an adult who should know better (and does, most likely) uses it to manipulate and control otherwise tabla rassa minds.

Hell, we do it in America all the time, from birth to grave and just look at the result today! Millions of conditioned minds who continue to think black is white at the detriment of their own lives.

It's very powerful mojo, yes?

boingo82

I have a neighbor who is a geologist and a Mormon. Ask him how old he believes the earth is, he'll tell you a few thousand years. Give him a rock, he'll tell you it's 7 million years old, without a doubt.

Obviously both statements are conflicting.

My dad asked him how this could be, and he replied that he has the two statements compartmentalized, which is to say that he keeps them in totally separate sections of the brain. If they were to get too close to each other, he would be forced to seriously question his religious beliefs and it's easier not to do that at all.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

If we're talking about the psychology of how people manage to hold contradictory beliefs, then I'm not sure that cognitive dissonance is the most relevant idea. In fact, the cognitive dissonance of holding two contradictory beliefs would tend to encourage people to discard one or the other belief. In this case, we want to know why this doesn't happen.

The interconnectedness of attitudes is the concept we're interested in. In a very general sense (probably irresponsibly general), the more intelligent and sophisticated someone is, the more interconnectedness there will be between his various attitudes towards things. He will tend to spot the logical relationships between ideas more readily, and think about how his attitudes fit together. It's a matter of degree, because clusters of attitudes are always somewhat separable.

The person who wants to maintain his religious beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence engages in a kind of selective autism. He concentrates almost entirely upon his personal and emotional response to religion, and refuses to think about it objectively or logically. Indeed, it's not even that he chooses to be consciously disingenuous and hypocritical, because the autistic nature of his religious faith excludes even the possibility of objective appraisal.

No matter how logical or intelligent he is in his day to day life, at church he becomes the religious equivalent of The Rain Man.

jupstin

I fail to see the error in setting science and religion in separate “compartments” of the mind. In what possible way can you imagine that they belong together? Science by definition deals with what is quantifiable, observable etc. Religion on the other hand is all about what cannot be seen or measured. To say that there exists on the one hand an observable, measurable universe of predictable “stuff” is not to say that a world of “spirit” does not exist. Problems arise out of an attempt to explain one in terms of the other. This is not to say that there is no use for scientific method in religion any more than it is to say that there is no place for faith in science, but religion must always come back to religion and science must always come back to science. Otherwise, one will become the other. I’m sure that while most of you would disagree thoroughly with my religious views, you can agree with me that religion is at its weakest when it appeals to physical science. At the same time, is not science at its weakest when its postulates are supported by the popular imagination and not the facts? The problem is that the latter is adequately termed “junk” or “pop” science while the former is heralded by the religious community as “the final nail in the coffin of Godless naturalism.” In other words, what humanists, naturalists, atheists etc. have succeeded in doing is what the religious have failed miserably at: you point at the weak link and say, “remove the part that compromises the whole.” The religious community just says, “hey, check it out, another link in the chain. Longer is better, right?”

philechat

I have a theory that this apparant "acceptance of contradiction" rises from the mainly compartmental nature of the human brain. The human brain is not a complete system that integrates all knowledge, but is comprised of seperate areas processing seperate information, neither of which cross over to another. This nature of the brain shows when most people are making sense of the problems in science and religion.

In monkeys this compartmentalization of information is even more pronounced. The vervet monkey may see the lions' track without knowing the lions being near, and would run away (or produce alarm calls) only when it sees the face of the lion. The inability of the monkey to make sense of secondary information (the foot tracks) rises from the fact that the monkeys use secondary visual signals only in the social sphere, and cannot generalize similar information to their relations with the other species. Birds and other animal species also show remarkable ability in seperate, specialized areas often without apparant connections with one another.

Those people who extend the problem-solving abilities in the sciences to the field of religion probably have brains that are somewhat more accessible than average. They are more able to generalize the knowledge of one field to another without the difficulty that plagues our primate cousins (and maybe many humans). In these people it is more difficult to hold contradictory beliefs in science and religon, because the communications between the different areas of their brains are stronger.