Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion

by John W. Loftus

emphasis on propagating belief (i.e., evangelism) and purity of belief (i.e.,

  orthodoxy) is only one of those strategies. In the late nineteeth and early

  twentieth century, a movement called modernism emerged within Christianity.

  Modernist theologians began reexamining traditional orthodox beliefs in light of

  what we now know about linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, biology, and

  human history. In this light, traditional Christian certainties looked less certain,

  and many modernist Christians have become more like members of Eastern

  religions in that their primary concern is with spiritual practice rather than belief.

  But a backlash emerged in response to modernism. People who proudly called

  themselves "fundamentalists" insisted that no one was a real Christian who didn't

  hold to the traditional dogmas. Evangelicals inherited the fundamentalist torch,

  and even some of the more inquiring denominations have reverted back toward

  emphasis on right belief.

  This is the mindset that dominates Christianity in the public square. It is the

  mindset that sends Christian missionaries out to seek converts in impoverished

  and obscure corners of the planet. It is the mindset that prints Bibles to be

  distributed in Iraq and has organized strategically within the United States

  military hierarchy, seeking to create an "army of Christian soldiers." Hence, to

  understand Christianity it is helpful to understand the psychology of belief.

  So You THINK YOU'RE RATIONAL

  I like to think of myself as fair-minded and reasonable. In fact, I pride myself on

  "following the evidence where it leads, whether I like the conclusion or not."

  Integrity and truth seeking are near the top of my wantedvirtues list.

  The problem is-research on human cognition suggests that I am neither fair-

  minded nor reasonable. None of us are. And it's not just a matter of sloppy

  thinking. Our brains have builtin biases that stack the odds against objectivity, so

  much so that the success of the scientific endeavor can be attributed to one

  factor: it pits itself against our natural leanings, erects barriers across the

  openings to rabbit trails, and systematically exposes faulty thinking to public

  critique. In fact, the scientific method has been called "what we know about how

  not to fool ourselves."

  In some ways, science picks up where philosophy leaves off. Philosophers,

  from classical times to the present, have developed sophisticated, useful lines of

  reasoning about knowledge (epistemology), morality (ethics), and the nature of

  reality (metaphysics). They have identified and learned to avoid "logical

  fallacies." But their approach has limitations. Without the constraints of external

  real-world tests, philosophers go down their own kind of rabbit trails, into a

  world of ideals. Philosophy assumes that if an argument can be made logic-tight,

  then it will be persuasive. It assumes that people can be compelled by reason. It

  assumes that we make moral decisions by doing some calculus that prioritizes

  harm avoidance or the greater good. Psychology, on the other hand, looks at how

  ordinary people function in everyday life and says "that ain't the way things

  work around here."

  The way things actually do work is somewhat embarrassing. The fact is, we

  distort reality in a host of ways-many of which are extravagantly selfserving. We

  take undue credit for successes, and blame failures on external circumstances

  (attribution biases). We even revise history so that, in hindsight, our failures

  were simply to be expected because of the challenges we faced (retroactive

  pessimism). We retain memories of when we were kind, finny, personable, and

  clever, better than memories of when we were boorish and mean. On average,

  we expect to live ten years longer than average.3 And virtually all of us who

  believe in heaven think we are going there. To put it bluntly, each of us is the

  protagonist in a custom-made Hollywood movie with the best possible camera

  angles. Our selfserving biases may have a positive function. They may play a

  role in fending off depression, feeding hope, and getting us to try harder. But

  they also help to explain why stunningly self-centered religious beliefs don't

  trigger any alarms.

  It is easy for us to distort the evidence in our own favor, in part because we

  aren't so great with evidence in general. One of the strongest builtin mental

  distortions we have is called confirmation bias. Once we have a hunch about

  how things work, we seek information that fits what we already think. It's like

  our minds set up filters-with contradictory evidence stuck in gray tones on the

  outside and the confirmatory evidence flowing through in bright and shining

  color. This bias optimizes for efficiency over accuracy. It allows us to rapidly sift

  through the information coming at us and piece together a meaningful story line.

  But in situations where emotions run high or evidence is ambiguous, it also lets

  us go very wrong. Corporate leaders fall into group-think about the best

  competitive strategy. Jurors assume an accused criminal is guilty. Politicians

  fabricate reasons for warcertain that the real evidence must be just out of sight.

  What we're always trying to do is get to a coherent plot line. Consider what

  it's like to read a novel: when there are too many contradictions or loose ends, or

  the conclusion is ambiguous, we grumble and lose interest. What we want is a

  story where the mysteries get solved and everything gets tied up in the end. In

  everyday life, we operate the same way. Our brains are constantly trying to

  create a smooth narrative out of fragments of information. This is true of our

  eyes, which make jerky movements and have actual blind spots that our brains

  revise to create a seamless picture of the scene in front of us. It is also true of our

  higher cognitive processes. The mind edits and fills in gaps.

  This imaginative infill is why we experience dreams as stories. As our

  nighttime brain is at work on synthesizing memories, it insists on interpreting the

  images and ideas flashing through them in a narrative form. Alcoholics and

  patients with brain injuries that cause memory gaps sometimes "confabulate."

  When asked about missing chunks of time they make up stories about where

  they were and what happened. This is not intentional deception. It is the brain,

  faced with an impossible question, creating an answer. And once the answer is

  generated, the person whose subconscious created the history actually believes

  it. Our compulsion to think in "stories," to ignore threads that don't fit the plot

  line, and to fill in any gaps, may be at the heart of the religious impulse.

  As we learn more about the human mind, even the outrages of religious belief

  become more understandable. How can a college-educated engineer think he just

  happened to be born into the one true religion? How can a doctor who looks at

  the evidence and dismisses homeopathy believe in the healing power of

  intercessory prayer? How can tourists who escaped a hurricane or plane crash

  believe that a god intervened to save them while letting others drown or burn?

  How can a minister with a high school education-or a doctorate, for that matter-

>   be convinced after two thousand years of theological blood feuds that he knows

  how God meant the book of Genesis to be interpreted?

  It all becomes a bit easier to understand when you realize that we humans are

  only partly rational. Bias is our default setting, and most of the distortions

  happen below the level of conscious awareness. Understanding this may let us

  be a little more sympathetic toward otherwise smart, decent people who hold

  beliefs that make us cringe. It should also make us wonder about our own blind

  spots. But it puts Christianity as a system in an awkward position because

  Christianity sanctifies belief itself. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou

  shalt be saved and thy house" (Acts 16:3 1). Christians call themselves believers.

  Philosopher Daniel Dennett calls their stance "belief in belief," which shines a

  light on one of the core problems Christianity must face. Arriving at belief in an

  infallible God by way of an inerrant Bible requires an unwarranted belief in

  yourself.

  I KNOW BECAUSE I KNOW

  On a warm afternoon in June, two men have appointments with a psychiatrist.

  The first has been dragged to the office by his wife, much to his irritation. He is

  a biologist who suffers from schizophrenia, and the wife insists that his meds are

  not working. "No," says the biologist, "I'm actually fine. It's just that because of

  what I'm working on right now the CIA has been bugging my calls and reading

  my e-mail." Despite his wife's skepticism and his understanding of his own

  illness, he insists calmly that he is sure, and he lines up evidence to support his

  claim. The second man has come on his own because he is feeling exhausted and

  desperate. He shows the psychiatrist his hands, which are raw to the point of

  bleeding. No matter how many times he washes them (up to a hundred times in a

  day) or what he uses (soap, alcohol, bleach, or scouring pads) he never feels

  confident that they are clean.

  In both of these cases, after brain biochemistry is rebalanced, the patient's

  sense of certainty falls back in line with the evidence. The first man becomes

  less sure about the CIA thing and gradually loses interest in the idea. The second

  man begins feeling confident that his hands are clean after a normal round of

  soap and water, and the cracks start healing.

  How do we know what is real? How do we know what we know? We don't,

  entirely. Research on psychiatric disorders and brain injuries shows that humans

  have a feeling or sense of knowing that can get activated by reason and evidence

  but can get activated in other ways as well. Conversely, when certain kinds of

  brain malfunctions occur, it may be impossible to experience a sense of knowing

  no matter how much evidence piles up. V. S. Ramachandran describes a brain-

  injured patient who sees his mother and says, "This looks like my mother in

  every way, but she is an imposter." The connection between his visual cortex and

  his limbic system has been severed, and even though he sees his mother

  perfectly well, he has no emotional sense of rightness or knowing, so he offers

  the only explanation he can find (called the Capgras Delusion).4

  From malfunctions like these we gain an understanding of normal brain

  function and how it shapes our day-to-day experience, including the experience

  of religion. Neurologist Robert Burton explains it this way: "Despite how

  certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process.

  Certainty and similar states of knowing what we know arise out of involuntary

  brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason."5

  This "knowing what we know" mechanism is good enough for getting around in

  the world, but it is not perfect. For the most part, it lets us explain, predict, and

  influence people or objects or events, and we use that knowledge to advantage.

  But as the above scenarios show, it can also get thrown off.

  Burton says that the feeling of knowing (),ightness, correctness, certainty,

  conviction) should be thought of as one of our primary emotions, like anger,

  pleasure, or fear. Like these other feelings, it can be triggered by a seizure or a

  drug or direct electrical stimulation of the brain. Research after the Korean War

  suggested that the feeling of knowing or not knowing also can be produced by

  what are called brainwashing techniques: repetition, sleep deprivation, and

  social/emotional manipulation.6 Once triggered for any reason, the feeling that

  something is right or real can be incredibly powerful-so powerful that when it

  goes head-to-head with logic or evidence, the feeling wins. Our brains make up

  reasons to justify our feeling of knowing, rather than following logic to its

  logical conclusion.

  For many reasons, religious beliefs are usually undergirded by a strong feeling

  of knowing. Set aside for the moment the question of whether those beliefs tap

  some underlying realities. Conversion experiences can be intense, hypnotic, and

  transformative. Worship practices, music and religious architecture have been

  optimized over time to evoke right-brain sensations of transcendence and

  euphoria. Social insularity protects a community consensus. Repetition of ideas

  reinforces a sense of conviction or certainty. Forms of Christianity that

  emphasize right belief have builtin safeguards against contrary evidence, doubt,

  and the assertions of other religions. Many a freethinker has sparred a smart,

  educated fundamentalist into a corner only to have the believer utter some form

  of "I just know."

  Given what I've said about knowing, how can anybody claim to know

  anything? We can't, with certainty. Those of us who are not religious could do

  with a little more humility on this point. We all see "through a glass darkly," and

  there is a realm in which all any of us can do is to make our own best guesses

  about what is real and important. This doesn't imply, though, that all ideas are

  created equal or that our traditional understanding of "knowledge" is useless. As

  I said before, our sense of knowing allows us to navigate this world pretty well-

  to detect regularities, anticipate events, and make things happen. In the concrete

  domain of everyday life it works pretty well for us. Nonetheless, it is a healthy

  mistrust for our sense of knowing that has allowed scientists to reach beyond

  everyday life to detect, predict, and produce desired outcomes with ever greater

  precision.

  When we overstate our ability to know, we play into the fundamentalist

  fallacy that certainty is possible. Burton, author of On Being Certain, calls this

  "the all-knowing rational mind myth." As scientists learn more about how our

  brains work, certitude is coming to be seen as a vice rather than a virtue.

  Certainty is a confession of ignorance about our ability to be passionately

  mistaken. Humans will always argue passionately about things that we do not

  know and cannot know, but with a little more selfknowledge and humility we

  may get to the point where those arguments are less often lethal.

  WHY GOD HAS A HUMAN MIND

  As the story goes, Jesus was a human, fathered by a god and born to a virgin. He

  died for three d
ays and was resurrected. His death was a sacrifice, an offering or

  propitiation. It brings favor for humans. He lives now in a realm where other

  supernatural beings interact with each other and sometimes intervene in human

  affairs.

  Gradually the mainstream of the American public is becoming aware that

  none of these elements is unique to Christianity. Symbologists, or scholars who

  specialize in understanding ancient symbols, tell us that the orthodox Jesus story,

  as it appears in our gospels, follows a specific sacred or mythic template that

  existed in the ancient Near East long before Christianity or even Judaism. In part

  this is due to the flow of history. Religions emerge out of ancestor religions.

  Though the characters and details merge and morph, elements get carried

  through that allow us to track the lineage. The Gilgamesh and Noah flood-hero

  stories are similar because the Hebrew story descended from the Sumerian story.

  The same can be said of the Sumerian "Descent of Inana" and the Christian

  resurrection story.? Even religions that exist side by side borrow elements from

  each other, in a process scholars call syncretism, something Her has shown us in

  the first chapter.

  But another reason for similarities among religious stories is that all of them

  are carried by similar human minds. To quote cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer,

  "Evolution by natural selection gave us a particular kind of mind so that only

  particular kinds of religious notions can be acquired.... All human beings can

  easily acquire a certain range of religious notions and communicate them to

  others." Our supernatural notions are shaped by the builtin structures that let us

  acquire, sort, and access information efficiently, especially information about

  other people.

  You may have heard the old adage "If dogs had a god, God would be a dog; if

  horses had a god, God would be a horse...." Humans are more inventive than

  dogs and horses, and not all human gods or magical beings have human bodies.

  They do, however, have human psyches-minds with quirks and limitations that

  are peculiar to our species. Philosopher John Locke believed that the human

  mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. We now know this is not the case. Because

  we need to learn so much so fast, certain assumptions are actually builtin. This

  allows us to generalize from a few bits of data to a big fiend of knowledge. It lets

  us know more than we have actually experienced or been told.

  Let me illustrate. If I tell you that my "guarg," Annie, just made a baby by

  laying an egg and sitting on it, your brain says: Guargs (not just Valerie's guarg)

  are nonhuman animals that reproduce by laying eggs. You have different

  categories in your brain for animal reproductive systems, and putting one guarg

  in the egg-laying category puts them all there. To oversimplify, we have a builtin

  filing system. Most of the labels actually start out blank, but some of them don't.

  The preprinted labels appear to include human, nonhuman animal, plant, human-

  made object, natural object.

  A large percentage of our mental architecture consists of specialized "domain-

  specific" structures for processing information about other humans. We Homo

  sapiens sapiens are social information specialists; that is our specialized niche in

  this world. Our survival and wellbeing depend mostly on smarts rather than

  teeth, claws, stealth, or an innate sense of direction, and most of the information

  we need comes from other humans. Our greatest threats also come from our own

  species-people who seek to out-compete, exploit, or kill us. For this reason, our

  brains are optimized to process information from and about other humans.

  How DOES ALL OF THIS AFFECT RELIGION?