Ways I Used to Rationalize Absurd Things I Believed ...and the consequences of rationalizing away unsupported beliefs

When I was a believer, I sometimes struggled with how to make sense of things the Bible said.  How, for example, do you explain the fact that the Bible says there were once people who lived to be hundreds of years old? How could a donkey or a snake speak? How could there be a global flood? How could a man survive in the belly of a "great fish" for 3 days? Why does the Earth appear to be so much older than the Bible would suggest? Giants?

In my mind, I rationalized it this way. We believe that laws of nature are the same now as they always have been. How do we know that people didn't live to be hundreds of years old at some point in human history? Maybe time itself functioned differently in that era. Maybe biology or the environment was radically different back then. I rationalized away all of these problems with a combination of pleading ignorance to whether or not the laws of physics/time etc have always held in the same way they do now and magical thinking. Yahweh can do anything he wants because he's the creator god.

Djinn

It is true that we don't know those the apparent "laws of nature" that seem to govern physics and biology and other realms we study with science have always held in the same way we observe them now. Philosopher David Hume pointed this out. It is also true that if magic exists and there are allowances for events that defy the apparent laws of science, many things we think are not possible or unlikely could occur. I was doing a lot of mental acrobatics to preserve my beliefs in the religious claims that I held to be true and important. Here is the problem from a honest intellectual standpoint. If I was willing to accept these claims made by my religion, by what rational standard could I reject magical or supernatural claims of any other kind from any other source? If similar accounts from other religions were proposed, I was not tempted to apply the same kind of allowances to accept claims of miracles or supernatural events. Aliens, fairies, Islamic djinn, kami spirits from Japan, Catholic miracles performed by saints and various virgin apparitions, ghosts, Big Foot, etc etc etc. I didn't really believe those things were real, but in order to leave space for my own sacred beliefs, I had to hedge and couldn't fully deny those accounts as being outside the realm of possibilities.

Kami god from Japan

This thinking didn't generally penetrate my life beyond my religious beliefs. However, in college, I took a critical thinking course. On one test in that class I missed a question about whether a person in a brief narrative could have simultaneously been in more than one place. The part of my brain that needed to leave room for miracles and magic jumped to attention and said, "Hey! That's possible if our understanding of space-time and the limits of human biology and physics are incomplete..." Irrational thinking was leaking out of my religious life in at least his moment and it had a small, but real impact in my ability to perform on a test.

Levitating Catholic Saint

I was sincerely striving to be consistent with regard to my beliefs, but I came to realize (eventually) that I was not being reasonable. The excuses I was using to rationalize away the problems with the Bible were no better than an excuse a toddler might use to explain how the cookies were gone, he has cookie crumbs on his hands and face, but he didn't know what happened to the cookies. "Maybe the cookies turned invisible! Maybe a ghost ate them! How am I supposed to know what happened to the cookies?" I was starting from the conclusion (the Bible has to be true) and doing all I could to work my way through the evidence rather than trying to look objectively at the evidence.

Irrational modes of thinking can have a negative impact in our personal lives and in society at large. On reflection, I wonder what might have happened if instead of a test in a critical thinking class, I had been serving on a jury. Would I have made allowances for something I felt was true or false about the case and rationalized away evidence to reach my preferred conclusion? I hope not, but I can't be sure. It isn't possible to know for sure how much irrational thinking impacts people's lives or society in general, but I am confident it is happening and that there is a cost. People spend money on snake oil cures instead of scientifically tested treatments and medications. People spend time and money on religions, prayers, holy water, amulets, charms... How many innocent people have been incarcerated unfairly or allowed to go free because people ignored evidence or the lack of evidence and went with their gut feelings with regard to the question of innocence or guilt?

There are real world consequences when we allow ourselves to believe things uncritically and without good reasons and evidence. Our beliefs and thought processes do not happen in a vacuum. Even when people quarter off their religious beliefs, but tend to be otherwise critical thinkers and rational agents in their day to day lives, irrationality can leak into a person's thinking, just as it did for me.

Fun stuff. I enjoyed that. I hope you did too.

Cheers,

Gavagai