Willful Blindness

I am currently reading the book "Willful Blindness" by Margaret Heffernan.  One subject Heffernan discusses is how we tend to cling to our beliefs no matter how much evidence is stacked against them.  This can apply to political views, religious beliefs, or our beliefs about ourselves.  Since this is a blog about religion I want to focus on the religious aspect of this phenomenon.

As I write this, there is a case pending before a British court wherein Thomas S. Monson is being charged with fraud under a new statute (as of 2006) for using false claims to benefit financially.  The false claims include certain Mormon beliefs that can be demonstrated scientifically to be false.  The financial benefit comes from tithing, which in the Mormon church constitutes 10 percent of gross income and is mandatory for baptism and temple attendance.  Monson has been named because he is the sole of a corporation sole that is responsible for collecting and managing the tithing funds of the church.  Thomas Phillips, who has filed this criminal case as a private British citizen, has documented cases where members had to go into debt to pay back tithing in order to qualify to attend their children's wedding in a Mormon temple.  The contrast between this method of extorting money out of its members, and freewill offerings collected in other churches is one of the main reasons that this case has been allowed to get this far.

Phillips has included 7 teachings of Mormonism that can most easily be demonstrated to be false.  Some of the items are the same things that caused me to lose faith in Mormonism.  One belief is that a group of Jews came to America in 600 BC as told in the Book of Mormon.  This can be proven false through archeological, DNA, linguistic, and cultural evidence.  Another belief is that the Book of Abraham is a literal translation of an ancient papyrus by Joseph Smith that contains the writings of Abraham.  This can be demonstrated to be false because this papyrus still exists and has been translated by Egyptologists, who found it to common funeral text.  Other beliefs include mankind descending from a single couple who lived about 6,000 years ago and a world-wide flood about 4,500 years ago that killed all but eight people.  These beliefs are incompatible with the natural history of the world as revealed through geology, biological evolution, and genetics.

My main purpose is not to debate these beliefs or to provide evidence for them.  The evidence is readily available and is overwhelming.  The question that interests me is the subject of Heffernan's book: how intelligent people can maintain beliefs despite overwhelming evidence against them.  According to Heffernan, belief takes much less energy and cognitive resources than skepticism and doubt.  This is not to say that doubters are smarter than believers, but only that they had the time, motivation, and available cognitive resources free from distractions to do the difficult mental work required by skepticism and doubt.  Maintaining belief is the default, easy, comfortable behavior while changing requires great effort.  This contrasts sharply with the idea of many believers that doubters have taken the easy way out.  Not only is doubt more difficult and less comfortable than belief, but doubters have also often paid high social costs as well.

When my ex wife learned of my doubts she accused me of arrogance and reminded me that lots of smart people at BYU knew about these issues and still believed.  Given Heffernan's insights this should not be surprising.  The easier, more comfortable path is maintaining belief.  This is what our minds want to do.  It is much more significant to change.  That so few are willing to change their beliefs speaks to our natural tendency and desire to maintain the status quo, not to the weakness of the evidence that created the doubt.

The reasons some maintain belief and some do not is a frequently discussed topic on support message boards.  An often discussed theory is that somehow skepticism correlates with intelligence.  However, this is an overly simplistic view.  Everyone knows some very smart people who believe all sorts of things that are not backed up by evidence.  It is not raw general intelligence that makes the difference, but applying that intelligence to grappling with the difficult questions and not being afraid of what we might find when we look into the forbidden box.