Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (29 page)

At the very least, if you combine these two techniques, the patient will be left with the impression that the debate between you and her brother is all square—that neither side can be said to have achieved a decisive victory. And that is all the space we need in which to operate.

Your affectionate aunt,
Tapescrew

The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
June 28, 2009

Dear Woodworm,

I have not heard from you for a while. Gibbons tells me (yes, I have my spies in Oxford) that you haven't been into our Oxford centre much over the last few weeks. I very much hope that is because you are beavering away with your patient, whose brother, I anticipate, has now been dispatched?

Let us hope so. If you suspect the patient is having doubts, and if the other techniques I recommended are not proving effective enough to allay them, then let me share with some further thoughts passed on to a select group of us Seniors at one of our Leader's training sessions held in the South of France last week.

First of all, our Leader says he wants us to focus attention more on
morality.
He believes we have been missing a trick there. We must get our patients thinking, first of all, that
morality depends on religion.
That's to say, get them thinking people won't be good without religion, that religion provides us with our only moral compass. Take that compass away, and society will eventually slide into moral degeneracy.

Of course, that morality depends on religion is something your patient probably believes already. That is because the mainstream religions hijacked morality long ago. They created the myth that morality is their invention. They took the basic universal prohibitions against stealing, lying, murder, and so on, rigidly codified them, added a few idiosyncratic prohibitions of their own (typically concerning sexual practices and foodstuffs), and said, “Voilà! Religion has
created
morality! Without us,
there is no morality!
”

Never mind that there's growing scientific evidence that our morality is in large part a product of our evolutionary history. Never mind that the least religious Western democracies—Sweden, for example—are in many respects the most socially and morally healthy. Never mind that in traditional Chinese society—in which the dominant cultural force was not religion but a secular ethical doctrine, Confucianism—levels of ordinary morality have been much the same as in parts of the world dominated by transcendental religion. Because “morality depends on religion” has been endlessly repeated by religious folk—it is the one mantra they all share—it has, in many corners of the world, become a factoid, an unquestioned part of the cultural landscape. No one really thinks about it. They just accept it. Even many atheists (some of whom, while not religious, nevertheless suppose religious belief is therefore desirable
in others
—especially those lower down the socioeconomic ladder, who might otherwise burgle their house).

Take advantage of this widespread myth. Say, “Yes, morality
does
indeed depend on religion.” Then add, “But of course, it has to be the
right
religion, doesn't it?”

As I endlessly repeat to you—the key to recruitment is not reason but emotion. However, the fact is that the emotions on which we rely change. As I have already mentioned, we seduce new recruits with joy, but, as they begin to mature into seasoned Followers, we must increasingly come to rely on fear. Fear of loss of friends. Fear of loss of meaning and purpose. Now our Leader wants us to add another fear to the mix—fear of
moral oblivion.
Get our Followers holding tightly onto nurse, for fear of finding something worse. Our Leader wants our movement to achieve official status. He wants the state to recognise it as an important moral beacon—providing moral guidance to young people who might otherwise fall into degeneracy and sin. This way, we may even receive government funds. Certainly, there will no longer be any official resistance to our starting our own schools.

At the conference (which, I must say, was lavishly catered for—never have I tasted such smoked salmon), our Leader spoke of something else too. What we ultimately want, he forcefully and inspiringly reminded us, is what he calls the
Vision Thing.

The vision of which our Leader spoke, is not, of course,
a
vision—of heaven, or a religious figure descending, or anything like that. No, no. Not that there's anything wrong with our Followers having that sort of vision, of course. Sometimes they do. But our Leader meant something much less trivial. He was speaking of the all-encompassing mindset. He gave us various examples.

Sometimes a conspiracy theorist will become so enmeshed in their theory that they can just “see” that it is true. Wherever they look, they find their theory
fits.
Of course, what they are really doing is finding a way to
make it
fit. They interpret whatever they experience in such a way that it “makes sense” on their worldview. They also develop no end of moves to explain away anything that might look like a rational threat to their belief system. Anything that might seem not to fit—that the conspiracy theorist can't fully make sense of—is put down to the powerful and sometimes mysterious and inscrutable forces and plans of the conspirators. The conspiracy theorist supposes that he is the one whose eyes have been opened to what the rest of us cannot see. He turns on his TV of an evening, and discovers that each news item only further confirms his worst fears about the spread of the Conspiracy. He looks out the window and sees agents of evil spying on him from that parked car across the street. Eventually, the Conspiracy becomes
so
obvious to him that he is astonished the rest of us can't “see it” too, especially after he has pointed it out to us in some detail. So he supposes that we must be part of the Conspiracy. Either that, or our minds have been “got to” somehow. By
them.

The Vision Thing is not uncommon in the political sphere, of course. Witness the Marxist who, wherever she looks, finds that Marx's theories account for what happens. It all
fits.
It all
makes sense.
So obvious does it become to our Marxist, in the end, that she's astonished we cannot see what's going on in front of our eyes. Have we somehow been blinded by the forces of capitalism? Perhaps our senses have been dulled by the opiate of the masses?

The religious person, too, can achieve such an all-encompassing vision. Indeed, people often say that religious faith is something like a perspective on the world, a way of viewing it. We fling open our curtains in the morning and see sunlight. They fling open their curtains and see the glory of God flooding into their room. It's so obvious to them, they wonder why we can't see it too. They suppose we must be defective. “Perhaps,” they think, “it is because they have been corrupted by sin? Or
led astray by devils?
”

The Vision Thing can be produced in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it is a product of long immersion in a political ideology or some Internet-based conspiracy theory mindset. Sometimes it is a result of drug abuse. Sometimes it is caused by a mental illness. Sometimes it happens quite spontaneously. Occasionally, people look at the world and suddenly, apparently for no reason at all, just “see” that it is imbued with a kind of cosmic radiance.

Of course, others look and are suddenly consumed by a very different vision—a vision, say, of the world as the product of some awful cosmic malignancy. Those who have the latter sort of experience—and they are more common than you might imagine—tend to be put on medication. Those who have the former sort of experience tend to put on a dog collar. Had we the advantage of being one of the established, mainstream religions, many of those spontaneously having the first sort of experience would walk in through our doors, already converts!

What we are after with every patient is, our Leader helpfully reminded us, the Vision Thing. Our patients must come to
see
—with their hearts, if not their eyes—that our teaching is the Truth—that it accords in every last detail with everything they have ever experienced. They must find that it ultimately
makes sense
of everything.

I am concerned by the lack of communication, Woodworm. Get in touch. Now.

Your aunt,

Tapescrew

The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
September 14, 2009

Woodworm,

Finally, a missive from you. But I would rather not have received it. The brother, it turns out, is a skeptic—someone who insists on subjecting claims of a supernatural or extraordinary nature to close critical scrutiny before accepting them? And the patient shows signs of becoming one too? She has even signed up for a class in critical thinking and taken out a subscription to
Skeptical Inquirer?
How could you have let this happen, you oaf? Now we discover why you have been so quiet of late. You have failed catastrophically. You have allowed him to throw her the lifeline of reason, and she has used it to pull herself free!

Had I been forewarned that the brother is one of these irritatingly persistent and clear-headed free-thought types, well, we could have made plans. We could have at least prepared to
Go Nuclear.
But now it is too late.

Remember, at the end of the day, all we have got is a collection of extraordinary claims for which we can provide scarcely a shred of evidence. Other than that
we say they are true.
That's it!

Of course, all other cults and religions are in the same boat, yet that has not stopped
them
from flourishing, sometimes spectacularly so. How do
they
achieve such extraordinary success? Rule Number One is this: They manage, by one means or another, to obscure the fact that the evidence for what they believe is simply
that they say it's true.
Either that, or they succeed in neutralizing this fact by making it seem unimportant. They insist that the truth of what they say is known, not on the basis of
evidence
, oh, no, but in some other,
deeper
way—“with the heart,” or some other codswallop with which they fob off their respective followers.

Ultimately, you had one simple, basic job to do: to deal with the otherwise obvious thought that the only real reason our patient has got to believe any of this twaddle is that
we say it is true.
Which is hardly much of a reason, is it? That, Woodworm, is the one thought that, above all, you should have suppressed or neutralized. Yet that is the one thought you have allowed to pop—nay,
explode
—in the patient's head, and with devastating consequences!

You say she is now doubting even the “experience” we worked so carefully to cultivate at the Retreat? You say she thinks we have been playing with her mind? She supposes she may merely have felt certain powerful emotions that she
mistook
to be some sort of revelation? Good grief. We are sunk.

How on earth is our cult to expand if it has to rely on gurus as incompetent as yourself? The consequences of such an error will be serious, my boy. Our Leader does not forgive failure. You were warned.

Your bitterly disappointed aunt,

Tapescrew

INTRODUCTION

1.
See Harry Frankfurt,
On Bullshit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005),
p. 56
.

2.
Justin Barrett,
Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
(Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2004).

3.
Daniel D. Wegner,
The Illusion of Conscious Will
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002),
p. 113
.

4.
John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale,
Questions of Truth
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009),
p. 17
.

5.
See my paper “The Evil God Challenge,”
Religious Studies
46 (2010): 353–73.

6.
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5481-believe-it-or-not
(accessed September 27, 2010).

7.
Broadcast by Premier Christian Radio on May 1, 2010,
http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/3ad5f46f-e8c4-4ef5-85c8-37429f399c86.mp3
(accessed September 27, 2010).

CHAPTER 1

1.
G. W. F. Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
, vol. 1,
Introduction and Concept of Religion
, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
p. 258
.

2.
Quoted in John Woodcock and Jennifer Hill, “Crystal Healing All in the Mind,”
Scotsman
, March 29, 2001,
http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general369.html
(accessed September 27, 2010).

3.
http://recursed.blogspot.com/2006/05/debunking-crystal-healing.html
(accessed September 27, 2010).

4.
As the owner of the blog, Jeffrey Shallit, points out.

5.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
40, no. 3 (2010): 579–600.

6.
Martin Rees, “Other Universes: A Scientific Perspective,” in
God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science
, edited by Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003),
pp. 211
-
20
.

7.
John Polkinghorne,
Questions of Truth
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009),
p. 45
.

8.
Paul Davies,
The Goldilocks Enigma
(London: Penguin, 2007).

9.
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(London: Black Swan, 2007),
p. 136
.

10.
Published in the
Times
(London), February 10, 2007.

11.
Dawkins,
God Delusion
,
p. 80
.

12.
Ibid.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Ibid.

15.
Alister McGrath,
The Dawkins Delusion
(London: SPCK, 2007),
p. 14
.

16.
Quoted in Hales “You
Can
Prove a Negative,”
THINK
10 (2005): 109.

17.
Ibid.,
pp. 109
-
12
.

18.
Quentin Smith,
Two Ways to Defend Atheism.
Speech presented to the Atheist Alliance convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on April 6, 1996.

19.
Stephen Wykstra, “The Humean Objection to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance,’”
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
16 (1984): 91.

CHAPTER 2

1.
See, for example, the Gallup report “Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design,”
http://www.gallup.com/pollZ21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx
(accessed September 30, 2010).

2.
H. M. Morris,
The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth
(San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1972),
p. 75
.

3.
See, e.g., Richard E. Lenski, “Evolution: Fact and Theory,”
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/lenski.html
(accessed September 30, 2010).

4.
http://ldolphin.org/cisflood.html
(accessed September 30, 2010).

5.
http://creation.com/were-dinosaurs-on-noahs-ark
(accessed September 30, 2010).

6.
Ibid.

7.
http://ldolphin.org/cisflood.html
(accessed September 30, 2010).

8.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/really-a-flood-and-ark
(accessed September 30, 2010).

9.
Ibid.

10.
Douglas Theobald, “29+ Evidences for Macro-evolution Part 1: The Unique Universal Phylogenetic Tree,”
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html
(accessed September 30, 2010).

11.
See, for example, ibid.

12.
"Science as Falsification,”
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
(accessed September 30, 2010).

13.
Ibid.

14.
Quoted in Martin Gardner, “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1957),
p. 126
.

15.
Robin Pharoah, Tamara Hale, and Becky Rowe,
Doubting Darwin: Creationism and Evolution Scepticism in Britain Today
,
pp. 138
-
39
,
http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/TheosDoubtingDarwin.pdf
(accessed September 30, 2010).

16.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/the-lie/chapter4.asp
(accessed September 30, 2010).

17.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/206.asp
(accessed September 30, 2010).

18.
Bodie Hodge, “Why Don't We Find Human and Dinosaur Fossils Together?”
http://www.answersingenesis.org/publicstore/pdfs/sam-plechapter/10-2-267.pdf
(accessed September 30, 2010).

19.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/184
(accessed September 30, 2010).

20.
"Science as Falsification,”
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
(accessed September 30, 2010).

21.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/the-lie/chapter4.asp
(accessed September 30, 2010).

CHAPTER 3

1.
Quoted in Solomon Schimmel,
The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 66
(quoting Samuel Heilman, H-JUDAIC Discussion group, January 15, 1997).

2.
In a comment on my blog post at
http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2008/08/sye-latest-twist.html
(accessed September 20, 2010).

3.
MacLaine quote taken from Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn, eds.,
How to Think about Weird Things
, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), p. 310.

4.
http://www.psychicbutsane.com/intuition/how-to-discern-what-is-true
(accessed September 20, 2010).

5.
Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Touchstone, 1987),
p. 25
.

6.
Quotation is the first line of “On Truth,” available at
http://www.personal.psu.edu/jxm22/browseread/bacontruth.html
.

CHAPTER 4

1.
http://elizaphanian.blogspot.com/2008/06/meaning-suffering-and-integrity.html
(accessed October 2, 2010).

2.
Karen Armstrong,
The Case for God
(London: Bodley Head, 2009), p. 293.

3.
Ibid., p. 307.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Ibid.,
p. 246
.

6.
Ibid.,
p. 34
-also see p. 314.

7.
Denys Turner, “How to Be an Atheist” in his
Faith Seeking
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
p. 10
.

8.
Ibid.,
p. 13
.

9.
Ibid.

10.
Ibid.,
p. 19
.

11.
See A. J. Ayer,
Language, Truth and Logic
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971).

12.
Nicholas Lash, “The Impossibility of Atheism” in his
Theology for Pilgrims
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008),
p. 34
.

13.
Lash, incidentally, then goes on to argue that the latter sort of atheism is
impossible
, as “effective refusal to have anything to do with God can only mean self-destruction, annihilation, return to the
nihil
from which all things came” (
p. 35
). Lash's argument for the impossibility of this kind of atheism contains two obvious flaws: (1) Lash here just
assumes
that there is a God from which all things came, and (2) in case Lash muddles up two senses of “refusal to have anything to do with.” I can refuse to have anything to with my mother in the sense that I can ignore her, etc., but of course I still have
something
to do with her, and indeed do so necessarily: it remains true that if she had not existed, then neither would I. Atheists might similarly refuse to have anything to do with God even if there is, as Lash here just assumes, a God on which their existence depends.

14.
Lash, “The Impossibility of Atheism,”
p. 34
.

15.
Ibid.,
p. 35
.

16.
Ibid.,
p. 26
.

17.
Ibid.,
p. 15
.

CHAPTER 5

1.
Charles E. Miller, “Intuitive Policing,” in
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
, February 1, 2004. Also see Malcolm Gladwell's book
Blink
(London: Penguin, 2006) for other examples.

2.
Rich Proctor, “The Bush Style: Going on His Fabled Gut,”
CounterPunch
, February 22, 2003,
http://www.counterpunch.org/procter02222003.html
(accessed October 5, 2010).

3.
Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,”
New York Times Magazine
, October 17, 2004,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
(accessed October 5, 2010).

4.
Clifford's paper “The Ethics of Belief” is currently in print in W. K. Clifford,
The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999).

5.
Richard Dawkins,
A Devil's Chaplain
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003),
p. 248
.

6.
For a brief overview of Plantinga's view, see his entry “Reformed Epistemology” in
A Companion to the Philosophy of Religion
, edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 383–89.

7.
Alvin Plantinga,
Warranted Christian Belief
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
p. 214
.

8.
My thanks to Tim Mawson for this nice way of making the point.

9.
Karen Armstrong,
The Case for God
(London: Bodley Head, 2009), p. 305.

10.
Ibid., p. 316.

11.
Ibid.,
p. 34
.

12.
Ibid., p. 314.

13.
In his book
Why Gods Persist
, biologist and psychologist Professor Robert Hinde, having surveyed the scientific literature on religious and certain sorts of nonreligious experience, also tentatively concludes that the two sets of experiences are remarkably similar, differing largely only in how they are interpreted:

It is difficult to draw a line between experience that is clearly religious and experiences of a more secular nature. The emotions aroused in many secular gatherings are not clearly different from those involved in religious ones, and aesthetic experience would seem to have much in common with religious experience. The view tentatively suggested here … is that the experiences are essentially the same, and it is primarily the interpretations put on them that differ. (Robert A. Hinde,
Why Gods Persist: A Scientific Approach to Religion
, 2nd ed. [Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2000],
p. 205
)

Hinde adds the caveat that the nature of the experience, once it is interpreted religiously, may change as a result.

14.
http://www.answers2prayer.org/bible_questions/Answers/prayer/speaking.html
(accessed October 5, 2010).

CHAPTER 6

1.
In a speech to the American Atheists Institution conference in 2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9w8JougLQ
(accessed October 2, 2010).

2.
Borrowed from the website
http://www.parables.com
(accessed October 2, 2010).

3.
Maxwell's inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, 1871.