Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (27 page)

The connection between beauty and God seems very intuitive to many people and has wide social support among those to whom the sight of a flower confirms theology. For such people, the nature of beauty itself goes unexamined.
Why
do some things strike us as beautiful and others not? Is beauty simply a
thing
that resides in some items but not others? Perhaps we might wonder why we perceive certain things as beautiful and others as ugly. Or is it enough to simply let beauty accumulate in an unexamined way until we are convinced that beauty → design → designer → God?

Joanne viewed these questions as a big waste of time. She asked, “Why do you think you’re sitting here, at this table, next to us? Do you believe
that’s
a coincidence too? Do you not see that
everything
in the universe has meaning and purpose?”

This moment underscored the enormity of the challenge facing this book. Almost every error of fact, logic, and perception discussed in
Caveman Logic
seemed to be present in Joanne’s thinking and the arguments she made with considerable force. These attitudes and beliefs were present in a normal, intelligent woman whose job it was to educate hundreds of children each year. These are children whose minds are already predisposed to the same mistakes that Joanne wore on her sleeve. These are children who would already be hearing similar thinking from their families and friends, as well as from people they respected in all walks of life. And now their educators were piling it on as well, perhaps winning teaching awards in the process.

A controversial subject matter and a teacher who professes ambivalence about it are not a recipe for good education.

“Do you think you understand natural selection?” I asked Joanne.

“Probably not as well as I ought to,” she admitted.

This, too, underscores the dilemma: Should a teacher who does not understand an important subject very well be entrusted with teaching it to the next generation, as well as making decisions about the extent to which it should be taught at all?

Joanne was very clear.
Chance
is a cold, ugly process that can only result in empty sterility. It can never produce beauty. Beauty can only result from conscious design. Joanne’s viewpoint is actually more enlightened than some. It is a dual system that relegates ugly-looking weeds or warthogs to natural selection (score one for Darwin!), but ascribes things like roses and bunny rabbits to God. Nowhere inside these beliefs is there any reflection on the possibility that beauty might reside in the mind of the beholder and not in the rose. And if it does, that sense of beauty might result from an evolutionary process whose existence Joanne doubts.

Creationists sometimes use the analogy of a tornado blowing through a junkyard. When the wind subsides, you find a perfectly assembled jet engine. Now how likely is that? they ask with glee. To many, evolution goes beyond silliness and if a bunch of godless academics want to put it in some fancy book, that’s their business. Joanne, like any team player, will dutifully present evolution in class (with no great enthusiasm), but she’ll damn well remind the kids that it’s “only a theory.”

The second scenario has both common sense and comfort on its side, not to mention the fact that it doesn’t stir up protest from the parents. Common sense and comfort without conflict: an unbeatable combination. This scenario simply says that someone very wise and very powerful spent time in that junkyard and
designed
that jet engine and left it for us. If anyone asks why, you can suggest that he loves us. Plainly, this is the scenario many teachers favor for both personal and pedagogical reasons. You’ve just got to hope that your class doesn’t include some smartass atheist kid who points out that it doesn’t take much to insert that heavenly jet engine into a plane and fly it into a building.

“They’re no fools, those believers. You may think of them as weak-minded sheep, but there are some pretty smart people out there who believe in God.”

I’ve heard this from more than one colleague who knew about this book and wanted to help. I agree with them. We already looked at the smart/dumb, atheist/theist correlation table in chapter 2 and found it less than helpful. There are better predictors of religious belief than intelligence. Certainly, cleverness is not in short supply among the religious. How else to account for the billboard on display in the Nashville, Tennessee, area bearing the words, “Exposure to the Son prevents burning”? Atheists could use a few good slogan writers to work for them.

So what do we make of the almost intractable resistance one finds to logical Darwinian arguments? If you listen carefully to what opponents tell you at unguarded moments, a recurrent theme emerges. What we often learn is that concerns about morality are absolutely central to rejecting Darwin. You can argue the fossil record until you’re blue in the face. You may win some unenthusiastic concessions, but only up to a point. That point was well expressed recently in the Arkansas State House of Representatives. In essence, “If we teach children they’re descended from monkeys, they’ll act like monkeys.”

That fear of “monkey sex” is so basic to creationist resistance that no amount of scientific evidence can budge it. “Throw out God and you’ll throw out morality.” That’s what you’ll hear, along with fears about fornicating in the streets. “Within a single generation we’ll lose every bit of decency, self-restraint, and morality we’ve worked hard to instill in them.”
Them,
of course, are the children who are viewed as moral blank slates upon which religion’s mighty pen had better start writing. Seen from the conservative Christian /creationist point of view, this debate is a battle for civilization itself, not some academic difference over paleontology. To understand or engage it in those terms is to embrace failure.

Darwinians and scientists in general might be better advised to focus on this rarely stated core of resistance and not worry as much about the academic-style arguments they were trained to make to convince their students and colleagues. There are relevant papers out there like Frans de Waal’s “Primates: A Natural Heritage of Conflict Resolution,” and books like Matt Ridley’s
The Origins of Virtue
and Marc Hauser’s
Moral Minds
.
¹
But they are neither written for, nor widely read by, creationists. This is an entirely different adversary. They are frightened—not about the particulars of natural selection, but about its implications for everyday life. A colleague of mine who occasionally debates creationists makes a point of bringing his wife and two young sons with him to the events. As he observes, “Seeing me surrounded by a normal-looking family may do more to give them second thoughts about Darwin or atheism than all of my best logical arguments put together.”

So, if we can’t persuade them using our usual arsenal, can we at least immunize ourselves (or perhaps some of them) against such wrongheaded beliefs? We’ve already noted that creationist/anti-Darwinian beliefs have a considerable advantage in the marketplace of ideas. When you pair that natural advantage with modern teaching aids like Kenneth Miller’s article in the April 2007
Parents
magazine, “Giving Kids the Gift of Faith” (available at
www.beliefnet.com
), it’s a wonder atheism is still around to protest.

Fortunately, technology has been put to use on both sides of the spiritual divide. There is a full library of children’s books and videos on subjects such as secular humanism, critical thinking, skepticism, and atheism. A series of offerings by Dan Barker such as
Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children
²
encourages them to question and doubt the religiosity they will find everywhere. The publicity surrounding these products seldom uses the word “immunize,” choosing instead to say things like, “In a world flooded with religious literature, there is a need for material that nonreligious families can present to their children that validates their decision not to believe in gods or myths.” Longitudinal studies examining the effects of such early experience on later beliefs would be useful to determine whether early “immunization” can overcome later religious indoctrination.

It might also be useful for these longitudinal studies to document the fact that nonindoctrinated individuals do not routinely become drooling, amoral sexual predators or mass murderers. There are those to whom that simple fact might be somewhat surprising. It won’t put the debate to rest, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The confirmation bias is one of the most insidious and pervasive bits of software in your head. It is as much a part of being human as having two eyes, one nose, and two feet. To avoid evaluating the world through the confirmation bias, you have got to take conscious steps against it. Even then there is no guarantee you’ll succeed. If you allow your mental software to operate on its Pleistocene default settings, you will bring this bias into play.

Worse yet, you won’t even be aware of it. In all likelihood, if you are confronted with what you are doing, you will probably deny it. You might even bring some righteous indignation to the denial. When its rules and properties are spelled out, the confirmation bias is actually quite unappealing to most people. They agree that it is
not
very reasonable or fair. It is not the kind of mental style they want to associate with themselves. People prefer to see themselves as open-minded, rational, and fair. Those are admirable qualities, indeed, and it is good that we value them so highly. It’s just that those qualities are almost the opposite of how we function in the real world.

So just what is this dreaded confirmation bias? It refers to the fact that we form opinions, social perceptions, and judgments very quickly—and often by rules that we would not want to bring before the Oxford Debating Society. Once these opinions, perceptions, and judgments are in place, we do not hold them up to critical scrutiny. Instead, we look for confirming evidence and seize upon it as quickly as it appears. We spend virtually no time seeking negative evidence about our beliefs and, even when such information forces itself into our awareness, we find ways of discounting or dismissing it altogether. In short, we don’t play fair. We are emotionally invested in supporting our beliefs and worldviews. We have an almost inexhaustible supply of “Yes, buts” when some of that threatening negative evidence peers around the corners of our belief system.

This is nothing new. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that the confirmation bias has been a fundamental part of human mental functioning since we were certifiably human. It is nothing new in another sense also. Describing and diagnosing the confirmation bias is not just the domain of modern cognitive or social psychology. Evidence of this fundamental “unfairness” in human mental life has been known for centuries. It is hardly a well-kept secret. Francis Bacon wrote about it in his
Novum Organum
in 1620. Bacon’s language may appear quaint to us today, but there is no doubt that he was talking about this same glitch in human mental life. He spoke of our “drawing all things to support and agree with” our opinions, and “neglecting or despising” negative evidence even though “there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side.” Bacon spoke of our need to keep our “former conclusions” as “inviolate” and described the mental tricks we used to do so as “
great and pernicious”
(italics mine).

Evidence of the confirmation bias has advanced from earlier questionnaire studies by social psychologists to more modern neuroimaging techniques of cognitive neuroscientists. A 2006 study by Drew Westen and his colleagues
³
used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of a group of “strong” Republicans and Democrats as they responded to George W. Bush and John Kerry contradicting themselves during the 2004 presidential elections. True to form, the Democrats found a way to let their candidate off the hook for his verbal transgressions while remaining strongly critical of the Republican candidate’s gaffes. Republicans responded to Kerry in the same manner. The study’s primary contribution was to report that areas of the brain normally associated with logical reasoning—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—was all but missing in action during this processing. Instead, the most active regions of the brain were those associated with the processing of emotions and conflict resolution. Once subjects had reached a decision to support either Kerry or Bush, the “pleasure centers” of their brains were highly activated.

In a press release accompanying his findings, Westen noted, “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion and resolving conflicts.” Westen describes the overall process in terms that resonate with Bacon’s prose from nearly four centuries earlier. “Essentially it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states.”

Commenting on these findings,
Skeptic
editor Michael Shermer notes that such irrational information processing is hardly confined to the political arena. Because it is a fundamental part of human nature, the confirmation bias emerges everywhere humans are forced to reach and maintain conclusions as evidence continues to accumulate. All of our personal beliefs fall under this heading. Is this a just world? Am I lucky (or unlucky)? Is the president a great leader? Have we had previous lives? Does God love me? Do we have a divine purpose that will be revealed to us through signs in our lives? These are areas where we’re likely to find evidence of the confirmation bias in action. The conclusions were long ago reached; now we are in the business of weeding through the evidence in a way that keeps us feeling good about how “right” our viewpoints are. Most of these opinions are highly personal and may ultimately have little impact on the lives of others. However, Michael Shermer looks at examples whose implications may be greater, such as a juror assessing the innocence or guilt of a defendant or a high financier making decisions about the actions of his own company or a competitor.