Certainty, Certainly

Let's begin our journey through thoughtville by talking about a theory I learned about during my education in psychology. A consistency theory proposed by the influential Leon Festinger in 1957, modified by a number of researchers, and studied experimentally by an entire generation of social psychologists, I am talking about Dissonance Theory. According to my old university textbook on Attitudes and Opinions, "Without a doubt, dissonance theory has aroused more controversy and received more praise and criticism than any other current theory in social psychology". Big claim to live up to. Let's see what all the fuss is about:

The theory describes the relationship between items of knowledge, attitudes, information, or beliefs that a person holds about his or herself, or the world around them. Two different items can be either consonant, meaning they agree with one another, or they can be dissonant, or irrelevant. A dissonance can be some sort of logical inconsistency, when based on one belief one would expect X outcome, but instead found Y.

The basic principles of the theory are as follows:
1. Dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to redue the dissonance and achieve consonance... [and to] avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.
2. The magnitude of the dissonance (or consonance) increases as the importance or value of the elements increases.
3. The strength of the pressure to reduce dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance.

Just to give an example to help clarify for those stoners in the back, the thought "Speeding is dangerous" is consonant with the thought "Speeding is against the law", but disonant with "Speeding is necessary when running late". An irrelevant thought would be one like "I like mudkips". When a person holds dissonant thoughts, they can attempt to reduce that dissonance by:
1) Changing one of the held beliefs. With our example above, not speeding, or by deciding speeding is within her ability would qualify. Or by holding the belief that speeding is only a petty crime, or some other sort of notion that reduces the discrepency.
2) Adding new beliefs to strengthen one side or the other.
3) Lowering the importance of the belief. If two beliefs don't agree, she may simply say, "I know speeding is against the law, but I'm having health problems and my life is worth more than the risk" for example.

All of this has some interesting implications for Religion! As one of my favourite quotes states: "The bible is a mine rich in the ore of cognitive dissonance" (Delos B. McKown). The opportunities for cognitive dissonance to arise are everywhere. I'll look at a few, and then explore what it is about how these beliefs are structured that seems to prevent people from critically examining them or convincing themselves that no dissonance exists.

(Does Not Equal, our symbol of the day!)

I've recently gotten my little mittens on an audiobook copy of Bart D. Ehrman's "Jesus Interrupted", a book that literally slogs its way through the bible, bit by bit, pointing out irreconcilable contradictions in the text. The author is no clown show, he is "an American New Testament scholar and textual critic of early Christianity. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill." (thx wikiP). And when he says there is a great many contradictions in the bible, I'm going to believe him. We don't need to take his word for it though, he lays out his material quite plainly in his books. I've included a few of the issues he rasied just in the first chapter of his book while I was listening to it last night at the end of the article.

How does this relate to cognitive dissonance? Well, when a person holds a belief about religion, like say, that the bible is the inerrant word of god and also knows that one passage or book from the bible is in disagreement with another, there you have your cognitive dissonance. Everywhere you turn, some sort of little nagging disagreement seems to pop up. Our perception of "God" is a great example. According to most of the faithful, god posesses omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. God has also been conceived as being incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the "greatest conceivable existent". All of these concepts are inconsistent with anything we could ever hope to posess ourselves, and when I ask how it is that we even know that god posesses these characteristics, the most common answer I hear is that the bible tells us so. Maybe you haven't gotten all the way through that colossal bore of a bestseller yet, but for a being with perfect goodness, he gets pretty nasty when the occasion calls for a pillar of salt or two. I think Dawkins said it best when he said

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, bully.

How can anyone reconcile this extreme dissonance? Looking back at our list of ways people deal with beliefs they hold that do not mesh, we can draw a few likely conclusions. Either:
a) They didn't realize a discrepancy existed. ("I never really thought about it")
b) They conclude that god is beyond their understanding. (Lowering the importance of the problem. Dissonance only seems to exist due to their lack of comprehension)
c) Add more beliefs to balance things out (eg. God loves and forgives everyone. UNLESS you turn away from him. EXCEPT when you do not accept him as your personal saviour, and so on).

There isn't much you can do about situation a) except make a blog (reminds me of this funny quote). Option b) is incredibly weak and insulting to anyone who subscribes to this notion. If god is outside of the realm of our understanding, how do we have a book purportedly outlining his every wish and command for how we are to live? How did nomadic, uneducated, near-savages in the middle of the damn desert manage to get such a great grasp on things, yet we can't understand it today? No, b) is a cop-out I say. The last option is interesting, because it allows the believer to 'make up their own rules' in a way. You can carefully craft your own little 'if, unless, but' rules and you end up with a little logic square that can suit any sort of political agenda you wish, but the fact of the matter is, there will always be statements in the bible that are in direct conflict with one another.

You know what else works for reducing that psychologically stressful cognitive dissonance? Realizing that the whole thing is a craft that isn't the 100% inspired word of god, but a collection of primitive texts written by multiple authors, modified and mistranslated over hundreds of years to suit the agendas of those who passed them on. And they are. Any biblical scholar can tell you that. It is then and only then that you will realize that all of these debates on moral issues such as homosexuality that are based on pieces of scripture are ridiculous. We wouldn't follow the same rules and methods for preparing and storing food, or treating disease, or transporting ourselves, or communicating with members of the opposite sex (or or or) that we did then. Why would we follow any other specific verse?

(sidenote - I also find it interesting that God seems to posess every quality that is a failing or limitation in some way to us as humans. This notion was best pointed out to me by Michel Onfray when he said:

Mortal, finite, limited, suffering from all these constraints, haunted by the desire for completeness, human beings invent a power endowed with precisely the opposite characteristics. With their faults turned inside out, like the fingers of a pair of gloves, they manufacture characteristics at whose feet they kneel and finally prostrate themselves. I am mortal, but God is immortal. I am finite, but God is infinite. I am limited, but God knows no limits. I do not know everything, but God is omniscient. I cannot do everything, but God is omnipotent. I am not blessed with the gift of ubiquity, but God is omnipresent. I was created, but God is uncreated. I am weak, but God is the Almighty. I dwell on earth, but God is in heaven. I am imperfect, but God is perfect. I am nothing, but God is everything. And so on.

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Some discrepencies in the bible:

Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 2 Order of creation:
- Are animals created before humans (ch .1), or after (ch. 2)?
- Are plants created before humans or afterward?
- Is man the first living creature to be created, or the last?
- Is man created at the same time as women, or separately?
- If light was created on the first day of creation, how is it that the sun moon and stars not created til the fourth day?
- And how could there be an evening or morning on the first day if there was no sun?

When Noah takes his pairs of animals on the ark, does he take seven pairs of all the clean animals as Genesis 5-2 states, or just two pairs, as 7-2 indicates?

10 Plagues:
5th plague was a pestilence that killed all of the livestock of the Egyptians. How was it that a few days later the plague of hail was to destroy all of the Egyptian livestock in the fields? What livestock?

New Testament

Cleansing of the temple in Mark 11, John 2
In Mark (last event before he dies)
In John (first public event)
(maybe he did it twice?)

When did Jesus die? Mark vs. John

The birth narrative differences between gospels (lots)
Matthew - wise men come to worship Jesus (no shepherds)
Luke - shepherds come to worship Jesus (no wise men)

Geneologies of Joseph
- Why do the geneologies & royal lineage matter if Joseph and Mary didn't have sex?
Matthew (From Abraham --> David)
Luke (From Adam --> David)