Category Archives: General Apologetics

General Apologetics

What Is Confirmation Bias?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Confirmation bias is a concept you need to understand because it impacts all of us, and we are mostly unaware.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes confirmation bias in the context of a person being presented with a statement that they can choose to believe or not believe. Kahneman begins, “The initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1 , which involves the construction of the best possible interpretation of the situation. Even a nonsensical statement . . . will evoke initial belief.” (emphasis added)

Kahneman explains that unbelieving is an operation of System 2, but we already know that System 2 requires additional cognitive energy to get engaged. So what does this mean?

The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything . System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

And now comes the concept of confirmation bias:

The operations of [System 1] associative memory contribute to a general confirmation bias. When asked, “Is Sam friendly?” different instances of Sam’s behavior will come to mind than would if you had been asked “Is Sam unfriendly?” A deliberate search for confirming evidence, known as positive test strategy, is also how System 2 tests a hypothesis.

Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold. The confirmatory bias of System 1 favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events.

Unless we are paying close attention and engaging System 2, our bias is to believe what we are told. System 1 will pull memories and ideas out of our mind to confirm whatever is being presented to us. It is only when we pause, think, and consider what is being said, that System 2 can start to methodically test what is being presented to us.

As someone who reads a tremendous amount of anti-Christian material, I am aware of this process happening to me all the time. I will read statements that say, in effect, “This aspect of the Christian worldview is totally wrong,” and my initial reaction, if I don’t have my mind really engaged, is almost always to agree! In fact, if I just uncritically read any author, I will find myself wanting to agree with most of what the author is saying.

I don’t think this reaction is all bad, though. The best way to understand another person’s viewpoint is to immerse yourself in their ideas as best you can, and try to see the world as they see it. If you stop to critically analyze every sentence, you will quickly exhaust yourself and never see as the other person sees.

So my recommendation is to let System 1 have its way when you are reading new material, at least for a while. Once you’ve uncritically read enough to understand the main point of the author, then go back and bring System 2 into the game. Analyze, critique, question what you’ve read.

The situation where System 1 can really be dangerous for a person is when that person only reads material that already confirms their previous beliefs, and reads without ever engaging System 2 to analyze, critique, and question what they’ve read. If this happens over and over again for years, you have the making of a dogmatic and stubborn individual, someone who is rarely thinking about what they believe.

Existence of God, General Apologetics, Intelligent Design

Why Do We See Causality All Around Us?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes the concept of intentional causality. According to Kahneman,

Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here again, the evidence is that we are born prepared to make intentional attributions: infants under one year old identify bullies and victims, and expect a pursuer to follow the most direct path in attempting to catch whatever it is chasing.

Intentional causality is contrasted with physical causality. Physical causality is perceived when we see physical objects interacting with each other, such as one billiard ball hitting another and causing it to move.

Kahneman assigns the ability of human beings to see both kinds of causality to System 1 and believes there might be an evolutionary reason for why System 1 is so ready and adept at seeing both intentional and physical causality in the world around us.

The experience of freely willed action is quite separate from physical causality. Although it is your hand that picks up the salt , you do not think of the event in terms of a chain of physical causation. You experience it as caused by a decision that a disembodied you made, because you wanted to add salt to your food. Many people find it natural to describe their soul as the source and the cause of their actions.

The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.”

The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. In Bloom’s view, the two concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religion into the structure of System 1.

These two kinds of causality are important to understand, for they stand in the center of the battle between two major worldviews: atheism and theism. Atheists affirm physical causality, but deny intentional causality (they claim it is just an illusion and that only physical causality is really operating). Theists affirm both physical and intentional causality.

Almost every debate about the origin of the universe, or the fine-tuning of the physical constants in the universe, or the design of biological organisms, comes down to whether you believe that intentional causality is real or illusory. There is no doubt that most human beings believe that both are real, and that this belief is hard-wired into us, but that doesn’t settle the debate.

For those who want to claim that the concept of intentional causality is not real because it is produced by evolution, that argument doesn’t fly. Where the ability to see intentional causality came from is not directly relevant to whether there really are intentional causes.  Pressing this claim would be a case of the genetic fallacy. The source of an idea cannot tell you whether an idea is true or false.

And besides, if you believe evolution caused human beings to see intentional causality, then you must also believe that evolution caused human beings to see physical causality, and almost nobody wants to say that physical causality is unreal.

General Apologetics

Why Do We Answer Questions We Weren’t Asked?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, has introduced us to the two processes going on inside our minds: System 1 and System 2. We’ve already looked at the fact that System 1 kicks in first when we are approached by a situation with which we aren’t familiar. System 1 has lots of shortcuts it likes to take instead of dealing completely rationally and thoughtfully with what is being presented (that’s System 2’s job, after all).

One of these shortcuts is that System 1, instead of answering the question that is being posed, will substitute an easier question and answer that instead. Kahneman explains:

The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

How can this be? How can we have answers ready for everything that comes our way, without even giving the questions much thought?

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. I also adopt the following terms:

The target question is the assessment you intend to produce.

The heuristic question is the simpler question that you answer instead.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.

Kahneman is arguing that when we are presented with a complex or abstract question, instead of slowly thinking about it, our minds immediately offer up a solution by answering a simpler and different version of the question. The table below gives some examples.

Target Question Heuristic Question
How much would you contribute to save an endangered species? How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?
How happy are you with your life these days? What is my mood right now?
How popular is the president right now? How popular will the president be six months from now?
How should financial advisers who prey on the elderly be punished? How much anger do I feel when I think of financial predators?
This woman is running for the primary. How far will she go in politics? Does this woman look like a political winner?

Kahneman points out that

System 2 has the opportunity to reject this intuitive answer, or to modify it by incorporating other information. However, a lazy System 2 often follows the path of least effort and endorses a heuristic answer without much scrutiny of whether it is truly appropriate. You will not be stumped, you will not have to work very hard, and you may not even notice that you did not answer the question you were asked. Furthermore, you may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind.

As a Christian sharing the gospel and sharing evidences and arguments that  show Christianity is true, I have to be aware that substitution is going on. Here is another table that illustrates what I’m talking about.

Target Question Heuristic Question
Do you believe Christianity is true? Do I like the Christians I know?
Are you convicted by your sins? Am I basically a good person?
What do you think of the historical evidence of the resurrection? Do I think that miracles can ever occur?
Would you consider following Christ? Do I want to be associated with the Christians I know?

It sometimes takes great effort to convince your friend to actually answer the questions you’re posing to him. Be aware of what is going on and keep bringing your friend back to the real question, not the question he simply substitutes because it’s easier for him to answer.

General Apologetics

How Do We React When We Encounter Something New? (Not Rationally)

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Have you ever noticed the reactions you get when you present a new concept to someone, a new argument, a new piece of unexpected data? Unless the person with whom you are speaking is already familiar with what you are saying, you often get some kind of emotional or irrational response that indicates the person is not really getting what you’re saying.

Why is this? I see this happen in-person and on-line all the time. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains what happens in these circumstances in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. The first responder to our environment is our System 1 (see previous blog post to see explanation of System 1 and System 2). So what does System 1 do?

Kahneman gives an example of a typical System 1 reaction by presenting the reader with the following words side by side: bananas vomit. Take a minute and note your reaction to those words. Then read on.

The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words happened by a process called associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The essential feature of this complex set of mental events is its coherence.

Each element is connected, and each supports and strengthens the others. The word evokes memories, which evoke emotions, which in turn evoke facial expressions and other reactions, such as a general tensing up and an avoidance tendency. The facial expression and the avoidance motion intensify the feelings to which they are linked, and the feelings in turn reinforce compatible ideas. All this happens quickly and all at once, yielding a self-reinforcing pattern of cognitive, emotional, and physical responses that is both diverse and integrated— it has been called associatively coherent.

Kahneman continues:

In a second or so you accomplished, automatically and unconsciously, a remarkable feat. Starting from a completely unexpected event, your System 1 made as much sense as possible of the situation— two simple words, oddly juxtaposed— by linking the words in a causal story; it evaluated the possible threat (mild to moderate) and created a context for future developments by preparing you for events that had just become more likely; it also created a context for the current event by evaluating how surprising it was. . . .

An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality. Your body reacted in an attenuated replica of a reaction to the real thing, and the emotional response and physical recoil were part of the interpretation of the event. As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain. The mechanism that causes these mental events has been known for a long time: it is the association of ideas.

Kahneman then explains what he means by “ideas” in the mind. An idea can be

concrete or abstract, and it can be expressed in many ways: as a verb, as a noun, as an adjective, or as a clenched fist. Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others. There are different types of links: causes are linked to their effects (virus → cold); things to their properties (lime → green); things to the categories to which they belong (banana → fruit).

Psychologists and philosophers used to believe that ideas followed one after another in your mind, chronologically. Kahneman says that this view no longer holds:

In the current view of how associative memory works, a great deal happens at once. An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

Whenever a person is confronted with new data, System 1 takes over and delivers the first response. This response is largely unconscious and automatic, and it is based on all of the ideas in your mind that are unconsciously associated with the new data you’ve just been presented. Thus the strange reactions we often get when we present new ideas to someone.

At first, they are not able to think completely rationally and carefully about what you’re saying. They are just reacting based on their life experiences. Kahneman is not saying that we can never think clearly and rationally. System 2 can be brought to bear on any situation, but until it is, you are having to deal with a whole list of associations in the other person of which you are completely ignorant (unless you know that person really well).

General Apologetics

Why Don’t People Listen to Your Reasoning?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Christian apologists try to convince other people that Christianity is true (all Christians are supposed to be doing this, by the way). We have excellent arguments and we have powerful evidence from philosophy, science, and history to support those arguments. That is why Christian apologetics is in a golden age. Yet, more often than not, these arguments fall on deaf ears. Why?

Meet Daniel Kahneman. He is a world-renowned, Nobel-prize-winning psychologist who wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. The book argues that there are two systems operating in your mind: system 1 and system 2. Kahneman describes the two systems as follows:

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Here are some of the activities attributed to system 1:

  • Detect that one object is more distant than another.
  • Orient to the source of a sudden sound.
  • Complete the phrase “bread and…”
  • Make a “disgust face” when shown a horrible picture.
  • Detect hostility in a voice.
  • Answer to 2 + 2 = ?
  • Read words on large billboards.
  • Drive a car on an empty road.
  • Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master).
  • Understand simple sentences.
  • Recognize that a “meek and tidy soul with a passion for detail” resembles an occupational stereotype.

Here are some activities attributed to system 2:

  • Brace for the starter gun in a race.
  • Focus attention on the clowns in the circus.
  • Focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room.
  • Look for a woman with white hair.
  • Search memory to identify a surprising sound.
  • Maintain a faster walking speed than is natural for you.
  • Monitor the appropriateness of your behavior in a social situation.
  • Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of text.
  • Tell someone your phone number.
  • Park in a narrow space (for most people except garage attendants).
  • Compare two washing machines for overall value.
  • Fill out a tax form.
  • Check the validity of a complex logical argument.

Before I proceed, I want to point out that most apologists are trying to interact with system 2 and not system 1. All of our arguments generally require the person we are communicating with to activate their system 2.

So what’s the problem? System 2 requires effort and system 1 does not. More specifically, Kahneman notes that “it is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work.”

Kahneman cites the work of Roy Baumeister and his team:

The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint.

Listening to and trying to understand an argument that is new to you requires significant self-control and cognitive effort. This effort actually depletes your energy. It actually makes you tired.

Here is a big takeaway: human beings will tend to use system 1 whenever we possibly can in order to avoid mental effort. We use system 2 far less than we’d like to believe. Kahneman describes this in the following way:

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

At this point, you may be thinking, “Big deal. I already know that thinking is hard and people are lazy.” But there is so much more to the interplay of system 1 and system 2. Kahneman spends the next 38 chapters in the book detailing experimental research into their interaction.

He looks into what happens when a person is confronted with new concepts, when they are asked to make quick decisions about topics with which they aren’t familiar. He also digs into the kinds of decisions system 1 is actually good at making, which is important since system 1 is the mind’s default way of thinking.

I hope you can see why a Christian apologist would want to gain an understanding of these concepts. Kahneman’s research (and the research of other behavioral economists and psychologists) is providing us with a bountiful set of new concepts and data that can help us make our case. We want non-believers to know the truth, and that is what this research can help us do.

Church History, Eastern Orthodox, General Apologetics

How Is Apologetics Bringing Christians Together?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the largest blemishes on Christianity is the number of different denominations. Just among Protestants, there are dozens of major denominations and hundreds of smaller denominations around the world. And, of course, there are Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches as well. What does apologetics (defense of the Christian faith) have to do with denominations?

As a defender of Christianity, the very first thing you have to answer for yourself is this: what Christianity am I defending? It’s pretty difficult to defend something that you can’t describe.

I attend a Southern Baptist church, but when I started studying apologetics 10 years ago, I quickly came to realize that to defend the Southern Baptist denomination was not what I was called to do.

What I needed to defend was orthodox Christianity – the traditional, historical faith that was established during the first 500 years of the church, and codified in the ecumenical councils held during that time period. This is the Christianity that every major Christian group points back to in one way or another. As my seminary professor Norman Geisler once wrote, “Unity among all major sections of Christendom is found in the statement: One Bible, two testaments, three confessions, four councils, and five centuries.”

This is exactly the approach C. S. Lewis took in all of his apologetic writings. He always wrote about what he called “Mere Christianity.” Lewis had no interest in diving into the in-house debates among Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. His was a calling to defend the common doctrines that all of these groups held sacred.

As I’ve studied apologetics, I’ve read numerous non-Baptist scholars, including quite a few Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox thinkers. Every one of these men and woman do their utmost to enunciate mere Christianity to the non-Christian world. I guarantee that if I hadn’t been studying apologetics, I would not have been exposed to such a wide range of Christians outside my denomination.

If you’ve ever been to an apologetics conference, you’ve probably noticed the way that Christians from every denomination mingle and network without thinking twice. We don’t wear name tags that label our denominations. It never comes up, honestly.

I believe that Christian apologetics can be a powerful force that unifies all Christians around the essentials of our faith. When we truly focus on what is central, on what is at the heart of our faith, we find that many of our differences seem less important.

Are we ready to drop all of our differences and unite as one visible church? No. There are real and substantial disagreements to be worked out. But the apologists are at the forefront, whether we know it or not, of a global movement to unify around mere Christianity. I am really excited about that and I hope you are, too.

General Apologetics, Skeptics, Top Ten Posts of 2013

#1 Post of 2013 – You Might Be a Hyper-Skeptic of Christianity If . . .

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After producing the TQA blog for 5 years, we have had hundreds of skeptics comment on our blog posts. With so many skeptics, I’ve seen patterns of behavior that have led me to refer to some of the skeptical commenters as hyper-skeptics. A hyper-skeptic is someone who will not ever consider any evidences, arguments, or reasoning given for Christianity.

For those fair-minded skeptics out there who don’t want to become like this, here are the warning signs I’ve seen. What makes a person a hyper-skeptic? Well, you might be a hyper-skeptic if …

You don’t need to read anything actually written by Christian scholars, because you are just smarter than they are (and you’ve heard it all before).

You think it’s doubtful that Jesus ever lived.

You believe that Christian apologists are lying most of the time.

You actually think that the evidence for a flying spaghetti monster is as good as the evidence for the Christian God.

When you read a blog post written by a Christian, you aren’t reading for understanding; you’re reading to find isolated phrases or sentences that you can attack.

You believe that Antony Flew renounced atheism only because of old age and senility.

You don’t understand theology or metaphysics, but you’re certain it’s just a bunch of made-up mumbo-jumbo.

You almost never agree with anything a Christian apologist writes, even on the most uncontroversial subjects.

You believe that if you ever publicly agree with a Christian, you are contributing to the downfall of civilization.

You are 100% certain that people cannot rise from the dead, and no amount of historical evidence would ever be convincing.

You think that the strength of the historical evidence supporting the stories in the Book of Mormon is roughly equivalent to the strength of the historical evidence supporting the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

You think that The God Delusion is a tour de force that annihilates all of the best Christian arguments for God.

You think that the Bible contains nothing of value.

There are plenty of fair-minded skeptics that comment on the blog, and I appreciate them (at least I try to). But if you’re a skeptic and you find yourself fitting much of the criteria I’ve listed above, you need to step back and ask yourself why. Why have you become as dogmatic and fundamentalist as the religious folks you like to deride?

If you are a hyper-skeptic, you are not reasonable and you are not thinking clearly when it comes to Christianity.  Take some time off from the blogosphere and figure out why you’ve crossed this line. I sincerely doubt it is a purely intellectual issue.

General Apologetics

What Is the Hardest Way to Disagree with Someone?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Seth Godin recently wrote a great blog post on the ways we disagree with other people. He first describes three easy ways to disagree, and then gives the fourth more difficult way.

The easiest way to disagree with someone “is to assume that they are uninformed, and that once they know what you know, they will change their mind. (A marketing problem!)”

This is generally my default position when I see someone disagreeing with me. If we can just get the facts straight, then we will agree. That’s my going-in position. If  the subject of disagreement is fairly simple and limited in scope, then this assumption works out for me. Otherwise, not so much.

Godin continues:

The second easiest way to disagree is to assume that the other person is a dolt, a loon, a misguided zealot who refuses to see the truth. Their selfish desire to win interferes with their understanding of reality. (A political problem!)

I generally don’t resort to thinking this way unless I see that the person I’m talking to is taking extreme positions regardless of the evidence. I wrote a post recently on hyper-skepticism that relates to this way of disagreement.

Godin explains that the “third easiest way to disagree with someone is to not actually hear what they are saying. (A filtering problem!)”

I really try hard, myself, to not do this. I have to admit, though, that when a person comes on the blog and only ever disagrees with everything I say, that after a while, I find it harder and harder to listen to anything they say. Some skeptics have complained to me that I don’t answer them or listen to them, but I can’t help it. Put yourself in my place. What would you do?

Finally, Godin comes to the hardest way to disagree with someone.

The hardest way to disagree with someone is to come to understand that they see the world differently than we do, to acknowledge that they have a different worldview, something baked in long before they ever encountered this situation. (Another marketing problem, the biggest one).

This insight is pure gold. I have found time and time again that when someone is disagreeing with me – even when we have the same facts, even when we are both being reasonable, even when we are both listening to each other – that there is a profound difference in our worldviews. We simply see everything in the world very differently from each other.

Let’s face it. Changing someone’s worldview is extraordinarily difficult and takes a massive time investment. That is why I am thankful that God is in the business of radical change. Without the Holy Spirit moving in people’s lives, the work of evangelism would be pointless and fruitless. It is really, really, hard to change people’s worldviews without supernatural intervention.

General Apologetics

Before You Throw Out a Tradition, Know Why It Was There in the First Place

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

We’ve been talking recently about how conservatives tend to stand more firmly on tradition, whereas progressives and libertarians tend to be more willing to toss aside tradition. It is obvious that not all traditions should be maintained because the original circumstance for which the tradition was established no longer exists.

For example, if there was a tradition established that all roads should be at least 8 horse widths wide to accommodate horse-driven wagons moving in opposite directions, then we could safely drop this tradition when the time came that very few horse driven wagons were on the roads any more.

For those of us who think that a particular tradition should be undone, G. K. Chesterton has some very sound advice from his book The Thing:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Before you advocate the undoing of a long-held tradition, you had better be sure that you understand why the tradition exists. Don’t tear a fence down when you don’t even know why it’s there. I don’t think this is too much to ask. If you can clearly articulate why the tradition is in place, you can make your case for why circumstances have changed and why the tradition is no longer needed.

General Apologetics, Human Nature

Can a Fetus Gestate In a Box?

9 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

As someone who greatly respects the traditions and wisdom handed down from antiquity, I find myself constantly amazed at the way modern man wants to deny inconvenient bits of reality.  Bits such as:

  • Boys and girls are biologically different in significant ways.
  • Children can only be produced when a man and a woman unite in sexual reproduction.
  • When a small group of people is given a tremendous amount of power over a larger group of people, the small group will inevitably oppress the larger group.
  • No amount of education will ever eradicate human sin.
  • If you tell men that they don’t have to commit to women in order to have sex with them, marriages will decrease and divorces will increase.
  • As the traditional nuclear family goes, so goes civilization.
  • Human institutions that rely on centralized command and control inevitably fail as they grow larger.
  • The wisdom given us by our ancestors has been repeatedly tested and proved to work, so we ignore it at great peril.

I’m sure my conservative friends could add numerous bits of reality to this list, but I think you get the point. Those of us who find any of these bits of reality to be inconvenient are struggling in vain. This is the way the world is and has always been, and we have to adapt ourselves to it.

Obviously there are other parts of reality that we can change and should change, but oddly enough, we usually only know that our current reality needs to change because the wisdom of our ancestors tells us what is wrong with our current reality.

For example, I know that abortion on demand is wrong because life is sacred and an innocent life should never be taken without proper justification. I know these things from the highest traditions that have been passed down to us.

I also know that we should be constantly fighting against poverty, disease, and any form of human enslavement, as all of these bits of reality degrade sacred human life, life that is made in the image of God.

Do conservatives fight against the status quo? Absolutely. The difference is that conservatives fight against those things which actually can be changed about reality, while non-conservatives often fight against those bits of reality which cannot be changed. What’s even worse about this second approach is that these folks will force the rest of us, through legislative or judicial fiat, into hopeless social experiments that inevitably backfire and do far more damage than any good they might have achieved.

I was watching the Monty Python comedy, The Life of Brian, recently, and was reminded in a humorous way how silly those people are who want to change unchangeable realities. To set the scene, there are 3 men (Reg, Rogers, and Stan) and a woman (Judith), who are part of a radical Jewish political group, discussing and debating their political demands. During their discussion, one of the men, Stan, announces that he wants to become a woman. We pick it up there:

Reg: Why don’t you shut up about women, Stan? You’re putting us off.

Stan: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg.

Rogers: Why are you always on about women, Stan?

Stan: I want to be one.

Reg: What?

Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me Loretta.

Reg: What?

Loretta (Stan): It’s my right as a man.

Judith: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

Loretta (Stan): I want to have babies.

Reg: You want to have babies?!

Loretta (Stan): It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.

Reg: But…you can’t have babies!

Loretta (Stan): Don’t you oppress me!

Reg: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb. Where is the fetus going to gestate? You’re going to keep it in a box?

Loretta (Stan): Sniff.

Judith: Here, I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans, but that he can have the right to have babies.

Rogers: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister! Sorry.

Reg: What’s the point?

Rogers: What?

Reg: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can’t have babies?

Rogers: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

Reg: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.