DCHindley wrote:Despite all the mental gymnastics that are employed to justify our already held beliefs, it all boils down to whatever makes you feel good. There are different ways to bring back that warm fuzzy feeling when facts inconveniently challenge our preconceptions, some of which are better than others. In my warm fuzzy mind, I prefer to rearrange my assumptions to accommodate the new facts.
This makes an interesting case of people who would describe themselves as torn in two directions about a subject. Using a square:
(1) I get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
(2) I get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I do not get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
(3) I do not get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
(4) I do not get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I do not get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
The people in the first and fourth categories are not torn in two directions. They also describe most people about most beliefs. This is because the brain seems to take as one of its jobs to reduce our cognitive dissonance.
For example, if we have to do something we might otherwise find unethical or distasteful in order to survive, like at a job, the brain will go to work finding beliefs that will make it a bit less unethical and distasteful. Likewise if we find an opinion discovered with critical thinking / intellectual inquiry that doesn't have the other kind of warm fuzzies to it; we will try to manufacture them. Likewise if we have a strong opinion based on non-intellectual warm fuzzies; we will have a cognitive bias to favor any argument that can be thought to buttress that belief.
This makes the people in the second and third categories all the more interesting. These people are a phase of fundamental honesty about the origins of their beliefs, prior to the complete obliteration of cognitive dissonance. I will also speculate that some people are more in tune with the subtle things of both the heart and the mind and likewise admit more potential for disagreement between the two. Other people, by disposition, tolerate a lot less ambiguity, so other people have very little at any time of their lives that does not fall into (1) and (4).
I will also speculate that the preferred source of belief in ideologically-charged matters is also split. Some people have allegiances that are non-intellectually based, while others have those that are based on the exercise of reason and intellectual discourse. So we can have people who regularly subjugate the mind to the heart, who regularly subjugate the heart to the mind, who regularly have doubts about what they otherwise (and primarily) believe to be right and good, and who regularly feel in their heart what their mind tells them is not so.
Further it is not hard to see that there is a lot of deliberate deception going on in discourse about the source of our beliefs. Intellectual discourse is the wellspring of ideological power today in the public eye, so everyone who wants to appear respectable or convincing will want to shroud their beliefs in the cloak of intellectual discourse, even if it is not the primary means on which the belief is based. This includes the Young Earth Creationist and the Holocaust denier.
At the same time, it is not really that hard to peel back the veil of deception in some cases, the last two just mentioned being easy examples. Comparison of the arguments used with whether any reasonable person could actually be convinced on the basis of these arguments can go a long way in determining whether the claim to intellectual pedigree is fraudulent. Also, at the same time, somebody who has already passed beyond the pale of reason in the matter will, as a secondary layer of self-deception, deny that the arguments are weak or the intellectual pedigree is fraudulent; so powerful is the desire to prevent cognitive dissonance.
If we want to try to get a third party perspective, however, on the actual basis on which a belief is usually held, a little head counting could go a long way. The heads that are particularly interesting are the ones that confess to having different pulls on the matter. I won't pretend to have conducted a survey here, though. I will tell my own experience.
For me, "conservative Christianity" once fell here:
(3) I do not get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
However, by way of reduction of cognitive dissonance, there is no longer two different pulls here in my mind. I no longer get any kind of warm fuzzies from entertaining the beliefs of "conservative Christianity."
But now I do have the same situation with some form of "progressive Christianity" that I formerly had with more conservative kinds, i.e.:
(3) I do not get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
Meanwhile my avowed agnosticism puts me in this position:
(2) I get intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief, and I do not get non-intellectual warm fuzzies by holding the belief.
Time will tell if my cognitive-dissonance-reducing tendencies will finally resolve themselves to unite these different grounds of belief in either of these ideas or a third. Until such time, my preference for the intellectual kind of warm fuzzies guides my agnosticism.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
