Sermon Notes: Cognitive Biases in Theology

 Sermon Notes: Cognitive Biases in Theology

 

What are Biases? Technically speaking, a bias is the inclination to show prejudice or favor towards something. An extreme case of bias would be when a judge renders a reduced sentence to a criminal because the criminal is the judge’s brother. That’s a bias, the causing or showing of prejudice or favor. Biases have a purpose of course, they’re not without some merit. We do arrange data in our heads necessarily because we don’t have the means of processing everything. However, despite their usefulness, biases are often ignored and left unchecked. When they go unnoticed and unchecked, they cause problems.

 

Today I want to explore some biases we all have and how they interact with our Theology. We will do this by having an interactive study.

 

The biases I want to explore today are Cognitive Biases like, Anchor-Bias, Survivorship Bias and False Consensus Bias.

 

This is going to be interactive, so have a pen and paper ready in case you need it. If you don’t have one, raise hold up your hand or ask for one because I brought enough for everyone.

 

Let’s start by setting aside a data point for future use. If I ask you for this answer later, you will not be able to give it accurately.

 

How concrete is your theology? I want you to take your pen and paper, before we get into this, and on a scale of 1 being week, and 10 being concrete, write a number down on your paper and grade your own grasp of theology. We will come back to this later and I want you to have an honest answer to work with then.

 

Let’s start looking into the connection between these biases and our theology.

 

First, I want to ask you about ‘the plan of God’. We, more-or-less all come from a common theological background and we are very aware of the idea that the Holy Days ‘lay out the plan of God’ This plan as we have received it, includes 6000 years of Satan’s rule on earth followed by Christ’s return and a subsequent 1000-year rule of Jesus Christ as King.  The Holy Days explain this because they start with Passover Symbolizing the death of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins, then comes Unleavened bread and the putting out of sin and putting on righteousness, then comes Pentecost and the giving of the Holy Spirit, then comes Trumpets where Christ returns and is coronated, then comes Atonement where Satan is bound for a thousand years, then comes the Millennium explained by the Feast of Tabernacles and finally The Great White throne judgement where all 100 Billion humans who have ever lived come up for a 100 year physical life of judgement after which the New Jerusalem comes down out of Heaven onto a new earth.

Is that in the Bible?  I suspect statistically everyone here will say ‘yes’? At the least, if we use a graded answer in a 1-10 spectrum of agreement most will probably answer 7-8. You can also probably turn to a long list of scriptures that prove your belief, right? Good.

 

Let’s do an experiment. I’m going to tell you a sequence of numbers, and I want you to tell me the rule I used to make this sequence. Here’s the tricky part, you have to give me some number sequences and I’ll tell you whether or not they follow my rule. So, I want you to give me number sets that follow my rule until you think you have the rule.

 

The number sequence is, 2, 4, 8, 16. What is the rule I used to make that sequence?

 

Did you answer something like ‘double the previous number’ or ‘multiply by two’? Did you say 32,64,128? That rule in math would read n*2.

 

That’s not the rule, the real rule I used to formulate that sequence, is 'each number is higher than the last', or n+.

 

Now, what can we learn from this experiment? Why did we all latch-on to various rules? Was there not “ample evidence” to conclude that the Rule was multiply the previous number by 2? Every number I gave you in the sequence DID agree with the idea of multiplying the previous number by two... Yet, even though ALL the evidence fit, it was not THE answer. This is an example of a Cognitive Bias. The giving of favor to the idea that’s in your head. 

While n*2 can be ‘proven’ to fit perfectly, the real rule is n+. That’s a big problem to think about. If your answer is right, but your math is wrong, you’re still wrong. You’re wrong because you cannot replicate your answer. You’re essentially playing roulette and guessing on numbers. 2-4-8 is a pretty simple sequence too, what If I gave you another sequence later, something like 13-71-73? How could you make that work? Wouldn’t you spend all your energy trying to figure out a way to make n*2 apply to the second sequence, rather than questioning your first assumed and 'provable' rule?

 

Back to the ‘plan of God as laid out by the Holy Days’. I will not argue the fact that there’s a compelling narrative in the Holy Days ‘laying out the plan of God’, I won’t even argue that you might have some of the meanings correct, but does that mean they explain the plan of God the way it plays out in your mind? No, it does not, EVIDENCE THAT FITS YOUR IDEA IS NOT PROOF. Also, there are a lot of ‘plot holes’ in the ‘plan of God, as laid out by the Holy Days’ doctrine, regardless of which church writes it out, but you will not hear them explained here from the pulpit, because to argue THAT point is to confront another bias. That one being called Confirmation Bias.

 

Confirmation bias is the favor given to data that supports your existing idea and prejudice towards those that don’t.

In more simple terms, it’s only using evidence that supports your claim.

In Theology we have a phrase for confirmation bias, we say ‘proof-texting’. That’s where you support your claim with scriptures as proof. This is a very dangerous, but very common practice.  Often, you can spot a confirmation bias when a speaker takes a phrase out of context to support an unrelated idea.

A common one that we can use from within our background is ‘The Gap Theory’.

 

The gap theory is the hypothesis that in Genesis 1:2 The earth BECAME 'without form'(Tohu) and 'void'(Bohu) and therefore that’s where the dinosaurs existed, and that’s where Satan’s Rebellion Happened, and that’s where the moon got its craters, etc, etc. This entire concept is supported by the out-of-context phrase in 1 Corinthians 14:33 “God is not the Author of confusion”. That is a cartoonish and extreme example of proof-texting, or Confirmation Bias. 

 

You might wonder, from where, and why do we get the idea of Gap Theory in this example?

 

That’s the next bias we’ll cover, and this one is called Anchor Bias. Anchor bias is the preference of early information AS primary information. First-come-first-served if you will. For many in our church history there wasn’t a lot of higher-level education. There were certainly educated people, but the majority of our COG lineage have been poor-folk, farmers, and the ‘salt of the earth’. When a 'minister of the truth’ or a college professor tells you about a subject like prehistory for which you have no previous education, that idea gets ‘anchored’.  Without noticing, we have set a standard by which to compare new information.

 

How many times have you heard or perhaps said, ‘that’s not the way I was taught that’? The bias is exposed here in the assumption that the first thing you heard was the correct thing.

 

Do you see how these biases can cause you to view the world incorrectly? These are just a few examples of MANY biases that we have.

 

I should reiterate here that I AM NOT SUGGESTING the scriptures you cite aren’t in the Bible.  Every word of God, as Paul said is good for education. The problem arises not from the raw data, the scriptures in this case, but in our interpretation.

 

Just like the number sequence experiment we did, when we explore our theology with sermons or booklets or conversation, we are subject to our biases, and we have to be aware of that.

 

The next bias we will examine Is False Consensus.

 

This one we can have some fun with. I personally, find this one to be a very big problem in churches. I will need your help with this because without your input we can’t see this work in action.

You all have 2 slips of paper now with 6 doctrines listed on them, each has a graded answer from 1, meaning HIGHLY Disagree, to 10, meaning STRONGLY agree.

The questions on each are identical but we will answer them based on different criteria and I really need you to be honest here. These slips are completely anonymous and cannot bite you.

 

 

 

On the first section, answer your own beliefs. Don't answer what you think the answer should be, or what you want to believe, but what you currently think.

On the second section, answer as if a pollster is asking you 'what does the church you attend think about _____?'.

 

Now, we will put these on the whiteboard but in a different color, as well as an average of these answers.

 

(this is actual data from my current congregation)

 

 

Do you notice the Delta here between the two sets of answers? The same people, the same questions, different answers. Here’s where False Consensus comes into play. Very often we think one way and act another way, because we think, that other people think something else. This a part of the method by which self-fulfilling-prophecies happen. It turns out, we modify and twist the world we inhabit to fit what we think other people think. Another term for this is Group Think, or Mob Think. This is the group of people becoming it’s own entity with it’s own opinion. Notice too, that group think isn’t even the ‘average’ opinion, it’s something else entirely. It would be easy to assume that the group opinion is calculated by averaging the opinions of individuals within the group, but it’s not. In reality, it’s just an imaginary opinion, built entirely of individual biases.

 

How does this interfere with our theology?

 

A big way it interferes is by being a blockade to growth. It’s very hard to break away from the pack… if ALL of your friends are doing something, isn’t that peer pressure is a strong force? Now imagine this scenario, imagine that the peer-pressure to stay with the group and not stray from ‘the trunk of the tree’ is not based on actual people’s opinions, but rather on your belief in an imaginary opinion of a group whose individual members don’t actually have?

 

How many times in our churches have you heard the warning or felt the pressure to not study too far from the ‘trunk of the tree’? The delta between these answers on the whiteboard shows the degree of separation between real ideas and perceived ideas.

 

This bias of False Consensus can be a wall between us and growth and maturity. That limiting of the availability of data leads us right into the final bias I want to explore today.

 

 

The next Bias to look at is Survivorship Bias. This bias is best described from a WWII story.

 

 

 

During WWII the British were losing a lot of planes to anti-aircraft guns so they started documenting bullet holes on planes as they came back to base. The ended up with a chart that looked like this, each one of these spots marks a bullet hole. Now, if you want to armor your planes better to prevent bullet holes where should you add armor?

 

See, the problem here is that you’re playing with a short-deck. Every bullet hole recorded was from a plane that returned to base. Despite the visible clusters of bullet holes on the chart this graph doesn’t show where planes are most vulnerable, in fact, it counter-intuitively shows the opposite. This graph ACTUALLY shows where you can shoot a plane without knocking it out of the sky.

The issue here is called survivorship bias, and it’s categorized as a preference to available data as ALL data.

 

This one has been on my mind a lot recently because in the last couple years I experienced a church split.  I watched this split from an unusual 3^rd party viewpoint while also being somewhat within the fray. It was very interesting to me that both sides of the split labeled the other with all sorts of motivations and intentions, yet completely missed the real issues. For instance, one side claimed the other left over the enforcement of face masks in church and as in the plane chart here, masks were indeed a bullet hole. The other side claimed the other was lacking faith… once again yes, they were, that too was a bullet hole. Yet both were looking at bullet holes on planes that had landed. These were painful disputes that existed within one organization where people still went to church together… almost like things you could disagree about but still meet together.

However, I was one of the casualties of a bullet hole to the cockpit. That's why I was a 3rd party to this situation. With the ability to stand off at somewhat of a distance, I was able to see the bullets hitting the cockpits, and in the engines. These were things like the ‘nature of the church’, the purpose of being a Christian, the place of government, etc… these were the real issues bringing the planes down. Yet, the new post-split churches simply armored the wings. They doubled down on those ideas that aren’t important and never addressed what took so many out.

That was one of MY experiences, but such things happen to all of us.

How often do we see people leave our fellowship and attribute their departure to something that was a hot-button issue? How often do we attribute symptoms to causes we understand? The answer is ‘almost always’.  That’s because we’re always playing with a short deck, we only know what we know, but ‘what we know’ is lightyears away from the extent of the ‘whole truth’.  This is a problem in our theology as well, because we will naturally try to simplify every problem or question down to the basic facts we have. This is arguably where the necessity of Faith comes into the picture, but that faith we have shouldn’t be there to cover every plot hole in our belief structure, that faith should be to believe that God’s plan has integers and aspects we don’t understand. That will undoubtedly be a difficult distinction to make, between faith to believe in illogical things, and faith in God having a higher and more developed form of logic, but that’s also why we have access to the Holy Spirit. Despite how hard that distinction may seem, if we are aware of HOW our biases distort our perception, maybe we’ll be able to see when we’re twisting our own world to fit OUR IDEAS.

 

I say all these things and point out the biases not to tear down your faith, or to cause you an emotional earthquake, though that may-well be the effect. I bring these points up because you need to know about them. A real question you could spend some time answering if this subject bothers you is, ’do I want to be Right or do I want to be Correct?’

 

If we let our biases exist unchecked, we will find ourselves being our own worst enemy.  Always, always, always ask yourself why you have and from where your ideas originate. Question the foundations of claims, seek the truth, and never assume that you have it already. As soon as you assume you have the right answer you are no longer seeking the truth, that’s because from that point on you will only be confirming YOUR truth.

 

Now go back to your original grade you gave your own understanding… do you still think that’s true? 

 

It’s a monumental task to evaluate your belief system. I know, I’ve been there and I’m still in the process and it IS earth-shaking. I had to jettison a lot of things that were built on imagination, and that was way more building material than I wanted to lose. That hurt something awful, and still does every time I have to remove something from my theological structure, but what is the alternative? Is it worse to build a tower on imaginary rock or to keep digging until you hit real rock?

 

Isn’t a fallen tower a bigger tragedy than a delayed construction? People die when towers fall. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s much better, less expensive and way safer to tear down an unsafe structure and start over correctly, than it is to wait until it falls and hurts someone and rely on insurance to pay the bill.

 

Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, not with doctrine or the fear of peer-pressure. When you start inspecting your belief structure, start with the foundation. If you start at the top of the tower and inspect light-switches and carpet specifications you will fill dozens of volumes of notebooks with infractions, and you will spend immeasurable amounts of time addressing these issues. If you start with trying to correctly identify which COG is represented by each of the 10 virgins, you will be distracted.

Start your self-inspection with the foundation, on what are your beliefs built? If you do that with an honest recognition of your own biases, you might be able to spot that foundation crack before the tower falls on top of you.

 

Seth Forrestier – 8-18-2022