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Faith Is Not Confirmation
Faith Is Not Confirmation by
PadreOK, there I was, standing in the living room...with no conceivable idea as to why I was there. I remember walking up the steps like a man on a mission…. But there I was – upstairs -- all dressed up and nowhere to go. Why, exactly, had I come up here? I know it must have been important.
Then comes The Decision: do I go back downstairs until that same idea inspires me? Or do I tough it out up here until I remember? Everybody, apparently, has had this happen to them. My dad explains it by saying that he has 16 gigabytes of memory and 4K of RAM. I suppose it could be worse: data indicates that 6 per cent of all skydiver deaths are a result of forgetting to pull the ripcord….
But, when not in the throes of short-term memory loss, I can be a world champion at selective memory. And, apparently, I am not alone. Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist, says that, although we’re quite good at storing information, we are incredibly bad at retrieving it.
We’re not like computers, which assign every 1 and 0 according to a master map in which each byte is assigned a specific, uniquely identifiable location. In contrast, Marcus maintains, human beings lack any such master map and, instead, retrieve information in a far more haphazard fashion by using context as to what it’s looking for rather than knowing in advance where in the brain a given memory lies.
But there are other, more dire, consequences, according to Marcus. We are better, for example, at remembering things that are consistent with our existing beliefs than evidence that might refute them. We might disagree about something by focusing on different pieces of the puzzle. We do not, in other words, give ourselves a balanced perspective. This phenomenon is known in cognitive circles as “confirmation bias.”
My favorite story about this comes from David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The context was the Vietnam War, in which General Westmoreland had demanded a briefing about a battle just completed. The young American officer had been uneasy about giving the General the briefing, apologizing for being so frank with reporters present, but finally it all came pouring out. The South Vietnamese Army soldiers, it turned out, had been cowards and had refused to fight. They had abused the local population and in this most recent battle they had all fled. All but one man.
That one man had stood and fought and almost single-handedly staved off a Viet Cong attack. When the young officer had finished his briefing – still apologizing for being so candid – General Westmoreland turned to a reporter and said, “Now you see how distorted the press image of this war is. This is a perfect example – a great act of bravery and not a single mention of it in the New York Times.
An Ohio State study in 2009 showed people spend 36% more time reading an essay if that essay aligns with their opinions. Another study at Ohio State in 2009 showed subjects clips of the parody show “The Colbert Report,” and people who considered themselves politically conservative consistently reported “Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said.”
A wee bit closer to home is the art of the pundit. Punditry, it turns out, is a whole industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views.
If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.
When asked, “From whom do you receive your religious identity?” Christians will invariably say, “Why, from Jesus, of course.” But that’s selective memory. That’s confirmation bias. The truth is, we receive our religious identity from Abraham. This was what Paul was getting at when he spent so many chapters on Abraham in his letter to the church in Rome. But that inconvenient piece of information has been selectively forgotten because, after all, that would put us on the same footing as the Jews and Muslims.
Let’s take it from the top. Abraham was a polytheist. (Well, initially, at least.) He was not a Jew. There was no Law. There was no Jewish way of life. Abraham’s calling by God meant that he was to turn from his way of life. As one writer concludes, “The idea is that the Gentiles are blessed not simply like Abraham but because of Abraham. Abraham becomes the reason why Gentiles experience salvation, not the example of how an individual becomes saved.”
So Abraham is not just the father of the Jews, but of Gentiles also. And not just in some spiritualized sense. Many people who read Romans, for example, interpret what Paul says about Abraham as exemplary – that Abraham is an example for us on what it means to have faith.
But Pamela Eisenbaum, a Jewish professor at a Christian school of theology, begs leave to differ. She maintains that the emphasis for Paul, both in Galatians and Romans, is not on the way Gentiles can be like Abraham if they emulate his faith; the emphasis is on their existing relatedness to him which they can now claim.
Abraham’s faith is not just some ethereal quality of general trust; no, Abraham’s act of faith is to start a family on behalf of God; he produces offspring that bear God’s blessing. [Eisenbaum] What’s more, the heirs include “the nations.” What is unusual, however, is that Paul explicitly connects the promise that Abraham will be the father of many nations to the conception of Isaac.
Then, once Paul’s Gentiles become part of the lineage of Abraham, they not only receive God’s promises, they help God enact God’s promise to the great patriarch that he would become the “father of many nations.” And helping God to realize God’s promises is apparently what Paul really means by “faith.”
Now, “helping God realize God’s promises” is not the first thing we think of when we think of “faith.” Instead, we think of “faith” as trusting someone else to do all the heavy lifting.
It confirms something we fervently wish were true.
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Faith Is Not Confirmation
