Amanda Wong: "Dear Caroline Yoachim: To Believe, or Not to Believe"

Dear Caroline Yoachim: To Believe, or not to Believe

By: Amanda Wong

Religion is a touchy subject for some, and that’s perfectly reasonable because everyone has different opinions, beliefs, and outlooks. Take Christianity for example. In Christianity there are believers and nonbelievers of Christ, Jesus, the salvation, the redemption, and whatnot. But how much of Christianity is based off real evidence and not just conformational bias?

I’ll admit, there’s nothing more satisfying than being right. Especially when you’re right about something you strongly believe in. However, sometimes it’s easy to focus our attention to evidence or data that ONLY supports our beliefs. After all, no one wants to hear or learn that their beliefs are wrong. That’s how confirmation bias comes into play. In effort to aid our opinions about our beliefs, we dismiss any evidence that contradicts our preconceived ideas and instead find the evidence that supports our beliefs which is why conformational bias is such a problem.

Take the issue of the accuracy of the bible. In support of Christian beliefs, there’s the universal flood/Noah’s ark that is consistent with various other religions. There are names of more than forty kings mentioned in the bibles that have documents or outside evidence outside of the bible. The Roman occupation of Israel, the genealogies, the accounts of eyewitnesses in the New Testament are all details that prove that the bible is accurate. So yes, the bible appears to be historically accurate but what about the miracles and actions performed by Jesus? How do we know that happened? How do you prove the resurrection outside of the eyewitnesses in the bible? Are the eyewitnesses like Luke writing history for accuracy or to build people’s faith? While conformational bias might ignore the question the doubts of eyewitnesses and accounts of Jesus’s various movements, who’s to say these doubts are completely illegitimate?

Another example of Christian conformational bias is prayer. Say you pray for your sick dog to get better. If it so happens that your dog does get better, the Christian’s conformational bias would be “Wow God is so great and mighty!” rather than acknowledging the possibility that it had just been by chance or worked out like that by itself. But say your dog’s condition gets even worse and he ends up dead. The Christian’s conformational bias would be “Oh God meant it to be like that” or “It was God’s will”. Anyhow, this ignores the possibility that this had been by chance or maybe you didn’t get your dog the proper help or whatnot.

In general, religious confirmation bias can be hard to combat especially if you have a personal need to believe in these ideas. I think that it would be helpful to understand religion from an unbiased position.

 If I could transform this into a speculative fiction story I feel that this would require the perspective of a clueless individual, the presence of a mysterious object, and a set of struggles/conflict.

For example, there chicken farmer having tough luck with his goat business. In this imaginary story, all this farmer has are his four chickens and his lucky purple straw hat. One day, he decides to throw his hat on the ground and for some reason his hat lands facing the right way up and for that day, his chicken business goes great. The next day he flips his hat, which lands the wrong side up. Then he has a horrible chicken business day. In addition, for the rest of rest of his chicken business days, he decides he will let his hat flip dictate his chicken business despite the lack of consistent results.

The presence of this clueless individual (the farmer) is most helpful in creating that distance away from an inclination religion and it steers away from reader’s preexisting beliefs with a shift in topic. Then the mysterious object, the hat in this case acts as the mysterious force that may or may not be aiding the clueless individual. The fact that it is present to the character is something that draws the character’s attention. Throughout the series of conflicts that the poor clueless character undergoes in the presence of stagnant object, this metaphorically represents theism. Overall, I think this helps engage the topic of religion better because it demonstrates what is really happening without having to draw opinions from preexisting beliefs.