Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You write, “the despair was lifted by a force greater than my own.”

You do realize that this is simply confirmation bias at work? Or more accurately, confirmation bias combined with the divine fallacy.  From the Skeptic’s Dictionary, “Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs.”  The divine fallacy is defined as such, “The divine fallacy, or the argument from incredulity, is a species of non sequitur reasoning which goes something like this: I can't figure this out, so God must have done it”.

And as long as you’re on a roll let’s not forget the pragmatic fallacy: “The pragmatic fallacy is committed when one argues that something is true because it works and where 'works' means something like "I'm satisfied with it," "I feel better," "I find it beneficial, meaningful, or significant," or "It explains things for me."

So, you have doubt, you get over it because you have the most highly evolved brain of any species on the planet Earth but instead say God did it.  Why? One, it confirms your beliefs (confirmation bias), two, it allows you to stop thinking immediately and take the easy way out (divine fallacy) and three, if challenged you can say, “But I didn’t want to come out of it and did. Therefore, God did it.  It’s true because I know it was God who did it.” (pragmatic and divine fallacies snuggled up together).

Look: I cannot possibly disprove this. These are matters that reflect very basic assumptions about what is or is not possible here on earth. Which is why all I can say, after all this, is still: I believe.