Column On Ideology Over Reality

When I was in my first year of college, I learned about Soviet agriculture under the assumptions of Lysenko. He denied the importance of the gene. Instead, he maintained that acquired characteristics in plants could be transmitted to succeeding generations of plants: nurture over nature, if you will. Pluck leaves off plants, and the descendants of the plant will be leafless. It fit a vulgar Marxist notion that changing conditions could change heredity, a prop for the program of the “new Soviet.” Those scientists who opposed his program were killed over the years.

I plan to go to Glacier National Park next month. When it was launched, one could see over 100 glaciers. Not long ago, travel materials listed 27, and now it is 23. As our youngest said, “you better get there soon; those glaciers are receding faster than your hairline.” The founder of Facebook recently toured the park, but the park’s expert was pulled from the trip. Presumably, he may have spoken truth to a wealthy visitor. Years ago, when I visited the Grand Canyon with our young children, protestors screamed about the park giving the geological age of the layers of rock in the vista, as it conflicted with th4eir notion of the age of the earth according to their ill-considered religious reading of Genesis 1.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. (Charles Spurgeon)
When I was young, I learned about cognitive dissonance. The notion is that we like to have harmony between our attitudes and actual event. His work noted the difficulty religious members felt when a prophecy failed. Think of 7^th Day Adventists speaking of the Great Disappointment when Miller’s prediction of the end of the world in 1844 failed again. Over the years, social psychologists demonstrate that it seems that we are prone to making bad decisions. For instance, David Rapp found that we tend to hold on to inaccurate information easily. We don’t apply critical thinking to it, and the misinformation seems to get lodged in our awareness. It becomes the most easily accessed information, and we give it credence because that is what we recall. sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. "Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief," he says, "people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe." 

"We refer to this as 'inferred justification,'" says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it 

In John’s gospel, Jesus says that the truth shall make us free.. The command against false witness has in its heart to speak the truth. I think of the southern injunction: one should always tell the truth, but you needn’t be telling it all of the time. When we get presented with information in a lecturing, superior tone, we tend to get defensive and reject both the speaker and the message. We can counter our natural disposition toward falsity but trying to grasp a fuller a picture than we have at our disposal. That applies to politics as well as our quick judgments about others without having a better picture of their background and dispositions. An assault on evidence, on reason, on truth itself does not permit us to work together.

Proiv. 22:20-21 Have not I written unto thee excellent things of counsels and knowledge; That I might make thee know the certainty of the words of truth, that thou mightest bring back words of truth to them that send thee?