Critical thinking and Jesus

One of the worst mistakes critical thinking can help with is helping us not believe things just because we want to believe them.  The temptation to give in to what we want to be true is so strong and gives us such joy that the mistake gets buried in the emotion and we rationalize out of our skins to get there.

I remember in my college days there was an argument over whether the "big bang" or "steady state" universe was the correct view, and I really liked the steady state view.  The big bang seemed contrived and seemed to raise more problems than it solved.  So I came to believe it but as science progressed I realized how wrong I had been and look back at it as a case of my allowing my desires (philosophical inclination) to get the better of me where I should have reserved judgment until better data became available.


We are all "believers."  If my boss calls me into his office and tells me I am fired, I had better believe it and seek another job 'cause paychecks are not going to continue.  Thus the ability to believe has its selective or evolutionary function.

But we must apply critical thinking to what we believe.  Critical thinking is among other things the skills enabling us to see through the tricks and devices of con artists, and the first skill needed is the humility to admit that the magician knows the trick but you don't.  Therefore, before believing that the guy can bend spoons it is good to study some professional magic and see what tricks can be used to do the same thing, and then observe whether or not those tricks are being used.  Studying critical skills is the same as studying such professional magic, but applied instead to the realm of what we will believe.

One example I might mention regarding religion -- all the prophesies about Jesus that supposedly came true (mostly this derives from the book of Matthew, who was the main pusher of this idea).  If you study critical thinking, you learn that there is such a thing as "stacking the deck," which is shorthand for claiming things that on the surface look true but where details are left out that have a different effect.  Thus, when one looks at these prophesies carefully, one finds all kinds of problems with them.  In some cases they weren't prophesies at all; in other cases they had other fulfillments; in other cases the story is constructed so as to make a fulfillment seem as though it happened.


A similar case of stacking the deck comes from the claim that the existence of Jesus is well documented, when the fact is the opposite, that we have no eye-witness records (the earliest New Testament books cannot be proven to have existed before several centuries latest although most scholars from clues inside the books give them a late first century date).  The very earliest mention of him outside the New Testament is known to be a later fraud.  This doesn't get mentioned by those who cite it (Josephus), even when they know about the controversy.