Pious fraud and epistemic humility

 Claude finished the response

One of the things one has to be attuned to as a skeptic (a person from Missouri) is the phenomenon of "pious fraud." In its classic form it consists of creating evidence or distorting evidence or lying in order to win converts to a religion.  The idea is that saving the soul is more important than little details like honesty.

I remember seeing a brochure from a fundamentalist group listing all the prophecies of the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Jesus.  Thing is it is all a pious fraud.  None of the points exactly point to Jesus and most of them were not even prophesies, and the details of the Jesus story was manipulated to fit. This doesn't just apply to religion. 

People who have a conspiracy theory sometimes do this.  So are people who support one of the countless pseudo-sciences or bizarre phenomena we hear tell of. I think in fact this is the main reason personal testimony is not credible, on its own.  Supporting evidence may be credible, but even then the personal testimony counts for nothing (it is possible to commit pious fraud in favor of something that is in fact true).

Of course we have to watch ourselves here too.  The temptation to elaborate a little beyond what actually happened is huge, and we do it all the time.  To an extent this is innocent, but in a chain of retellings, well, we can see what happens. 

So when someone tells me this or that based on testimony or their own experience, I may be polite and not say what I think.
9:51 AM

This is a well-developed epistemological point. A few things worth adding or sharpening:

The spectrum matters. Pious fraud runs from conscious, deliberate lying all the way down to sincere self-deception — and the sincere end is probably more common and more dangerous. The person who genuinely believes their embellished account is harder to catch and often more convincing. They pass polygraphs, they look you in the eye, they're hurt when doubted. This is why "they really believe it" is not a defense.

The fulfilled prophecy problem is particularly instructive. What you're describing has a technical name — retrofitting or post hoc prophecy confirmation. The gospel writers (or their oral tradition predecessors) demonstrably shaped narrative details to match Isaiah, Psalms, Zechariah and so on. Matthew is especially aggressive about this. The circularity is complete: the "prophecy" is confirmed by a story that was written to confirm it.

Your point about personal testimony is philosophically robust. The legal system learned this the hard way. Eyewitness testimony is now known to be the least reliable form of evidence, yet it's the most persuasive to juries. Memory is reconstructive, not reproductive — every time you recall something you partly rewrite it. Your chain-of-retellings point is essentially how folklore scholars explain miracle stories generally.

The self-monitoring point is the hardest part. Most people grant themselves an exemption from the skepticism they apply to others. The consistent skeptic has to apply the same standards to their own experience and their own cherished conclusions — which is genuinely uncomfortable. Confirmation bias doesn't feel like bias; it feels like noticing things.

One nuance worth sitting with: you're right that testimony for something true is still unreliable testimony. The conclusion being correct doesn't validate the method. This confuses people — they think if they can show the conclusion is right, that vindicates the evidence. It doesn't. A stopped clock is right twice a day.

The polite silence you mention is probably wise in social contexts — but it does let the fraud, pious or otherwise, keep circulating.

Well we can't, nor should we if we could, fix all the world's ills, especially its exciting little stories.  Judgment is needed before going on the error-correction crusade.  Clearly in a trial where someone's liberty is at stake is a different thing from idle gossip or the pleasure and peace derived from religious faith.
9:57 AM

Exactly right, and this is where rigid rationalism becomes its own kind of foolishness. A few thoughts:

The cost-benefit question is real. Correcting someone's comforting belief about their deceased relative, or their folk explanation for why they recovered from illness, accomplishes what exactly? You've made them feel bad, possibly damaged the relationship, and gained nothing. The belief wasn't load-bearing in any dangerous way.

The "load-bearing" distinction is probably the key one. A belief becomes worth challenging when it drives consequential decisions — medical treatment, legal judgments, public policy, financial choices, who to trust or fear. A creation myth held loosely as cultural identity is a different animal from the same belief being used to block science education. The same content, different stakes.

There's also something to be said for functional value. Religious faith, even if founded on dubious historical claims, demonstrably provides community, psychological resilience, a framework for ethical behavior, comfort at death. The strict evidentialist who strips all that away and offers nothing in return should at least acknowledge what they're taking. Voltaire, no friend of the Church, still thought religion socially necessary for the masses — whether or not you agree with his rather patrician view, the underlying observation about function isn't stupid.

The crusading rationalist is also, ironically, displaying a kind of faith — faith that more accurate beliefs reliably produce better outcomes, and that people can absorb corrections without harmful side effects. Neither of these is obviously true.

Where it gets genuinely hard is the middle ground — the person whose medical quackery is probably harmless but might not be, the conspiracy theory that's mostly entertainment but occasionally tips into real-world harm. Judgment calls all the way down.

Yea the Voltaire attitude is a bit arrogant.  Not for the masses, for people -- human beings.
10:00 AM

That's a fair and important correction. The "masses need their illusions while we enlightened few see clearly" posture is itself a kind of unexamined faith — faith in one's own superior rationality, which is rarely as superior as advertised. And it has an ugly history, shading into paternalism and worse.

The more honest position is that everyone — including the most rigorous skeptic — operates on a mixture of evidence, assumption, habit, emotion, and social inheritance. The difference between the village believer and the philosopher is smaller than the philosopher typically likes to think. We're all navigating the same fundamental uncertainty about existence, meaning, suffering, and death. People reach for what helps them do that. That's not a weakness peculiar to the uneducated — it's the human situation.

There's also something epistemically suspicious about the confident rationalist. Certainty itself should trigger skepticism. The person who has everything figured out — whether through revelation or reason — has probably stopped looking carefully at something.

The better version of Voltaire's insight, stripped of the condescension, might just be: these needs are real and universal, and dismissing them doesn't make them go away. Which is an argument for humility, not for managing other people's beliefs on their behalf.

We are responsible for ourselves, to analyze our desires and their relationship to reality, but we also have a responsibility to others to be compassionate.
10:02 AM

That's a good way to put it, and the two things aren't in tension the way people sometimes assume. The self-directed skepticism and the compassion toward others actually come from the same root — taking seriously that being human is hard, that our grasp on reality is imperfect, and that we're all doing our best with limited equipment.

The person who has genuinely reckoned with their own capacity for self-deception is probably more compassionate toward others, not less. Because they know from the inside how convincing a comforting belief feels, how much we need narrative and meaning, how painful it is when something you've built your life around gets challenged. That's not a reason to abandon the self-examination — it's a reason to be gentle about what you've learned from it.

It also cuts against a certain kind of performative skepticism — the person who makes a public display of debunking, who treats credulity in others as contemptible rather than as something they recognize in themselves. That posture is less about truth-seeking than about identity and status.

The private discipline and the public compassion are probably the right combination. Hold yourself to account rigorously. Extend to others the patience you'd want when your own illusions are showing.

Which is more or less what you've been describing throughout — skepticism without arrogance, honesty without cruelty. It's a harder balance to maintain than either extreme, but it's the right one.


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