Believers

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.  

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.  It would seem the ability to believe has its use.

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 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 prophecies 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 the prophecies 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 to make a fulfillment seem as though it happened.
Calibrated intellectual engagement with hermeneutical and epistemological nuances

The steady-state/Big Bang case is a good one because it shows the trap operates even on people who are actively trying to think well. You weren't being lazy — you'd looked at both models and the Big Bang genuinely did seem to import an uncomfortable amount of "and then something happened for no reason" into physics. Steady-state was more aesthetically satisfying. The error wasn't in noticing that; the error was letting the aesthetic preference function as evidence. And the thing that eventually corrected you wasn't your own better judgment, it was the CMB in '65 forcing the issue. Which points to something worth separating out: the belief was correctable because the domain had a mechanism for correction independent of anyone's preference. That's the real difference between the useful kind of "believing" (the boss telling you you're fired) and the dangerous kind — not whether the belief feels certain, but whether the thing you're forming a belief about is capable of pushing back on you if you're wrong.

That's also, I think, the sharpest version of your magician point. The con works because the performer has engineered a situation where nothing pushes back — you don't get to see the trap door, the stooge in the audience doesn't announce himself. Critical thinking, in that frame, isn't a set of rules so much as the habit of asking "if I'm wrong about this, is there any way I'd find out?" Steady-state theory could answer yes. A rigged prophecy can't, and that's diagnostic in itself.

On Matthew — you're right that it's the worst offender among the gospels for this, and it's worth being precise about which trick is being run, because there are actually two different ones tangled together and they deserve separate treatment.

One is straightforward decontextualization: Hosea 11:1, "out of Egypt I called my son," is Hosea talking about the nation of Israel in the Exodus, past tense, no messianic content whatsoever, and Matthew (2:15) lifts it as a prediction of the infant Jesus's return from Egypt. Isaiah 7:14 is addressed to King Ahaz about a child to be born within his own lifetime as a sign regarding an eighth-century political crisis — the "almah" (young woman) becomes "virgin" only once you're reading the Greek Septuagint's parthenos back into a Hebrew word that didn't require it. Matthew 2:23, "he shall be called a Nazarene," cites a prophecy that appears nowhere in the Old Testament at all — there's no source text anyone has ever located.

The other trick is different and, honestly, more interesting than deception: it's the hermeneutic method itself. Second Temple Jewish exegesis, the kind you see at Qumran in the pesher commentaries, treated scripture as a kind of code whose "real" meaning was contemporary events, regardless of what the original author was talking about. Matthew is writing in that tradition, not perpetrating a hoax in a modern forensic sense — he and his likely audience may have understood "fulfillment" as a legitimate reading strategy rather than as "this text literally predicted this event and here is the unbroken causal chain." That's a genre-convention point, and it's worth holding onto because it's the more defensible reading a serious scholar would offer in Matthew's defense — that this is typological reasoning, not fraud.

But I'd say that defense actually strengthens your critical-thinking point rather than undercutting it, because it means the "fulfilled prophecy" argument, when it shows up in modern apologetics as a proof of the text's supernatural accuracy, is doubly stacked: it borrows the rhetorical force of "prediction" from a culture that wasn't using the word that way, and it's being deployed to a modern audience that will hear it in the forensic sense. That's the sleight of hand — not just cherry-picked verses, but a category swap nobody flags.

When I was doing my social work about Jehovah's Witnesses, what I noticed most was cherry-picking, but of course it was not my job to undermine, I was doing ethnology not theology, so I didn't really categorize it all.
Reconciled ethnographic neutrality with analytical observation of rhetorical patterns

That's the right discipline for the fieldwork, though — an ethnographer who starts cataloguing the informants' reasoning errors has stopped doing ethnology and started doing apologetics of a different sort. The whole value of the method is that you're documenting how the belief functions and propagates within the community, not adjudicating whether the belief survives scrutiny. Those are genuinely different projects and mixing them corrupts both — you'd have gotten worse ethnography and mediocre theology.

But now, decades later, with no fieldwork obligations left to protect, it might be worth going back over what you noticed and actually sorting it, if only because JWs are an unusually clean case study. The organization has produced a century of falsifiable, dated predictions — 1914, 1925, 1975 most famously — which gives you something rarer than most religious cherry-picking: a paper trail where you can watch the deck get reshuffled in real time. The pattern is fairly well documented — a specific date is set with real institutional confidence, the date passes, and the literature doesn't simply admit error but retroactively reinterprets what "actually" happened (1914 becoming an invisible heavenly enthronement once the visible Armageddon didn't arrive), while past confident predictions get quietly dropped from reprinted materials. That's cherry-picking operating at the institutional level rather than the individual-verse level — the organization curating its own history the way Matthew curates Hosea.

The other layer you'd have seen up close, that's harder to get from outside literature, is how individual members handle the cognitive load — whether the reinterpretation is something they've actively worked through or something they've simply absorbed as the current teaching without the earlier version registering as a prediction that failed. That distinction (calculated reinterpretation vs. this generation had a natural memory reset) matters a lot for the mechanism, and it's exactly the kind of thing only someone who was in the room, not reading the Watchtower archive after the fact, would be positioned to speak to.

Did you keep field notes detailed enough that you could reconstruct that now, or is it mostly general impression at this distance?

Oh I made no notes whatsoever about doctrine or doctrinal cognition.  I was interested in family structure, social structure, etc.  Of course I picked up a good deal as they saw me as a conversion potential.
Examined conversion dynamics within family and social structures

That makes sense given the actual research question — family structure and social organization don't require you to track how members metabolize a failed prophecy, and trying to hold both would have diluted the real data. The conversion-potential angle is interesting though, because it means you weren't a neutral observer taking notes from the margins — you were being actively worked, which is its own kind of data even if you weren't collecting it as such. Being cultivated as a prospect would have put you inside the persuasion machinery in a way a disinterested observer never sees: which doctrines get led with, which get held back until later, how objections get handled in real time, who does the approaching and who does the closing. That's usually invisible to an ethnographer studying kinship charts from a respectful distance.

Did that side of it ever get uncomfortable — the tension between needing them to keep treating you as a live prospect for access, and having no intention of converting?

I was honest about it and they understood, but that didn't mean they wouldn't take any opportunity.

That's a fairly sophisticated equilibrium, when you think about it — an organization confident enough in its methods that "he's told us plainly he's not buying it" doesn't get treated as a stop signal, just as the current state of a negotiation that stays open indefinitely. It's a rational strategy if you believe, as they presumably do, that conversion isn't really won by a single winning argument but by cumulative exposure and relationship — so your stated position today has no real bearing on where you might be in a year of continued contact. Which also means your honesty cost you nothing in terms of access; they could just file it as "not yet" rather than "no," and keep going. Did that persistence ever shift what you were studying, or did it stay strictly in the background while you kept the kinship and household data as the actual subject?
Orchestrated conversational exploration of plate tectonics and paleomagnetic vindication

That's a genuinely satisfying case, and a useful counterweight to the steady-state story, because it runs in the opposite direction — Wegener was mocked for decades, dismissed as amateur pattern-matching on a jigsaw-puzzle coastline fit, largely because he had no mechanism and the establishment geophysicists insisted continents simply couldn't plow through ocean floor. The land-bridge hypotheses you're remembering were the establishment's actual answer to the fossil-distribution problem he was trying to solve — sunken Atlantis-style bridges connecting continents to explain why the same fossils turned up on both sides of oceans, which is a much less parsimonious fix than "the continents used to be joined," but it had the advantage of not requiring anyone to believe rock could flow.

What actually vindicated him wasn't better arguments about coastlines, it was the paleomagnetic striping on the seafloor — the symmetric zebra pattern either side of the mid-ocean ridges recording the periodic reversals of Earth's magnetic field, laid down in new rock as the seafloor spreads and pulls apart. That gave a mechanism (seafloor spreading via mantle convection) and a literal magnetic tape recording, dated and datable, showing the process actually happening. It's about as close as geology gets to a smoking gun, which is presumably why the Scientific American moment landed the way it did — you weren't just getting told he was right, you were getting shown a physical record of it.

The interesting contrast with steady-state is that here the delight and the correct update pointed the same direction — you wanted Wegener vindicated and he was, whereas with steady-state the wanting and the evidence pulled apart. Worth noting because it's a reminder the danger isn't wanting something to be true, it's letting the wanting substitute for the check. Same emotional experience of delight in both cases; only one of them had earned it at the time you felt it.

The jig-saw stuff of how continents "fit" is a bit cartoonish.  The important things was fossil distribution.
Recalibrated understanding of Wegener's evidence hierarchy

Fair correction, and worth taking seriously rather than smoothing over. The coastline fit is what survives in popular accounts because it's visually intuitive, but it wasn't the load-bearing evidence in Wegener's actual 1912 case or in his 1915 book — Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane leaned heavily on matching fossil assemblages (Mesosaurus, Glossopteris, Lystrosaurus) turning up on continents now separated by ocean, plus matching rock strata and mountain-belt continuations across the Atlantic (the Appalachians lining up with ranges in Scotland and Scandinavia), plus glacial striation patterns that only made sense if the glaciated regions had once been contiguous near a pole. The coastlines were the observation that got him looking; the fossils and strata were the actual argument, because they're much harder to explain away with land bridges — a Mesosaurus is a freshwater reptile with no plausible way to swim an ocean, which the land-bridge advocates had to answer for and mostly couldn't except by positing an increasingly implausible number of bridges.

So my error there was reproducing the popularized version of the story rather than the actual evidentiary structure — a small instance, on a much smaller scale, of the same thing you flagged in Matthew: the version that circulates is the version that's easy to picture, not necessarily the version that did the work.


Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.