Here are two sets of beliefs. Read each and decide which is set of beliefs is more likely to be true.
Belief set
one
Mary lives in London
Jill travelled in a sports car.
Jill had a sun tan.
Jill gave someone a case of wine.
Belief set
two
Mary, who lives in London, inherited a
sports car, but didn't have a driving license at that time, so she lent it to
her good friend Jill, who used it to drive down to the South of France for a
week long vacation on which she developed an impressive sun tan. On her return,
Jill gave Mary a case of good French wine she bought while there to show her
appreciation.
The first belief set involves just four disconnected claims. The second
set includes those claims but weaves them together into a narrative that is coherent and makes sense. The story makes meaningful connections between the four claims.
Many people will intuitively find the second set of beliefs much more
plausible than the first. They will suppose it's more likely to be true.
However, a moment's reflection reveals that the second belief set
can't be more probable than the first, because it makes the same four claims plus several additional claims. If the
story is true, then the four claims are true, but even if all four claims are
true, the story could easily be false.
Here's a quite different story involving the same four claims.
Mary lives in a London, and suddenly
fell ill. Jill, her closest friend, was skiing at the time, and wanted to be by
her friend's side. So Jill persuaded someone staying at the same hotel, and who
was driving their sports car back to London the next day, to give her a lift.
Jill arrived in London tanned but exhausted, glad to see Mary recovering.
Jill was so grateful to the driver, she later sent them a case of wine.
It too 'makes sense' of the same four claims. But both these stories are rather less probable than just the four claims being true.
This tendency to find stories and narratives rather more probable than a
series of otherwise disconnected claims contained within them is flagged by Daniel Kahneman in his Thinking Fast and Slow. He writes that the following two
scenarios were presented to different groups with a request to calculate their
probability:
A massive flood somewhere
in North America next year, in which more than 1,000 people drown
An earthquake in
California sometime next year, causing a flood in which more than 1,000 people
drown
The second scenario was judged more probable, though it's actually
less probable as it involves more claims. However, it links events together
causally, in a narrative fashion, and so is more coherent. Kahneman suggests
our 'fast thinking' tends to confuse plausibility/coherence with probability,
leading us astray. As a result, we commit what's sometimes called the narrative fallacy.
I think this tendency may partly explain the human
propensity toward religious belief. Religions invariably tell a story about
human beings and our place in the universe. When we take a step back and look
at the 'big picture', a belief system like Christianity can seem to 'make sense'
of things in a way that can lead us to judge it to be much more probable than it really is.
I think this is going on in these quotes from the theologian
Alister McGrath, for example:
it is the
Christian vision of reality as a whole – rather than any of its individual
components – that proves compelling. Individual observations of nature do not
“prove” Christianity to be true; rather, Christianity validates itself by its
ability to make sense of those observations. p4 of
'The Rationality of Faith: How
does Christianity make sense of things?'
As a younger man, I found that the chief intellectual
virtue of Christianity then seemed to be that it offered a coherent and
rationally motivated account of the world, disclosing a hidden web of meaning
and connectedness behind the ephemeral and seemingly incoherent world that we
experience. No matter how fragmented our world of experience may seem, there is
a half-glimpsed bigger picture that holds things together, its threads
connecting together in a web of meaning what might otherwise seem incoherent
and pointless. What once might have seemed to be a muddle and jumble
comes to be seen as an interconnected and meaningful vision of reality (Ibid. pp5-6)
Faith does not
contradict reason, but transcends it through a joyous divine deliverance from
the cold and austere limits of human reason and logic. We are surprised and
delighted by a meaning to life that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves. But
once we’ve seen it, everything makes sense and fits into place…Like Moses, we
are led to climb Mount Nebo, and catch a glimpse of the promised land – a land
that really is there, but which lies beyond our normal capacity to see, hidden
by the horizon of human limitations. The framework of faith, once grasped,
gives us a new way of seeing the world, and making sense of our place in the
greater scheme of things.(McGrath, Surprised by Meaning, p6)
I suspect the Narrative Fallacy also partly explains the enduring popularity of argument-to-the-best-explanation type cases for miracles, religious and New Age belief systems, and conspiracy theories. An explanation of otherwise unrelated events/coincidences in terms of a narrative involving conspirators, spirit beings, ghosts, or gods, etc. is going to seem more intuitively plausible and appealing than just a bald statement of the facts to be explained, even if it's actually less likely to be true.
Comments