Irrational Truth

It's amusing to see the occasional scientific article come across concerning some aspect of human behavior that is incredibly "illogical" when it concerns ethics or religious beliefs. I pointed this out months ago with an article on teleologic statements (statements that say there is purpose to creation) that found people tend to subconsciously believe there is purpose in creation, regardless of their stated beliefs otherwise.

The latest is this article from Ars Technica that talks about a behavioral experiment set up to determine how rational people would be about money. From the article:

The basic rules of the Ultimatum Game are simple. One person is given a stack of cash, and told to divide it between themselves and a second party. That second party is then given the chance to accept or reject the offer; if it's rejected, neither of them get any money. Clearly, any of this free money should be better than nothing, so under assumptions of strictly rational behavior, you might expect all offers to be accepted.

They're not. Things in the neighborhood of a 50/50 split are accepted, but as the proportions shift to where the person issuing the ultimatum tries to keep seventy percent of the total, rejections increase. By the time they hit an 80/20 split, nearly 70 percent of the offers are rejected, even though that 20 percent of the total cash would leave the recipient better off than where they started.

The authors of the experiment went on to refine the experiment to ensure that people could make more rational decisions about the money, but at least 40% of the time they rejected any offers they considered "unfair".

Initially, they try to pin it down as a form of "primate behavior" centered on ensuring "cooperative behavior in small groups" but even that explanation was rejected because they found that even if the only consequence was guilt for accepting an unfair offer, it was still rejected a significant portion of the time.

So, once again, a behavior experiment has teased out the notion that we all have an innate idea of what is right and wrong. Particularly in this experiment, an idea of what is "fair" and what causes guilt. I wonder where that came from?

Anyway, sorry if my exposition of the experiment isn't that clear, the original article is much more in depth. Enjoy.

The Hallelujah Epiphany

For the Easter service at our church the choir sang the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. It was, of course, majestic, but I was unexpectedly quite moved by the song.

While they were singing it, I was thinking about a story my friend Jason had referenced last week in a blog post. It's the story of a South American Indian who was hearing Handel's Messiah for the first time. Upon hearing the Hallelujah chorus she began to cry, and later explained that she'd heard the chorus before. She was, in fact, one of the famous Auca Indians, the tribe that had killed Jim Elliot and his fellow missionaries in 1956. (If you're not familiar with the story, read a short synopsis here.) She recounted that, as the missionaries were being speared to death on the Curaray river, she saw men in white on the opposite side. They were singing the Hallelujah chorus.

While the story is pretty neat, I didn't really think much of it. I cynically thought that it was a little cliche, the idea of angels singing the Hallelujah chorus. It wasn't until I heard the words of the chorus Sunday morning that I realized something that really shook me to my core:

The kingdom of this world

Is become the kingdom of our Lord,

And of His Christ, and of His Christ;

And He shall reign for ever and ever.

Those angels weren't singing about Jim Elliot or Nate Saint. They weren't singing about the Auca Indians. They sang only about God. And I realized that was kind of the point. When those missionaries were getting murdered it looked like defeat. But those angels were proclaiming that God really was the ruler of this world, and that he would reign forever, even as His subjects were being humiliated by the forces of evil. We know, of course, that those Indians eventually became Christians by God's grace. In the end, God won.

That, I realized, was why angels would sing that song. Handel ripped those lyrics straight from Revelations and the point of that book is simply that no matter how things appear, in the end God wins.

Oh, The Irony

This article in the New Scientist magazine is hilarious in it's one-sided take on an experiment someone did with "teleological" statements. Basically what they did was ask a bunch of people "true or false" through a number of statements based on the subtle idea that there was purpose in creation. On the surface a statement such as "Earthworms tunnel underground to aerate the soil" may seem harmless, but the innocuous word "to" makes it a question that determines cause and effect, rather than a mere statement. If they had said "Earthworms tunnel underground and aerate the soil," it would have counted as a true statement.

As it turns out, regardless of a persons religious orientation, they reliably orient towards the subtly, purpose-tinged statements. The article notes that children have a stronger tendency towards this. However, New Scientist chalks this up to some latent ignorance that must be cleaned up through solid education (despite the fact that the test-takers had college degrees). One scientist seems to lament that even "Dawkins or Einstein or whomever... no matter how expert or educated they are, they might still make these mistakes."

First, I find it interesting that there even exists an experiment that seemed to show that we're "primed" (they changed the headline from "hard-wired" after people objected to it in the comments) for, not simply a latent belief in God, but for hope and a desire for there to be purpose in our world. Secondly, I find it funny, and a bit sad, that the people responsible for the article seem to think it a wrong thing to believe in purpose. I get the feeling that the "correct" viewpoint on our world is that nothing has purpose, it merely is, and the only option is to "educate" people to their innate bias so that we realize that there is only existence, and nothing beyond.

Having been taught faith from an early age, it's hard for me to get in the mind of someone who is purely existential. In the moments of doubt and struggle that have brought me close to the brink of hopelessness, I've stared in the cold, dark maw of a life without God and seen clearly that there is no life there after all. I can only pray that for the people who encounter this experiment, they will come to realize that they are indeed "hard-wired" for hope, a desire for purpose, and for God.