Let me be plain about something, because a few readers have asked. This page is not here to bring you around to my views. If you finish reading and find that you agree with me, but you arrived there without examining a single thing along the way, then I have wasted your time and mine. What I want is harder and far more interesting. I want us to walk through the big questions together, and I want each of us to hold our own ideas up to the light before we hold up anyone else’s.
The Machinery We Never Notice
I spend my working life around research and evidence, and here is what worries me most. It is not that people reach wrong conclusions. Everyone does, often. What worries me is how rarely we notice the machinery that carried us to those conclusions in the first place. All of us, and I put myself at the front of this line, are shaped by forces that have nothing whatsoever to do with whether a thing is true.
Seven Forces That Shape What We Believe
I have watched these forces at work in students, in colleagues, in critics, and in the mirror.
- We favor what we learned first. Whatever arrives in an empty room becomes the furniture, and every idea that comes afterward has to argue for space.
- We favor what came from someone we trusted. A parent, a pastor, a professor, a biology teacher working faithfully through a curriculum she did not write. Our warmth toward the person transfers, quietly, to the claim.
- We are shaped by what we suffered. Grief and pain do not leave reasoning untouched. They can push a person into faith, and they can push a person out of it. I have traveled the second road. When my father died after I had prayed for him, I spent twelve years angry, building a case against God. I was not weighing evidence during those years. I was prosecuting a case.
- We favor what our people hold. Disagreement carries a social cost, and belonging is never free.
- We favor what we have already defended in public. Retracting feels like losing rather than learning, so we dig in.
- We favor what is convenient. Ideas that permit what we already wanted to do, and that ask nothing of us, get a very easy hearing.
- We reject what we have only met in caricature. Most of us have dismissed a position we never once encountered in its strongest form, argued by its most capable defender.
Read that list honestly and you will find yourself in it somewhere. I find myself in several places.
What I Am Asking
So here is my request, and I make it of myself before I make it of anyone reading.
Read the other side from its best writers, not from someone mocking it. Notice the moment when you are scrutinizing an argument you dislike while waving through one you find comfortable. Then ask the question that actually costs something. What if I am wrong? What if the idea I have spent twenty years dismissing turns out to be true, and the only thing between me and it is that I have never once examined it honestly?
I can tell you from experience that this is survivable. I have been wrong before, publicly and at length. It was not pleasant. It was also the most useful thing that ever happened to my thinking.
So, by all means, disagree with me here. Bring your objections and the evidence behind them. Ask for my reasons, hold me to them, and I will hold you to yours, courteously. That is not a disclaimer attached to the page. It is the whole invitation.
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