Catastrophic Worldview Collapse

psychology of religious certainty

Imagine that you bet $80 on PredictIt dot org that Mr. X will win the presidential election. But Mr. X loses the election to Mr. Y. Okay, that’s kind of upsetting. You lost eighty dollars. But it doesn’t completely shatter your worldview. It’s trivially easy to accept that you were wrong and move on.

Let’s take it a step further. Imagine you found out that your father is a drug lord who is running a massive cocaine trafficking conspiracy. This will surely come as shocking, devastating news. You will refuse to believe it at first, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence. This is impossible! It has to be a mistake! There must be some kind of explanation! It may take days or weeks or months or years, but eventually you will accept the truth. You will have mixed feelings about your father afterwards. On the one hand, he’s your dad, you have fond memories of him taking you to visit the Biblical Museum of Natural History on Chol HaMoed, etc. On the other hand, he’s a monster.

Now let us take it 10,000 steps further! Imagine someone told you that shapeshifting reptilian aliens control Earth by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate human societies. And they claim to have evidence for their position.

Unless you were already a conspiracy-minded person, you will utterly refuse to believe it under any circumstances whatsoever. In fact, you won’t even pay attention to them! You’ll just laugh it off and go on with your day, without giving it a second thought. You don’t even suspect for a moment that they could be right. It’s not worth your time. Why? Because this contradicts everything you know about the world. It is simply impossible. It’s ridiculous. Absurd. Ludicrous. Preposterous.

I think this is essentially how many deeply religious people, especially when they are very sheltered, feel when confronted with the possibility that their religion might be wrong. For a certain type of religious person, there is literally no possible combination of English letters that would convince them that they’re wrong. Trying to convince Yanky from Bnei Brak that evolution is real or that the Toyre is made up is like trying to convince me that shapeshifting reptilians are running the earth. Actually, maybe that’s not the best comparison, because I don’t think it’s impossible that shapeshifting reptilians are running the earth. Just out of sheer epistemic humility, I don’t feel comfortable assigning a probability of exactly 0 to anything. It’s just so unlikely that I don’t have the time or the energy to seriously consider the possibility. If there really was incontrovertible evidence that shapeshifting reptilians are running the earth, then I would ultimately have to accept it as true. But what would it actually mean to live in a world like that? I have no idea. My entire worldview would simply collapse, and I would have to rebuild a new worldview from the ground up.