The Tools of Integrated Apologetic Course 1.7.6
Fantasies
Why People Accept Fantasies and Lies
By Bob Passantino
One morning my daughter Karen, who has very vivid dreams and even more vivid stories retelling her dreams, was telling me about a dream she had just had. "It was a great dream," she started, "just like real life, but better!" Following are ten common reasons even cult researchers sometimes accept what’s not true instead of what’s true. The common thread running through most reasons people accept fantasies or even lies is what Karen said, "just like real life, but better!"
And yet, as cult apologetics researchers we have a serious responsibility to observe, understand and explain the world as it really is, not "better" than real. We can’t treat our ministry like a child treats a dream, or we risk drawing both ourselves and others who trust us into deceit. Paul admonishes,. . . we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness by which they lie in wait to deceive, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head — Christ. . . . Keep in mind that one of the reasons we can be so susceptible to fantasies is that we sometimes unwittingly suspend our critical thinking ability. After the following survey of common reasons people accept fantasies, I shall discuss some of the most common logical fallacies, into which and for which we sometimes fall in our research and an evaluation of the cults and the occult.
1. It fits into our world view.
Because something is possible, doesn’t mean that it is true; and just because something exists, doesn’t mean every report we receive of it must be true. Let me explain what I mean with an example. As Christians we believe that God specially and directly created life on this planet. Given His attribute of omnipotence and the fact that He is the God of all existence, and not just, like the Mormons would say, of this planet, it is certainly possible that God could have created life somewhere else in the universe. However, we have no Biblical or scientific evidence that He did. It is possible, but it is not necessarily true.
Another example will illustrate my second point. How do you explain UFO reports? As "lying signs and wonders in the air"? As demonic apparitions? If you’re thinking critically, you won’t accept my question in the way it was posed. Instead, you will ask, "Which UFO reports do you want me to explain?" In fact, careful investigation shows that the vast majority of UFO sightings are of natural or manmade phenomena, misidentified by observers.
Second Corinthians 11:4 and 13-15 teach us that Satan and his followers can transform themselves so that they look like "ministers of righteousness." In our Biblical world view, we would expect to find instances of demonic evil masquerading as what is good, perhaps as UFO phenomena. However, we fall for fantasies if we do not discriminate among the reports of evil-in- progress.
We tend to believe what is allowed for in and predicted by our world view, but investigation is necessary to determine the explanation of a particular report. This is a vulnerability to which counselors seem especially prone. We tend to believe the personal experiences we’re told that correspond to our world view without checking to see whether there is any validity to the report at all.
2. We accept what we’re told.
Researchers under time constraints sometimes find themselves accepting what they’re told without sufficient testing. It’s not that we don’t want to be critical, but we don’t always have time to check everything we’re told. We forget that finding someone willing to tell us what to think about a certain situation is not the same as finding the right person to tell us what can be verified.
How many different applications of the term "brainwashing" can you think of? We’re told our children are brainwashed by television commercials, Christians are brainwashed by televangelists, Moonies are brainwashed by too much rice, Americans are brainwashed by the liberal media, and adult Jews are brainwashed by Jews for Jesus. I’m sure you can think of other examples.
But how many of you have studied classic brainwashing and know its symptoms, how it is accomplished, and how its effects are maintained? I don’t mean what you’ve been told, I mean the reports of clinical studies and military research on, for example, U.S. POWs in North Korea? In fact, most of us are not even aware that out of 4500 American POWs in North Korea, who had been exposed to classic, isolationist brainwashing, only twenty-two voluntarily elected to stay in North Korea after the war. All too often we have accepted what we’ve been told about brainwashing, even when it refers to cultists, without checking it out for ourselves.
3. We base our knowledge on common sense.
Something I said earlier bears repeating here. Sometimes we stumble on the truth even in the midst of our vulnerability. If I were paranoid, I could attribute all sorts of menacing motives to each of you to support my contention that you are all out to destroy me. But just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not out to harm me. Your fiendish plot can’t be proved by my delusional ravings. Often common sense parallels the truth. That is, what we commonly think makes sense, and it may even correspond to truth, but common sense is not a trustworthy method to find truth.
Let’s take a quick survey. How many of you think college enrollment goes up during a recession? Why do you think so? Maybe because out-of-work people have more time for classes and want to better their job market potential? That’s a sensible idea. Now, how many of you think college enrollment goes down during a recession? Why? Maybe because fewer people have the money to afford college and people don’t want to have their time tied up in case they are offered a job? That makes sense, too. Common sense can be used to answer my question either way, but only an actual investigation of college enrollment figures before, during, and after recessions can tell us what the true answer is.
4. We place too much faith in "experts."
This is a tendency I can see in myself when it comes to my children and their welfare. My wife and I may be pretty sure that one of our children has the flu, but I accept the diagnosis a lot better if I pay the pediatrician forty dollars to tell me the same thing. I can help my children with their homework, check their papers, and talk to them about what they’re learning in school, but I feel much more assured of their progress at Parent-Teacher Conference time when their teachers agree, "Your children are doing fine in school." But because pediatricians and teachers are "experts" that doesn’t make them infallible. It is possible to place blind faith in experts. What if our pediatrician misdiagnoses my son’s illness as flu when it’s really meningitis? What if my daughter’s teacher has missed a serious learning disability that doesn’t show up in standard classroom work?
Even cult apologetics research is susceptible to placing too much faith in experts. This is especially true when there are very few experts in any one area and we are forced to get all or most of our information from one source, or when we trust experts to tell us about something outside their field of expertise. We seem to think that truth becomes more true if someone important says it, even if that important person has no particular knowledge of that field. On the contrary, two plus two still equals four, no matter whether a mathematician, a zoologist, or our young son says it. Conversely, the popular proposition, "People can achieve anything they want" isn’t true, whether Shirley MacLaine, Ronald Reagan, or even Mother Theresa says it.
One contemporary book relegating psychology to the world of the cults quotes Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman criticizing psychoanalysis as being unscientific "witch doctoring." Well, that proves it! Psychoanalysis is down the drain! Now, I’m not trying to defend psychoanalysis, and I have other reasons for questioning its validity, but Richard Feynman’s opinion and status as a Nobel prize winner isn’t sufficient.
Richard Feynman was a brilliant atomic physicist who worked in pioneering atomic energy and weaponry. His Nobel prize was awarded for his work in physics. He was an inspiring scientist, teacher and innovative researcher. His ability to think creatively in the field of quantum electrodynamics was unsurpassed.
But he was not an expert in psychology, psychotherapy, or the philosophy of science. (In fact, he thought philosophers operated in a state of complete chaos.) He was opinionated and cared little for subjects that didn’t interest him. He is entitled to his opinion about psychoanalysis, but he has no special knowledge, experience, or education to give it special weight. Believing an expert without appropriate authority and without corroborating evidence is not a trustworthy way to discern truth.
5. We think seeing is believing.
Raised in the "scientific" age, we tend to think that whatever we encounter empirically, or with any of our five senses, must be real. We describe something incredible by "You have to see it to believe it!" We express our doubt by "I won’t believe it until I see it!" And even the Apostle Thomas affirmed his scientific status by qualifying what it would take for him to believe Jesus’ resurrection, "Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe." There’s nothing inherently wrong with empirical testing. In fact, some things must be tested empirically. But we need to be careful of two things.
First, not everything is empirically verifiable. What laboratory experiments can you devise to test my assertion that I love Jesus? My ministry? What if I’m doing it for the vast fortune I can amass from cult apologetics? (OK, maybe that’s not a great "what if.") My public profession of faith? What if I have been coerced into it by "cultic brainwashing"? My attendance at church? What if I only go because I don’t want to listen to my wife nag me? You get the point. Some things are not inherently material and cannot be tested adequately by the senses. Second, when we test empirically, we cannot always trust our senses. We have to add critical thinking to our sensory experience. If sensory experience were sufficient in itself, we would assume that pencils bend each time we place them in glasses of water because they look bent. Critical thinking reconciles what our eyes tell us with what other tests tell us. That way we can explain the illusion of the bent pencil in terms of light refraction in the two different mediums of air and water.
How does this relate to cult apologetics? As cult apologists, we need to be careful that we don’t fall for misperceptions by our senses. For example, when I was a young Christian, the church I was involved in was really into miraculous healing. They even imported a travelling healing evangelist. Since I was practically blind in my left eye, I fell in line that night to have the evangelist pray for my healing. I believed God could do it, and I even activated my faith by my offering. But here’s what happened.
Finally I was at the head of the line. The rest of the congregation sat and watched as the evangelist asked me my problem. "I’m practically blind in my left eye," I told him. "Praise God!" the evangelist shouted, "This man is blind in one eye and we’re going to pray for his healing right now!" After his very impassioned prayer, he put his hand over my left eye, the nearly blind one, and shouted, "Can you see, brother?" "Yes, but that’s not the eye . . . . " "Glory be to God, He can see! Hallelujah! Everybody say Amen!" Well, the entire congregation thought they saw me healed of blindness, but I still have worse than 20/400 vision in that eye. (Maybe it is healed and I just have the symptoms left. That makes as much sense as believing the "healing" I received.)
6. We draw conclusions from faulty evidence.
Here’s a common reason we believe fantasies. We do a great job of thinking critically from evidence to conclusion, but we forget to check our evidence. What if the evidence is faulty? All the critical thinking in the world can’t change bad evidence into good evidence. Contemporary cultic and occultic "myths" fall into this category. A caller to our radio program once told us what she had decided to do in light of the evidence that a major luxury hotel in our area was owned by the Church of Satan. She was going to call all the radio, television and newspaper offices so she could to obtain the widest possible publicity about this terrible situation, and she was urging all Christians to boycott the hotel as a protest against Satanism. There was nothing wrong with her action plan.
Except she hadn’t checked her evidence. It is true that the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel in my city of Costa Mesa is at 666 Anton Way, and it is true that Anton is also the first name of Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. But it’s not true that the Church of Satan owns the hotel (it’s owned by one of the wealthiest families in Southern California, the Segerstroms); it’s not true that the Church of Satan picked the street number 666 (the hotel falls just past half-way through the 600 block square of the Costa Mesa city street number grid); and Anton Way is in honor of two Segerstrom family members, not of LaVey. Trusting faulty evidence had sabotaged our caller’s entire action plan.
7. We draw faulty conclusions from good evidence.
It’s fairly easy to recognize when we draw conclusions from faulty evidence, but it’s harder to recognize drawing faulty conclusions from good evidence. Check for this vulnerability the next time you have a conclusion that doesn’t seem true, and yet you have checked, double checked and even triple checked your evidence. Maybe your evidence isn’t the problem. Maybe you have drawn a faulty conclusion from your evidence.
For example, we have heard the warning that, since Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, we should devote a large portion of our American cult apologetic ministry to combating Islam. However, that conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the evidence. We need to find out why and where Islam is the fastest growing religion before we can justify making it the number one target of American cult apologetics. In fact, Islam’s growth is due mostly to Islamic nationalism in the East and to the fact that strict Muslims neither practice birth control nor kill one-third of their unborn children, unlike Americans. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t care about evangelism to Muslims. My former organization published materials by the noted missionary to the Muslims, William McElwee Miller; we have had representatives of the Zwemer Institute on our radio show; and we have assisted several Christian missions to Muslims. But one can’t jump from an isolated statistic on membership growth to an immediate and close threat.
8. We believe what makes us feel comfortable.
How many calls do you think your ministry receives in any given week from people who want you to come witness to their Jehovah’s Witness neighbor, their Mormon co-worker, their New Age relative? How many of those callers make you feel good by commenting something like this, "I just know you can get through to So-and-so. I want so much for him (or her) to know the Lord, but he needs a real professional to talk to him." Well, comments like those make the caller feel even better. Why? It is rarely because the caller is totally incapable of sharing the Gospel with the cultist. Mostly it’s because the caller wants to be believe only a professional can witness to a cultist. That way the caller can feel comfortable about never witnessing or defending the Gospel to the cultist.
9. We see the world as we would like it to be rather than as it really is.
I become upset at injustice. I can’t stand to see someone taken advantage of or falling victim to a scam. When I receive a chain letter in the mail, I turn it over to the Postmaster, fully confident that the perpetrators will be caught. When I see a police officer make an illegal U-turn, I think I should be able to complain to the desk sergeant and have the officer disciplined. When I talk to a cultist, I never give up. I keep thinking that if I can hit upon the perfect combination of arguments, or the exact set of scriptures, all cultists will see the error of their ways and come to Christ.
I also spend time being frustrated. Postmasters don’t have time for petty crooks. The desk sergeant makes illegal U-turns too. And some people won’t believe no matter what, even if, as Jesus said, someone were to rise from the dead with the truth. I have to keep reminding myself that the world is not really the way I would like it to be. When I forget, I don’t make accurate evaluations about the world.
10. We base our beliefs on personal experience.
We have a serious disease in Christian apologetics today. That is, we too often substitute personal stories or experience for comprehensive, accurate research and evaluation. It’s so much easier to tell a story or get a guest speaker with a great story than it is to put in good, hard work at apologetics. Christian bookstores are full of personal stories, testimonies, and experiences on everything from possibility thinking through "I was a baby breeder for Satan." Most of these stories are characterized by subjective emotionalism, undocumented assertions, and little or no biblical or theological evaluation. But that’s acceptable, we’re told, because
So-and-so really experienced it, so s/ he knows all about it. We don’t need doctrine. We don’t need theology. We don’t need facts. We don’t need documentation. Just tell a story. It makes people feel good, and who can argue with a story? But personal experience doesn’t always tell the truth. Think about "personal experience" and cult apologetics. How many Jehovah’s Witnesses have you had tell you that they used to be "born- againers" before they joined the Watchtower, and they used to believe Jesus was the Father, so they know that’s what the deity of Christ means"? Or Mormons who say that they won’t argue about the Book of Mormon because they’ve prayed about it and they testify to you that they know the Book of Mormon is the Word of God and
Joseph Smith is a prophet of God? Personal experience can deceive. Have a healthy skepticism toward Christian "stories," too. If the book you’re reading on Satanism, for example, has no dates, no places, no names, no events — is completely undatable and untestable, how can we know it is true? And even if the events recorded happened, how do we know they are interpreted properly by the story teller? No matter how tempting and easy, don’t substitute stories for responsible research and evaluation.
Summary
These are ten of the most common reasons people — sometimes even cult apologists — fall for fantasies instead of truth. Closely related to, and often overlapping with, these vulnerabilities are the logical fallacies that scatter the landscape of cult apologetics. Sometimes we fall for logical fallacies when they are used by cultists or occultists, and sometimes we fall into using logical fallacies ourselves.
In common language, a logical fallacy is a false idea or notion, something that appears to make perfect sense, and yet doesn’t. A lack of critical thinking ability creates two kinds of Christians: (1) those who don’t think at all and who consequently don’t worship and serve God with their minds; and (2) those who attempt to use their minds, but who end up making mistakes that could be avoided by learning to think straight.
Mistakes in thinking and reasoning, or logical fallacies, make up the largest group of discernment faults. If an argument or accusation cannot stand the test of logic, is inconsistent and fails to prove its point, then it loses all rational force. However, it can be used destructively to obscure the truth, mislead people, or even harm the very cultists and occultists who need our help. These problems become even more pronounced and have even greater consequences when they are picked up by novice readers or listeners and are misused even more.
There are many logical fallacies, some with long fancy Latin names and some with ordinary folk names. This talk is not the forum for a lengthy listing or discussion of logical fallacies, but I refer you to my recommended reading list for several good books on logical fallacies.(Article is used with permission)
Fantasies
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