Cognitive dissonance is usually seen as the enemy of reason. For example, in the science-faith field, the old trope is that the Christian indoctrinated in the superstitions of the Bible, when confronted by the facts of science, becomes mentally scrambled and simply fails to perceive obvious realities. This criticism extends to the highest levels, for example in Jerry Coyne’s attempt to exclude Francis Collins from becoming head of the NIH some years ago, on the grounds that he was a Christian and therefore not scientifically reputable. But in fact, cognitive dissonance can often free the mind to pursue truth.
Let me cite my own experience in this very area. I got interested in fossils when I was six, and learned as much about deep time and evolution as dinosaur sticker books would teach me. At the same time, I became vaguely aware that it didn’t quite match those mysterious verses at the beginning of my christening Bible.
As years went on, I learned more about evolutionary theory, but also became a Christian with a high view of Scripture. Unlike America in the 1960s, my Christian circles didn’t consider the tensions between evolution and Genesis as crucial, though they were certainly discussed. At Cambridge, the same situation applied at a higher level. The Christian student magazine Really carried a back-to-back pair of articles from Christians reading Natural Sciences, one of whom argued for evolution, and the other for young earth literalism. Neither attempted to resolved the tensions effectively, and neither anathematised the other.
As for me, I found helpful pointers that a resolution was possible in my neighbour Derek Kidner’s Genesis commentary. As I remember it, I accepted evolutionary theory with the proviso that it was providentially directed by God, enzymes and the complexity of biological chemical pathways being the most implausible things to attribute to chance mutations. Genesis, whose truth as God’s word I accepted, seemed to call for some kind of new interpretation I was not then equipped to make. With variations, that remained my position for many years – two incompatible truths held uneasily in tension, which is to say in cognitive dissonance.
Ultimately, that is unsatisfactory. For example, it wasn’t the best position to sell to the less mature chap in the youth group whose faith was threatened by encountering A-level biology as his first taste of evolutionary science. The young, in particular, feel the need to resolve cognitive dissonance immediately by coming down on one side or the other, in this case by rejecting science or rejecting faith.
But in the meantime, my belief taken on board since childhood was that in the end nature would not contradict Scripture, and that even full acceptance of current evolutionary theory (though underpinned by a non-materialist metaphysics) was no threat to faith. That gave me the intellectual freedom to critique both accepted science and accepted theology if evidence presented itself. By contrast, a Fundamentalist confronted by the evolutionary framework for the first time, because intellectually threatened, is tempted to reject science, or abandon Christianity. Or, of course, to squeeze one or other of them entirely out of shape to fit the other.
But by the same token, the lifelong materialist confronted with spiritual claims finds it easiest to reject them out of hand. But having no conceivable alternative to undirected evolution, his bias is towards accepting poor evidence for it that someone like me, open to alternatives, will question more rigorously, having nothing to lose.
A great example of all this came through reading Sy Garte’s latest book. I noted in my last article about it that I felt Sy was relatively uncritical about evolutionary theory compared to his sober appraisal of, say, origin- of-life studies, and I attributed this to his membership of the evolutionary science “guild.” It turns out that I was not the only person to notice this.
In a YouTube discussion on the book with ID researcher Doug Axe, Doug accused Sy of uncharacteristic handwaving in claiming that whole genome duplication would make it easy for a mass of mutations to occur that could, for example, turn a roundworm into an invertebrate. He challenged Sy to find anything in the literature that would suggest any possible pathways for such a transition, and said that if Sy found them, he himself would become an Evolutionary Creationist. Sy, being sure the scientific literature would be full of the details, accepted the challenge and said that, if he failed, he would never use the argument again.
Fast forward to a later excellent discussion, this time with Sy and the organic chemist James Tour, and towards the end Sy admits that Axe was absolutely right. He had now searched the literature, and although he had been taught, and had always assumed, that plausible evolutionary pathways from C. elegans to vertebrates, after genome duplication, had been frequently suggested, in fact they hadn’t. Evolution by genome duplication is, as Doug Axe rightly said, mere handwaving.
The point I want to make here is that Sy’s admirable willingness to admit evidence against an important tenet of Neodarwinism, which he himself had endorsed in print, is truly scientific. But it was in fact prompted by cognitive dissonance between his membership of the evolution “club,” and a significant sense of being an outsider. Having more than one frame of reference enabled him to shift his position in the face of the evidence.
The most superficial explanation for this, in his case, is his exploration of new science which questions the adequacy of Neodarwinism, an interest since his days with me here and at BioLogos. But that, too, needs explanation. One vital reason, of course, is his discovery of Christ, and the whole spiritual realm. As in my own case this gives him the freedom to say that God is the truth behind nature, whether he works by Darwinian mechanisms, unknown natural laws, or direct creative acts. But as I hinted in my previous post, having come to faith later in life than I did, and having worked in evolutionary science as I did not, his “culture” of evolutionism is inevitably more deeply embedded.
But Sy also mentioned to James Tour that, at heart, he is a chemist, and the son of a chemist. And so, like Tour, he wants to see detailed receipts for scientific claims, rather than believing the Just-So stories favoured by dyed-in-the-wool evolutionary biologists. Whole-genome duplication and mass-mutation was, it turned out, such a Just-So story, but he’d never realised it until he dug into the literature. I have a suspicion that, like me, Sy Garte might discover a whole lot more handwaving in evolutionary science before he’s finished.
Contrast Sy’s open attitude, if you’re interested, with that of origin-of-life researcher Lee Cronin, the only worker in that discipline to respond to James Tour’s challenge to provide a plausible mechanism for life’s natural origin. As Onsi Fakhouri’s comprehensive take-down shows, Cronin’s appeal to “Assembly Theory” boils down to (1) a method of demonstrating specified complexity that only appears in living things, (2) a claim that this entails “selection,” which he assumes because of his metaphysical commitment to naturalism to be “natural selection,” and (3) the claim that since even the most primitive life shows such specified complexity, there simply must have been pre-biotic natural selection of some sort. Ergo, Assembly Theory proves life emerged naturally, despite absolutely no hypothesis about how this implausible thing might happen.
To be fair, Cronin mentions an “intelligent designer” as a possible cause of selection, but only to discount it immediately because, I assume, it’s mere creationism. But his lack of any cognitive dissonance about it, since he is rigidly materialist, disables him from seeing that his response to Tour is nothing more than, “There must be some natural cause, because I don’t believe in God.” That is, of course, simply begging the question – a kind of mental gymnastics which, in my cognitively dissonant opinion, has motivated the entire science of evolution since Darwin himself.
