I listened recently to a fascinating radio broadcast where Adrian Shine was discussing how, to date, he had failed to find the mythical watery monster of Loch Ness (Saturday Live, BBC Radio 4, 18/08/07).
Two things made this conversation interesting for me and took it above the realms of the usual “the-monster-must-exist-coz-I’ve-seen-pictures” story. First, this man was no fool. He was a serious naturalist who had spent over thirty years exploring and collaborating in over 200 university projects on the loch. He writes in learned journals and can do the science.
Secondly, when asked why he hadn’t found the leviathan, he simply stated that it didn’t exist. At least, there wasn’t a shred of scientific evidence that it did. And he should know, because he has spent the best part of a working life doing the sonar, going in the submarines, looking in the mud, sampling the plankton, testing the photographs, and analysing the data.
“But what about all the people who are convinced that it does?” pleaded the interviewer. ”There are over 1000 reported sightings?”
At this point Adrian argued that if put in a court of law he could present supposed evidence and that might convince some people, but there was nothing that would stand up before a much more rigorous investigation. If the data were discussed in ‘normal’ human interaction, some would say that the monster existed, but that data would not survive the greater demands of science.
His point was a simple one that any psychology student would understand: in order to get on with life we need to process vast amounts of information very quickly. In order to help us to do that we use meaning-templates so that we can make guesses about what we are seeing on the basis of very little data (we see a door-knob, for example, and assume that it is attached to a door without having to study all the data about the door.) When we face puzzlement and don’t understand what we are seeing, we instinctively look for a template that will fit, and we interpret that data in the light of that template. As human beings, we find it very difficult to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. But the interpretation that we may have hastily adopted may prove to be wrong.
The scenery of Loch Ness is such that it is a place where monsters ought to exist, even if they don’t. If you add the weight of a strong cultural myth that it does exist, and if you then are faced with phenomena that you do not have the science or experience to interpret (the lines from a loch wave, for example), you are very likely to assume that you have seen the beast.
Endless other examples of this tendency to create meaning in the face of uncertainty are provided by the conspiracy theorists. If, as human beings we find it difficult to tolerate ambiguity about what we are seeing, we are also very good at avoiding unpallitable meaning and of creating fairytale alternatives. When Diana, Princess of Wales was tragically killed in a car crash, even before any forensic investigation, many people drew on cultural myths to confidently proclaim that she had been killed by members of the British Establishment because she was pregnant and about to marry a Muslim. Somehow it seemed easier to believe a creative, complicated fantasy, rather than face the very uncomfortable apparent arbitrary randomness of life and death.
As I listened to Adrian Shine, I remembered a particular incident from my former church life (charismatic-evangelical). It involved an unremarkable case of divine guidance. (When I say ‘unremarkable’, I mean unremarkable in the context of the time. It felt like a normal, everyday event. Things like this were said or happened all of the time. It was the cultural norm. Now, of course, to me, it seems very unusual and bizarre.) As a church we were being asked to consider a reasonably large amount of expenditure. Should we, or should we not fund a fortnight’s trip abroad that our pastor was thinking of undertaking? After explaining the initial case for the trip the pastor then said he felt he should go because God had confirmed that he should.
The pastor had been driving down a small road in rural Norfolk during the previous week when God spoke to him clearly in two ways. First, he had seen a garage sign that contained a combination of letters that related to the foreign destination. Secondly, a pheasant had flown out of the hedgerow and startled him as he drove by. (I’m afraid that I cannot remember the precise importance of the pheasant now, but I know it was the clincher at the time.) These two things together confirmed that he should go. If you want to go on a trip, and you have a cultural template that says God speaks in unusual ways, you can then create your meaning from any random or natural phenomenon. I am not for a moment doubting the pastor’s sincerity or saying that he manipulated things deliberately. He subconsciously did what was natural in resolving the ambiguity.
If the creation of meaning is something that we all naturally do all the time, we surely need to make sure that we are using good templates, and that we can adjust them, or abandon them for new templates when alternative evidence is presented. The tragedy is that we seem reluctant to let go of faulty templates. I remember hearing of a man who was convinced that his internal pain was being caused by a snake inside his stomach. When presented with an x-ray showing no evidence of a snake, he just claimed that the snake was hiding. Believers in the Loch Ness Monster will not be persuaded by thorough sonar scans showing little but emptiness.
Sometimes the templates can have a strong emotional attachment. They may have comforted us for years and we are extremely reluctant to part with them. We created the meaning to meet particular needs, and that meaning may have served us well for a time. The new car may be more efficient and dynamic and functional, but we like the feel and the smell of the old machine that saw us through many a difficult trip. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who observed that although God was dead, people still found it difficult to leave the Temple.
Sometimes attachment to particular templates is culturally enforced by more than emotion and tradition. People still face persecution and death if they dare to challenge existing interpretation and come up with other meaning. I personally have friends who are still facing the pain and financial consequences of leaving one branch of their faith (Plymouth Bretheren) and joining another (Baptist). Because of that change the mortgage on their house was withdrawn by the first church, and their parents now regard them as dead and refuse to have any contact with them. And of course, throughout history and even today members of various religions still kill those who recant their faith or who dare to convert to another.
Regardless of external pressure to hold on to inadequate and wrong templates, my experience is that there is often strong internal pressure to do so, and this is often more than emotional attachment. I have written elsewhere about my own exchange of templates. However, one reason it took so long for me is that you can feel very foolish having held onto something that you now regard as at best ‘inadequate’, and at worst ‘bonkers’, for such a significant length of time. Having invested so much energy and money in a particular template, it isn’t always easy to swallow pride and admit to what you now regard as colossal mistakes.
As we naturally rush to create meaning, let’s remember that uncertainty can sometimes not only be good, but best. And if we cling tightly to interpretations, let’s make sure that we are willing to re-examine them or change them when presented with new evidence. Remember, despite over 1000 people claiming to have seen her (or him), Nessie is a myth - probably.
____________
Just a footnote (30/09/07). The Times published an article today reporting that in recent years the number of monster sightings has dwindled to about two a year. Many around the loch are worried what effect this will have on tourism in the area. Some die-hard monster activists explain the drop in sightings to either the age of the monsters (they are dieing off) or the activity of the Royal Air Force (flying low over the loch and terrifying the beasts). Adrian Shine just hypothesizes that the decline in the number of sightings is probably due to the fact that people are more sceptical about what they see. “I think we live in a more pragmatic age, and that people are becoming more aware of the sort of illusions that can occur on water,” he said.
[...] have written elsewhere about the power of faith that causes people to see things that aren’t there, and do some very strange things. Part of me wants to think, if anything helps the dangerously [...]
An incredibly thought provoking blog and extremely interesting.
I found the idea of the templates fascinating and can not really argue against what is said ; with reference to us having our own unique view of say a certain template of thinking, action or belief, and how this might be influenced by experiences or events.
Steve Covey in his book “Seven Habits” would call such a shift of thought from one template to another as a paradigm shift. This is where we are presented with new evidence to alter our prejudged view of a situation as one clear example.
I think it is true that our emotional attachements keep us wanting to believe, say a christain faith and confess this is how I am partly feeling right now.
However, when we talk about evidence sometimes, as you are well aware, evidence is hard to measure and in research people’s experiences can be viewed as data. I believe this is called Qualitative data. I shall be learning more about this soon with my next study module coming up.
Some thoughts or ideas are hard to explain with hard core facts. Let me give one example.
When I was recently studying physiology I had to learn the complicated stages of wound healing and the incredible process of chain reactions that takes place. Each phase with its amazing biological feat of engineering. It took me 8 weeks to learn in detail the vast amount of information to recite in an exam as to how skin heals.
I was excited and amazed and I asked:
” How could this process just have evolved though chance, surely this proves a define hand, creator even though I don’t believe in the Adam and Eve story in a literal sense. God must have created us because what I am learning here is too much of a miracle.”
How could you dismiss or prove what I have said is true or false? It is down to opinion and belief.
Just another thought.
With something like Nessie, you have something more concrete to prove or disprove. He is either there or not and all the evidence suggest not.
The other thing to consider is, should we take away people’s beliefs if it gives them comfort, provided it causes them and no-one else harm which I know is very debatable in religion? The JW example is a good example where harm can occur.
Providing no-one else is involved should we take away someone elses belief in faries or in the healing power of crystals if it brings meaning and comfort?
For me now though I have to go not back to the bible but to other thinkers to work out for myself with evidence, if I can find it, as to who Christ was rather than just cling to feeling. I can clearly see that doesn’t wash anymore.
When I have the answers it would be great to re-convert you.( I can’t do a smiley on here but you have one from me)
Keep writing!
On one level, taking comfort from believing that fairies at the bottom of the garden exist may be harmless. However, on other levels it is destructive (and may be regarded as a kind of mental illness in some circles). It encourages other people to believe irrational things. It encourages people to cope with life by resorting to fantasy. My personal view is that it is always best to encourage people to face truth rather than resort to fantasy.
Once you get your head round quantitive research methods, there are plenty of studies challenging the effectiveness of prayer and the helpfulness of religion, as I have previously pointed out in other postings.
Continue to have a nice day.
[...] it. Once we have a theory that meets some need in our psyche, that creates meaning for us, we will find evidence to back it up. In my view (hey, I am just thinking aloud here, not claiming a universal truth that is backed up [...]
[...] that we are all capable of coming up with the most bizarre explanations for natural phenomenon (see Nessie, God, and the Creation of Meaning). For millions of years people have resorted to the spirit world to explain the initially [...]
How could the process of healing “just” have been created? What is it about creation that is so much easier to swallow than “mere” chance? By what precise means does creation occur? And why did the designer see fit to give better eyeballs to squids than to people?
Just keeping up the conversation…
[...] about the human ability to go to extraordinary and illogical lengths to create meaning (see Nessie, God, and the Creation of Meaning). In many cases it could be argued that this harms no-one, although I would argue that the attitude [...]
Hay this is a fascinating thread. At the root of this discusion, is the issue of how we create meaning, and this is such a diffucult area.
The idea of us having templates, is of course true, and a further context is how we test out those templates and change them when they do not fit our experience. Do we hold on to them, and re-interpret our experinece according to the template, or do we change the template ? A further consideration is how our templates corrispond to ‘reality’, what is out there.
There are of course ’scientific’ templates, ( theries), and those theries have also changed over the centuries. Newtonian Physicis has I believed been replaced with Quantum physics. Scientists use to believe in gravity waves, but this to has apparently been replaced with more sopsiticaed templates, and will probably change again in the next 100 or so years.
For me I have two issues that jostle in my mind. One is that I believe(, along with most people,) that I live in a world, of which I am also a part, and that my experiences of that world, also tell me about that world. There is then, some sort of objective dimention to my experiencing.
The other ( perhaps less widly acknowedged) truth, is that we also live in an interpreted world, that nothing is totally objective. What I mean by this is that everying is subjectivly interpered by the individual.
These two beliefs jostle with each other, and this raises the question about how we ‘know’ what is real, and what is perhaps an illusion , or just a construction. ?
And this is a problem that philosopers and theologons have struggled with over the years, and their are no easy answers, or rather there are easy answers and those anwers do not satisfy !
It seems to me that our individual journey, can be traced back to our conception. Modern technoladgy shows that the unborn baby is interacting while in the womb.
Conciouness originates from us as living organsims, either at the point of or soon after conception. I recall a sicientist on TV, explaning how many more twins were concieved than were born, and how an unexplained sense of loss that many people experinece, may be traced back to a distant memory of sharing a womb with an unborn sibling.
We all start off with so much. As a baby no one teaches us to be born, we are one with our mother. We know how to cry, we are prepared for the breast, and the breast is prepared for us. We need milk, and when all is well, milk is supplied to us. we know without being taught how to suck, when we are full and need to stop sucking. We know how to cry in our distress, and when to stop crying. We are not blank sheets, but living and interactive beings who have a wonderful capacity to live, to interact, and to learn.
Our body as a living breathing, organism, is amazing. Our body functious beneith what we learn, from our environemnt, from culture, and other people.
Of course it is true to say, that our templates are developed though a complex interaction that includes our physiological responses, the interaction of
1) Our bodies, and all that happens before we can articulate what happenes.
2) Our capacity to be aware and partricularly self aware of those processes. You could reframe Descarte’s ‘I think therefor I am’ to one of ‘ I am self aware, and experience myself experieing, therefor I am’.
3) The interaction of our pre-articulate experinecing, with Language, and logic, which themselves can carry forward our experiential process.
The probelm is that somehow we can get stuck. we can hold on to ‘templates’, that no longer truly symbolise our experinece, and we can distort our experience to justify our pre-existing templates.
A phemominological appraoch is the one that I am currently experimenting with.
1) I try and allow experience to ’speak for itself’, and suspend making immediate judgemnts.
2) I am very much aware of how my body is reacting to this experience, and particularly aware of my responses before I have articulated those responses,
2) I try and allow that experinece to interact with with my current templates, or pre-assumptions, and even test out language to see if such language resonates or feels right, and whether it caries forward my experiencial process.
3) The interaction of experience, and language, with testing out language against my experiencial process, then develops new ways of expereincing and understanding both myself, and the world that I live in.
Experience is then for me the driving force of change. I am allowing myself a ‘whole body take’ in any situation, with the trust that my body can be a good guide to what is true.
Of course there is an objection to this, which is why choose the body as the arbitor, rather than ( say) an external authority, or for example take as primary rationality and logic ? The issue of course raises its head what ever we choose. Why take an axternal authoeiry figure ? Why promote rationality, as the supreme arbitor, rather than seeing it as one part of a wider process ?
In the end we all have to choose. Even saying ‘ I take (the body, rationality, the Bible, the Church etc) as my authority, we are still making a choise !
In the end we are destined to choose, even saying ‘ I wont choose I will simply obey’, is itslef a choice !
Re the Lock Ness Monster. it seems highly unlikly that a physical creature is actually living in the Lock, the evidence does not support it.
But it is equally true that people will have had experiences, ( we can not help but experience), and will have interpreted that experience in a particular way. Often it is the experience itself may simply have been misinterpreted, it may be telling us something other than what is believed.
I recall how asking a Jehovah wittness how he came to faith. He told me that he was living a recless life filled with drugs, sleeping around, etc. A jw showed him some passages in a Bible, the word jehovah leeped out at him, ( he had not been taking drugs that day). Later on he said a prayer, had a life changing experience, ( again without drugs being involved), stoped the drugs and sleeping arround, and became a JW, and accepted all of their teachings
Put that experinece into an evangelical christian framework, and he would be taking about being ‘born again of the spirit’. This is not something he could say within a JW framework as in the JW faith only 144000 are ‘born again’.
What would happen if you put this within a Christadelphiam framework ? Or Gnostic Christianity ? How would an athiest interpret the same experience ? would he change his framework, of understanding ? Interpret is differnetly to maintaint hat framework ? Andwho do we know which response would be correct ?
The whole issues between one of experience and understanding or interpretation, is one that is so difficult !
It is something that any thinking person, sturggles with !
John T
While the Brethren even say they Believe the Bible is the Word of God, they too clearly do have this unholy, desperate and complicated need to reinterpret almost every passages of the Bible suitable to their own liking.
http://postedat.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/dispensationalists-it-seems-to-compensate-for-their-often-rejections/
Who are you to falsely judge another man’s servant now.. any personal slanders, personal attacks are unacceptable
(Rev 3:19 KJV) As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.
http://postedat.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/lies-slander-personal-defamation-on-the-net-be-warned/