The Elephant and Rider
I've recently been reading a book about moral psychology – a fascinating subject – which has the sub-title "Why good people are divided by politics and religion". The book shows that although we all like to think we are rational people when making moral judgements (including religious and political judgements), actually we are not. We are following deeper intuitive feelings and the rational explanation we give ourselves is constructed post hoc and used to seek support from others rather than to convince ourselves of our own righteousness.
The book provides the metaphor of an intellectual rider on an intuitive elephant. The elephant largely goes where it wants in search of its basic needs: food, water, shelter. The job of the rider is to serve the elephant and make sure that it doesn't fall into any immediate danger. So when the elephant looks right towards some succulent fresh plants it wants to eat there is little the rider can do to stop it going to feed. All the rider can do is point out the hunter and urge caution to the elephant. Further, as soon as the elephant turns to the right the rider loses all interest in what is to the left, the lion pack over there doesn't matter anymore. Our rational mind operates in a similar way, cognitive biases prevent our rider from looking left when our elephant is turning right.
You can even test some of your deep seated intuitive biases on a website that primes your mind with pictures/words you may subconsciously find acceptable or unacceptable and then asks you to decide if a word like 'happy' is positive or negative as quickly as possible. If you are slow to define a positive word as positive after seeing an unacceptable image (or vice versa) then it’s because your elephant has started to turn one way and it takes a lot of conscious effort from the rider to correct the mistake and turn the other.
This concept makes a lot of sense to me. I have thought for a while that the judgement people make on the existence or otherwise of a Deity or Deities is largely based on feelings and emotion rather than logic and rationality. People either feel that ‘God’ is ‘up there’ or they don’t. So belief in Deity or Deities seems to me to be a bit like love, you either feel it or you don’t. I love my wife and I can tell you some reasons why I love her, but I don’t use those reasons to rationally decide if I’m going to love her or not. The reasons don’t come first, the love comes first and it is something I just feel. Emotions like these are deep feelings; we are not in conscious control of them.
What happened to my Elephant?
I used to ride my elephant in a Christadelphian way, but now I don’t. So what caused me to change? Well it can’t have started with my own power of reasoning since science has demonstrated that reasoning in this area is a post hoc construction. The initial jolt that made me ponder my deep seated emotions was when those very emotions didn’t make sense any more. At the time my eldest child was born, the meeting I was a member of was very critical of any ‘distracting noise’ during the formal worship services. I felt this disapproval acutely, not only for me but also for my young baby. The reality that presented itself to me stood in sharp contrast to my intuition at the time that children are the future of the church and they should be included and embraced, not pushed into the outer (sound proof) reaches of the ecclesial hall.
I was experiencing the cognitive dissonance of colliding realities: the physical one I experienced and the theoretical one I had constructed in my head. Clearly something was wrong and I set about working out what was ‘right’ – my physical reality or my mental reality. At that point, though I didn’t know it yet, a sequence of events was to unfold that spoke to my elephant and changed my intuitions.
These events caught my elephant off guard. It was heading towards the land of promise and its rider was dutifully helping it get there. On the way though, my elephant noticed that something funny was going on. The sweet lush grass it could see in its mind’s eye was different to the course sharp grass it was experiencing around its feet. The elephant had to stop, which was it to believe; the grass it believed existed or the reality of the grass it found itself in? Now the elephant stopped, stood to attention and asked its rider which way to go. This isn’t something that happens to people often, normally their elephant knows its course and carries on regardless, perhaps making some small adjustments from time to time. My rider now found himself in deep trouble – my elephant had stopped and was asking for help in deciding which way to go. Not something it had ever done before!
At that point my feelings and emotions were no longer calling all the shots, my rider was not only able to set the direction of my elephant, but the elephant was requesting it. My elephant stood in that field, not moving for years while the rider checked his field book, maps and various instruments. He called out to other riders to see if they knew what was going on, some of whom were going this way and some going that. Eventually the rider set the elephant on a new course, one that is in all likelihood equally difficult to bring to a stop. But if it does it’ll be because something has spoken to my elephant, not my rider.
Why Religion hates Science
Finally, I think this also demonstrates why fundamentalist religion, hates science. Science is a powerful way of cutting through what the elephant thinks: our feelings, emotions and biases. It presents the rider with an inescapable physical reality and the rider has to do something with that. The rider can close their eyes and carry on if they like, but it can also force them to bring the elephant to a stop and gives the rider some control for a time. This can happen not just to one elephant and rider but to the whole herd.
Science has done this many times in the past, we can think of the cosmology of early Genesis which has been demonstrated to be physically wrong by science. Or the centrality of the earth in the heavens, which has also fallen to science. At present special creation is falling to the science of evolution. It seems highly likely that this process will continue into the future. Whether we like it or not, or even accept it or not, the scientific method will in the end overturn our preconceptions that surround our personal ideas of the nature of our physical reality.
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