• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1074 0

if you think the odds are a gazillion to one against the existence of God, you should still throw your lot in on his side. It’s hard to argue with this logic qua logic; the wager draws on the same kind of decision theory that is still used today to minimize risk and maximize gain in a wide range of fields. But for most people, it is a profoundly unsatisfactory defense of faith, since a calculated belief seems like no kind of belief at all. Even the very language of the wager seems off: surely, our meditations on the meaning of life, not to mention the fate of our mortal soul, shouldn’t sound quite so much like the Preakness. Then there’s the bothersome problem that, if an omniscient God did exist, he would surely see straight through these Pascalian calculations. As William James noted, “if we were ourselves in the place of the deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.” Here again, the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint holds sway: we are supposed to think we hold our beliefs because they are true, not because we stand to gain by them.

* As long as the sample isn’t contaminated, the error rate for DNA testing is estimated at roughly one in a million. Under the testing procedures used by the FBI, the odds of two unrelated people matching the same DNA sample are one in 100 billion. Since the total population of the planet is under nine billion, DNA evidence can reasonably be regarded as conclusive.

* The sincere form of denial flourishes in politics, too. To quote the historian Barbara Tuchman: “Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Phillip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: ‘No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.’”

* In the 1970s, at the request of a federal oversight agency, ninety forensic laboratories analyzed five different hair samples each. On average for the five samples, the analysts correctly matched the hair to its donor 50, 28, 54, 68, and 56 percent of the time. They might as well have flipped coins.

* Defenders of this position don’t deny that a prisoner could be innocent of a specific crime; instead, they challenge the person’s overall innocence, his or her moral worth. As they see it, anyone who gets caught in the dragnet of the law must be a bad egg, already or soon to be guilty of something, so that society is better off keeping such people locked up—due process and DNA be damned. For a thorough debunking of this argument, I strongly recommend Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck, and Jim Dwyer’s Actual Innocence.

* Of course, we also want to be right about other people because they supply so many of the rest of our convictions. Recall Avishai Margalit’s point that we exist within a web of witnesses, not a web of beliefs. Or recall the Millerites: if we are wrong about our preacher, we risk being wrong about our whole cosmology.

* As the title “Heartbreak” suggests, this chapter is largely about the kind of wrongness involved in becoming disillusioned with or being left by a lover. But there are other and better ways to be wrong about love, too. Consider one of the world’s most popular story lines, as featured in (among about a gazillion others) When Harry Met Sally and Pride and Prejudice: boy meets girl; boy and girl hate each other; boy and girl fall madly in love.

* Our very morality is grounded in this paradox of identification. The most basic and universal ethical precept, the golden rule—“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—suggests that we can treat other people right only by reference to our own likes, dislikes, needs, hopes, and fears. Accordingly, one effective way to undermine the golden rule