Trent Horn explains what confirmation bias is and why it is not a valid reason to discredit faith in any religion.
Transcript:
Host: Let’s go real quick to try to get this in before the break, Anonymous in Fairfax, Virginia, listening online, you are on with Trent Horn, what’s your question, Anonymous?
Caller: Hey, so I just recently watched a video on Vice news that was talking about exorcisms, and they showed this one atheist activist named Michael Shermer who was trying to debunk exorcisms, and one of his premises was that “You know, religion and faith and all that, it’s nothing more than just confirmation bias.” And I kind of hear this a lot too, that, you know, “Oh, faith is nothing more than just confirmation bias. People with their beliefs, they’ll go wherever their beliefs…” You know, kind of ad hoc. But how do you respond to stuff like that, Trent?
Trent: What I would say is that confirmation bias is not an objection to Catholicism, or even to religion in general. Confirmation bias is a psychological defect that all people suffer from, including atheists. It’s just a part of the human condition, as fallen creatures, as fallible creatures. Confirmation bias is a tendency among human beings to only notice evidence that supports a belief they already hold, and then to ignore or suppress evidence that contradicts that belief.
And everyone does this, including atheists, and I would say even Shermer himself would do this, that if you were talking about exorcisms that he and others may bring up, yeah, there are cases where you might say someone who seems possessed may have a mental illness and it’s indistinguishable, but then people don’t bring up the other cases where the person who’s possessed speaks a language they never knew before, or has superhuman strength. That part gets kind of pushed to the side. That would be an example of confirmation bias. I don’t know if Shermer does that, but I can imagine there are atheists who do.
So I would say, to repeat that, well we have a little bit of time, I can go into this before we have to go to a break, that confirmation bias, it is a psychological defect, an error in thinking, everybody suffers from it. So everyone has to watch out for it, so there are atheists—and I’ve seen this in literature, where atheists will attack, you know, weak arguments against the Catholic faith, but then they don’t deal with other stronger issues or things that may contradict a belief that they hold.
So everyone does this, we have to be watchful for it, but it’s not an objection against the faith. It’s just something everyone has to watch out for, and Catholics believe in faith seeking understanding, and everyone’s biased, but we can work hard to look at evidence objectively, and I would say the evidence objectively supports the truth of the Catholic faith.