Are we treating the facts fairly?
Welcome to Critical Thinking Scan, where we
look at how you can think about any faith-challenging
message and arrive at a biblical, logical
conclusion yourself.
I’m Patricia Engler and today, let’s take
a closer look at a type of cognitive bias,
or faulty thinking pattern, which is especially
relevant to the origins controversy, and it’s
called the confirmation bias.
In an earlier video, I mentioned that the
confirmation bias describes humans’ tendency
to look for and focus on information that
confirms our beliefs and expectations, while
paying less attention to information that
contradicts our beliefs and expectations.
For instance, here’s the example I remember
a professor using to teach about the confirmation
bias in my research methods in psychology class:
Imagine you’re a basketball player, and
partway into the season, you notice that for
almost every winning game, you’ve worn your
favourite blue socks.
You might start to hypothesize that the socks
are somehow helping you win.
You’re playing again that night, so you
decide to wear the socks.
And sure enough, you score the winning basket!
The next game, however, you forget your socks,
and end up losing.
At this point, it might be easy to conclude
that the blue socks are somehow “lucky.”
But (besides being illogical and potentially
unbiblical) this would be an example of the
confirmation bias, because you’re only looking
at cases which confirmed your hypothesis that
the socks were helping you win.
To avoid the confirmation bias, you would
have to equally test your null hypothesis—that’s
the opposite of your original idea—by considering
all the games you lost while wearing the socks,
or won without wearing the socks.
And in science, researchers can show a confirmation
bias if they only look for and pay attention
to results that confirm their hypothesis.
And, like you can see from the resources linked
to this video, the confirmation bias may often
affect what dates researchers end up with
for things like rocks and fossils.
For instance, if researchers expect a rock
sample to fall within a certain age range,
say around 100 million years, those expectations
can often help determine the type of dating
methods they choose and the way they interpret
the results.
If the results give an unexpected date, it’s
common to try explaining away the discrepancy;
for instance, the researchers might suggest
that the rock sample was contaminated.
So, looking only for a date within the expected
age range, while dismissing contradictory
data, could be considered an example of 
confirmation bias.
Of course, creation researchers can be subject
to the conformation bias too, if they only
pay attention to data that support their models.
But, remember, the thing to keep in mind when
using words like “data” or “evidence”
is that these words represent facts from observational
science, and all of us have access to the
same facts—same rocks, same fossils, same
measurements.
But we interpret those facts differently as
“evidence” for different conclusions,
depending on the worldviews we start with.
My textbooks, for instance, interpreted the
fact that mammals have similar forelimb skeletons
as evidence for evolution.
But a biblical interpretation of that same
observation would be that mammals share a
common Designer.
So, was I showing the confirmation bias by
not accepting this as “evidence” for evolution?
Not necessarily, because it wasn’t the evidence
itself I was rejecting—the observation that
mammals have similar forelimbs; it was the
interpretation of that evidence, based on
evolutionary presuppositions about the past,
which didn’t align with my biblical presuppositions.
Now, some people would say that consistently
interpreting evidence according to one presupposition
is the confirmation bias too.
But at the end of the day, whether our starting
point is God’s Word or man’s word, we
all have those presuppositions.
Within a secular worldview, however, there’s
no good reason to start with or trust in any
presupposition, because no one can know everything—
or even anything!
So, you can never know whether that presupposition
is valid.
But within a biblical worldview, there IS
good reason to ground our presupposition in
God’s Word the absolute truth, because if
a loving God created a logical universe and
made us in His image as rational creatures,
we have a consistent philosophical basis from
which to know things and reason and learn
about our universe.
For more on how to think critically about
messages that challenge the Bible’s teaching,
you can access my other CT Scan videos packed
with tactics, tips and tools that helped me
as a Christian student at secular university.
Thank you for watching!
Hey, it’s Patricia, just wanting to let
you know that if you like these videos, are
on board to share the message of biblical
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