Dunning-Kruger refers to the work of psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who identified “a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.”
Or, in the words of Alexander Pope, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Most of my social media activity is on Facebook, because that’s where my friends are. I’m on Threads mainly to promote the blog, but early on I stumbled on to a bunch of Exvangelicals who were deconstructing their religion in much the same way as I did many years ago. I engaged with some of them and the Threads algorithm did its thing. Now my feed is flooded with people on the edges of the religious mainstream.
Which means I see a steady stream of posts by Evangelicals (they label themselves Christians but I never see Catholics or Mainline Protestants in the fight, only Evangelicals) trying to “debate” atheists and doing a very poor job of it. They present weak arguments based on weak evidence that they learned from preachers whose goal is proselytizing, not education. But they’re 100% certain that they’re 100% right.
And as a quote often misattributed to Mark Twain says, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
They know nothing of metaphysics
Their first problem is trying to have a religious argument about topics that belong in other disciplines. Questions about the origins and nature of the universe begin in science, of course. But when we reach the limits of science we move into metaphysics, not religion.
Metaphysics (“beyond physics”) are our foundational assumptions about the world and how it works. They form a container for interpreting our experiences, a boundary between what we assume is possible and what we assume is not. Anything that conflicts with our metaphysics is likely to be rejected, because it’s easier to deny the reality of our own experiences than it is to contemplate the possibility that our fundamental assumptions about the universe might be wrong.
Everyone has a metaphysics, but for most people, they’re “what everybody knows” and “common sense” and “just the way things are.” They’re what they were taught as small children. They never consider that perhaps their fundamental assumptions are wrong, or that another explanation might be better, or that another approach might be more in line with their values.
It’s not just metaphysics. I see people arguing religion when their question belongs in philosophy or ethics. I see people who argue “the Bible says…” without ever considering the field of epistemology – how we know what we think we know.
They don’t know what they don’t know, and their insistence that they have all the answers lines up well with the Dunning-Kruger model.
They know little about their own religion
I grew up in a small fundamentalist Baptist church where the preacher hadn’t graduated from high school, much less gone to seminary. Their idea of church history started in the American revival movement of the early 1800s – anything before that was considered “too Catholic” and therefore wrong. They knew nothing of Luther, Calvin, and Wesley. They ignored the historic creeds – their insistence that “we need no creed but the Bible” showed a complete misunderstanding of what a creed is for.
The people who try to start these “debates” – most of whom come out of fundamentalist non-denominational or Baptist churches – have a similar ignorance.
Just from paying attention to the mainstream culture (which was even more Christian then than it is now… and it’s still very Christian) I knew there was a history I wasn’t being taught. And so I read.
I learned that all Christians were Catholics for the first thousand years, and in Western Europe for another five hundred years after that (it wasn’t until after I became a Pagan that I learned how gradual and uneven the conversion of Europe to Christianity was, but that’s another topic for another time). I learned about the Desert Fathers, Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea, and about Martin Luther and Henry VIII. My parents had grown up Methodist and occasionally mentioned John Wesley, but I had to learn on my own that he never intended to found a new denomination and always considered himself a priest in the Church of England.
I still occasionally encounter people who say “we didn’t branch off the Catholic Church – our church has an unbroken line to the ‘New Testament Church’.” They have no more evidence for their continuity than the Pagans who claim to be direct descendants of the ancient Druids or medieval Goddess worshippers.
If you’re going to recruit for your religion, the least you could do is to learn what it is and where it came from.
They know nothing about other religions (or the lack thereof)
Catholics don’t worship Mary. Buddhists don’t worship the Buddha. Muslims don’t worship Muhammad. Pagans worship many Gods and none of them are the Christian devil. The fact that your preacher said they do doesn’t make it true.
More relevantly to their arguments, atheism is not a religion and it is certainly not a “faith” (“faith” is not a synonym for “religion” or “denomination” or even “path”). Atheism is simply the lack of belief in any God or Gods.
Religion can be non-theistic. There are non-theistic Pagans who revere Nature and find meaning in our Pagan heritage, but do not recognize the existence of any deities. You can even be an atheist and believe in magic (my own three-part definition of magic includes one part that is entirely naturalistic) though most don’t. Most atheists have no religion, because religion doesn’t interest them.
This is perhaps the worst – and the most offensive – expression of Dunning-Kruger: people who know a little about a religion (or lack thereof) that isn’t their own and proceed to tell people who’ve been practicing it for many years – or for their whole lives – what it really means.
The other side of Dunning-Kruger
Dunning and Kruger’s model also points out that people who are quite knowledgeable about a subject tend to be very aware of how much they don’t know. People who are well-informed about their own religion – much less who know a thing or two about other religions – tend to be tolerant (if not always accepting) of other people’s religions, because they understand that religious certainty is not possible.
An honest religion is a humble religion.
Avoiding Dunning-Kruger as Pagans
Pagans don’t proselytize, so I don’t see this kind of behavior from Pagans too often. But I do see it some, and so we need to take care that we don’t assume we know more than we do.
The degree systems of Wicca, OBOD Druidry, and some other traditions are helpful for letting you know where you are on your journey. If you’re in the Bardic Grove, you know for certain there are things you don’t know, because you haven’t been exposed to the Ovate or Druid Groves and their material yet.
If you’re not part of a degree system – or if you are but you’re dealing with something outside your tradition – try to remember that virtually all religious and spiritual traditions are deeper and more complex than they appear at first. Remember different traditions often have different metaphysics – different foundational assumptions about the world and how it works.
If someone says something you think is wrong, look it up before you say anything. Even if they are, do you really need to correct them? There are no prizes awarded for best performance in an on-line religious argument. If they aren’t harming anyone and they aren’t promoting outright misinformation, it’s probably best to mind your own business. We have no mission to convert the world to Paganism and witchcraft. It’s our job take care of ourselves, and to be here to help those who have an interest in such things find their way – if they ask.
There is a place for debate within the Pagan movement. We did a lot of that about ten years ago. Some of it was ultimately necessary and helpful in refining our beliefs and practices, while some of it just turned friends into enemies. But these debates are only useful among people who share enough common foundations to agree on the starting point. “Debating” people in other religions is a waste of time.
Beyond Dunning-Kruger – trying to assure themselves they’re right
It would be incorrect to blame all the aggressive and poorly-reasoned arguments on Threads on Dunning-Kruger.
While much of this is people who don’t know as much as they think they know, a lot of it is people who’ve been told that the fate of their immortal souls depends on believing the “right” things in exactly the “right” way. Deep down, they aren’t trying to convince atheists to “believe in Jesus.” They’re trying to convince themselves that they really really do believe themselves.
And so they insist they really believe the Bible is the literal and inerrant “Word of God” when the evidence shows it’s no such thing. They insist Adam and Eve were historical people when there’s no evidence they were and plenty of evidence they weren’t, because if Adam and Eve weren’t historical people then the doctrine of Original Sin crumbles, and with it, their whole “metanarrative” of sin and salvation.
And of course, they believe some things – like being gay is a sin or that women can’t be ministers – because they want to believe them.
Education and learning are always good
I was a smart kid who was very good at school. I was occasionally warned (though thankfully, never by my parents) about the dangers of “too much education.” That may have been my first clue that what I was being taught wasn’t quite right.
The more you study, the more you learn… and the more you realize how much there is you don’t know. That can be scary – I once had someone tell me “I wish I could go back to when I was a kid and just believed.”
It’s hard to accept that our very valid questions about Gods and magic and life and death and what comes after have no certain answers. But better to be honest about our uncertainty than to lie to ourselves and to others and claim we know things that are ultimately unknowable.
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