No, this isn’t a post about Star Trek. It is about something that sounds just like the title of this post: the con, which originally stems from confidence man. And that is worth thinking about. Tobias Buckell linked to an article about research which shows that a pundit’s popularity correlates not with their knowledge or accuracy but with their confidence.
I suspect this is at least as true among Christians, if not more so. Charlatans and liars like the proponents of young-earth creationism or the prosperity Gospel make claims that can easily be fact-checked and demonstrated to be false, and yet even so they are believed.
Why? I suspect that their confidence has much to do with it.
Everyone ought to know that the truly well-informed may often be confident, but they tend also to be humble, being aware of just how vast fields of inquiry are and how limited the perspective of any one of us.
But Christians ought to be particularly appreciative of such humility. And yet too often that seems not to be the case.
(In case you haven’t worked it out yet, the reason for the title of this post is that I wanted to call it “Cooooooooon!” but I suspected that readers would think furry critters rather than confidence men).
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In