{"id":1075,"date":"2014-02-12T04:59:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T04:59:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/?p=1075"},"modified":"2014-02-13T05:17:48","modified_gmt":"2014-02-13T05:17:48","slug":"the-reality-of-false-memories-and-implications-for-the-accuracy-of-the-gospels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/2014\/02\/12\/the-reality-of-false-memories-and-implications-for-the-accuracy-of-the-gospels\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reality of False Memories and Implications for the Accuracy of the Gospels"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of a series of guest posts on GPS by the undergraduate and graduate students in my\u00a0Science vs. Pseudoscience<\/a>\u00a0course. As part of their work for the course, each student had to demonstrate mastery of the skill of “Educating the Public about Pseudoscience.” To that end, each student has to prepare two 1,000ish word posts on a particular pseudoscience topic, as well as run a booth on-campus to help reach people physically about the topic.<\/em><\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

The Reality of False Memories and Implications for the Accuracy of the Gospels\u00a0by Dustin Belden<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In my <\/span>previous blog<\/a>, I discussed <\/span>false memories<\/span>, and the different ways they could distort your reality.\u00a0 Sometimes the distortion begins while the original event is still occurring, that is, while the memory is being\u00a0encoded. As such, if the perception of an event is inaccurate, or the original encoding is inaccurate, then it cannot be remembered accurately.\u00a0 An example is the <\/span>eyewitness<\/a> who is asked to accurately remember a crime; who may have seen the perpetrator only briefly, from a distance, in the dark, and while experiencing stress \u2013 all conditions that reduce their ability to see the perpetrator in the first place, which will in turn dramatically reduce their later ability to identify him or her.\u00a0 False memories may also arise from inferences made during an event, or previous learning history. The witness to a crime is usually actively trying to figure out what is going on during the event, and uses prior knowledge to make sense of what is happening. Similarly, a reader actively interprets information while reading stories, interpreting simple statements like \u201cAndrew went to the hospital\u201d differently if they know the character is a doctor rather than if he had been sick previously in the narrative.\u00a0 In both cases, applying knowledge changes what people remember.\u00a0 The witness may later remember the robbery as more typical than it was, thanks to preconceived notions of what a “robbery” is, and the reader will misremember the passage to be consistent with the employment theme. \u00a0Humans are <\/span>biased<\/a> to extract meaning from events and this may lead to confusions about what was inferred versus what actually happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Memory is constructive and reconstructive. \u00a0Here’s a refresher on one of the most groundbreaking experiments on false memory, the Elizabeth Loftus car wreck experiment.\u00a0 In Loftus\u2019 prime study<\/a>, participants were shown slides of a car accident involving various cars and were asked to describe what had happened as if they were eyewitnesses.\u00a0 The participants were then asked how fast the cars were going, and were given different leading suggestions concerning the accident (the cars smashed, bumped, collided, and contacted.\u00a0 The leading verbs directly coincided with how the participants answered the next question.\u00a0 Loftus asked the question of whether the participants saw any broken glass at the accident.\u00a0 The participants who were asked the \u201csmashed\u201d question thought the cars were going faster than those who were asked the \u201chit\u201d question. The participants in the \u201csmashed\u201d condition reported the highest speeds, followed by \u201ccollided\u201d, \u201cbumped\u201d, \u201chit\u201d, and \u201ccontacted\u201d.\u00a0 People in the \u201csmashed\u201d group were more likely to report that they saw broken glass.\u00a0 Loftus\u2019s findings showed that leading the witness with certain verbs can change their memory of the events.<\/p>\n

In Loftus\u2019 study, one word completely changed the memory of participants in just one week.\u00a0 Many participants in the \u201csmashed\u201d condition reported seeing broken glass, which wasn\u2019t actually present.\u00a0 One weeks time is all it took<\/a>.\u00a0 Imagine what could happen to the accuracy of memories after two words, three words, or an entire story is slanted; how accurate would things be after one month, one year, or one century?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This brings me to my point about how false memories could be related to religion.\u00a0 In an attempt to unify the Roman church, St. Irenaeus <\/a>declared the four books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the only four gospels that Christians should read, out of up to 30 different gospel candidates that existed at the time.\u00a0 These four gospels best fit the church\u2019s view on how the Old Testament prophecies connected with the New Testament, and the Roman church.\u00a0 Most religious scholars<\/a> do believe that a man named Jesus was alive around the timeline commonly prescribed to his life (although there are several<\/a> prominent<\/a> scholars<\/a> who hold that he was nothing but a myth), but most disagree on the historical accounts described in the bible with the exception of two events: the baptism by John the Baptist and the crucifixion by the order of Pontius Pilate.\u00a0 Everything else, from the resurrection to the miracles to all of the words reportedly spoken, came from the account of these four stories that were written sometime between 65 and 95 A.D. \u00a0This means that, sometime between three and six decades after the life of Jesus, the account of his life was written.<\/p>\n

There is no agreement if the gospels were actually written by the witnesses themselves, or those that might have known the witnesses, or others relying on third or fourth hand accounts.\u00a0 Even if the witnesses themselves wrote the accounts, the work of Loftus and many others <\/a>shows that the accounts are likely to be extremely unreliable.\u00a0 If the accounts were written by associates, they wouldn\u2019t even be admissible in a court of law today. \u00a0Knowledge about false memories, including how they occur<\/a> and how common they are<\/a>, has completely changed our legal system because evidence has shown that we have prosecuted the wrong people, based on eyewitness accounts that were given in by people that were sure of their validity.\u00a0 No judge in the world would accept an eyewitness account from half a century ago, especially one that differed from dozens of other accounts (most of the gospel candidates<\/a> were completely different from each other<\/a>).<\/p>\n

False memories don\u2019t happen only to people with lower intelligence, or the illiterate, or poor memories; instead, anyone can fall victim to false memories. \u00a0One\u00a0study<\/a>,\u00a0by psychologist Lawrence Patihis, tested whether there was a false memory difference in two participant groups, those with normal memory, and those with perfect autobiographical memory.\u00a0 Surprisingly, the people with near perfect memory were just as susceptible to false memory as those with more normal memory.\u00a0 This suggests that no matter whom you are, everyone is susceptible to memory distortion.\u00a0 Your age doesn\u2019t matter; neither does your race, your beliefs, or your intelligence.\u00a0 All that matters is if you don\u2019t take events for what they are, and instead make inferences or accept suggestions that other things are the cause.<\/p>\n

Shift the understanding of false memories away from the Gospels now, and onto your present life.\u00a0 A religious life is based on faith:\u00a0 Having faith that God is looking over you and has his best interest in your life; that you can pray to him, and if your faith is strong enough, your prayers will be answered, and that living a biblically sound life will ensure that your faith will be rewarded.\u00a0 But imagine just for a moment that you look at these beliefs in a slightly different way, applying what you know about false memories.\u00a0 One out of one thousand prayers might come true.\u00a0 Instead of thinking that event was a prayer being answered, what if you looked at it as only one out of one thousand things you wanted came true?\u00a0 By inferring that the prayer was answered, you immediately change the way you remember the event, and accept that prayer as the cause of the outcome.\u00a0 Having that memory changes your perception of everything thing else, and your faith becomes stronger.\u00a0 Think back to when you were a child, and the question you asked about why does God let bad things happen to good people was answered with, \u201cGod works in mysterious ways\u201d.\u00a0 This encoding of memory allows you to accept everything as God\u2019s work, and not question further.\u00a0 I\u2019m not interested in disproving religion or God in this post, there\u2019s plenty of <\/span>authors<\/a> out there that do that.\u00a0 But perceiving events as they actually occurred and remembering them as they happened, rather than through a distorted facade, is an important thing in being able to suss out reality from myth, truth from legend.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which one of my students asks the question, “If we know how easily memory is manipulated and falsified, can the Gospels possibly be considered to be accurate records of the life of Jesus?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,86,402,14,52],"tags":[453,91,310,451,309,452,454,455,307,450,308,456,107],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","category-religion","category-secularism-2","category-skepticism","category-teaching","tag-accuracy","tag-bible","tag-eyewitness","tag-false","tag-false-memory","tag-gospels","tag-historicity","tag-jesus","tag-loftus","tag-memories","tag-memory","tag-reliability","tag-religion-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/gps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}