By: Ian McKerracher, FBB Speaker

A few years ago, my wife and I took a camping trip to Yellowstone Park in the beautiful state of Wyoming. We set up our tent trailer (aka “Lap of Luxury”) at the foot of a high cliff, with rocks as big as houses piled at its base. It was a beautiful place, but something happened every afternoon that made the site unforgettable. Each day as the sun set, an outcropping of rock high up the precipice would reflect the visage of famous movie star Sylvester Stallone, making it one of the most spectacular examples of pareidolia I’ve ever experienced.

Pareidolia (par-i-DOH-lee-a) is not a word generally used in polite conversation, but it describes the experience of seeing familiar shapes in random patterns—faces, animals, or other objects in random puffs of clouds. It can hit us at an unexpected moment when the contrasts of light, shadow, colour, and our imaginations conspire to form an image or silhouette of something familiar. Similar pattern-forming in sound is called auditory pareidolia, perhaps the source of puns! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think of playing vinyl records backwards in  the 60s and 70s and hearing words sprout from the usual clicks and scratches. Sometimes you didn’t have to play the record backwards; consider the last few seconds of the Beatles’ song Strawberry Fields Forever, featuring John Lennon’s voice supposedly saying, “I buried Paul.” The “Paul is dead” meme generated a world-wide conspiracy theory, alleging that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and had been replaced by an imposter.

Generally this pareidolia business is simple enough and rather harmless. It is in the wider story that the danger lies. So far we have been talking about the mostly pleasant experience of audio and visual pareidolia, but these are only a subset of a larger human characteristic called “apophenia,” the “discovery” of patterns or meaning in a jumble of unconnected data. I mentioned earlier the conspiracy theory surrounding the supposed death of Paul McCartney. In that case the audible pareidolia led to huge assumptions based on barely audible human voices. All conspiracy theories worthy of the name are constructed thusly. 

But as bad as Paul McCartney’s fake death may have been, a sizable number of people believe there are intersections between apophenia and the Christian worldview that are more dangerous. The basic accusation is that Christianity is itself an imaginary construct, and I would suggest that the “Jesus Myth,” an expression made famous by a pseudo-documentary produced around 15 years ago, is an example of such thinking. 

I remember one day walking into the lunchroom at work and finding two colleagues in a deep discussion about whether Jesus had ever existed. One of them had seen a documentary about the topic on television the evening before and was surprised at the lack of evidence supporting the reality of Christ’s life. As I listened I discovered the documentary had dismissed out of hand the eyewitness accounts of the four Gospel writers. Indeed, it seemed that everything in the Bible had been dismissed as fiction because of slight discrepancies in how each gospel reported the same stories. I asked my coworkers if the documentary offered any possible reasons for those supposed discrepancies. As far as they could remember it had not.

I turned to the fellow who had seen the show and said, “Since the records of the Gospels were disallowed, what about the extra-biblical words written by Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Josephus?” None of those writers were mentioned. Instead, the documentary stated no extra-biblical evidence existed. As you can see, a myth is easy to build if the builders are allowed to dismiss contrary evidence. Later I sent these men a YouTube video featuring Dr. Gary Habermas. You can catch his talk here. To me it seemed obvious the documentary was indulging in willful apophenia, disregarding real evidence while piecing together suppositions and guesswork to make the case they preferred.

Apophenia also comes into play when ardent scientific materialists build their case while rejecting the evidence for Intelligent Design (ID). Naturalists insist that ID is not science, and unashamedly admit that if it were admitted into academia it would lead inevitably to a “divine foot in the door” (Professor Richard Lewontin; The full quote can be found here. It is worth reading to appreciate how determined Lewontin and his colleagues are to keep all mention of ID out of their “scientific “worldview. They admit the razor-edge precision of the fine-tuning that makes the universe possible, but nevertheless suggest the ID people willingly see design where there is none; the very definition of pareidolia they say, when, as I’ve argued above, they are the ones who refuse to see what self-evidently exists. 

Naturalists are equally blind to the reality that probability theory has destroyed the possibility that chance had anything to do with creation. Yet chance is embraced by materialists because chance alone makes their narrative possible. To those committed to a materialist theory of creation, even the least possibility of a random creation leads to assumed probability. 

To the objective observer, it is mind boggling how many data points must be modified or ignored to prevent seeing the necessary design inherent in that amazing construct called the eye. Yet whole books have been written (see The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins) to tell “what if” stories to explain the eye, and the many varieties of eyes that exist, as products of pure chance. Now who suffers from Pareidolia? A little more than two centuries ago, a fellow by the name of William Paley put forward an argument for ID that naturalists have been trying to refute ever since. It is called Paley’s Watch argument and you can see it explained here. I’ll ask again, does pareidolia or apophenia explain the science that supports the existence of God, or are those terms better applied to the naturalist's point of view? 

Of course, we need to learn to recognize any biases that we may have. Otherwise we will be no better than the gambler who sees pareidolic patterns in the roll of a pair of dice or in the slots where the roulette ball falls. We must find the determining factors for our thinking within the pages of the Bible as we learn to read it with discernment. 

Start by giving thought to the assumptions that form the important elements of your worldview. They are not necessarily wrong, but no assumption should be allowed to inform your thinking until it has been thoroughly examined. Be certain that your arguments are based on the foundations of your Biblical worldview. 

This matters because “we tend to think with instead of about our worldview” (Randy Baker; Worldview, The Adventure of Seeing Through Scripture). The bottom line is that the probability of being heard by those immersed in the present culture goes up when we clean up our own ideological backyard. Are we functioning with a Biblical worldview or is it some syncretistic mixture of Biblical ideas and the various notions that invade from outside? The first baby step towards that kind of maturity is to become familiar with what is in the pages of Scripture. Sadly, the shameful secret of today’s church is that collectively we are Biblical illiterates. We may read the Bible, but we do not engage with it, or even believe much of it. We struggle to defend a Biblical worldview because a great hole of Biblical illiteracy weakens our understanding of what Christianity is! 

Biblical literacy is only one of the data points needed for a well-formed vision of Reality. Christianity can be viewed as a suite of ideas, and we need to allow our God to slowly replace the parts of our worldview that don’t belong in the suite. It would be a great disservice to God and humanity to function under some sort of pareidolic idea of our Faith. We need to know that we have the important data points, and that we have connected them so as to create the picture first formed in the mind of God. This is a good starting place and it may well lead to other things that the Holy Spirit can use to adjust our worldview to better reflect the Truth. Christianity without the pretense of a self-imposed pareidolia isn’t for the cowardly or lazy. It may be tough; it may be laborious, but it is eternally worth it!

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