The Black Swans
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 11:46 pm | Filed under Christianity | Tags: apologetics, Christianity
If you had asked 17th century Europeans about swans, they would have told you that “all swans are white”. This was a scientific truth. There were no black swans. We were completely certain of it.
At least we were until 1697 when explorers landed on Australia and, oh crap, black swans are discovered.
This is the story that Nassim Taleb tells in his book The Black Swan. He applies it to economic theory and uses it to explain why humans behave why we do. The jist of the argument is that things are far more unpredictable than we really know. (I haven’t read the book, and I’m not endorsing it. I only mention it because I like the illustration and want to use it to make another point.)
The world is far more chaotic and unpredictable, at least to us, than we really care to admit, and this is a pretty fundamental human fault. You see, if all your life you only ever saw white swans, you would tend to think that all swans are white. That seems pretty reasonable, right? Reasonable but wrong.
With every white swan you ran into, you’d become more and more convinced that all swans are white. But that’s the trick! We take every white swan we see as further confirmation of our white swan theory, when in reality it isn’t.
How many white swans would you have to see before you proved that “all swans are white”? You would have to see all of them. Seeing one more does not lend any extra credence to your theory. It’s an impossible theory. You would have to know about every swan on earth to prove your theory (impossible) but you only have to know about one black swan to disprove it.
And that’s really the mind trick. Every white swan we see makes us perceive the statement “all swans are white” as being confirmed when in reality it is impossible to actually prove.
So if this is just natural human nature playing its role out, that means we are very confident about things we really don’t know much about.
Now, let’s move on from a trivial subject like feathers on a bird and look instead at something more substantial: the resurrection of Jesus.
I’ve heard from many people that are using faulty white swan reasoning unawares. They’re the ones who say, “Dead people stay dead. Therefore Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.”
This theory is very, very convincing. I don’t know about you, but all the dead people I know have, so far at least, remained dead. All of them. It would be tempting to expand my experience and say, “Well, that must mean that all people everywhere die and stay dead.” Tempting, but wrong. Just like with the black swan example, all it would take is one single case of a person rising from the dead to disprove this whole worldview. Our confidence is misplaced because it is an impossible statement to prove. We do not know about every dead person on earth (it’s impossible), so it’s impossible to make statements about them with certainty. We feel like there is certainty, but that is the mind trick.
Certainly no one would say that rising from the dead is the norm. And for Europeans, the norm certainly had nothing to do with black swans. But don’t get logical dyslexia and confuse “uncommon” with “impossible”.
If you had asked 17th century Europeans about swans, they would have told you that “all swans are white”. This was a scientific truth. There were no black swans. We were completely certain of it.
At least we were until 1697 when explorers landed on Australia and, oh crap, black swans are discovered.
This is the story that Nassim Taleb tells in his book The Black Swan. He applies it to economic theory and uses it to explain why humans behave why we do. The jist of the argument is that things are far more unpredictable than we really know. (I haven’t read the book, and I’m not endorsing it. I only mention it because I like the illustration and want to use it to make another point.)
The world is far more chaotic and unpredictable, at least to us, than we really care to admit, and this is a pretty fundamental human fault. You see, if all your life you only ever saw white swans, you would tend to think that all swans are white. That seems pretty reasonable, right? Reasonable but wrong.
With every white swan you ran into, you’d become more and more convinced that all swans are white. But that’s the trick! We take every white swan we see as further confirmation of our white swan theory, when in reality it isn’t.
How many white swans would you have to see before you proved that “all swans are white”? You would have to see all of them. Seeing one more does not lend any extra credence to your theory. It’s an impossible theory. You would have to know about every swan on earth to prove your theory (impossible) but you only have to know about one black swan to disprove it.
And that’s really the mind trick. Every white swan we see makes us perceive the statement “all swans are white” as being confirmed when in reality it is impossible to actually prove.
So if this is just natural human nature playing its role out, that means we are very confident about things we really don’t know much about.
Now, let’s move on from a trivial subject like feathers on a bird and look instead at something more substantial: the resurrection of Jesus.
I’ve heard from many people that are using faulty white swan reasoning unawares. They’re the ones who say, “Dead people stay dead. Therefore Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.”
This theory is very, very convincing. I don’t know about you, but all the dead people I know have, so far at least, remained dead. All of them. It would be tempting to expand my experience and say, “Well, that must mean that all people everywhere die and stay dead.” Tempting, but wrong. Just like with the black swan example, all it would take is one single case of a person rising from the dead to disprove this whole worldview. Our confidence is misplaced because it is an impossible statement to prove. We do not know about every dead person on earth (it’s impossible), so it’s impossible to make statements about them with certainty. We feel like there is certainty, but that is the mind trick.
Certainly no one would say that rising from the dead is the norm. And for Europeans, the norm certainly had nothing to do with black swans. But don’t get logical dyslexia and confuse “uncommon” with “impossible”.
Hey Nephew,
I appreciate your thinking regarding the black swan disproof of the white swan theory. Reminds me of my scientific method classes back in college: we never prove a hypothesis; we only fail to disprove.
A theological question: Jesus died so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life; therefore, perhaps you have known people who died and did NOT “stay dead”, right?
Finally, on another note, I don’t see a way to comment on your pictures. Am I missing something? If not, would it be hard to do add that function? I would really love to be able to comment on individual pictures of yours. (They’re great, by the way; just some are thought provoking and it would be fun to comment. For instance, the “pretty songbird” in one of your pics appears to be a meadowlark, the state bird of the state of your birth. Now isn’t that interesting?)
Love ya!
Ultimately we believe that everyone will one day rise from the dead at the last and final resurrection.
Jesus covered this very well. When the Sadducees came to Jesus, they wanted to trip him up with scripture and show that there is no resurrection because they didn’t believe in the final and ultimate resurrection. (which is why they are sad, you see?
)
So they gave Jesus a problem. It was Jewish law that if a man died before he and his wife had a child, that the other brother would marry her and have a child. So the Sadducees concocted this hypothetical story of seven brothers. One of the brothers marries a woman but dies before having children. So the second brother marries her, but he too dies before having children. And the third. All the way up until the seventh. And then finally the woman dies.
So the Sadducees pose this question to Jesus: “At the resurrection, whose wife is she?”
You can just imagine them cocking their heads back triumphantly ready to shout out, “Gotcha!” And Jesus falling back saying, “Why, I had never thought of that before. How could I have missed it! You are right and I am wrong.”
Or at least that’s the exchange they were expecting. Instead, Jesus came out of left field and told them all their assumptions were wrong. Everything they had grown up to believe was a mistake. Their whole theology was in error. They thought that if they had no answer, there was no answer. They had seen 1,000 white swans so they couldn’t believe there was a single black swan. Jesus said there was no marriage in heaven. Problem solved.
But more relevant to our point here, Jesus went further in his proof for the resurrection. He said something very interesting, he reminded them of what Moses called God at the burning bush. Moses called the Lord “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”.
What was the relationship between Moses and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Abraham/Isaac/Jacob preceded Moses by hundreds and hundreds of years. They were long gone by the time Moses came on the scene. But Moses didn’t say that God WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He IS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The Sadducees weren’t dumb men, they spent most of their lives studying scripture. And Jesus came along and dismantled all of it by using verb tense of all things! Something they had never before noticed in all their years of studying.
This to me illustrates two incredible things: one, that the resurrection is true. And two, that even the most educated people of Jesus’ time fell victim to thinking there’s no such thing as a Black Swan.
You can read the whole encounter in Luke 20. And I have to give credit where credit is due, I just heard an excellent sermon by Andy Stanley on this topic last week. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s available directly on the website, but you can subscribe to their Andy Stanley Podcast, the specific sermon is “Defining Moments, Part 6: Games People Play.” Or here’s the direct link to the mp3. (this specific topic is mentioned about 15:35 in, but the whole sermon is well worth a listen)