One of the core lessons they teach is that maintaining faith requires active effort—you need accountability partners, you need to pray when you have doubts, you need to avoid situations that might lead you astray.
From what I’ve seen,* the purpose of accountability partners is to subdue akrasia, not to maintain faith. In other words, it’s about purity of behavior, not purity of belief. In principle, this is like a couple of Effective Altruists agreeing to confront the other whenever either of them cheats on a vegan diet.
There might be a similar confusion between belief and behavior behind the line “avoiding situations that might lead you astray”. Although some Christians avoid exposure to challenging ideas (which they shouldn’t), avoidance is mostly about akrasia. It’s the commonsense notion that if you’re a recovering alcoholic, then you shouldn’t visit bars.
Also, I have a question about your framing. Were you suggesting that expending effort to maintain a belief is evidence that the belief is irrational?
*I’ve been a repeat attendee at ~10 different churches and at least a dozen Bible study groups, with a wide geographic distribution across the United States and a decent distribution across evangelical and mainline denominations.
Why would a rational person expend any effort to “defend” a belief? Shouldn’t all such effort be spent exposing one’s beliefs to potential refutation and weighing alternatives? Otoh, if we substitute the word “faith” for “belief” then we’ve got the answer to your question about rationality right there.
Suppose that you disagree with 80% of the people around you about a particular belief, but you’re correct. If the belief is complicated, with lots of supporting premises and independent lines of evidence, then it’s difficult to think about rigorously, so you’re likely to rely on heuristics.
In this case, there are at least two heuristics that will push your belief toward falsehood:
Social desirability bias. Unless you’re unusually contrarian, you’ll face psychological pressure to agree with the people around you.
Availability bias. Because people tend to list arguments that support their conclusion, you’ll be exposed to opposing and supporting arguments at a ratio of 4:1. Because people tend to treat things that are easy to recall as more likely to be true (the availability bias), you’re likely to give the opposing side more credit than it’s due.
In both cases, but especially the second, counteracting the biases requires you to expend effort to generate supporting arguments.
From what I’ve seen,* the purpose of accountability partners is to subdue akrasia, not to maintain faith. In other words, it’s about purity of behavior, not purity of belief. In principle, this is like a couple of Effective Altruists agreeing to confront the other whenever either of them cheats on a vegan diet.
There might be a similar confusion between belief and behavior behind the line “avoiding situations that might lead you astray”. Although some Christians avoid exposure to challenging ideas (which they shouldn’t), avoidance is mostly about akrasia. It’s the commonsense notion that if you’re a recovering alcoholic, then you shouldn’t visit bars.
Also, I have a question about your framing. Were you suggesting that expending effort to maintain a belief is evidence that the belief is irrational?
*I’ve been a repeat attendee at ~10 different churches and at least a dozen Bible study groups, with a wide geographic distribution across the United States and a decent distribution across evangelical and mainline denominations.
Why would a rational person expend any effort to “defend” a belief? Shouldn’t all such effort be spent exposing one’s beliefs to potential refutation and weighing alternatives? Otoh, if we substitute the word “faith” for “belief” then we’ve got the answer to your question about rationality right there.
Suppose that you disagree with 80% of the people around you about a particular belief, but you’re correct. If the belief is complicated, with lots of supporting premises and independent lines of evidence, then it’s difficult to think about rigorously, so you’re likely to rely on heuristics.
In this case, there are at least two heuristics that will push your belief toward falsehood:
Social desirability bias. Unless you’re unusually contrarian, you’ll face psychological pressure to agree with the people around you.
Availability bias. Because people tend to list arguments that support their conclusion, you’ll be exposed to opposing and supporting arguments at a ratio of 4:1. Because people tend to treat things that are easy to recall as more likely to be true (the availability bias), you’re likely to give the opposing side more credit than it’s due.
In both cases, but especially the second, counteracting the biases requires you to expend effort to generate supporting arguments.