Faith versus Objective Realitypage 2
Both sets of parents are extremely religious. The Ceraks wrote in Whitney’s obituary that their daughter had been accepted in heaven; the Van Ryn’s prayed vigorously that the patient actually misidentified as their daughter would recover from her extensive injuries. The Ceraks took the word of the hospital staff that the dead blonde girl was their daughter, didn’t physically identify the body, and didn’t request a DNA test. The Van Ryn’s also didn’t request DNA tests that might conceivably determine that the girl for whom they were sitting bedside wasn’t their daughter. They actively ignored discrepancies, that the patient was a couple of inches taller than their daughter, had different teeth, different eye color, and shoes and clothes that the Van Ryn’s and Laura’s sister couldn’t identify as Laura’s.
The nature of belief, of hope and delusion and faith in miracles, can have a permeating and crippling effect on the believer’s grasp of reality, severely impairing judgment in the face of multiple points of fact and options. Information is viewed partially, as it supports hope and religious dogma during traumatic events. Though capable under other circumstances, clear-eyed, objective, impartial, intellectually curious people fall back on faith to get them through moments of terror that threaten mortality.
The Cerak’s decision not to identify their daughter’s lifeless body in the Marion General morgue was born, they said, of a desire to preserve their memory of their daughter as a vibrant young girl, not a disfigured corpse. A closed casket funeral was ordered. For weeks, the Van Ryn’s, possibly too afraid of the truth to exercise critical observation skills concerning the girl for whom they held vigil, refused to recognize the truth.
This story led me to a premise that seems like a case of circular logic: people who believe in things based of faith…are more likely to believe in things based on faith. In general, compared to people who typically require scientific or experiential evidence before believing something to be factual and true, many religious people trust in others to tell the truth and not make mistakes. Religious beliefs are habituated, and the habit of accepting unproven premises, such as those found in Biblical stories, myths, and legends negatively transfers to other areas of one’s belief schema, affecting the ease with which one accepts propositions as true and false. Susceptibility to suggestion becomes a personality trait. To suggestible people, there is efficacy in seances, spirits can return, ghost stories could be true, and charismatic cult leaders have the answers. Suggestible people are influenced to accept religion, or change religions if such a change gives them a better sense of connection to the universe and others in it. The habit of religious people to easily accept based on faith carries over into other areas of their lives. They don’t demand proof of concepts, corroborative, indisputable, reliable evidence to support them. They aren’t frustrated by magical thinking.
This mistaken identity happened and persisted over six weeks because four religious parents trusted the word of several authority figures in the medical profession who didn’t know either of the daughters. It continued for two parents because they wanted it to. They deluded themselves because the truth about their daughter’s death was too hard to glimpse. They chose to be gullible and accepting as a reactive style to bad news, rather than skeptical, all the while selfishly allowing another set of parents to believe that their daughter was dead.
Being religious may not be predictive for susceptibility to persuasion, but in the case of the Van Ryns, whose daughter’s death they couldn’t accept, and the Ceraks, faith postponed reality.