Understand Why You Believe? The Problem of Confabulation

Here is the cover of The Apologetics Study Bible. Note the tagline at the top: “Understand why you believe.” Uh? Anybody see the paradox here? If you do not yet understand the grounds you have for belief, then those grounds cannot presently be your grounds for belief. What the tagline should have said is something like this: “Understand some reasons to believe” or “Understand why you can rationally believe”.

The point here is not merely that coherence is often sacrificed on the altar of quick and memorable advertising slogans. This tagline also illustrates the general problem of confabulation whereby people fabricate grounds for belief after the fact and then treat those grounds as the original basis for belief.

I suspect by now some partisan critics of Christian apologetics will be anxious to add this instance of confabulation to their toolbox of points-by-which-they-critique-apologetics. But that would be to miss the point. Everybody is liable to engage in confabulation. The lesson is not to worry about identifying it in your chosen outgroup but rather identify it in your ingroup, and indeed in yourself.