Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly interviewed the president of American Atheists, Dave Silverman, on Jan. 4. While discussing an anti-religion billboard commissioned by the group, the pair fell into a debate over the existence of God.
Neither man did a good job of defending his position, but one comment from O’Reilly stood out.
After Silverman called religion a scam, O’Reilly responded, “I’ll tell you why it’s not a scam. … Tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.”
O’Reilly may have been right about Silverman, because the atheist did not offer an explanation. It is also possible he was too amazed by O’Reilly’s ignorance of grade school science to point out how the moon’s gravity causes the tides.
We may never know.
After the interview, Stephen Colbert featured several other clips of O’Reilly using the same argument in the past. It’s easy to make fun of Papa Bear for not understanding the influence of the moon’s gravity on tides (which Sir Isaac Newton managed to figure out 300 years ago). But I’m interested in why O’Reilly continues to deny a scientific explanation.
In a billoreilly.com video a viewer asked, “What do you mean when you refer to the tides when asked about the existence of God? Science explains the tides … the moon’s gravity pulls on the oceans.”
O’Reilly shot back, asking, “How’d the moon get there? Can you explain it?” He called the “pinheads” offering explanations “desperate.”
I find O’Reilly’s unwillingness to accept scientific explanations for such well-documented phenomena unbelievable, but a growing body of psychological research may offer an explanation for his stubbornness.
Researchers from the University of Michigan have found people usually maintain their opinions even after facts disprove their positions. Many actually cling to their mistaken views even more fiercely after being shown contradictory facts, a phenomenon known as “backfire.”
An easy scapegoat is the media. It’s never been easier to find hundreds of different commentators and politicians who agree with your views, no matter how demonstrably false those beliefs are. However, I believe much of this effect can be explained by the different ways people approach information.
On a fundamental level, humans usually base their opinions on either reason or emotion. Unfortunately, emotions are quite powerful.
Look no further than the recent debate over Obamacare, which, according to an NBC survey, nearly half the country believed would “allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly,” despite the “death panel” debate having literally no basis in fact.
Our political discourse is dominated by cheap appeals to emotion, and once an idea takes hold, it is immediately protected by the mind’s backfire mechanism.
While backfire affects everyone, I believe it affects people differently based on their priorities.
People who value logic and reason are probably less likely to succumb to their natural instincts in the face of facts proving them wrong, while those who are governed by emotion are more likely to cling to their beliefs in the face of reason.
O’Reilly, despite any of his claims to the contrary, clearly did not reach his position on the tides and the moon through reason. If a team of astrophysicists tutored him for a year, they would be lucky if he accepted the moon’s origins.
O’Reilly’s emotions have betrayed him so forcefully that his belief in God is now tied up in how the tides work. No amount of reason will show him scientists don’t want him to stop believing in God — they just want him to believe in science, too.
Andrew Shockey is a 20 year-old biological engineering sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.
 
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Contact Andrew Shockey at [email protected]