Deal Or No Deal

One activity that Marci and I love to do is to watch game shows on television. We do not have a lot of free time anymore to watch shows, but when we do have a free evening, we like to watch Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, or Cash Cab on the Discovery Channel. There is one game show that we find particularly frustrating, however, and that is Deal or No Deal. If you haven't seen the show, the basic premise is this: there are 26 briefcases that contain different hidden dollar amounts rising incrementally from $.01 to $1 million. At the beginning of the game, the contestant selects one briefcase as his or her own. They then proceed to select other briefcases and the shiny models open them to show what dollar amounts are not in the contestant's briefcase. After a number of dollar amounts have been exposed, the banker offers the contestant a sum of money to sell his or her briefcase based on the odds that the contestant's briefcase contains a high dollar amount. This amount is usually pretty high, ranging from $70,000 to $300,000 depending on what is left on the board. The contestant can take this money and quit, but they rarely do. They forget that this is money they have been given and are now gambling to go for the million dollars. The host of the show, Howie Mandel, always asks the contestant, "Do you believe that your case is the million dollar case?" And almost always the contestant replies, "Yes, I do. I believe that my case contains the million dollars. I just feel it."

This is where the famous Marci eyeroll comes in handy. When watching these people say these things there is no doubt that they are being sincere. They really believe it. Many say that the show preys on human greed, and that's why it works, but I think it is actually a fault of belief formation. The chance of the contestant having the million dollars is precisely 1/26 at the beginning of the show, which are not great odds. This bugs me everytime I watch the show, so I want to discuss a little about belief formation and what we can do to know that we have right beliefs.

When I was just a lower-cased mark, around the age of five or six, I believed that I would one day play professional baseball. I was quite sure of it. When I hit the ball, it seemed to go pretty far off the tee. I could throw the ball, even occasionally catch it, and I had seen enough dropped balls on TV that I knew I wasn't the only one. Marci thought she would be a professional tap dancer. She could kick it with the best of them. We believed not only that we could achieve these goals, but that we certainly would. Adults participate in this type of belief as well. Consider the Cincinnati Bengals fan who watches their team lose year after year, but consistenly believes that the next year will be different. This is why at a casino the house always comes out on top. We'll call this type of belief "wish-believing." This is the error of the Deal or No Deal contestant. He doesn't believe because the odds of her being correct are in his favor, but he believes because he really wants it to be true.

Another type of belief comes from personal experience. If I grow up with a dog that has been trained by the circus, and is really amazing at basketball, I may come to the belief that all dogs are awesome at basketball, and I will be sorely disappointed. More seriously, however, people can come out of bad relationships, or maybe a series of bad relationships, and believe that true love doesn't exist. This belief is false, but it is reasonable to imagine that this false belief is held by many people. We'll call this type of belief "experience-believing."

A final type of belief is both culturally instantiated and learned from parents. This is arguably the most influential type of belief formation, because it is the one to which we are most exposed. We hear accents on this type of belief all the time. People will say, "well, that's how I was raised." Many children are raised in Muslim households where God is an entity that must be appeased by performing certain duties. Families from Hindu cultures teach children that there are thousands of gods that we learn about in different ways. Buddhist parents teach children not necessarily about God but about a path to enlightenment. People from secular backgrounds often adapt popular cultural beliefs, or anti-cultural beliefs if they are against any type of establishment. I disagree with these beliefs, but I hope it is not because I was taught differently. Then I would be making the same mistake that I was just criticizing. If this type of belief takes us in so many different contradictory directions, it can only be regarded as unreliable. We'll call this type of belief "culture-believing."

Everyone holds a very detailed set of beliefs that may be impacted as the years go on by experience, culture, and what we want to be true. All of these beliefs are unreliable at pointing us in the direction of actual, true belief. What then do we do? Rene Descartes got rid of every type of belief if he had any grounds to believe it might be false. This is what led to his "I think, therefore I am" statement. He didn't know anything, except that he could think the thought, "I don't know anything," therefore, "he is a thinking being." I know what you are thinking, "that is the most unhelpful thing I've ever heard." And you're right. That doesn't exactly clear things up in our daily lives. It is very popular in our culture today to believe that everyone's beliefs are equally valid no matter what they are, and we should not judge anyone's set of beliefs against our own. That inself is a belief that would have been crazy a few hundred years ago, it is both culturally relative and what we would really like to be true. It seems to get us off the hook. Where, then, can we find any reliable information in regards to truth? I will use hypothetical logic here so that I cannot be accused of any type of belief that commits a fallacy that I have previously mentioned:

If there is a God that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent, then this God knows what is true.
If he were to write a book containing some of this information, I should read it.
If I believe anything that is not contained in the book, it may have come from an unreliable source.

This is why I believe what I believe, because there is a book that supercedes any type of knowledge I might have garnered elsewhere. Of course the Bible is not explicit in every facet of life, but we must begin with it as our only source of knowledge, and be sure that our beliefs that are obtained otherwise are still inline with what the book says. It will most likely keep us from making the same belief mistakes that the contestants of Deal or No Deal make, and if the book is true, secure us a spot in the place where all truth will one day be revealed. When confronted with the question about the authenticity of the book, and of the truth of Jesus Christ, we will have confidence when answering. Because in matters such as these, it is truly Deal or No Deal.