The impact of being given answers before learning how to ask questions.
What happens when you learn how to evaluate truth after spending a lifetime believing you already possess it
By Steve Paddon
How does one go about determining what is true, when you are born into a religious culture that defines itself and its beliefs as “The Truth”, and all other intellectual framing as either dangerous, false, or ultimately unimportant? What effect does this have on a person? This is my experience and one of the questions I have sought to answer. In coming to understand the impact of this world framing including throughout childhood development, I realize that I have navigated life trying to reason in reverse; the truth was known, the evidence therefore must be adapted to fit.
As I have sought to reframe my existence now outside the pre-defined one I was born into, I am currently participating in a modern introduction to Philosophy class, one offered here on Substack. Suddenly the dust-covered Great Books collection given us as a wedding present is of great interest, and slowly becoming accessible to me.
And as part of my new learning, I was introduced to something that seems almost embarrassingly basic: How do we go about determining whether something is true or not? Thus, I’m moving from being born into simply knowing “the truth,” to learning how humanity has gone about identifying what is indeed true. And that brings us to the fascinating branch of Philosophy called Epistemology.
For those also new to this, let’s establish what epistemology is:
Epistemology: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
Effectively, it’s how we evaluate, with some process logical process, whether something is true or not.
For context of why I’m starting with the definition of epistemology, the reader should understand I am someone who has a master’s degree-level of education, yet only came across the study of epistemology in my 50s. Yet this branch of Philosophy and relates to many other branches of knowledge, and underscores so much of what surrounds my daily life. Mathematical proofs, scientific experiments, the standards used in a courtroom, etc are all ultimately concerned with the same basic epistemological question: How and what do we know do we know about a thing?
Living Within “The Truth”
Here’s the important reality about what happens in environments like fundamental religions, those that claim, even brand themselves as, “The Truth”: it can make identifying what is actually true very hard to discern.
There is an enormous difference between saying:
“We believe these things are true.”
compared to
“We are in The Truth.”
The first leaves at least some room for the possibility that what we believe could be wrong. The second predefines and surrounds the conclusion.
Normally, we might imagine reasoning working something like this:
Evidence > reasoning > conclusion > belief
But in environments that start with the answer, the reasoning works in reverse:
The Truth > interpretation of evidence > conclusion
The fundamental proposition has already been settled. Reasoning then becomes less about discovering whether the belief is true and more about explaining how the belief must already be true. The latter can no longer be considered reasoning, and is better labeled dogmatism. And dogmatism differs from simply having strong convictions, as dogmatism occurs when alternatives aren’t allowed genuine consideration in the first place. Unfortunately, dogmatism is often rewarded in closed systems, rebranded as faith. This can then result in a culture incapable of self-reflection and growth.
When beliefs become identity
Consider the difference again:
“We believe these things are true.” compared to “I am in The Truth.”
The first describes a proposition held by the person.
The second describes where and who the person is.
That means questioning a proposition with framing that defines the person and their environment can mean simultaneously questioning their beliefs, their community, their family, their identity, their moral standing, and potentially their eternal destiny. That’s a whole lot of water for a proposition to carry! At that point, evidence is no longer psychologically neutral. It carries one’s entire being. There is a named concept for this identity-protective reasoning. When beliefs become attached to an important social identity, our motivation to protect that identity can severely affect how we evaluate information that threatens it.
Identity-protective reasoning certainly isn’t peculiar to religion. We commonly see the same mechanism in political parties, ideological movements, professional communities, nationalism, and other cultural clusters that group strongly held identities. However, identity connected to faith often raises the stakes considerably. Much more becomes at stake when admitting “I was wrong”. It can mean admitting we were wrong, bringing all of the relational, social, moral, and eternal implications attached to that possibility.
In recent years, I’ve witnessed my own historical faith church community experience a major public crisis, yet the crisis invoked no meaningful change or public remorse. The church as an entity had to still be right, even in the face of obvious culpability for what had gone horribly wrong.
When questioning becomes a closed loop
What happens when evidence contradicted “The Truth”?
With ordinary reasoning, when evidence contradicts a belief, one possibility we have to entertain is that the belief itself may need revisiting.
That doesn’t mean immediately abandoning the belief. Evidence can be incomplete. Experts can be wrong. Historical records can be misleading. People can lie. There are perfectly rational reasons to question counter-evidence.
The problem comes when the belief itself is the one possibility that cannot be questioned. The results in the system becoming closed to any real examination.
Such a closed system can provide an explanation for virtually any evidence without ever allowing the original proposition to be reconsidered. This is how I witnessed it playing out in the community I was part of:
- Evidence supports us: The Truth is confirmed.
- Evidence contradicts us: The evidence is faulty, contrary accounts are false or overblown.
- Experts disagree: Worldly wisdom can’t understand spiritual truth.
- Former members disagree: They lost faith/became bitter.
- Other Christians disagree: They are deceived by false religion.
- Society criticizes us: This confirms we are right; Jesus said his followers would be persecuted.
- I experience doubt: My faith is being tested.
This is what happens in a system like this; every possible observation gets force-fit into supporting the original proposition being true. I directly observed this collision when the church’s historical narrative increasingly collided with abundant evidence of a different, and far lest supportive historical reality.
The closed loop does not itself prove that the beliefs are false. It merely exposes an epistemological problem: the proposition is protected from ever being meaningfully tested.
A question that works well to uncover if the loop is closed is the following:
“What conceivable evidence would cause me to conclude that my belief isn’t true?”
If the sincere answer is “nothing,” then it doesn’t really matter how much evidence is collected. The belief has been constructed so that no counter-evidence is allowed to count against it.
We had spent our lives being told we possessed the Truth. We hadn’t necessarily been taught how to identify truth, even though we would regularly testify that we had ‘found the Truth’.
What I never dared ask with respect to my beliefs
Epistemology requires learning to ask questions such as:
- How do I know this?
- What is my evidence?
- How reliable is the person telling me this?
- What alternative explanations exist?
- Am I applying the same evidentiary standard to my belief that I apply to someone else’s?
- What would change my mind?
- How confident should I actually be?
Those are metacognitive questions. They aren’t merely questions about what we think; they force us to contemplate the reliability of our own thinking.
And this is where there is an important distinction between being studious and learning how to think epistemologically. For example, the community I grew up in knew the Bible well. Study was strongly encouraged and structured. Yet that study was rife with eisegesis; that is, we read our behaviors into scriptures, rather than studied the text in a traditional sense of the term.
At the same time, other kinds of study were largely discouraged. Even within the Biblical narrative, reading other translations or studying the history of the Bible itself could be discouraged.
So there was a strange contradiction: we studied a great deal, while the boundaries around what could be studied and what conclusions could be reached were already established.
As a result, all that study didn’t lend itself to someone openly asking probing epistemological question, such as:
“Why do I regard this form of knowing as reliable in the first place?”
That’s the difference between studying within a worldview vs. examining the truth of the worldview itself.
We never learned how to ask the right questions, only how to work back from a pre-determined answer.
I had two standards for measuring truth
Here’s the diagnostic test that really gets to intellectual honesty.
If a Jehovah’s Witness had said to me:
“I know this is God’s true organization because when I pray and attend our gatherings, I feel Jehovah confirming it to me.”
I would immediately recognize the epistemological problem, since I was not a JW.
“But members of other religions say essentially the same thing about their churches, yet have very different beliefs.”
I would simultaneously accept virtually identical reasoning when applied to my own church’s traditions. That was the epistemic contradiction: applying one standard of knowing to someone else’s beliefs and another to your own.
My contradictions (and I suspect is common) looked something like this:
Their testimony requires evidence.
My testimony confirms evidence.
Their tradition is cultural conditioning/brainwashing.
Mine is spiritual discernment.
Their leaders are false prophets.
Mine are servants God uses.
Their spiritual experiences are psychological.
Mine indicate God’s presence/spirit.
For me, the critical-thinking breakthrough ultimately wasn’t just discovering previously hidden, yet abundant evidence of criminal behaviors within my church community. Rather, what ultimately became completely unbearable was confronting my own epistemological hypocrisy:
“I’m applying different standards to my beliefs than I am to everybody else’s.”
I was forced to confront my own intellectual dishonesty. And that conflicted deeply with my sense of morality and values.
That realization shoved me directly down a path of rapid re-evaluation of my worldview. It was initially a terrifying experience to feel the framework that had given meaning and certainty come apart at the seams.
Uncertainty in itself was threatening
Part of what made that experience so difficult was that having uncertainty and doubts never felt neutral. Having a lack of certainty of faith was effectively an indictment of character, at minimum.
A healthy worldview, both socially and morally, requires often tolerating, accepting, and declaring “I don’t know.”
Scientific and philosophical thinking depend heavily upon this. That is why fields that make progress routinely talk in probabilities and confidence levels rather than reducing everything to simply true/false.
Yet this grayness doesn’t work well in an exclusive religious culture since uncertainty itself can signal moral failure.
certainty = faith
while
uncertainty = doubt = spiritual weakness
With that framing, people aren’t merely motivated to find the truth. They are motivated to fiercely defend their beliefs with devout certainty.
We were highly motivated to feel certain, because it was dangerous not to feel that way. If doubts were expressed, many relationships could be put at risk. When doubts were shared, they were often met with thought-stopping clichés like “only God knows all things” that reinforced the idea that such territory was dangerous. Or worse, very threatening responses to doubts were “Get thee behind me Satan!”. Such blatant spiritual abuse, effectively invoking that the expressed doubts were of someone possessed, wasn’t my personal experience, but it was of others I knew.
Thus, certainty became synonymous with truth, and uncertainty took on moral trepidation. Yet we attributed the certainty of those with differing beliefs as evidence of them being more severely deceived. We gave ample space for the possibility of their delusion, but never to ours.
Surely the community’s intelligent people had it all sorted
When I struggled with my own doubts, I took comfort in those around me who were educated and clearly intelligent. While I had my own educational credentials, there were always those around me who had more, and their certainty appeared solid. So I took comfort that while I hadn’t sorted my doubts out, they surely had. Surely these intelligent people wouldn’t believe without good reasons. Surely somebody smarter than me had asked the difficult questions and satisfactorily answered them.
This is where research on motivated reasoning gets particularly interesting.
It seems reasonable to assume that better analytical thinkers will be better at reasoning their way out of irrational beliefs. Yet greater reasoning ability can also give us better tools for defending conclusions we’re already motivated to maintain.
Recent research found that better analytical reasoning does not necessarily protect people from ideological bias. In this experiment, the people with greater cognitive-reflection ability sometimes showed more ideologically motivated reasoning, not less. That doesn’t mean intelligence makes people irrational. It means intelligence doesn’t necessarily protect from from motivated reasoning.
For instance, a capable mind can become exceptionally good at doing this:
Conclusion > robust search for justification
rather than:
Evidence > reasoning > unbiased logical conclusion
The reasoning itself can be sophisticated and highly intelligent. What’s constrained is which conclusions are permissible.
I had previously mistaken the certainty of the intelligent people in my community as epistemological evidence for the correctness of the community’s worldview. But intelligence and certainty are not evidence that a belief has been epistemologically tested. After all, people can be confidently wrong, and their intelligence can merely make their confidence more compelling.
That distinction and understanding is now very important to me, and I apply it widely in hearing various perspectives on any subject.
Learning Forward
None of this demonstrates that a religion that calls itself “The Truth” is false. That would be more bad reasoning. A community could conceivably possess many true beliefs and still have a poor epistemological method for arriving at them.
That’s an important distinction:
“Is this belief true?”
and
“Is this a reliable method for determining whether beliefs are true?”
are two completely different questions.
But that nuance would have previously been lost on me. Truth simply was as we believed it to be. No evidence needed.
A particularly powerful exercise for someone raised inside an exclusive “Truth” culture is therefore not:
Can you prove my beliefs wrong?
but rather:
If you had been born into Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Islam, Catholicism—or no religion at all—and used exactly the same methods of knowing that you currently use, would those methods reliably lead me to your present beliefs?
If the answer is no, you’ve identified an epistemological problem regardless of whether the underlying claims ultimately turn out to be true.
Of course, this question would likely be brushed aside in fundamental religious cultures. For instance, we believed we were fortunate enough to have stumbled into knowing the “Truth” – for reasons on a spectrum ranging from good fortune to some level of predestination.
Such cultures resist the idea that their ultimate truth revelation was ever an epistemological exercise in the first place. So the answer for many would be, “God would have brought me to this Truth regardless,” or at least they hope they’d be that fortunate. But in my experience, contemplating the possibility that my good fortune could have played out in another reality was a disturbing exercise, and I would need to stop contemplating such questions.
That may be one of the most important effects of a culture literally calling itself “The Truth.” It can subtly transform truth from something to be discovered into something one already possesses.
And critical thinking changes profoundly once the conclusion is settled before any questions begin. Ultimately, it allows truth to become simply whatever one wants or needs to believe, indifferent to any amount of counter-evidence.
That’s not to say evidence is the end-all-be-all as the ultimate yardstick of truth. For example, something can be true with no current evidence for it. It’s understandable that we seek existential answers in places where evidence is lacking, in a void of better answers.
Yet this common human duality is itself fascinating. We require evidence in nearly every other important aspect of our lives. Imagine a judicial system that required no substantiated evidence to convict. Or medicine that required no concrete evidence that a treatment worked. Or a news report that didn’t bother talking to witnesses.
We would reject them outright.
Yet when it comes to our most consequential existential claims; where we came from, why we’re here, what God requires of us, what happens after we die, the epistemological standards we rely upon everywhere else can suddenly be deemed inappropriate or insufficient, even offensive.
Thus humanity has consequently arrived at thousands of contradictory versions of ultimate truth, often held with equal certainty by their believers.
I soon realized my certainty was very unlikely to return as my knowledge of epistemology grew. Initially I found the absence of certainty frightening. Certainty previously meant safety; it meant knowing where I stood, why I was here, and who possessed the answers.
Now I increasingly find the opposite. There is something remarkably freeing about being able to say:
I don’t know.
Not because truth doesn’t matter. It very much matters. And because it matters, I have to be willing to discover that something I currently believe might not be true. The difference is that this; now armed with epistemological tools, I no longer navigate the world learning backwards.
By Steve Paddon
Aug 16, 2026
Source: https://substack.com/@lastofadozen