Why Do Experts Get It Wrong?
“The Pharisees answered them, ‘Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in Him?’” - John 7:47-48
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Have you ever wondered about the Pharisees? About what it must have been like for men so educated and pious to have their authority threatened by a blue collar nobody who eviscerated them every time there was an argument? To watch as the people whom you have dedicated your life to teaching and guiding cease paying attention to you and begin to focus instead on someone without even a hint of your pedigree, expertise or credentials? It doesn’t take much imagination to understand just how maddening it must have been. After all, what was all the training, study and discipline worth if any old carpenter from the backside of nowhere could just waltz in and turn everything upside down? Who did they think this fool must have thought He was?
But, here’s the thing: the Pharisees were wrong.
And not just a little bit wrong. They didn’t barely miss the bullseye. The Pharisees, the expert authorities on all things scriptural and true, stared the Truth Himself square in the face, heard His sermons and the reports of His miracles, had their hats handed to them time and again by His unassailable logic and reason, and concluded that the most sensible solution to their conundrum was to break the Law they claimed to value so highly by trumping up charges and paying some false witnesses in order to murder Him (John 11:47-53).
The certified, bonafide, quintessential experts on truth decided the best way to handle Truth was to kill it.
How could this happen? How could experts get things so wrong? Isn’t that the point of expertise, to be able to discern truth from error and to make correct decisions in the face of the available evidence?
Have you ever wondered just why it is that experts seem to be so often wrong?
2020 has given us plenty of examples of this phenomenon. And it has led to no small amount of bickering and outright confrontation. People are told repeatedly that the best thing to do is to trust the experts, even as the experts offer contradictory guidance based on wildly inconsistent information.
Experts in science lecture about biological processes and cosmological events that defy the laws of science and reality. Experts in history revise the facts to fit particular ideological narratives that can be debunked with simple internet searches or access to a library. Experts in theology teach ideas that stand opposed to the teachings of the scriptures and then resort to hiding behind their degrees when challenged about it. Experts in containing the spread of communicable disease recommend something as the best thing to do one month, only to completely reverse course and suggest the exact opposite later.
All around us and seemingly all the time, we are subjected to the tyranny of experts who routinely demonstrate that they don’t seem to know very much about the things they’re supposed to be experts on. And since people have been taught and conditioned to believe that expertise ought to be unassailable and unquestioned, much of society is led around by the nose by those who, like the Pharisees before them, are just as capable of getting things catastrophically wrong as any of the rest of us.
So what accounts for such a phenomenon?
Put simply, it is what the Bible tells us time and time again is true of all people, regardless of education or expertise: sin. And while this may sound like an obvious oversimplification, the truth is that many of us don’t seem to believe the Bible when it tells us that sin infects and affects the deepest parts of who we are:
“For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. … So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. …but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” - Romans 7:14, 21, 23
These are the words of Paul, a Pharisee. An expert. (If you’d like even more elucidation on the reality of humanity’s inherent nature as sinners and enemies of truth, read Romans 3:9-23, Ecclesiastes 7:20, I John 1:8, Ephesians 2:1-3, and Psalm 51:5, just for starters).
Experts are human. And humans are sinners, completely and thoroughly, with only that one notable exception. Expertise, education and study can do absolutely nothing to free a person from the mastery of sin to which we have all subjected ourselves. Experts, just like the rest of us, are driven primarily by their desires (James 1:14, 4:1). They are sinners with agendas, worldviews, presuppositions and preferences. They are sinners, which means they are corruptible, prone to dishonesty, greed and arrogance. And while the process of becoming an expert may rid people of some of their inherent biases and prejudices or correct their thinking on a particular subject, it has no power by itself to correct the much deeper core issues that cause each of us to try to bend and distort reality to conform to our will.
This is how two equally credentialed and authoritative experts can look at issues such as the economy, the pandemic, global warming, the creation of the world or the teachings of the Scriptures and reach totally opposite conclusions. Truth, no matter how clear and untarnished, must always be understood through whatever lens a person elects to see it. And those lenses are the interpretive framework through which all people, not just experts, use to understand the world they’re looking at.
Consequently, if the lens a person decides to use is smudged or distorted with something like political persuasion, or personal conviction, or narcissism, or racial prejudice, or elitism, or ideological commitment, or any other of a million different things that could alter their perception of whatever they’re looking at, then all the expertise in the world will not prevent them from seeing what they want to see. Sinners subordinate truth to their desires. So whether we are carefully cleaning our lenses so that we can see what is really there or we are happy with what we see through all of the accumulated muck of our own desire is a matter of the heart and of spiritual wisdom, not of education or expertise.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.” He understood that education and qualification and expertise in-and-of themselves are nothing when it comes to truth. What matters more is the heart of the person being educated. If the raw material is contaminated, refining it through education and training will only make the situation worse because that education will serve not as a purifying element to the contamination, but as a catalyst for it.
So a handful of fishermen, a tax collector, a physician and a few other guys looked at the embodied Christ and saw Him for who He really was. The Pharisees looked and saw someone who needed to be destroyed for the good of the people. Same evidence, different lenses.
We must never fool ourselves into believing that human credentials eliminate the need for accountability or discernment. True expertise is demonstrated through conformity to truth and reality, not simply through paying tuition, doing the homework and having the proper title. Each one of us should feel perfectly comfortable holding the claims and testimony of experts at arm’s length until we can see that they hold the truth in as high a regard as we do.
And do not be surprised when experts get things wrong. They’ve been diligently doing so for millennia.
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