Self-Enhancement and the Apocalypse

Source: J. Krueger

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation. –John Calvin

L'homme ne poursuit que des chimères. (Man pursues nothing but illusions.) –Pierre-Simon Laplace

What does "eschatology" mean? –Otto N. V. Braucher (unverified)

According to the doctrine of predestination, God decides before birth whether He will save a person or whether He will turn her over to Satan for eternal punishment. In The Book of Revelation, John of Patmos (or "John the Theologian" as the Greeks know him) prophesies that near the end of days, the chosen will be raptured into heaven, and the earthly tribulations will proceed without them. Individual mortals may hope or wish or put their faith in the idea that they are among the chosen, but they cannot know it. Such knowledge would vitiate the doctrine of God’s autonomy and the inscrutability of His will. John Calvin asserted that a human being cannot do anything to earn a place in heaven. Pascal’s Wager therefore appeals only to the Catholic mind because it is premised on the idea that, if God exists, He will save those who make a conscious choice to believe in Him. If He doesn’t exist, then never mind (Krueger, 2011). Not being free to earn salvation through faith or good deeds puts Calvinists in a deterministic frame; the doctrine of predestination demands it (Krueger & Acevedo, 2008). Incidentally, the doctrine of predestination nullifies the doctrine of the last judgment, for why should those be judged whose deeds and eternal fate are predetermined?

God’s autonomy and the inscrutability of His will have a further implication. Since no one can know if the own soul is saved, the probability of salvation is unknown, which means that the percentage of the saved in the population and the percentage of the saved among the faithful is unknown. This lack of knowledge makes the prospect of salvation not just risky but uncertain. The difference between risk and uncertainty is that the former provides the probability of success, whereas the latter does not even give that (Knight, 1921).

As a Presbyterian, the Reverend Thomas Bayes was a Calvinist. Using his own approach to statistics [or, with precognition, what Pierre-Simon Laplace made of it], Bayes would have expressed maximum uncertainty with a uniform distribution of prior probabilities. That is, each individual probability of being saved (.01, .02, .03 . . . .99) would be equally likely. When asked about the odds of his own salvation, Bayes would have been compelled to integrate over this distribution and conclude with an answer of “50:50.” A strict Calvinist, who respects the doctrine of the inscrutability, would consider any other odds presumptuous.

Of course, today’s internet and folk psychology are full of presumption. Informal observation suggests that many dedicated Calvinists express personal certitude that they themselves will be saved. Perhaps they did not read Calvin closely, or found the implications of his teachings too fearful to contemplate. A Google search on the percentage of the raptured delivers many estimates other than 50%. Consider middletownbiblechurch.org where we are told about another Calvinist’s estimate, which is suspiciously high. A certain Dr. Tim LaHaye believes that more than 50% of Americans will be raptured. This is important to Dr. LaHaye because this percentage will surely be lower in socialist countries such as Germany and France. The implication – to Dr. LaHaye – is sobering. If many of the good people (Doctors, nurses, firefighters, preachers, and the LaHayes) are missing from the U.S. population, Germany and France will have little difficulty bringing the darkness of socialism to these shores. The differential rapture rate will not only make the tribulations worse, it will also contribute to greater American suffering [I will not pursues the point that everyone left during the period of tribulation, be they American, German, or French, faces eternal brim and firestone anyway]. Dr. LaHaye’s analysis amounts to an eschatological form of ingroup-favoritism. His ingroup (the U.S.) is superior to the outgroup (Continental Europe) because it is here that God disproportionately finds His favorites.

From ingroup-favoritism it is a short step to self-enhancement. A self-enhancing Calvinist will estimate his own chances of being chosen to be greater than the average person’s (or even the average Calvinist’s). This hypothesis remains to be tested. Again, there is a rational benchmark imposed by Calvinist doctrine. Someone who accepts God’s inscrutability should stick to p = .5 for every individual. But a self-enhancing Calvinist will estimate that p(salvation|self) > p(salvation|other). At the limit, p(salvation|self) is close to or equal to 1 with p(salvation|other) being very low.

Theory and research in social cognition raise the following hypotheses: The degree of personal commitment and the strength of the experienced and expressed faith in the Calvinist sense will be positively correlated with the estimated probability of own salvation, p(salvation|self). The probability of others’ salvation, p(salvation|other), will also be correlated with the strength of faith, but less strongly so. The difference between these two correlations, paired with a higher mean for p(salvation|self) than for p(salvation|other) reflects a pattern of self-enhancement. Finally, the two conditional probabilities, p(salvation|self) and p(salvation|other), will be positively correlated with each other. The latter phenomenon is called social projection, a process by which people assume that what is true for them is likely true for others – but not quite as much. Social projection limits the expression of self-enhancement, but helps predict where self-enhancement will be strongest (see Heck & Krueger, 2015, for the full conceptual and statistical model).

In our quantitative model, we distinguish between self-enhancement bias and self-enhancement error. Bias is expressed by the belief that the self is better (more likely to be saved) than the other. An error occurs if this belief turns out to be false. But no such distinction can be made when God is autonomous and inscrutable. Lacking a text from God, a Calvinist must object to any estimate other than p = .5 because any such estimate presumes knowledge that cannot be had. Oddly then, Calvinist self-enhancement fulfills a wish among many psychological researchers who treat any evidence of bias as evidence of error (a conflation to which we objected in Heck & Krueger, 2015).