Sufficiently large communities must at some point trust experts.

Click to enlarge: The wisdom of crowds: It has been repeatedly shown that given a few conditions that ensure the free exchange of information, groups of people will come closer to good decisions than individuals within those groups.

That goes for everything from healthcare to theology.

Human understanding long ago increased to a point where it became impossible to know everything. In large societies, this means we must trust experts who understand bits and pieces enough to direct the rest of us in decision making.

Expert advice will sometimes be wrong, but a large community with a sufficient number of experts reviewing each others' work will keep those mistakes to a minimum and create rules around how errors and corrections are handled.

If that system is removed, there are no rules guarding our mutual welfare.

A medical example:
If you wish to believe that blood transfusions are morally wrong, you are free to do so (for yourself). Your community will let you die because you believe this. The rules about when and how to safely collect blood, store it, and perform a transfusion, cannot save you. Those things will save millions of others, but they will not save you.

A philosophical example:
Why do we have thousands of Protestant denominations? Because a few folks decided they could determine theological truth themselves. In reality, all that means is each of those thousands of Protestant denominations acts as its own little universal church, in much the same way the Catholic church did and still does today.

[2013-03-13]

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Martin Luther

Why the Reformation Got it Wrong

Because most "reformers" didn't understand or underestimated the principle I just wrote about above.[1]

Rather than assent to a governing Christian body, they chose individual interpretations, and thereby opened the door to more competing individual interpretations with no consensual review to govern their shape or growth. (That last part is important; it's not the new ideas that are problematic, but how they are reviewed and adopted).

Everyone thinks they know better than the next guy, that goes for you and me both, but one of us is often wrong, and in large communities, decisions outside consensus can be dangerous.

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I am of course speaking in the context of a free society that allows the open exchange of both popular and unpopular ideas. This is akin to requiring an open system to observe entropy.

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BTW, my private interpretation can exist alongside (or among or inside) larger ideas I share with others. I'm not advocating we all conform to some dilution of common denominators.

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[1]
The Church (the one and only at the time) was then going through renewal. It's very likely that the same spirit of renewal that led Luther and others to challenge the Church was also renewing it. So the same sincere spiritual reassessment may have been responsible for both the Reformation and for strengthening Rome.

Both Protestants and Catholics may have undergone what we called a "revival" when I was boy.

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