The Plausibility Problem: The Church And Same-Sex Attraction

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Faced with what seems like a tidal wave of change within our culture, many within the Church are cautious. We believe, or would like to believe, the Church’s long-held beliefs about sex and marriage. But even if our teaching is biblical, is it practical? Are we setting standards that no one can live up to? We suspect, as Ed puts it, that we have a plausibility problem: is the Bible’s teaching on sexuality actually plausible for those who experience same-sex attraction? Existing accounts of plausibility judgments seem incomplete: they emphasize logical analyses, scrutiny of the credibility of sources, and so forth, all of which are important, but fail to consider plausibility judgments as a form of sensemaking. This is the true cost of following Jesus. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. The problem is that we have become to comfortable with less than this. We have gotten used to "following Jesus" whilst also doing our own thing. We shy away from sacrifice. We gravitate towards living for me, whatever suits me. Ed Shaw is a pastor in the United Kingdom and one who has always experienced same-sex attraction. He does not want to and has tried not to, but, at the end of the day, only feels romantic and sexual attraction for men. Yet he understands that the Bible forbids him from acting on this. While friends, family, and the world around him tell him to go ahead and to indulge, he remains fully committed to what the Bible says about sex and marriage being between only a husband and a wife. He understands that the “full life” Jesus offers must be for him, too, even if it is a life of self-denial in such a foundational way. Ed Shaw’s book The Plausibility Problemis not simply for those living with same-sex attraction, it’s for all of us. The ‘just say no’ approach to human sexuality does not work anymore; it’s left the church sounding like the Jesus way is a poor substitute for a good life. Ed calls us all to a ‘better way’ as radically inclusive church families who find our identity first and foremost in Christ, not in our sexuality - Steve Clifford

We describe the general methods and findings of these four categories in the next subsections. Philosophical/logical/analytical perspective Now lets look into the study details that can influence the relative likelihood of the 4 outcomes: TP, FN, FP, and TN. We now believe that plausibility judgments are relevant for elaborating a frame, the left-hand side of the diagram, as people judge whether the elaboration is acceptable, and also for the right-hand side of the diagram, as people engage in the Re-Framing activity, specifically, “seeking a new frame.” Literature review Our account is most closely aligned with the PJCC (Plausibility Judgments in Conceptual Change) model of Lombardi et al. (2016a). Their emphasis was on scientific beliefs, whereas ours is on the construction of stories to account for events. However, we did include several cases centered on beliefs rather than events, and we did not see any differences in the plausibility transition model for these cases. ConclusionHoffman et al. (2011) reviewed the literature on the criteria for what counts as a cause for an effect and identified three factors: co-variance (the putative cause comes before the effect), mutability (the putative cause was theoretically reversible), and propensity (the putative cause had the potential to bring about the effect). Hoffman et al. (2011) relabeled “propensity” as “plausibility” because “propensity” puts the focus on the putative cause whereas “plausibility” puts the focus on the person. The book also challenges the whole church to change, pointing out many ways in which we have been led into false assumptions in our largely comfortable lives. These "missteps" include: "A family is Mum, Dad and 2.4 children", "If it makes you happy, it must be right", "Sex is where true intimacy is found", "Celibacy is bad for you" and "Suffering is to be avoided." The church throughout history has known well that these statements cause assumptions; the modern church is in real danger of forgetting. Shaw also includes "If you are born gay, it can't be wrong to be gay", and "Your identity is your sexuality", which are much more specific and modern problems, which the whole church needs to be empowered to resist. What counts as causes for accidents, anomalies, and surprises? We generally know the types of things that come to mind as potential causes. These include events, decisions, forces, missing data, erroneous data, and flawed beliefs. But these factors are too general. For the analysis of the 23 cases of story-building, we found that we were attending to potential causes even as we were constructing the story. The plausibility transition model assumes that people have causal repertoires–their mental models include a capability for generating potential causes for a given outcome. Different people would have different causal repertoires of the types of things they would consider in building a story. What does the plausibility transition model look like when applied to actual instances? We use an example, the Air France Flight 447 accident, to answer this question. Air France flight 447

GK, developed the plausibility transition model, selected and reviewed the cases, wrote the initial draft, and completed the final draft of the manuscript. MJ conducted the literature review, prepared the analysis of the articles that were selected for further examination, and assisted in the editing of the manuscript. RH provided critiques and suggestions for the plausibility transition model, identified additional literature for inclusion in the manuscript, and made numerous editorial recommendations on the manuscript. SM provided valuable recommendations on the plausibility transition model from the very inception of the model. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version. Funding The positive predictive value of this study is reflected by the area of TP divided by the area of TP+FP. If we calculate the PPV this study we come up with a value of 0.46. So given a powerful study, and a VERY charitable prior probability for homeopathy, a positive clinical trial result for homeopathy has positive predictive value a little worse than a coin toss. If you lower the prior probability to more accurate .01 (1%) the positive predictive value becomes .14. Story-building continues as a person introduces leverage points and clues into the causal chain and network until the person has an account that satisfies his/her sense of plausibility: “Yes, this makes sense, it could easily have happened this way.” One of the 23 cases we studied is the analysis presented by Gladwell (2014) about David Koresh and the Waco Texas tragedy. The behavior of the Branch Davidians seemed completely irrational at the start, but by the end of Gladwell’s account, their behavior made a lot of sense. It was plausible.Klein et al. (2021) investigated the process of forming explanations–the ways that people react when they encounter unexpected, anomalous, and surprising items of information and how they try to diagnose what happened. We collected a corpus of 73 cases that were a convenience sample. We did not formulate criteria in advance because we wanted to cast a wide net that did not systematically exclude any types of incidents. However, we did not see a reflection of research and modeling that involved sensemaking. In all of the papers we reviewed in these three categories, only one mentioned causal inference– Lombardi et al. (2016a) raised the issue of physical mechanisms, which seemed to imply causality–but that was only a brief and passing mention. Connell and Keane (2004) alluded to causal factors in their discussion of prior knowledge as they studied the way subjects made plausibility judgments of textual material–sentence pairs.