I’ve looked it up, but still feel a little confused
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Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling an individual experiences when something they believe to be true, is challenged and shown to be false.
A good example of how cognitive dissonance is experienced is the the old philosophy argument “the logic of evil” the argument works as below to prove that god being all knowing, all powerful, and all good, is not possible because evil still exists in the world.
If god is all good, and all powerful, and all knowing, and tragedies still occur which result in the death of children; then god can’t be all 3 of those things at once.
If he’s all knowing and all powerful, and allows the tragedy to occur, then he’s not all good.
If he’s all good and all knowing, but unable to prevent the tragedy, then he’s not all powerful.
If he’s all powerful and all good, and the tragedy still occurs, then he’s not all knowing. Because he would’ve prevented it.
When a deeply religious person is challenged with this thought experiment, some tend to experience cognitive dissonance as they can’t logically argue that their god is all knowing and all powerful and all good (even though their bible claims so) because evil exists all around us and tragedies occur everyday.
Now, will every monotheistic religious person whose presented with this argument abandon their deeply held religious beliefs and convert to atheism, or some different spirituality/religion? No, probably not. What happens is they usually ignore the information when they can’t refute it, because so much of their identity is tethered with the concept and belief of a perfectly good god.
Another less philosophical example of cognitive dissonance is how everyone wants to be healthy and look good, but nobody wants to go to the gym and eat healthy, or stop smoking/drinking.
people experiencing cognitive dissonance tend to rationalize away their beliefs/behaviors so that they don’t have to actually change anything. Common phrases are “that’s not what that means”, or “I don’t really believe that”, or “that’s not important”.
Generally speaking, the best case scenario for someone experiencing cognitive dissonance is to change their underlying belief/opinion to accurately reflect the new information. The issue with that, tends to be that it’s painful and embarrassing to have lived X years on earth only to realize that you’ve been probably wrong the entire time.
It’s embarrassing, anxiety inducing, and uncomfortable. Evolving/growing requires intentional effort, but remaining the same costs nothing, and all you have to do to defend your own ignorance is proclaim to yourself “that’s not right”, then continue on about your life.
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