A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were engaged in a far reaching discussion, and, as often happens around Christmas, the conversation turned to religion. My friend, who is a firm atheist, started expressing his difficulty in understanding how someone whom he otherwise considered intelligent could possibly believe the nonsense that I claimed to believe. In particular, he was distraught at the idea that I would be so willing to “disregard science.” Now, I don’t see that there is any incompatibility between science and Christian doctrine, and I certainly don’t think that I’m at all willing to “disregard science.” So, I asked my friend what exactly he thought it was that I believed. He retorted, “What do you think I should believe?”
At the time, I struggled to answer this question. My obvious response should have been to point out that the answer to this question really has no relevance to the conversation we had initially started to have, but I clearly wasn’t thinking straight and launched into a poorly worded articulation of what I believe to be the core doctrines of the Christian faith. Since then and despite its irrelevance to our initial conversation, I’ve been thinking a lot about the question that my friend asked me.
For starters, I’m not sure that I agree with the very premise of the question. Of course, I think my own beliefs are justified. Because of the content of those beliefs, I hope to live in such a way that I might help others come to accept them as well. However, philosophically, I don’t think anyone should believe anything that doesn’t resonate with their own experience. I have no problem admitting that my own beliefs may be wrong. Nonetheless, I don’t think that my life experiences to this point have been so wildly different from my friend’s that they should be mutually incomprehensible. So, I’d like to use the rest of this post to articulate an answer to a different but related question to the one that my friend asked. Specifically, “Why do you believe the things you do?”
I am, fundamentally, an empiricist at heart. I believe that there exists a reality external to myself and that my senses give me some ability to experience that external reality as it actually is. I believe these things not because I have been convinced that they are true, but rather, because I cannot think of any way to make sense of my experience if they are not. In short, I believe them axiomatically. Though I think they can be supported by a sort of circular logic once one introduces religion, I admit that they are philosophically groundless. Yet, they are also entirely unproblematic for the purposes of this discussion. One cannot function sanely in our modern world, let alone affirm any belief in science, without making these very assumptions. I know that my inquiring friend shares these beliefs, and I think I can safely assume that everyone else reading this blog post does too. This empiricism is the foundation upon which my own faith is built.
It would be an under statement to say that it was with reluctance that I came actually to believe Christian doctrine. At first, I convinced myself that it was silly to put stock in any unnecessary assumptions. Science could explain the world perfectly well, so why turn to religion — especially in light of the fact that many historical religions had clearly been about modeling (poorly) natural phenomena? While in this mindset, I delighted in every finding I came across that suggested that we humans might be nothing more than automata ourselves — mere physical processes responding deterministically to physical stimuli. To me, these discoveries only strengthened the argument against spirituality, which I understood to require some notion of free will.
I see now that the thinking I just described isn’t logically sound. Evidence of free will is evidence in support of a dualist notion of a soul, but evidence against free will is not evidence against religion. Christianity’s insistence on incarnation and bodily resurrection, to me, underscores that the Church has been as much committed to the idea that physical effects need to have physical causes as is any modern scientist. It seems to me that this line of thinking reaches its natural conclusion during the Reformation when both Luther and Calvin argue explicitly for determinism. So, while I continue to be a determinist who rejects the idea of free will, I no longer see a tension here. In fact, as I studied the philosophy of science, I increasingly came to the view that science and religion are entirely complementary in so far as they address different questions (how should I model the world vs. what meaning underlies our experiences).
In any case, it wasn’t the works of theologians or any theory of non-overlapping magisteria that ultimately convinced me to become a Christian. Rather, it was a single empirical observation that I found myself making over and over again. Specifically, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong in the world and that I (along with the rest of mankind) was to blame for it. Put another way, I kept feeling that the world should be different — it should be a place of peace and plenty; it should be a place where hope triumphs over fear; it should be a place where we are able to love one another as ourselves.
This wasn’t the sort of realization that comes suddenly. In truth, I think I’ve always felt this way. In my younger years, though, I think I saw all of the world’s faults not as failings but as challenges yet to be overcome. What changed for me is that I’ve slowly come to realize that I cannot be the change that I want to see because I am the problem (in the sense that it is my very conception of self that is the issue). I value my own happiness and wellbeing above that of the stranger I encounter on the street; I vainly try to control the world around me to ensure my own comfort and security; and, even when I do something for someone else, it’s almost invariably to produce some sort of benefit for myself (even if it’s just the fleeting sensation of feeling good about myself for a few moments before I get on with my day). I don’t think any of this makes me a bad person — I just think it makes me human.
I suspect that most everyone who subjects himself to careful self-reflection finds most of what I’ve just said about myself to be true. We can console ourselves by observing that there are other people who are “worse” than ourselves, but this somewhat misses the point in that it sidesteps entirely the question of why we should be so imperfect in the first place. One could argue that we’re the product of evolution and that, from a survival of the fittest perspective, greed is good, especially since it is kept in check by our natural inclination to form communities and empathize with one another. Maybe so, but if the world in which we live is really just the unfolding of physical processes according to some doubly constrained optimization problem that trends towards success by making us feel guilty about the very thing that drives us forward, then that’s a bleak picture indeed. It’s also one laden with nihilistic assumptions that actually go well beyond the mere axioms of empiricism that I laid out above.
As I said before, science does not answer the question “why?” So, to argue that processes just happen, for no metaphysical reason, is to make a choice. One can never show through the lens of science whether it’s the right choice or not, since that’s not the sort of question that science answers. Frankly, there’s no physical solution to the question of whether or not there’s inherent meaning to our very existence. Thus, we reach a fork: We can choose to believe that we are part of something inherently meaningful that is greater than ourselves, or we choose to believe that the world is ontologically random and that all meaning is merely the product of our own creation. Either way, it’s not a silly extraneous assumption to turn to religion (or the rejection of it) to fill in the metaphysical gaps — it’s actually necessary to have a coherent world view.
For the same reasons that it makes sense to be an empiricist, I argue it makes sense to adopt the view that there is inherent meaning to the world. Just as I can vaguely imagine that my senses totally deceive me, I can vaguely imagine a world utterly devoid of meaning (which is to say, I can posit its existence, but have no real sense of what that would actually entail). So, I choose to believe that there is meaning to the world not because I am convinced that there must be meaning, but because I cannot make sense of my experience if there is none. Within this context, the angst I feel about our imperfections begins to make sense. If there is objectively a way that the world ought to be and we have some intuitive sense that that isn’t the world in which we live, then we should feel anxious.
At this point, I haven’t given an answer to the question of why we’re imperfect. Truthfully, at the most fundamental level, I don’t think one can do any better than mere speculation. To do so would be to claim not just that there is meaning to the world but also that one understands how that meaning came to be. This goes beyond me, but at the very least, I think that, if we add an assumption of inherent meaning to the empiricist assumptions with which we began, we have the basis for a theology that we can use to interpret both our own experiences and the history that we’ve inherited. More on that in my next post.
