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Why I’m a Christian 2: I want to believe
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Before you laugh at me and call me a fool, read my reasoning, and then laugh at me and call me a fool. In the last installment I laid out what I believe to be a rational reason for rejecting materialism. A fundamental scientific precept is that one should not reject a claim based on a philosophical bias, which materialism clearly is. Of course rejecting materialism is not the same as Christianity. It’s not even necessarily religious. But I think that’s as far as a purely rational analysis can get us. In order to move from a position that is at least open to the idea of a God, over to a specific claim about that God, requires a leap of faith. Now, the direction of that leap can be determined with rational, logical examination of claims, (such as leaping away from Zeus and a Flying Spaghetti Monster.) but since all these claims are founded on supposed revelation, one is forced to eventually buy into the circularity of the claim. That is to say that one must put faith in the medium for that revelation, whether it be a human oracle, prophet, or collected writings of some group. And that medium’s position as a true carrier of revelation can only be confirmed by their own word. Miracles are often proffered as proof for the medium’s message, but that doesn’t accomplish much since those miracles are usually recorded in the same text or tradition that is making the claims of revelation. So specific claims of revelation are by definition circular arguments.
Now you could say that one should reject all circular arguments. But that is not logical. For instance, if we are doing a trust exercise and I tell you that I will catch you if you fall backwards into my arms, the only evidence to back up my claim is my own assurance. I’m self-validating, and that is a circular argument. But the fact that it’s circular has absolutely no bearing on the Truth of my claim. I will catch you because that’s just my nature. I’m too empathetic to let someone fall no matter how much I dislike them.
Therefore one cannot use the excuse that religious claims are circular to summarily dismiss them. But one CAN use internal logical fallacies to dismiss them. The problem that I’ve seen in this endeavor is that the critics almost always misinterpret the doctrines they deconstruct. Or they find the most literalistic interpretation possible, creating semi-straw-men. But so much of a religion is lived beyond written doctrine. It lives in community, and until one has spent time within that community it is all too easy to misinterpret the dogma.
All this to say that the step from rejecting materialism for its close-minded unscientific attitude, to accepting Christianity is one that is multi-dimensional, incorporating emotional desires along with rational assessment. But I’m not going to get into Christianity in this installment. I want to be clear about the emotional aspects of religion, and try to show that desire is actually at the base of all of our beliefs, religious and secular alike.
We all like to believe that our world view is the right one. That if any person just spent enough time examining all the facts with an open mind they would agree with us. I think this is a very foolish and naive belief. Here are two reasons why.
No one can examine all the facts that reality has to offer in order to make a rational decision about their world view. There are just too many facts in the universe and no one has the time to investigate them all fully. Someone may know all the ins and outs about making peanut butter, launching rockets, or building kites, but no one can thoroughly research every philosophic claim and vet every authority that dispenses data. (Authority is another circular problem.) To put it simply: YOU have not studied the world enough to justify your world view. Neither have I. I don’t care how smart, wise, or old you are; no human can say they have what it takes to apprehend reality and form a consistent theory about it. We are all working with bits and pieces. It’s like there’s a hundred trillion-piece puzzle, and we all have managed to get a dozen or so pieces together and then start making pronouncements about what the picture is. Maybe if you’re super brilliant and mature you’ve managed to get a hundred, or a thousand pieces together. But given the magnitude of the task, isn’t it ridiculous to assume that your little portion is an accurate representation of the whole?
No one can experience every event necessary to be able to form valid opinions that build their world view. We make sweeping assumptions and generalize things for the sake of brevity. We build analogies and make interpolative guesses. Someone who has never given birth or killed a man in war can never really view reality with the perspective of one who has. If you’ve have children you can agree with me that your view of the world changed. You’re perspective broadened. You started to care about things you never did before and stopped caring about other things. This change of view opens new possibilities in your mind, and closes others. Who’s to say who has the better perspective for understanding reality? People specialize, find comfortable niches and cling to philosophies that reinforce their comfort zone. The experiences of others are discounted as unimportant to developing the correct world view that we assume we have. Yet the obvious fact is that our world view is in large part derived from our experiences. And one human can only experience an infinitesimal fraction of all possible experiences. Maybe one that you or I missed is a key to opening our minds to Truth.
Given these massive limitations, how should we go about finding Truth? I’m not speaking about facts. Facts are abundant. Truth is composed of all facts and organizes them according to a logical system. Since we only know some facts and not all of them, and since we only have one lifetime of experiences against which to falsify the validity of those facts, we are working with woefully incomplete data, and are forced to come to our conclusions about Truth by another means. I believe that means is the topsy-turvy world of emotions. I’m not saying I like this fact, or that I want to admit it, but I can’t see a way around it. To put it simply: we believe what we want to believe. Then we backfill our belief with whatever facts and authorities reinforce our desired world view. (See the circularity there?)
I was quite pleasantly surprised to hear a famous atheist honestly and humbly admitting this fact. In a round table discussion on the T.V. special called The Question of God, which compared and contrasted the lives and ideas of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, the figurehead of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer said the following:
Michael Shermer: “Socially, when I moved from theism to atheism and science as a world view, I guess to be honest: I just liked the people in science and scientists and their books and just… the lifestyle, the way of living. I liked that better than the religious books, the religious people I was hanging out with. Just socially, it just felt more comfortable for me.”
Moderator: “So it was a relationship-driven decision?”
Michael Shermer: “Not solely… but the intellectual stuff and all that is part of it but if you’re going to be honest: it’s not just reasoning your way into a position. In reality I think most of us arrive at most of our beliefs for non-rational reasons. And then we justify them with these reasons after the fact.”
I thought that was beautiful. As empowering as it may seem to claim that your world view is Truth because you logically assessed all the data and came to the only rational conclusion… such a notion is simply bullshit. We are not perfect machines for parsing data. Even if we were, we don’t have all the data, or even a significant fraction of it. Our experience with affirming or falsifying our ideas and interpretive processes are pathetically limited by our finite bodies, senses, and time. What we really do is use our gut. We follow our heart. Our beliefs are organized around what makes us feel good about ourselves. Some of us feel better if there’s a God who’s in control of everything. Other’s want a God who lets us do our own thing. Some want a God who will torture those who disagree with them for eternity. And some of us are just more comfortable if there is no God at all.
Since desire plays such a crucial role in our beliefs I had to ask myself: “Do I desire Truth more than the idea of a God?” (An atheist would have to ask: “Do I desire Truth more than the idea of no God?”) To put it another way: would I be able to handle the cold void of life without a God if a God did not exist? Or would I just stick to arguments that placated my felt need for a God? These are highly theoretical and speculative questions that are impossible to answer with certainty. And as I’ve shown, no one can claim that they believe the Truth of an idea without some emotional impetus that inclines them to that idea. So to put it bluntly: I believe in God because I want there to be a God. I’m fairly certain that theists and atheists alike believe what makes them comfortable. I don’t think there are any Christians who became believers despite a uniformly emotionally cold posture towards the evidence. And I don’t think there are any atheists who continually really, really wish there was a God. Mind follows heart. There are conflicted hearts, but the mind will always argue for the dominant desire. At least that’s a theory I have.
The point is that I found that I do emotionally desire Truth more than I emotionally desire the idea of a God. If God is disproven I will be sad. But I would move on, happy that another question of the Universe had been answered. Now, I’ve read a LOT of atheist rebuttals to arguments for God, and read many of their “logical” proofs against God, and I just can’t get behind much of their thought process. Too many presuppositions, (Just like the “proofs” for God they are rebutting.) and too much reliance on semantics dealing with things we can’t possibly understand. (Things like time.) But since I am biased, I can’t claim to judge these arguments fairly. I can only attempt to override my biases by compensating in a way I think most fair. There is one thing I am absolutely convinced of: that is that one can never prove or disprove the existence of God. One can disprove various theories about what God may or may not be like, by attacking faulty logic; but as long as the possibility exists that there is a reality unseen by us or our tools, there can be a God that defies our expectations, descriptions and guesses. And you can’t wiggle out of that by saying, “Ok fine, but the chances are SO LOW that it’s not even worth considering.” Because there is no way to even approach the possibility numerically, any more than you could state the chances that there’s another 11 dimensions or that there’s intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I think there is an important lesson to be learned in the fact that God can’t be proven or disproven. But both sides are too busy arguing at each other to learn it.
That lesson is: the most important concept in the universe cannot be known. If God were proven to all people to exist, the ramifications would be so huge that everything we humans think we know would have to be reworked. And the same if God were proven not to exist. Without universal prima facie proof, we are forced to cobble together a coherent worldview without assurance concerning this vital component. That should make us recognize the contingency of all our truth-claims. The fundamentalist religionist and atheist “solve” this problem by pretending that the question is not in dispute. I think they are all being silly. They just want the comfort of thinking that the rug can’t be pulled out from under them. As for myself, I try to remind myself of that fact constantly. That’s why I love talking to atheists. They remind me that my arguments are not obvious or settled. And my whole thought world is constantly threatened by some alarming revelation, data, or logic string that I’ve simply been too dense (or unwilling) to see. My world view could come crashing down like a house of cards, and I’m ok with that.
So to summarize my points so far… Last article I rambled on about why I don’t accept materialism due to its inability to adequately satisfy my curious nature about origins and purpose. And while “purpose” can be couched in existential self-defined terms I just don’t find that satisfying. And origins cannot, by definition, be “discovered” by science since science can only operate on material properties. My point in this article is simply to say that since I can’t find a purely logical basis for choosing a world view I have to accept the fact that my beliefs are motivated by emotion first and foremost. Can you accept that, or is it too threatening to your comfortable paradigm?
Addendum:
I swear I am not making this up. I’ve been borrowing seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation from my friend and watching them in the evenings to unwind. I’m about halfway through season 3 on an episode called The Defector. I have not seen any of these episodes in my life. After writing the preceding article today, I come home, pop in the DVD and this episode comes on with a plot about a mysterious Romulan (bad guy alien) who seems to be defecting to warn the good guys about an imminent threat. The good guys don’t know if they should believe him or not. At one point the mild-mannered engineer, Geordi, is attempting to explain something to the constantly bewildered android, Data. The way this dialog sums up the point of the article I just wrote this afternoon is stunning, even using many of the key words. See for yourself…
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Geordi: I don’t know Data, my gut tells me we ought to be listening to what this guy’s trying to tell us.
Data: Your “gut”?
Geordi: It’s just a… a feeling, you know… an instinct, intuition.
Data: But those qualities would interfere with rational judgment, would they not?
Geordi: You’re right, sometimes they do.
Data: Then why not rely strictly on the facts?
Geordi: Because you just can’t rely on the plain and simple facts. Sometimes they lie.
Data: They can lead to the wrong conclusions but they cannot lie.
Geordi: Yeah? Well, what do you think? Is he a defector or not?
Data: The facts to date would lead to the objective conclusion that he is not.
Geordi: Yeah… well, somehow I think we’re going to catch the Romulans with their pants down on Nelvana III, just like he says.
Data: “With their pants”…?
Geordi: A metaphor… Catching them in the act.
Data: Because your gut tells you so.
Geordi: Exactly. But you can’t always go with your gut, either. It’s… Well, it’s a combination, Data. All right, I’ll put it to you this way. All these feelings that get in the way of human judgment, that confuse the hell out of us, that make us second-guess ourselves… well, we need them. We need them to… help us fill in the missing pieces because we almost never have all the facts.
Data: So a person fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle with his own personality, resulting in a conclusion based as much on instinct and intuition as on fact.
Geordi: Now you’re getting it.
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Having been so amazed by the similarities I had to see who wrote the dialog. Low and behold it was none other than Ronald D. Moore executive producer and writer for the modern Battlestar Galactica series. I’ve been working on an article about the philosophical explorations on that show for the past couple years as I’ve been listening to the commentary tracks and reading various interviews with him. I really, really love the way Moore handles complex issues without being didactic or preachy. Battlestar is the ultimate agnostic’s picnic and I’m seeing that his sensibilities still resonate with me in his work from 1989.
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