A Bit of Soul Searching

Thanks to my harshest critic, Alison, I’ve spent a couple of days considering my beliefs about religion.  I’m still thinking about them, but I have reached a couple of conclusions, and I’d like to share them with you.  Maybe in the process of writing them out, I’ll spur myself on to further revelations.

Question:  Could I be wrong about faith causing societal dysfunction?

Short answer, yes.  I could be wrong.   It might be that faith based reasoning is neutral or even helpful to humanity.  I don’t believe it, but I accept the possibility.

When I asked myself this question, the answer came easily and without the cringing some people might expect.  I sometimes try to imagine what Alison thinks of my brain.  I suspect she thinks of me as deeply emotionally attached to tilting the windmill of eradicating religion from the world.  But in examining my own psyche, I found that this is not the case.  I’m deeply emotionally attached to ending as much suffering as possible and increasing happiness as much as possible.  I happen to believe that faith is one of the biggest hindrances to both these ends, and so I focus the brunt of my energy in that direction.

But what I realized in the last day or two is that I would jump ship in a heartbeat if I became convinced that faith was not the enemy.  More importantly, I would jump on whatever boat led to the realization of my goals.

Let me put it another way.  Suppose there is a possible cultural environment where the vast majority of people believe in faith-based paradigms.  In this culture, science is the first and only avenue used by the government for determining social legislation.  The faithful are tolerant and accepting of people who disagree with them, and never try to impose their own beliefs on anyone else.  They take the attitude, “As long as you’re letting me practice my beliefs in private, I respect the obligation of the government to give you the same privilege.”

In this culture, when science proves something beyond any reasonable doubt, it’s accepted by the faithful without complaint or revolt.  When science and faith clash, the faithful might not agree with the science, but they would understand and accept that some people just don’t have faith, and instead believe in science as the source of knowledge.

You get where I’m going with this.  I tried to imagine a world where faith and science coexist harmoniously.  I’ll be honest, I can’t figure out how that could possibly happen, but I ran with the idea anyway.  Supposing that it could happen, I would be the first one to join the campaign to get us there.  I’d be the freaking poster child for faith and science coexisting.

Question:  Is it possible that Faith is a symptom of a more fundamental problem?

Yes.  It is.  Human cognition is a really tricky process, and it’s almost always devilishly complex.  When I say, “That woman’s FAITH made her starve herself to death,” I might be describing the symptom, not the disease.  Perhaps the woman’s faith was the result of a combination of low self esteem, emotional connection to other people of faith, and fear of death.  Maybe she had a secret death wish and was using faith as a convenient excuse to get her way while garnering approval for her action.

I have no doubt that if we had a magic machine that told us the complete answer to the question of behavioral causality, each individual “faithist” would have their own unique combination of hundreds of causal factors.

This line of thought brought me to another question.

Question:  Why do I believe faith exists?

I don’t think it’s fair to ask why faith exists.  Ask a hundred scientists, and you’ll probably get a hundred answers, and most of them will probably have some element of truth.  In the broadest sense, I think it’s safe to say this, though:  Some twist of human evolution has hardwired our brains in such a way that faith is emotionally and intellectually satisfying to a great many humans.

I have my own beliefs about this, of course.  I think the most likely evolutionary culprits are our instinctive tendencies to attribute agency and recognize patterns.  But if it turns out to be something else, I’m perfectly fine with that.  I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover the cause of faith to be something other than an evolutionarily ingrained cognitive adaptation.

Question:  What does this all mean for me?

This is the big question.  If I believe all these things, and my goal is to reduce human suffering and increase human happiness, what should I be doing?

Well, as I see it, I should be doing exactly what I’m doing.  I don’t know for sure that faith is the root of all evil, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.  More importantly, the only irrefutable evidence I have on the subject points squarely to faith as dysfunctional.  That evidence is my own life, of course.  I remember being a theist, and I am keenly aware of my own thoughts and actions in hundreds of circumstances where I was behaving dysfunctionally, causing suffering, and reducing happiness.  And the reason I behaved the way I did was my faith that my actions were good.

I cannot get past this mountain.  I am no paragon of self-actualization and happiness, but by comparison my levels of happiness, self-actualization, empathy, tolerance, etc, are significantly higher now that I rely on empiricism and critical thought rather than faith.   In fact, I can boil everything down to exactly one cognitive difference between Hambydammit the Theist and Hambydammit the Naturalist.

Theist:  Faith = Conclusion = Action based on conclusion, regardless of conscience or contrary evidence.

Naturalist: Evidence = Belief = weighing the strength of my belief before committing to any action at all.

When I was a theist, I did a lot of things literally without thinking.  There was no need to think because the answer existed in perpetuity.  Everything was set, and time spent questioning was time wasted.  Action was what counted.  This was my ingrained worldview, and from it I committed many actions that still make me cringe.

As a naturalist, I still do things that make me cringe, but I do them substantially less than I used to.  And when I examine my own cognitive processes, the only difference I can find between now and then is the deeply ingrained awareness that I’m not certain.  I never feel like I know enough anymore.  Oh, sure, there are things that I’m so certain of that I never stop to question them.  That’s part of being human.  We create shortcuts around apparently redundant cognitive processes.  But even with things that are held near and dear to the core of my existence, I am aware on a very deep level that I might be wrong.  I honestly believe that there is nothing in my worldview so ingrained and persistent that I would refuse to consider evidence against it.

The reason I keep reading peer review journals a decade after finishing school is that I want to know the truth.  I genuinely enjoy learning new things, even when — especially when — they make me rethink my deepest beliefs.  When I was a theist, I was terrified of being wrong.  If I’m stubborn with my beliefs now, I was immovable then.  My emotional attachment to being right was strong enough to prevent me from even considering the possibility that I was wrong.  It’s ironic and sad.  I didn’t attempt to learn more for fear of being proved wrong, but in doing so, I exponentially increased the chance of being wrong.

I believe that faith was the biggest culprit.  Of course we can point to various cognitive mechanisms and we’d be right to do so, but when I removed faith from my worldview, my perception of “being right” changed.  It definitely happened in that order.  I remember the first time I realized that not only was it ok to admit being wrong, it was a good thing most of the time.  It was months after I admitted to myself and my friends that I was an atheist.  Faith departed, and when I looked at the world without the goggles, the world looked different.  In the new world, being wrong was ok.

It wasn’t a big step from “being wrong is ok” to “some things are subjective, and that’s ok.”  From there, it was a tiny leap to “there can be many paths to the same goal.”  All of these changes in my worldview were essential in creating the version of me that champions gay rights even though I’m straight, and that believes people are essentially good, and encourages everyone to choose their own path to happiness based on their desires, not what they believe their desires ought to be.  I firmly believe that if more people were like the current version of me, there would be a lot less social persecution, and a lot more general acceptance of different ways of living.  Maybe that’s tooting my own horn too much, but seriously… if I was ruler of the world, one of the first things I would do would be to erase all the discriminatory laws from the books.   If the entire world were populated with mental clones of me, there would be no “God Hates Fags” or “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”  If I could wave a magic wand and make everyone in the world as apathetic of sexual orientation as I am, I think the world would be much improved.  If that was the only change I got to make to the world, I would be disappointed that I couldn’t do more, but I would still die knowing I’d done something amazing for everybody.

And here’s the thing.  I can’t think of anything besides my faith that prevented me from being this way.  I was never abused by a homosexual.  Hell, as far as Theist Me could tell, I’d never met a homosexual.  (It’s funny how nobody admits to being gay in a Southern Baptist church.)  Come to think of it, even today, I can’t recall a single negative experience in my life that was caused by someone’s homosexuality.  Not one.  I have no reason to dislike homosexuals, and I don’t dislike homosexuals.  Easy.  But when I was a theist, I didn’t have any good reasons to dislike them, but I did.  The only reason I had was the belief that homosexuality was an abomination and a horrible sin in the eyes of God.  The only reason I believed that was that I had been taught to take things on faith.  So I did.

The chain of causality seems perfectly clear.  I had faith, so I believed homosexuals were bad.  That belief naturally turned into dislike.  When I thought about homosexuals, I had negative emotions and thoughts.  I can’t think of any other reason that I disliked homosexuals when I was a Christian.

So that’s where I stand today.  I have read Gregory Paul’s papers, and I recognize that they aren’t perfect.  I’ve read Robert Altmeyer, and I know that some people are naturally authoritarian, and would be so even if they weren’t Christian.  I’ve bloody read Atran’s papers, and I recognize that people create their religion in their own image.  I recognize that people in large groups believe and do stupid things without Christianity to urge them along.  I know that General Intelligence is far less useful to most humans as we’d like to imagine.  I know all the objections to the argument that religion is poison.  I understand them all.  I have considered them at length.

And I believe that the evidence is still overwhelming that in some manner or another, faith is a major component in a significant amount of dysfunctional behavior and belief in society.  I’ll be the first to admit that the persistence of my belief is largely due to personal experience.  But I believe that this evidence deserves to be taken seriously.  Until someone offers me a better explanation for my change in beliefs, emotions, and behavior patterns, I can only ascribe it to the switch from a faith-based worldview to an evidence based worldview.  I simply don’t have any other explanation that makes any sense.  And I’m just an average person.  What are the odds that I’m the only person whose societally dysfunctional behavior was caused by faith?  That’s too improbable to consider seriously.  So… because I am an average human, and faith caused me to behave dysfunctionally, cause suffering, and reduce happiness, it is highly probable that many people in similar environments are very similar to me.  So… faith is probably a bad thing for a lot of people.  I just cannot get around that logic.

So I guess the moral of the story is this.  I’m still here, and I’ll still be blogging about how bad faith is.  I firmly believe it to be true.  I believe that even if it turns out that there’s some other cognitive mechanism behind many of the ills in the religious world, I’ll have done a good thing if I help to convince any number of people to trust the evidence instead of their pre-formed conclusions.