Posted by Gunnar on May 22, 1999 at 03:35:38:
In Reply to: good thoughts posted by Trixie on May 21, 1999 at 21:02:44:
: Part of what I still struggle with is that, for some reason, there still remains some inner "core" within me that cannot let go of "god". I'm not speaking of the Santa Claus With An Evil Sense of Humor god that I conceived within the LDS culture and my protestant chidhood, and I'm not even speaking of a god that rewards, judges, or desires anything from us at all. I guess maybe I'm talking about something abstract, like Plato's "ideals" (or whatever he called them, and maybe it was Aristotle?) that still resides in me. There are still times when, after several years of agnosticism, I can weep at the idea that maybe I'm wrong, and "he" is still "out there". I don't know why, I don't want anything from "him", I'm happy and fulfilled in my life. I can't figure it out. Is it some sort of instinctual longing for the union with our mothers we once had as newborns, before we even realized we were separate beings?
One very strong and undeniable motivation for religious faith is the simple fact that we humans, perhaps alone of all the earth's creatures, are both aware of and capable of resenting our own mortality (I have actually heard some testify in church that the reason they believe is that they don't have enough courage to face the possibility that there is no hereafter). This motivation would exist whether or not there actually is any such thing as a hereafter and even whether God exists or not. This is what Voltaire meant when he said, "if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him." Ironically, religious authorities often cite this quotation from Voltaire (a confirmed atheist until he died) as a supporting argument for God's existence--which is just the opposite of what Voltaire intended by that remark! What Voltaire was trying to get across was that we humans often would rather believe comforting fictions of our own invention than honestly face disturbing realities. All successful medical quacks, mystics and other charlatans, both religious and secular, are masters at exploiting our deeply ingrained desire to believe that which comforts us. This is what makes placebo effect possible.
The unreliability of subjective, intuitive faith alone as an indicator of truth is made manifestly obvious by the undeniable fact that there are millions of people who accept on faith a wide variety of mutually incompatible and often nonsensical beliefs. The simple fact that there are so many different belief systems, no two of which entirely agree even on fundamentals, yet whose adherents all claim to have arrived at what they firmly believe to be absolute truth via subjective faith in divine revelation, is the strongest imaginable evidence of the unreliability of that approach to discerning any truth, religious or otherwise. To deny that evidence is like looking straight at the Sun at high noon on a cloudless summer day and insisting that it is dark. Consequently, the insistance that a particular belief or belief system can only be accepted on subjective faith, regardless of what is indicated by the available objective evidence or the lack of it, is actually a very damaging admission! Nothing is more deservedly suspect than doctrines that can only be justified by invoking the claim of divine authority for them.
I think it was Mark Twain who first defined religious faith as the capacity to believe what one knows is not true. I'm not quite that cynical myself, though it seems to be an accurate description of the faith of the more extreme fundamentalists who continue to cling, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to such nonsense as flat and motionless earth or one that is only a few thousand years old or to belief in a worldwide flood that submerged even the highest mountains and destroyed all mankind and all land creatures not aboard an impossibly large wooden boat.
A more balanced view is that of Albert Einstein (if I am not mistaken) who held that reason without faith is lame, and faith without reason is blind. I can agree with that conclusion, though I don't claim to have achieved the optimum balance between faith and reason. I will probably be working on that as long as I live. I do know, however, that if I had to choose one or the other of those two extremes, I would rather be lame than blind!
Gunnar