Also, you write, "Here’s what the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in his famous Pensées, counseled to those who are desperate to believe in God but can’t find the switch in their brain: just go through the motions.....But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing."
Ah, spoken like someone who's never seriously grappled with faith*, or with one's own belief in unbelief. Speaking as a former atheist, I think what Pascal is describing is a process more like learning how to dance than learning how to debate. When you first learn how to dance, you may consciously think that you can't dance, so you awkwardly try to do the moves. If you do them a lot, you get better at it, but you still have to constantly think about what you're doing. Until one day, you're just moving gracefully and in time without thinking about it at all. At some point, you can even reflect on dancing while you are dancing, and never miss a step. You can forget that you are dancing, while never forgetting how to dance. You can even think back on how it was true that once you couldn't dance, and now a different thing is true, because you are now a dancer. You just had to practice, and then your understanding of the truth changed. This isn't self-deception; it's a deeper kind of self-reflection.
*Forgive me if I'm wrong here. I don't mean to assume too much about your religious background.
Interesting to know! I apologize for my presumption and am happy to stand corrected.
I was a committed atheist as a teenager through much of my 20s, and started to consider religion seriously through an evolutionary psychology lens in my 20s (i.e., the "what are the selective advantages of faith?" kind of thing).
That's fascinating. But I presume you didn't embrace religious faith because of its social/evolutionary benefits? At some point you must've concluded that, regardless of its benefits, its metaphysical worldview is really true? (And no worries about your presumption, no offense taken).
In Sweden there are a lot of people right now advocating that one should become a part of the Christian community and behave like a Christian even though you don't believe in a God that cares for individual human beings, eternal damnation and whatnot. Attendance in the Lutheran Church is way up.
Yes. I did eventually come around to the idea that Christianity is really true--or at least, is the best approximation of the truth* that is available to me. This is both for personal experience reasons that inform the dancing metaphor above**, and for a reason derived from social/evolutionary benefits: belief works, and a key way humans have always been able to figure out what is true is that truer models of the world work (even when we do not understand them), and false models don't. For myself personally, I'll go a step further and say that I think Christianity is a better model than belief generically, in part because it works better, and in a more surprising way, than I think belief generically does.
*"Approximation of the truth" here is not the same thing as saying I think there are parts that are false; it's saying that humans are limited in their ability to understand things, and as such the models we have must be oversimplified. This is analogous to the orbital model of the atom or the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
**Which I get is deeply unsatisfying in an argument since we can't share experiences with other people except through the medium of language, and because people rewrite their memories and delude themselves about what they really experienced all the time. While all that is true, we obviously cannot dismiss all personal experience as being false, because then, um, where would this entire "let's know the truth" project even be?
Also, you write, "Here’s what the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in his famous Pensées, counseled to those who are desperate to believe in God but can’t find the switch in their brain: just go through the motions.....But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing."
Ah, spoken like someone who's never seriously grappled with faith*, or with one's own belief in unbelief. Speaking as a former atheist, I think what Pascal is describing is a process more like learning how to dance than learning how to debate. When you first learn how to dance, you may consciously think that you can't dance, so you awkwardly try to do the moves. If you do them a lot, you get better at it, but you still have to constantly think about what you're doing. Until one day, you're just moving gracefully and in time without thinking about it at all. At some point, you can even reflect on dancing while you are dancing, and never miss a step. You can forget that you are dancing, while never forgetting how to dance. You can even think back on how it was true that once you couldn't dance, and now a different thing is true, because you are now a dancer. You just had to practice, and then your understanding of the truth changed. This isn't self-deception; it's a deeper kind of self-reflection.
*Forgive me if I'm wrong here. I don't mean to assume too much about your religious background.
As it happens, you are wrong on this count: I was a devout Catholic until I was about 13 years old. ;-)
Interesting to know! I apologize for my presumption and am happy to stand corrected.
I was a committed atheist as a teenager through much of my 20s, and started to consider religion seriously through an evolutionary psychology lens in my 20s (i.e., the "what are the selective advantages of faith?" kind of thing).
That's fascinating. But I presume you didn't embrace religious faith because of its social/evolutionary benefits? At some point you must've concluded that, regardless of its benefits, its metaphysical worldview is really true? (And no worries about your presumption, no offense taken).
In Sweden there are a lot of people right now advocating that one should become a part of the Christian community and behave like a Christian even though you don't believe in a God that cares for individual human beings, eternal damnation and whatnot. Attendance in the Lutheran Church is way up.
Very interesting!
Yes. I did eventually come around to the idea that Christianity is really true--or at least, is the best approximation of the truth* that is available to me. This is both for personal experience reasons that inform the dancing metaphor above**, and for a reason derived from social/evolutionary benefits: belief works, and a key way humans have always been able to figure out what is true is that truer models of the world work (even when we do not understand them), and false models don't. For myself personally, I'll go a step further and say that I think Christianity is a better model than belief generically, in part because it works better, and in a more surprising way, than I think belief generically does.
*"Approximation of the truth" here is not the same thing as saying I think there are parts that are false; it's saying that humans are limited in their ability to understand things, and as such the models we have must be oversimplified. This is analogous to the orbital model of the atom or the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
**Which I get is deeply unsatisfying in an argument since we can't share experiences with other people except through the medium of language, and because people rewrite their memories and delude themselves about what they really experienced all the time. While all that is true, we obviously cannot dismiss all personal experience as being false, because then, um, where would this entire "let's know the truth" project even be?