Happiness and Religion are Incompatible

[elfs]

David Sosa, following Nozick's thought experiment on the Matrix, proposes:

Happiness is less like belief, and more like knowledge. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you're mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn't just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

Michael Kingsley writes about Intellectual Honesty

Intellectual honesty is more demanding: It means being truthful about what's going on inside your own head. To start, you shouldn't say anything that you don't believe is true. But that's just to start. Intellectual honesty means that you have a basis for your belief, that you have tested your belief against other beliefs on the same subject, that you have no blinding bias or, at least, have put bias aside as best you can.

PZ Myers, meanwhile, launched a broadside against dishonesty, starting with the accomodation of science and religion as non-overlapping magisteria:

All the evidence is crystal clear right now: the earth is far older than 6,000 years. Evolution is real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true. ... The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars". It shouldn't be "scientists". It shouldn't be "humanists".

All of this reminded me of Harry G. Frankfurt's absolutely wonderful book On Bullshit:

The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. ... For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

What's really going on here is simple, though: the vast majority of people put up with bullshit because it pleases them to do so. The very same mental machinery that leads them to the pleasures of religion makes them vulnerable to bullshit. And people put up with it because it's not lying: the person isn't trying to get away with actually portraying a version of reality, he's just trying to make the current situation beneficial for himself.

Which is what religion does. It's a persistent, self-replicating meme with which we have a relationship, the symbiotic value of which is very much in question. It's as persistent as Lactobacillus. The human mind has been built over the centuries to detect deception, but the detectors are weak when it comes to bullshit, because strong bullshit detectors would empty out the churches, mosques, and synagogues in a heartbeat. The human tolerance for bullshit, as opposed to outright lying, thrives because religion needs it to thrive. The human mind shies away from standing out and calling "bullshit!" because to do so threatens one's place in the tribe.

The question remains, just how necessary is religion, how much do we need to thrive as a species? Can we survive with just the cultural stuff, or do we need ritual? Must we keep that ultimate form of bullshit, supernaturalism?

What's most interesting to me is that the premise of Sosa's article (and Kinsley's) is that knowledge "requires the cooperation of the world beyond you," and that happiness is a form of knowledge, not a form of belief.

In Sosa's formulation, happiness requires authenticity, a consensus of the worthiness of what makes you happy. Pleasure does not. If Sosa's right, then religion is a potential source of pleasure, but not of happiness.

Comments

[codeamazon.livejournal.com]

The evidence that we fundamentally need a group with which to identify (and also other !me) is extensive. Religion is one of the easiest/most flexible ways to do that (and potentially one of the least damaging if you start from the premise that we DO need that herding identification and will find it in one way or another.)

That said, I became religious while studying Physics. My understanding of advanced Physics has led to the only definition of G-d I've ever had faith in, and while it is not a personal G-d, neither is is encompassed by what we currently know of science.

In other words, I think it is the height of arrogance to claim anything not currently encompassed by our scientific knowledge is bullshit, particularly given how much we KNOW we don't know.

What would you (generic) have us call that body of fact, not yet discovered?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Your mistake is calling it a "body of fact," which implies that it is somehow knowledge. It's not: it's conjecture.

Saying "I know I don't know these things" is knowledge about yourself, not about those things.

I would never argue that anything not encompassed by current knowledge is "bullshit"; I just want people to stop lying to themselves and to others about the distinction between knowledge and belief, and stop trying to shore up either with the generation of bullshit.

As I've pointed out before, go into any bookstore and look at the science section, and you'll find massive consensus and correlation; only the fringes and the kooks disagree about anything. (And those two are distinguished between the honest "We don't know what this means" and the bullshitting, "They can't tell you what it means, therefore it means...")

On the other hand, go to the religion section and you'll find dozens of competing points of view, many of them so diametrically and vehemently opposed to the others that you have to wonder if anything coherent lies at the base of all human experience.

[(Anonymous)]

As a one-time physics major who was "strongly discouraged" from taking classes that explored some of the "crackpot ideas" which are now being accepted as fact in Physics, I'd have to disagree with the notion that religion features only a few fringe crackpots and otherwise is in close agreement.

There is a biased belief that science somehow divorces humans from their irrational natures, but it doesn't. We can point to many many theories that were once accepted, then later found to be false. There are currently wildly divergent (and quite heated) sets of belief in many of the border-areas of science (most particularly Physics.) It is only the central cannon which is widely accepted, and even that is generally open to the realization that the domain in which is applies is more limited than we realized. (e.g. Newtonian Physics, which isn't wrong -- but which isn't exactly right either.)

As for G-d, it is irrefutable that there is some set of truth which we have not yet discovered. We KNOW there are things we don't yet know. What the body of unknown knowledge is, how much of it we will eventually discover, how much we're even capable of comprehending are all arguable, but there is SOME body of fact that we do not yet comprehend.

Give me a better name for that than "G-d" and convince me that the astonishing convergence of many religious teachings and modern Physics does NOT suggest that this is why religion strove to capture?

We no longer need a G-d of Thunder, now that we understand storms. I posit that religion, when it is not being used as a weapon for power, is designed to help us interact successfully with the parts of creation we do not yet comprehend.

And, before you say it, Science has certainly been mis-used to help those in power, just as religion has. Research the medical "science" of childbirth and the power dynamics that led to clearly suboptimal practices scream out in neon.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

As for G-d, it is irrefutable that there is some set of truth which we have not yet discovered. We KNOW there are things we don't yet know. What the body of unknown knowledge is, how much of it we will eventually discover, how much we're even capable of comprehending are all arguable, but there is SOME body of fact that we do not yet comprehend.

Give me a better name for that than "G-d" and convince me that the astonishing convergence of many religious teachings and modern Physics does NOT suggest that this is why religion strove to capture?

The problem with using "God" or "god" or "G-d" as a label for "that which we don't comprehend" is that these are not neutral terms... they implicitly refer to some "super person" with "super powers" who creates the universe, creates life, and, for some odd reason, is intimately concerned with matters such as what we do on Sunday, what we eat, or the circumstances under which we rub parts of our bodies up against parts of others' bodies.

We already have a term for that which is not known, a term which doesn't carry all of the above baggage: "the unknown."