This was an essay I wrote for a class I took this semester. Posted here for posterity.
Case Study: Is It Possible To Reconcile Faith and Rationality?
I am a Christian, and that makes me weird.My circle of friends consists primarily of rationalists. I am the only one amongst them who believes in any sort of God, and amongst them I am also the only one who is religious. Religion is not particularly fashionable amongst rational people.
If I claim to be a rational person (which is how I found myself
with this group of friends in the first place), then how am I to justify my
belief in the God of my religion?
This essay attempts to use some of the tools taught over the course of this semester, in GEM1902G, to answer this question.
Proof and God
Let's tackle the first problem with any rational approach to theism: i.e. the fact that — despite the best attempts of many of my fellow Christians — the existence of God is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Since God is supposed to exist outside of nature (and its trappings of space and time), one cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God using methods known to science.That is not to say that there haven't been such attempts. Historically, Christians have deployed all sorts of arguments for the existence of God. Take creation, for example. Christians have argued for centuries that the complexity of life justifies the existence of an intelligent designer. This was all well and good until Darwin came along and demonstrated that the explanation for this complexity was a lot simpler: that evolution, as a biological mechanism, enabled life to evolve incrementally towards what the biologist Richard Dawkins calls 'adaptive perfection'[1]. Dawkins and his ilk thus argue that Christians have no claim to the idea that God exists.
But there is a problem with this train of thought. It is not true that the complexity of life justifies the existence of God, as the Christians have argued. Conversely, the existence of evolution does not, as Dawkins would argue, preclude the existence of God. It strikes me that the debate surrounding evolution is only strong enough to deal with the mechanics of creation, not on the presence of creation itself.
What do I mean by this? Well, if science says that evolution was the mechanism with which we came to be, who, then, can stop us from arguing that God used evolution to create life? And if science says that the universe was created via the Big Bang, then what is to stop the Christians from saying that God created the universe via that exact phenomenon?
Science is silent on things that exist outside of nature. It is muted when dealing with non-observable, non-falsifiable hypotheses. Because the existence of God is not falsifiable, science is of no help to us here. It cannot say anything strong on the existence of God.
God and Correspondence
The correspondence theory of truth is thus of limited value when it comes to God. Even if we do attribute certain phenomena to him, we can never really know for sure.This attribution problem plagues all the other arguments that may fall into the correspondence theory of truth. For instance, some theists argue that our sense of right and wrong comes from God. (This is known as the moral argument for God.) This, too, is subject to the attribution problem — even if a scientific explanation is found for our moral senses (and there is good reason to believe that one will eventually be found — see recent advances in evolutionary psychology), theists may still attribute this mechanism to God.
This problem of attribution is applicable to any discovery in science. So we're left with where we began: if attribution is a problem, how else might we be able to reason about God?
God and Coherence
The coherence theory of truth gives us a possible alternative: we might reason about God by treating the belief in God as an axiom. When seen in this light, it becomes possible for us to build an internally-consistent system of beliefs that include the existence of God.A friend of mine, an agnostic, told me that she grew to understand her religious friends as people who started with a different set of base beliefs. This finally gave her the ability to understand where they were coming from (and, though this was left unsaid, in turn saved them from being seen by her as completely irrational creatures).
Perhaps this is a good rationalist justification for God. If science is silent on God, then one way of reconciling God with reason is to say that you simply choose to believe in Him. After accepting the axiom of God into your system of rationality, you may then proceed to weed out beliefs that are inconsistent with both belief in God and belief in Science. This makes things simpler for the thinking Christian.
God and Consensus
If enough people believed in these axioms, we might perhaps reach a consensus that God exists, and that it is not an intellectual 'crime' to believe in His existence.I, am, of course, being glib. Consensus is a very shallow way of validating the belief in God — just because everyone believes in something does not necessarily mean that the thing is true.
But the consensus theory of truth leads us to an interesting idea: if people all across the world, for most of history have agreed to cling to God, then perhaps we should not discount it so quickly in pursuit of pure rationality.
There are two ways of looking at the prevalence of religion: the first is that men are largely irrational creatures. This is — unkind as it is — probably true. The second way of looking at this is to conclude that there must be something to religiousity that appeals to basic human nature.
There is some evidence to support this claim. Anthropologist Richard Sosis, for instance, examined the history of 200 communes in the United States in the 19th century[2] and found that just 6 percent of secular communes were still functioning 20 years after their funding, as opposed to 39 percent of the religious communes.
The difference? Religious communes could demand more sacrifice from its members. The number of sacrifices demanded, such as giving up alcohol, or fasting, or cutting ties from outsiders, was linearly correlated with how long the communes lasted. But for secular communes, Sosis found that there was no relationship between sacrifice and longevity. Most of them failed within eight years.
Sosis then argued that the rituals and laws necessary for the health of a group work best when they are sacratized. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, especially if this sacredness binds people together. But secular settings fail to mask the arbitrariness of social conventions, making it harder for the group to cohere.
Interestingly enough, anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich showed in a 2010 paper[3] that the development of religion has been driven largely by competition amongst groups. They argued that groups that managed to put their gods to good use had an advantage over groups that didn't, and the groups that didn't soon began to adapt these religious ideas for their own use.
This is in line with Sosis's findings. If gods help groups outcompete other groups, then it makes sense for competing groups to adapt these ideas
for the benefit of their own group. Gods can be helpful as a form of social glue.
The idea that consensus on a religion is beneficial for the group is not without merit.
God and Pragmatism
But if there is a rational argument for God at the group level, then what of the individual? Perhaps the most rational, personal argument for God is that of pragmatism: it benefits me, therefore it is good enough for me that God is real.Religion does have its benefits, after all. For all the claimed injustices and horrors that intellectuals have attributed to religion, religion on a personal level is a pretty useful thing to have.
Christianity, for instance, has provided me with a clear moral code. It has also provided me with a social support system — that at its best is tolerant, and kind, and accepting (although it is very often not). Most importantly, however, Christianity gives me a mental framework with which to make sense of the world. It compels me to forgive those who have done nasty things to me, because of the belief that I am no better a person, at my core, than those who have wronged me. (The Christian terminology for this being 'everyone is a sinner, but God loves you anyway').
If Christianity makes it easier for me to be a better person, who can fault me for my belief in it?
The problem with rationality
There is one problem with this entire essay, though.In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks of a study he conducted in 1993[4], where he examined the moral judgments that people make when exposed to a series of moral conundrums.
A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it okay for them to make love?
Under interrogation, most subjects in the experiment agree that these things are wrong. But, with no demonstrable harm in these situations, they found it difficult to explain why.
Haidt argues that this difficulty did not stem from a lack of reasoning. He argues that people do reason. But like psychologist Daniel Kahneman[5], Haidt argues that human reason works like a 'press secretary': justifying our acts and snap judgments to others. (He calls this 'post-hoc rationalizations'). In the example of the incest question, for instance, subjects relentlessly marshal arguments against the act, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes their arguments, simply because they believe it to be wrong.
Haidt then explains this phenomenon in terms of evolution. Reason, he posits, evolved to help us exert influence over others, not to help us find truth. Or, as he puts it eloquently, 'reason evolved to help us spin, not learn'. People make judgments first, then come up with rational arguments to support their views.
Similarly, this entire essay can be seen as my attempt to do a post-hoc rationalization of my belief in Christianity. I believe Christianity to be true, and I believe, as a rational person, that there are rational reasons for thinking so. Naturally, I attempt to justify my beliefs.
Perhaps, then, the logical conclusion here is to say that reason is not the perfect ideal that my friends and I make it out to be. In this cynical view, what GEM1902G has provided me is simply a set of tools that — if I am so willing — I may employ to justify myself.
I have shown here the existence of a rational, truth-based argument for God. But I have also, you might say, engaged in an indulgent post-hoc rationalization of my Christianess.
I am slightly troubled by this. But as I have (rather competently) demonstrated rational reasons for believing in God, I think my irrational use of rationality can be set aside for the purpose of this essay, to be picked up on and brooded upon at a latter date. I am, after all, only human.
References
[1] - Time: God vs Science[2] - Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239.
[3] - Atran, S., & Henrich, J. (2010). The evolution of religion: How cognitive by-products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition generate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory, 5(1), 18-30.
[4] - Haidt, J., Koller, S. H., & Dias, M. G. (1993). Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 613.
[5] - Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
