Thursday, October 29, 2009

Religion, Part 2

As we said, religion is both primary and transcendent. What you believe about your religion probably takes precedence over all else, and it probably provides meaning or context for all else. Religious belief is mental ground zero. And as we also said, because religious belief relies on faith rather than logic and experience, it is different from most of our empirical approach to life in general.

This might be a good analogy. Imagine that you have a headache, a pounding in the back of your brain that won’t go away. You visit the doctor, who performs all the possible tests and discovers that, beyond any doubt, there is nothing wrong with you. What happens when the doctor tells you this? Does your head stop hurting? Of course not. Whatever you feel, you feel, and someone telling you that you don’t feel it is patently absurd. That you feel the pain is incontrovertible, even if, objectively, there is no reason for you to feel the pain. Just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean your head still doesn’t hurt.

Philosophers have juggled around the complexities of what is objective reality and what is subjective perception since the first powwow in the cave lo those many years ago. We intuit that there probably is an objective reality, but we realize that each individual brain may perceive that reality differently. Each individual brain has no ability to know anything beyond its own perceptions. Thus we piece together what we think might be objective reality by pooling our subjective perceptions. (And this can, at times, not be a good thing: study your Foucault, for instance, if you want to understand the nature of relativism in the 20th Century.) We are each a relativistic brain possessing its own share of objective reality.

The nature of knowledge, meanwhile, is variable. For instance, I know that Nightingale McQueen played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind.” You come along and tell me, no, it was Butterfly McQueen. I realize that you are right and I was wrong. Henceforth, I will store Butterfly in my brain instead of Nightingale. The thing is, this is just some random piece of information in my brain. I have no investment in it’s being correct or incorrect. I don’t really care. It can be this fact, or that fact. Whichever. It is just an item on the shelf, replaceable by another item, if the need arises. I do not define myself by what is one these shelves; they’re just storage areas for data.

Another form of knowledge is derivational. That is, I have worked it out on the basis of various premises. It is the result of my own active mental processes. For instance, I have studied anthropology, and know all the various branches of early hominid. I can name every fossil line from the missing link to Sarah Palin. The problem is, all of a sudden they discover a new skeleton in the Olduvai Gorge, and the whole schema of human evolution needs to be rewritten. Now, this may be harder for me to accept than the Nightingale Butterfly problem, because while that was just some random fact, the process of evolution is one that I have studied in depth and one on which I have reached various conclusions. Still, when the new skeleton comes along, I can rethink everything I’ve thought before and work that new piece of information into what I already know. After all, the accumulation of knowledge about this subject before I know about that skeleton was also a process of adding new information and evaluating it, and I’m just continuing the process. Even when it requires a total paradigm shift, I can handle it. It is the rational part of my brain doing its job, which is reasoning: new information, new thinking or perhaps rethinking. Whatever. It may be harder for me to make the shift for the new skeleton and a total new picture of evolution than it was with Nightingale Butterfly, which was simply a substitution of one fact (erroneous) for another (correct), but I can do it eventually. My investment in my prior knowledge was deeper than N/B, in that I had worked for it, but it was not self-definitional. Even if my job were anthropologist, I could make the shift, because that’s part of an anthropologist’s job, to update the paradigms when a new skeleton is found. In fact, it’s the so-called scientific method, to test ideas against the evidence at hand. The scientific method pretty much explains how the brain does its rational thinking on a philosophical level, whether or not we’re talking about science.

So, we see two types of knowledge, simple and complex. But both are flexible. Unlike the pain in my head, which I felt, these were simply pieces of information in my head, mere thoughts that I knew. Tell me that they’re not there, so to speak, and I have no problem with it. But tell me that the pain in my head is not there? Sorry, my head still hurts. Even though it is only what I think rather than what I have had demonstrated to me as true, my brain still accepts it as true, and more to the point, true beyond analysis or refutation. If I feel the pain, the pain is there.

Religious belief, based as it is on faith rather than rational process, is like the pain in the head, not because it’s real or unreal (that’s not my point) but that we feel it rather than rationally deduce it. At the point where we move from reason to faith, we leave reason behind. We believe what we believe because we believe it. Religion is not random facts like N/B, or knowledge we’ve worked out like science. It is things that we believe because we believe them, and because we choose to believe them. And, because they are prime, transcendent beliefs, they are probably even more unshakeable than that pain in our head. What it boils down to is, not only is religion the most important thing to many people, it is also a thing that is not subject to rational evaluation. This is why you can’t argue with someone about their religion. People believe their beliefs because they believe them, and they are of primary importance to them. You come along with some mere rational objection, and the religious person doesn’t care. Their beliefs, formed by faith rather than rationality, are not subject to rational evaluation. It’s pointless to attempt such an evaluation. You’re the doctor telling me my head doesn’t hurt. Sorry, but it does hurt. You can’t tell me otherwise.

Remarkably enough, despite the fact that religious belief is non-rational (it is not irrational, which is something else altogether, which I’m not going to go into because I’m not arguing about the content of religion but the nature of belief, which are two different things entirely), most people on the planet are religious, and do hold religious beliefs. This is rather curious, in a way, and points to a few possibilities. Maybe there’s something about being human that requires spirituality, or maybe spirituality is an objective reality and our religions are our ways of approaching that inherently unknowable concept. It doesn’t matter. The point is, most people do believe, whatever it is they believe in, and whether or not what they believe in is true.

With one tiny exception. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes. But, damn, there are an awful lot of atheists in debate rounds. Ask these people to evaluate something with a religious aspects, and they’re at a total loss. They simply cannot get past the rational/objective: “You believe in what? That’s preposterous.”

Well, yeah. It’s faith. It is non-rational, by definition. But, young padowan, you’d better get it into your head that this doesn’t make it any less real to the people who believe in it (who, by the way, might be right). And so often non-believing debaters want to attack the belief rather than the structures that contain it.

In this path lies madness.

[To be continued.]

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