The Question of Belief

At the Belmont Club, a discussion arose concerning the belief in God, and how the lack thereof correlates with the weakness in Western society.

My response:

I wonder whether believing in God, is, in fact, a necessary condition for righteous action, or whether it is merely a handy mental shortcut that resembles but does not equal the truth. I've said this before, but once again it is pertinent to the discussion.

Paul Berman, in his book Terror and Liberalism, had this to say about the anti-war French Socialists of the thirties, and how they thought the true enemies of peace were the warmongers and profiteers of the French right; in their eyes, these men, not Hitler, were provoking war:

Those were the arguments on the anti-war left, the political arguments. But the political arguments rested on something deeper, too--a philosophical belief, profound, large, and attractive, which was reassuring instead of terrifying. It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.

The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith in universal rationality...That belief was the other face of liberalism--not liberalism as the advocacy of freedom, rationality, progress, and the acceptance of uncertainty, but liberalism as blind faith in a predetermined future, liberalism as a fantasy of a strictly rational world, liberalism as denial...

The totalitarian movements arise because of failures in liberal civilization, but they flourish because of still other failures in liberal civilization, and if they go on flourishing, it is because of still more failures--one liberal failure after another.

The refusal to believe that pathological mass movements are possible--movements with no rational causes, movements that cannot be addressed with rational solutions--this is the failure of liberal society that allows evil to flourish. Is the denial a godless one, or is it merely the refusal to look at history empirically?

We look at the anti-war left, we see they are godless, and we assume causation. We look at the resolute right, we see they are devout, and we assume still more.

But how to explain someone like me? I can recognize evil, though I do not recognize a God. I believe in empiricism, but I do not have blind faith in rationality. I believe in blind physical and moral evolution, but I also believe in progress, and better. I look at history, and have no problem seeing pathology.

My eyes and my memory allow me to discern, and in that way they make me selfish, and give me the courage to discriminate. But it is an enlightened selfishness, not the drivel put forth by a novice of Nietzsche, and it is a rational discrimination, acceptance bleeding into tolerance bleeding into condemnation, and that which is condemned is that which I seek to destroy. My enlightened selfishness forces me to accept that my well-being is inextricably tied to the well-being of others; because there are masses of enemies who would destroy me, I must subsume myself into an even stronger mass. I accept any that believe likewise, that are willing to die for my freedom because I am willing to die for theirs, but in the end it is still selfishness. Without this nation of exceptional virtue, without its strength, I would be vulnerable and defenseless. And so I defend her unapologetically, and unabashedly clamor for her success.

I arrived at none of this by way of God. I know many others who feel the same, who do not need God to discern good and evil, who do not need religion to have the courage to do what needs to be done. We look around us, at the wealth, and decency, and opportunity of this land, and we simply know.

I guess a more precise statement would be that I arrived at my beliefs without also having a belief in God. I do not factor a deity into my analysis.

Whether or not God is causing me to arrive at these conclusions, or allowing me to arrive at these conclusions, is quite beyond my ability to know, though I doubt it. Descartes rejected "God the Deceiver", and I tend to doubt "God the Self-Denier".

As to why, who knows? The Anthropic Principle suggest that, in an infinite probability theater, it is unhelpful to ask why, because "why" means nothing more than "is". There is life in this universe because there is life in this universe. We can ask why because in this particular iteration of the universe we exist to ask why.

I never claim to be certain. But if an idea doesn't rise to the level of belief for lack of evidence, i.e. the existence of God, I discount it in my analyses. I could be wrong, but then again, so could you.

Being an empiricist, if I am to be intellectually honest I must defend the virtue of Judeo-Christian ethics because I celebrate the obvious results of their supremacy. I also am forced to concede that such ethics were probably a condition antecedent to our present situation.

Where I tend to disagree is on the issue of reality. That we have developed a useful mental construct to enable man to live with man does not mean that construct is true. Such ethical narratives can be necessary without being fact. But by necessary I mean necessary to get to this point, this time, not necessary metaphysically (an ethical version of the Anthropic Principle).

It is not curiosity that kills the cat, however the saying goes. It is exposure that kills the cat. Exposure to reality, exposure to phenomena for which it was defenseless or unprepared, that destroys it. Curiosity may be the proximate cause, but "reality" is always the cause-in-fact.

The same goes for belief and memes. They may be the proximate cause of ethical development or civilizational success, but the cause-in-fact is much more interesting. My belief that I can fly may make me leap from a building, but the cause-in-fact for my death must take into account neurological posture, prior experience, gravity, biology, etc.

The same principle applies to beliefs in general. Beliefs can correlate with reality without equaling reality (which is how I see Christianity--supplying the correct form without supplying the correct reason). The closer to equaling reality they are, the better they enable man to exercise power and survive. While man may have developed an unbelievably complicated mental universe, nothing can change the fact that we are mere animals, moving through and affecting reality, arbitrary in general, but precious in the particular.