Last week I had started something I’ll continue here and in one more article.  I had argued that we all have the right to believe what get us through the night.  I called that the Right to Believe.  I also argued that, collectively we need to be able to be able to deploy unfettered the most productive methods available for figuring out what’s true. I’m calling that the Need to Know.

The conflict between the Right to Believe and the Need to Know plays out in lots of arenas, the most prominent of which is the conflict between religion and science.

I then described two classic approaches to resolving the conflict.  One I’ll call the Egalitarian Approach, which argues that science has no grounds for claiming to be any better at discovering what we need to know than any other source of belief.   I countered that the proof is in the pudding.  Ideas with origins in science have tended overwhelmingly to have more significant consequences. While egalitarians might give lip service to religion and science having equal power, in practice no one acts like this is so. The most staunch anti-Darwinist intelligent design proponents still visit doctors when they are ill. We believe what we like, but on practical matters we trust science far more.

The other, which I’ll call the Parallelist Approach argues that since ideas of scientific origin only ever address what is, and never what should be, they operate independently of and neatly parallel to beliefs, which are about what should be.  I countered that since ideas of scientific origin are human products, they are never neatly separated from values.  If  a scientist says “cigarettes cause cancer,” as someone lights one up, this strictly descriptive statement has immediate consequences for values.


The core issue here has to do with the relationship between ideas’ origins and their consequences.  We intuit that the conflict would be resolved either if, as the Egalitarian Approach argues, we don’t have to distinguish between ideas of scientific or non-scientific origin, or if, alternatively, as the Parallelist Approach argues, somehow we don’t have to sort out ideas’ consequences because they automatically take care of themselves.

The Egalitarians have their greatest champions among religious people, and the Parallelists have their greatest champions among scientists.  We can therefore imagine this attempt at conflict resolution:

Egalitarian believer:  Look, I don’t mind if ideas with scientific origins have consequences. I just think their consequences should be no different from the consequences of ideas of any origin.

Parallelist scientist:  I can’t go along with that, but I can make room for your beliefs even though they don’t have scientific origins. You should be free to have such ideas, so long as they don’t have any practical consequences.

Neither of these are workable solutions so last week, I proposed another.

All ideas have practical consequences, and in practice we all employ some combination of scientific and non-scientific ideas.  If we could all admit to this (and if you’re reading any of current wealth of popular social science, admitting to this is the scientific thing to do.) then we could start to use our gullibility strategically.  We could venture forth more consciously and conscientiously in the pursuit of what I’ve called Optimal Illusion:  believing untrue things and discerningly enjoying their consequences.

So rather than this kind of dialog:

Believer:  The bible is the literal truth. That’s why it guides my life.

Scientist:  It’s not true, it shouldn’t guide your life and it doesn’t either because you don’t really live by everything it says.

Believer:  You don’t know that.

Scientist: You’re an idiot.

We could have dialogues like this:

Believer:  The bible was probably written by some people, not God, and yet I get a lot of value out of imagining that it was written by God. It gives me hope and I think it’s helping me to minimize some bad habits of mine. So I believe it even though I recognize that it’s not accurate.

Scientist:  Well, right on. I have ideas I believe like that too. And on practical life and death matters you end up taking a scientific approach?

Believer:  Yeah of course, though actually I think my untrue beliefs help me with the life and death issues too.  I mean I have to maintain hope and this is my tradition for doing so, so they’re practical too.  But no, you’re right, I do think that there are a bunch of practical issues where I should just leave my beliefs out of it.

Scientist:  Yup, where to draw that line? That’s the live issue isn’t it?  The origins of ideas should make a difference to what consequences those ideas have, but it’s up to us to figure out where they’re useful and where they aren’t.  At least we agree on that, right?

Believer:  Yes, that is the issue.  Pursuit of the optimal illusions.

This may seem to imposes all of the concession on believers. They have to surrender their argument that their ideas should be allowed unlimited consequences.  But there is a concession by scientifically minded too. They have to concede that, like all people they also rely on ideas whose origins are not in science.

I don’t think it’s easy for either side to make the concession here.  Still, though we don’t admit it, we’ve already made a lot of progress in this direction.  The scientific community doesn’t bar true believers from enjoying the benefits of their bounty, and churches don’t bar scientists from membership.

There are, no doubt, limits to one’s ability to do believe untrue things. Except in my dreams I can’t believe that my parents are still alive or that we’ve brought climate change under control.  My BS detector steps in and stops me. But I can believe all day long that my life has lots of universal meaning even though there’s a better chance it doesn’t.  Indeed the scientific approach has given us ample evidence to conclude that there is no grand purpose in the universe at the scale relevant to our little lives. And yet scientists and believers alike make up purposes that they have enormous consequences.

We all find what we could call oxymoronically, “our hand-made God-given purposes,” or “Our God-given purposes that we make up for ourselves.” If we could just admit it, we could manage the conflict between the Right to Believe and the Need to Know, much more smoothly.

So repeat after me: “That’s my fiction and I’m sticking to it.”

I’ve left a mess here. There are all sorts of issues I glossed over.  For example what exactly is science and why do I keep talking about it as a monolithic entity?  And what do I mean when I say that an idea has its origins in science when so many scientific ideas originate in non-scientific intuitions.  These issues aren’t lost on me.  I’ve written about them elsewhere.  They’re just isn’t room for them here.

I’ll end with a few quotes that relate to this potential for admitting to believing useful but inaccurate things.

First a quote from this week’s New Yorker profile of  the graphic novelist superstar,  Neil Gaiman.  Gaiman, who is famous for his fantasy graphic novels and children’s books including Coraline and The Sandman grew up in a family of devout scientologists.

“I’m terribly good at believing things, but I’m really good at believing things when I need them,” he said, “which in my case tends to be if I’m writing about them.” If he had not been a writer, he says, he would have wanted to design religions. “I’d have a little shop, and people would phone up or come into the shop and they’d say ‘I’d like a religion,’” he said.  “And I’d say, “Cool, O.K. Where do you stand on guilt, and how do you want to fund it? And would you like sort of a belief in the universe as a huge beneficent organ?  Or would you like something more complex?’  And they’d say, ‘Oh, we’d like God to be really big on guilt.’ And I’d say, “O.K., how does Wednesday sound to you as a sacred day?”

And here’s something pertinent from Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass:

`Oh, don’t go on like that!’ cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. `Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come to-day. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!’

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. `Can you keep from crying by considering things?’ she asked.

`That’s the way it’s done,’ the Queen said with great decision: `nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let’s consider your age to begin with — how old are you?’

`I’m seven and a half, exactly.’

`You needn’t say “exactly”,’ the Queen remarked. `I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’

`I ca’n't believe that!’ said Alice.

`Ca’n't you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. `Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. `There’s no use trying,’ she said `one ca’n't believe impossible things.’

`I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!’

And finally a poem wrote a few years ago when I discovered to my delight that I was capable of strategic gullibility:

On the origins of the specious

Can musicians feel the music,

Though they know the notes by name?

Can athletes play a death match

though they know it’s just a game?

Could Vargas feel the heat and lust

From a pinup he had painted?

When materialists know it’s glandular

Are their love affairs more tainted?

When you know it’s lights on silver screen

Do the movies seem more pallid?

If you see through God to his creator

Does your creed become less valid?

No, apparently we are able to both see through and believe

What an awesome gift from God is this, our power to self-deceive.