Why Not Just Believe in Belief?

My last post, in which I agreed with Richard Dawkins that truth matters, raised a couple of good questions: What is wrong with "belief in belief?" and, Did I really mean to say "that morality only has value if it is based in something that is empirically true"? (See here and here, and the conversation between those two comments.)

I'll start with the first question, which will (quite conveniently) provide a basis for handling the second one as well. "ordinary seeker" wrote,

"I'm thinking more that belief in something gives meaning to life; regardless of whether what one believes is 'true.' Thus, I believe in the value of belief. But, I guess belief for belief's sake (and not because the belief provided meaning) would be meaningless."

I heartily agree with part of what ordinary seeker is saying here--that it's a good thing to find meaning in life. But it's difficult. Our culture says there are "facts" and there are "values." Facts are those things that can be empirically verified--they are the stuff of science. Everything else is "values," and whether values are factual or not seems not to be a matter even for discussion. Values are what people choose. They're not facts. Dawkins and Krauss illustrated for us very well, as quoted in that previous post, that the things through which we typically find meaning have been disconnected from reality: they are "orthogonal" or "tangential," meaning they are completely disconnected from verifiable truths or very nearly so. Questions of meaning are "values," disconnected from "fact."

But we have this pesky drive within us to find meaning anyway, don't we? What do we do with it? Most likely we'll accept the reigning view of knowledge, and we'll believe we can have values but they cannot be the stuff of truth or fact. From that we're free to construct whatever meaning we can.

How can I say the next thing now? For I feel genuine grief over this, and I doubt I'll express it the way I feel it. We must have meaning, but how empty, how disconnected, how vain the search is, when we have no good place to look! We are treasure hunters with no map, no Treasure Island even, not even any real confidence that this gold we seek is anything more than a vain rumor. But we can't stop hunting and digging. How much of our culture's confusion comes from this misdirected search? We follow the glamorous lives of celebrities; but Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are just the most recent of many who have proved that you can have it all while having nothing. We seek power and position and find loneliness there. We seek real connection with other persons, but settle for sex and serial relationships. We rely television, or pornography, or philosophy, or philanthropy, as palliatives for our emptiness.

And it's all in search of a good thing, a sense of fullness about life: purpose, meaning, value, and direction; to rise above that empty naturalistic evolutionary view of humanity that says we are just the result of purposeless, meaningless, valueless, directionless processes.

One option is just to believe--to believe that there is meaning. I can see the attraction of that, for by it we can tell ourselves we have an answer. We can live and love and work for ends that we have chosen to believe in, to which we assign meaning regardless of what the scientistic view may tell us ("scientistic" here referring to a view of knowledge that says there is nothing we can know except that which can be discovered by methods of science or similar methods). If there were no better answer than that, I would choose that one.

It's what the existentialists told us to do in the early- to mid-20th century. The existentialist approach rather petered out, however, and morphed into postmodernism, which I consider to be both more interesting and more confused at the same time. Postmodernism, like existentialism, accepts that there is no grand meaning "out there" that we can discover and live by, and it too says we have our own decisions to make. It's different in that it is more likely to say that our decisions--in fact, our language about these decisions--"constitutes" reality, the only reality there is, and that reality is really different for different people. Not perceptions, not memories, not interpretations, but actual reality is constituted in our language and (I think also) our beliefs.

So from these viewpoints we have reasons, or at least motivation, for believing in belief. Existentialism says there is no meaning but we can choose to live as if there is. Postmodernism says there is no reality except for what we construct, so we can construct one in which there is meaning and we can follow it. Both take it that this is the best we can hope for.

I think you can see how all this discussion applies to the second question we started with, too: it's not just about meaning, it's about morality and ethics. The scientistic view provides no ethical information for us, but we (or our communities) can choose our ethics anyway, and we can believe in them.

I'll answer that second question now, and it will lead back toward a response to "belief in belief." No, I did not "mean to say that morality only has value if it is based in something that is empirically true" (emphasis added). Here is what I would rather say: Morality has value because it is based in something that is true. It is based in the fundamental ground of all reality: God, the creator of all things. It is based in the way we were designed by God to thrive and prosper. (Thus I believe that the moral actions of a non-believer in God can be good and have value, for they too are grounded in God and his design, whether or not the person recognizes that it is so.)

Now I would also say this: the value of morality can only be explained or grounded if it is explained or grounded in something larger than ourselves. The same is true of meaning in life. Here's why. Consider a possible world (as philosophers use that term) that is just like ours, except that the evolutionary, scientistic viewpoint is uncontroversially true and universally believed. We would all create or develop our personal meanings and ethics in this world as in this one, because we would be driven to do so as in this world; but we would know they are choices snatched from the wind, with no grounding in any reality. We could not say that our choices were adequate to validate themselves, because we would know that we ourselves are just what happened to pop up out of purposeless, meaningless, valueless, directionless processes. Something else could have popped up as easily; the only thing that makes is special is that we happened to pop up and the other thing didn't. We would all know that, as we believe in our beliefs, we are believing in something that is just as accidental as we are.

The Christian theistic alternative to this is so much more satisfactory! It gives strong place to learning from nature (science, in other words) but it does not entail that scientific knowledge is all there is. It includes knowledge given to us by revelation from God, especially in the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who spoke truly about realities of which science cannot speak. It tells us there is real meaning to life: that God so loved us that he gave his only Son for us (and love is not tangential to reality but basic to it); and that ethics flow from God himself from eternity past, so it matters how well we live. It assures us that we have an eternity ahead of us, so we're not doomed to annihilation individually, and our choices actually will matter a few hundred years from now; and our race is not doomed to annihilation either, so how we treat others will matter for an eternity to come. It tells us that there is good in the universe, and that it is good to seek that good.

Most of all, it tells us that all of this is real. We don't have to bootstrap meaning into our lives. We can discover it as it is revealed by the One who makes that meaning true, for he himself is that meaning.

Posted: Fri - June 22, 2007 at 11:20 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Why Not Just Believe in Belief?

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson