faith vs. reason : the final countdown

I was commenting over at Main Street Plaza on a post where the questions were brought up about why faith is bad, why rationality is good, whether we're ever really rational at all, and how (or if) individuals subjectively experience the "supernatural" and how that influences faith and religion.

I had a lot to say and wrote a crazy long comment which I decided to turn into a blog post.

It started with the following statement by one of the commenters:

We all use reason, but I weigh supernatural experience (as experienced by me) more heavily as evidence than you all.

Well that's obviously true, as I think that what is termed a "supernatural" experience isn't anything of the sort, and therefore isn't any sort of evidence for gods or the supposed positive effects of faith. I weigh it as having exactly zero evidentiary usefulness towards explaining reality, except in as far as the experience itself can be explained by reason - which I'll touch on in a bit.

Labelling the unexplained "supernatural" because there is no known natural cause is how religion got started in the first place when humans didn't know how suns were formed or why grass grew or how we evolved or why we reproduce sexually or how water freezes and so on ad infinitum. Of course, we've narrowed the gap between the unknown and the known, but it is still there. There are just far fewer things now that people try to explain as "supernatural". However, when we encounter something unexplained, we still have the impulse to label it as "supernatural" when the real explanation is that there is simply no current explanation, at least not to the individual at that time. Giving the "supernatural" "explanation" to an unexplained event is pointless because that's not useful, because it's a cop-out, because there's no way to check to see if that's the actual cause, and because it takes the onus from us to try to explain those events or experiences. It may be that some things aren't explicable, but that doesn't mean we should be lazy and label them "supernatural" when there is no evidence at all for anything supernatural existing, and because giving some unexplained event the label of "supernatural" is as silly as it was to say that the sun was a god who needed burnt human sacrifice to be convinced to get up each morning.

Even more implausible is trying to posit the existence of a single (or even a couple) version of the supernatural as the one "true" version. There being no evidence, no possibility of objectifying and measuring any particular supernatural world-view, every single one is therefore equally valid. It is completely ridiculous to even entertain the notion that there is some part of existence which cannot ever be measured, quantified, observed, or known. As soon as we start making such suppositions where does it end? If one god is real because of faith or so called "supernatural" experiences then we have to assume that all gods are real, all imaginations of every human is equally valid and real. Simply because a delusion is shared by many people doesn't make it any less a delusion.

In fact, I am convinced (until I've been presented with a more reasonable, convincing argument) that science is more than able to explain what many term "supernatural" experiences as natural events that happen in our brains, and have no basis in a reality that isn't measurable by science or reason. Any feelings I had when at church, praying, reading the Book of Mormon, or etc., when I was a Mormon I now know weren't any indicator of the supernatural (least of all the Mormon supernatural) but rather were biochemical, psychological, and other reactions (including many psychosomatic) that are natural and explicable, and happen to many, many humans in every culture and religion in the world.

While I know that my experiences, thoughts, feelings, and ideas are quite subjective, and that I'm not able to adequately distance myself from my own biases and prejudices to really be truly objective about my experiences, I can do a reasonable approximation of it when I look at a bigger picture. When I see that my experiences are not unique at all, but are wholly common to probably nearly every human, I can see that what at the time may seem to be a supernatural occurrence is actually nothing of the sort when I look at how brains work in general.

When I see that a Muslim has the same faith in their version of Allah that I had in my personal Mormon version of God, or that my experiences weren't at all different from those of any other religious person's, and that in fact that all types of non-physical reality-based belief are exactly the same means that my feeling that God was telling me the Book of Mormon was "of God", that Joseph Smith was his prophet, that being gay was evil that Jesus wanted me to go on a mission etc. can't possibly have been correct, but rather what I felt was my own desire to have what I was brainwashed/told/taught to believe be true. Indeed that has been shown by many, many psychological studies to be how the we cope with competing ideas and desires. Even though I wanted to not be burdened by the strictures of Mormon doctrines, I couldn't then conceive of a life without religious belief, and so created the feelings in myself to support the belief I already had. Those feelings weren't indicators that the belief was a valid one, simply that it was one that my psyche needed to preserve because it was a fundamental part of my world-view and self-concept. Logically, that is the only explanation that makes any sense at all, for all the explanations given by any one or all religions are all mutually contradictory and/or exclusive, and cannot be true, right, or in any way a useful or correct indicator of what is real in any meaningful sense of the word "real".

While we are very subjective beings by our nature, that doesn’t mean that we can’t step outside that limitation at times and use rationality and logic to get at the reality of our existence and our environment. The best logic and reason we can come up with very strongly suggests that the reality of the situation is that the chance of any gods/the supernatural existing at all is very slim. The chance of a supernatural-concept existing even remotely similar to how any one person conceives of is infinitesimally smaller (smaller in fact than the chance of life evolving in the first place in a totally natural way - untampered-with by gods or whatnot), and the chance of any group of people's (inevitably contradictory) concept of god being real smaller still.

Is it possible? Yes, it is, but so incredibly improbable (and unprovable) that is useless, silly, and a waste of time to seriously entertain the possibility. The obsession humanity has with religion and faith is purely detrimental. We as a species need to get outside our own heads and self-importance and see that faith and prayer and religion and magical thinking and prophets and baseless speculation about the “supernatural” don’t solve a damn thing, but rather make everything worse.

Faith is a negative because it teaches that belief in ideas for which there is no evidence is a virtue, when it is actually humanity’s greatest vice. We are remarkable only in as much as we are alive at all. We're no more special or at the centre of any grand cosmic scheme than some bacterium is. We're here by chance coupled with an evolutionary history that bred us and all life over billions of years to be the best suited organisms for our environment. That's it. No gods, no reason for faith, no basis for religion.

Even if there is some grand cause of everything, it's not like anything we've yet conceived of, and we can't see it or measure it's effects in any way, so it might as well not exist. And we've got better and more pressing things to take care of than to worry about whether made-up entities like Jesus or Jehovah or Allah or Shiva or Frigga or Zeus or Ra are the right imaginary deity to worship, or which of the untestable claims of Hinduism or Buddhism or Mormonism or Catholicism or Shintoism or Daoism is the best representation of an imagined supernatural world which exists outside/inside/over/under our own.

Personally I'm far more concerned about poverty and hunger and disease prevention, and whether I'm going to have health-care next year (let alone a job), or how to get it through the thick skulls of the crazies that all humans deserve the same treatment, and that comprehensive sex education is an amazingly good thing, and that socialism isn't going to eat your children in the middle of the night. Or how to stop our atmosphere from boiling off.

As a race, we've got no time to indulge in useless fantasies and faith, because we're not going to need a supernatural Armageddon, we're doing a dandy fine job of that all on our own, the natural way.