Believe as Little as You Can

We never really understand anything — we just get used to things."  (comment attributed to John von Neumann)

Since the mid-1970s, I've sometimes enjoyed flipping through The Skeptical Inquirer, a journal published by a group called The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).  Reading a recent amusing and scathing critique of spiritual sales techniques, I felt once again my recurring frustration that science and spirituality are so often portrayed in competition, when they can as easily complement each other. 

This spurious competition seems to arise from the idea that science and spirituality share a common goal: truth.  When you think about it, though, neither pursuit concerns what we know as much as what we don't.  I think truth is not a very useful goal. 

We do need to believe things, because we can't afford to think everything through from the ground up every time we make a decision.  To be efficient, we store various conclusions for repeated use, as beliefs.  A "true" belief is nothing more than one that doesn't seem to need re-examination at the moment. 

From this point of view, you can look at truth as a kind of conceptual tranquilizer, which we use to soothe the tension between our compulsion for tidiness and our intellectual laziness.  Because the process of natural selection has favored decisions based on sound conclusions, most of us have an instinctive drive to assemble comprehensive, well-thought-out beliefs.  For equally sound practical reasons, though, we can't afford to spend all our time in research and contemplation, and laziness saves us from this fate. 

Given that we all want powerful beliefs but shrink from the work of developing and maintaining them, the idea of a simple, comprehensive, eternal truth is naturally quite appealing. 

Religion in particular uses this kind of appeal as a selling point.  I would even suggest that religious organizations are best understood as businesses that make money and political power by selling spiritual "truth" (this is a good argument for supporting anarchy and openhandedness in the Craft).  Organized religions use people's hunger for truth as glue to bind them into a group cohesive enough to control and tax.  What I've studied of the rich history of Judeo-Christian theological squabbling leaves me convinced that modern corporations are no more sophisticated in conquering or defending their markets than religious leaders have been for thousands of years. 

The Skeptical Inquirer is full of material to support a negative view of the spiritual marketplace.  If you've ever doubted that spiritual promoters can lie elaborately, intelligently and enthusiastically, you should read a few issues.  Many of the exposés are well researched and convincing, and the hoaxes themselves are initially fascinating. 

And yet, I often find myself losing interest in The Skeptical Inquirer.  The archetypal unveiling of the Wizard of Oz turns out to be both tediously repetitive and relentlessly disappointing.  Because popular hoaxes use powerful mythic images to capture the imagination, somehow I always hope to find behind them a mythic world-view.  Unfortunately, the motivations exposed in the magazine usually seem to be a petty mix of cynicism, greed and neurotic hunger for attention.  The kind of artistic mischief that went into creating the English crop circles seems depressingly rare. 

Also, while The Skeptical Inquirer succeeds in painting a sad picture of business in the spiritual arena, its philosophical articles promoting "science" and "reason" tend to read like religious tracts.  Paul Kurtz, for example, CSICOP's founding chairman, is content simply to dismiss as "greatly exaggerated" unwelcome criticism of the scientific community coming from scholars of the stature of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault.  Kurtz seems to find his own beliefs so sensible, reasonable and, well, true that they need not be supported rigorously.  He can conclude a manifesto against "antiscience" with the straight-faced remark that our society needs "public re-enchantment with the ideals expressed by the scientific outlook [author's italics]."  Hmm.... 

In the same way that religious people can promote truth at the expense of spirituality, I guess self-proclaimed adherents of science can promote truth at the expense of rationality.  People like Kurtz seem to forget that the history of science is less a chronicle of brilliant discoveries than an encyclopedia of fascinating mistakes, and seem unmoved by the generations of "scientists" who have unfailingly hailed important new discoveries as ridiculous errors. 

We all hunger for applause and dread ridicule.  This axis of social greed and fear influences us to adjust our beliefs according to what has currency in our culture and subculture and join "like-minded" groups for the mutual defense of a common truth.  Both science and spirituality flourish in open fields, however, not in an intellectual fortress.  To discover something new, you must be able to risk investigating all kinds of strange possibilities.  The most effective escape from the prisons of truth seems to be found in an overpowering, child-like curiosity. 

Rationality can help too, if you're willing to follow where reason takes you.  The very concept of truth, appealing though it may be, is just not rational.  No one has shown this more lucidly than David Hume, my favorite skeptic and the greatest philosopher of empiricism (empiricism being the philosophical basis of the scientific method).  In Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739, Hume convincingly advanced the hypothesis

that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cognitive part of our natures.  [author's italics]

Using a cheerful, conversational style and relentless logic, Hume demolished argument after argument for the existence of objective truth.  As Bertrand Russell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy in 1945:

Hume, by his consistency, showed that empiricism, carried to its logical conclusion, ... abolished, over the whole field of science, the distinction between rational belief and credulity. 

In other words, Hume showed that to be rigorously scientific, we must recognize all our beliefs to be open to question.  To put it another way, we never really understand anything; we just get used to things.  Even Russell, the consummate logician, was uncomfortable with these results:

To refute [Hume] has been, ever since he wrote, a favorite pastime among metaphysicians.  For my part, I find none of their refutations convincing; nevertheless, I cannot but hope that something less skeptical than Hume's system may be discoverable. 

Russell, together with Alfred North Whitehead, had spent the first decade of the twentieth century in a famous effort to lay consistent logical foundations for the study of mathematics.  "I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith," he wrote in Portraits from Memory in 1958, but certainty eluded him.  It turned out that his most rigorous logic could not resolve various whimsical antinomies, analogous to the following paradox:

This statement is false.   (If it's true, it's false, but if it's false, it's true).

In 1931, Kurt Godel's abstruse and astonishing incompleteness theorem showed that Russell's problems were part of a larger paradox.  Godel demonstrated in this theorem that no logical system can be proved to be self-consistent.  Certainty is just not logically attainable. 

But if I abandon the notion of truth, what should I believe, then?  Why, as little as I can!  Scientifically, I have available to me a vast set of more or less elegant, interesting and useful hypotheses, which I ought to question as much as possible, but which I may accept provisionally if I'm lazy.  I am often lazy. 

Spiritual beliefs, on the other hand, are more overtly personal than scientific ones, and are harder to evaluate.  In spite of an almost universal intensity of human interest in spirituality, there exists little basis for agreement about what to believe, or even why to believe it. 

This uncertain personal nature of spiritual belief is disturbing to many people besides those who champion the "truth" of rationalism.  Theological battles for our money, swords and wombs have always been premised on the need for a stable body of communal spiritual beliefs.  When, in 325 C.E., the Council of Nicaea wanted to transform Christianity from a diverse group of mystic cults into a state religion, it promulgated a creed. 

However, as long as you are not driven and shorn with the flocks of the righteous, there is good reason to have a private theology that is just as tidy as your desktop, mutable as your moods, and complete as any scrapbook.  In your heart is where you will find spiritual reality, but don't expect it to be more constant than anything else in your emotional life.  This much at least should be clear:  You  get to choose your spiritual beliefs, because nobody else has any right or basis to choose for you. 

In my experience, actually, a belief system relates to spirituality much as theory relates to art.  Theory is the playing-field of art critics, but for the artist serves only as a distraction, useful to keep intellect from interfering with the creative process.  Theory comes in a vast variety of contradictory forms and has little part in determining the quality of work that an artist produces.  I find this analogy remarkably apt in the spiritual area. 

When dealing with the mundane external world that is the arena of science, intellectual structures are useful primarily because of their predictive power.  When you say, "I believe in general relativity," you are usually expressing more about your perception of the theory's utility than you are about your emotional allegiance to it.  Of course, you may be swayed by aesthetics, and if you are a theoretical physicist, you may be affected by personal investment in the theory.  Even so, if a different theory turned out to be better at predicting events, you could reasonably be expected to change your mind accordingly. 

Where spiritual experience is concerned, on the other hand, intellectual structures serve not so much to predict as to evoke.  Like sexual fantasies, they are specific, concrete representations in the consciousness of generalized unconscious experience.  For this very reason, like sexual fantasies, it is often the very imperfection of their imagery that attracts us.  After all, it may seem safer to distance a fantasy from the real focus of one's yearnings so as to limit disappointment; the gods we worship are not always the gods in our hearts.  Also, fantasies do not have an indefinite lifespan: What at first evokes strong arousal may later become blandly familiar. 

When a person says "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth" or "I worship the Goddess in all her manifestations, and I'm into Norse tradition pretty heavily too," what is being professed is emotional attachment to a set of imagery, not an evaluation of the predictive utility of whatever intellectual structures may be attached to that imagery.  Granted, organized religions have traditionally tried to compete using predictive marketing: for example, if you declare allegiance to one specific group of true believers, all your dreams will come true when you die, but if you don't, you will go to hell, where unbelievably awful things will be done to you for longer than you can imagine.  Although most Christians find Christ's gentleness and generosity more appealing than this carrot-and-stick symbolism, as members of an organized religion they must swallow the whole enchilada — they don't get to spit out the rotten parts. 

Neo-paganism in all its diversity has a glorious lack of organization.  Nobody can make much money from it, or gain from it much political power (a humorous thought).  As a result, it serves as a vast well of religious imagery out of which everyone may draw an individual draught.  Since spiritual needs differ from person to person, and from one time of life to another, why should any of us be stuck with a single truth?  Life, after all, is a dance of thought with love across fate's unknowable field of patterns.  We sometimes have fun criticizing obvious shortcomings of other people's spiritual or intellectual paths, but no interesting path is ever straight, and who can tell where we're meant to go? 

For myself, I think it works fairly well to believe things about the outer world in my head, and things about the spirit in my heart.  Even so, since pretending to understand things is a delusion that tends to veil the beautiful weirdness of actual experience, I try to believe as little as I can. 

(originally published in 1995 in Widdershins volume 1, issue 4).