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Some Good Reasons to Have Faith By: Mark Morgan on 10/21/2001; 4:34 PM by Mark Morgan(return to The Morgan Dilemna)I don't know everything. In the course of investigating faith, I may have come across a couple of reasons to have faith. They relate to religion, and mysticism. Wetwired for the Mystical ExperienceEric S. Raymond is perhaps best known for being a rabid open source computer code advocate. Publicly posted source code, freely shared, the money is in other things. The tools you are probably using to look at this document are closed source; the innards of the program are a closely guarded secret. Raymond thinks there is a better way. But he also writes about other things. In this case, about Dancing With the Gods. After a religious experience, he came to an interesting conclusion: we can't rationalize our way to mystical experiences. We must use mystical techniques to reach mystical insights. When a stone-cold skeptic such as myself tries to get at these sorts of insights, we can't. The human brain is not wired that way. Raymond falls off the cliff a little when he talks about using drugs for mystical insights (I'd rather have all neurons firing normally when I'm done with my insights, thanks). But what a powerful concept that is. Maybe all the garbage that follows in the wake of faith is the price we pay to access the mystic mind. What if there are insights that we can't gain any other way? I've said faith is a distinctly human activity; maybe this is what faith thinking brings to the table. Not all our processes are right up top. No, I don't mean the Freudian subconscious, lurking in our mind like an enemy trying to distract us with defense mechanisms. But you've had that experience where you can't remember the television actor's name until three in the morning the night after. So have I. Perhaps this mode of thinking--this turn off the mental train--gives us access to a powerful part of our mind. It's akin to what I think will happen when we finally contact an alien race. There will be things we learn that we would have never thought up for ourselves. Ideas and solutions that come so far out of left field they might as well have been pitched from another city altogether. Or, for that matter, what I think of the Internet. Discussions and readings online have made me think of things and decide things that I never would have come around to on my own. In fact, this series is based primarily on a series of online discussions I was involved in. How much less rich would my life have been if I had abandoned it. What if Raymond is right? What if faith thinking and the mystical experience is the only way to insights we might not gain any other way? Act as if There is a GodAnd, an offline source, just for completeness. In Skeptic magazine, Vol 7 No 3, 1999 (the special millennium issue), Alex Herd talks to some people about immortality. One of those people is Chet Fleming, author of Severed. The interview is about keeping a severed head alive (don't ask.) But Chet shares an interesting bit of philosophy with Herd: hope there is a God, but even if there isn't, act that way anyway. Note that this is the kind, benevolent liberal church God, not the walk-with-the-snakes evangelize the sinners God. I live in a Christian culture. Poll after poll confirms that people in America still consider themselves Christians of one stripe or another. It provides us with a convenient, if somewhat vague and fungible, rulebook to follow on a minute by minute basis. Act like there is a God, be kind to your kids, let the guy merge onto the freeway at rush hour. I think of this as the pragmatic view of faith. When the philosophy and the squabbling and debating is done, just act like a loving God is there. You will be a better person for it. I wonder, though. If God provides us with a simple rulebook for life, won't a secular rulebook do as well? I suppose the answer to that is that we Americans have been taught this rulebook from day one. It invades our lives and our morality. It's easy to remember to follow this rulebook. Substituting another one would take work. A lot of work. Several generations. Maybe never. So for pragmatic reasons, maybe we should stick with what we know. In my opinion, humans have never found a perfect rulebook, and never will. But we have this amazing ability to make good decisions based on flawed data. Given that, maybe it's not too horrible of an idea to just stick to the old faith rulebook. We'll muddle through fine, we mostly do. Ultimately, though, I'd rather see us muddle through with a rulebook that's less faith and more looking at the evidence. Sure, no rulebook will ever be the best, but shouldn't we find a better one anyway? At least that way we will waste less energy trying to overcome our rulebook, and will have more energy to solve problems. Or would we? Would the energy saved by a new rulebook be worth the energy expended learning to live by it? (return to The Morgan Dilemna)
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