Rejoinder to my Uncle

Uncle T,

Your response to my letter expressed some confusion that I hope to clear up. First and foremost, my breakdown and subsequent criticism of faith is based on the observation that it lacks rational support, and that it causes harm. You seem to suggest that by breaking down a concept, and seeking a scientific understanding of how it functions, I necessarily diminish whatever value it offers its users. I am going to argue that not only is this untrue, but impossible for me to do. I am going to do this with the example you gave: love.

Social psychologists and neuroscientists have been investigating love for many years, and have produced very interesting ideas and frameworks to help us understand how love may have been selected for by the environment, how the process plays out, and the neural correlates at work when we are in love. But no where in this project is anyone tempted to conclude "Aha, now that we understand something about love, its power over us is negated." That is simply not how science works. For instance, science has quite a robust understanding of the process going on in our bodies when we are enjoying the taste of chocolate. You could have your brain scanned while enjoying chocolate, see diagrams of the molecular structure of chocolate etc and none of this is going to make it taste any less wonderful. This is just an example of the fact that there are different levels of describing our experience. Chocolate can be understood with greater objectivity and it can be experienced subjectively, and both of these are worth pursuing. And love, certainly romantic love, is a greater source of happiness than the taste of chocolate (for all but the tiniest minority perhaps).

So why am I incapable of diminishing the meaning of love by understanding it? Because the meaning that you and I give love are decisions we have the personal freedom to make. One person may purpose their life around writing a great novel, or learning to play the guitar, or becoming an an actress, or raising a family. Philosophically, we are without the means to reduce the meaning someone can imbue into these enterprises. (There are a few caveats I would make to this, but they can be overlooked for our purposes here.)

It's also important to remember why I'm criticizing faith in the first place. Faith is the justification for a belief for which there is no credible evidence. This is a very dangerous way to behave. If you have faith that a proposition is true, because your belief is not based on evidence, you cannot, by definition, be persuaded out of your belief as I mount evidence to the contrary. There is simply nothing I can say to you that will change your mind. This is synonymous with saying that you are no longer taking any state of the world into consideration when forming or supporting your belief. But this is delusion defined. However, in what sense is love irrational? Valuing love, encouraging love in our friends, family and neighbors are all rational projects. They are rational projects because love makes us happy. What could be more rational than trying to make more people more happy more of the time? Faith, on the other hand, at best only offers a comforting delusion that is fragile to the encroachment of reality. This is not a rational basis for the well-being of an individual or a society.

The last point you made is one that I would also like to address because it speaks to the truth of everyone's experience: life is hard. Navigating the challenges of this world in order to get what we want is not easy. It is so challenging that often, people invent or adopt beliefs which make the challenges seem bearable. The afterlife is one such belief. The claim goes like this: Yes, life can be difficult, but do what your religion tells you, and you will get supreme happiness after you die. Now, there may actually be an afterlife. That is a possibility I am open to. But is it reasonable to believe, or to be certain that there is another life awaiting us? No. Why not? Because no compelling evidence has ever been put forth that such a life exists. This belief is operating in the minds of most living people merely because they wish it were true. But if humanity has conquered anything in its career of rationality, it is this: that there is every difference in the world between wanting to believe something is true, and having good reasons for believing something is true. This is why we have phrases like self-deception, observer bias and so forth.

To summarize, I think you have conflated two different projects: 1) Describing how a process works logically or scientifically, and 2) Making a statement of judgement about that process. These are distinct tasks and I am prepared to do both with religious faith. But when it comes to understanding a process such as love, I am restricted to only the first. This is so because the metric I use to guide my criticism is whether or not something causes people to suffer. The difference between well-being and suffering in conscious systems (like ourselves) is all we could care about. And love helps us achieve some state of well-being. Faith does not. In fact, faith very often does the opposite. I can't tell you how many times I have read reports of children dying to curable diseases because their parents put their faith in their religious beliefs and chose not to seek scientific medicinal help. These parents are not sick people, they want the best for their children. They simply have some irrational beliefs sitting at the base of their worldview. This is what faith makes people capable of, and why we are free to criticize it

Thank you again for taking the time to read this. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your willingness to engage me on the subject.

Best,
Corey