How Can We Find Truth? Part 4

2011-02-18 James Kenneth Rogers Comments 9 comments

Note: This is part 4 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 5. The entire series makes up the third chapter of my book, The Triple Path, which can be downloaded for free here in PDF and eReader formats or purchased at all major book retailers (in print and eReader formats).

6) Feelings

Feelings are also important parts of knowing truth and in the decision-making process. When certain areas of the brain associated with emotions are damaged, a person’s decision-making abilities are often significantly impaired.1 In spite of the benefits of empirical rationalism, our brains are not, and likely can never become, passionless rationality machines (much to the chagrin of many economists, New Atheists, and rationality enthusiasts).

Letting emotions influence your decisions means you are a normal human being. Rather than being an impediment to rationality, emotions are often a great help. Your feelings can help you subconsciously integrate what you learn using the previous five methods and come to the right conclusion.

In his 1971 essay “The Eureka Phenomenon”, Isaac Asimov explains that many discoveries are made when someone has a sudden flash of inspiration about the solution to a problem the person had been mulling over.2 Such “eureka” moments do not come from a rational, conscious process, but probably from subconscious processing by the brain. Even after we have stopped consciously thinking about a problem, our brain seems to continue to work on it subconsciously. Einstein and many other scientists have described experiencing sudden flashes of insight when making some of their most important discoveries.3 Indeed, the very term “eureka” originates from a (possibly apocryphal) story about the great ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, who had a sudden flash of insight while visiting the public baths; when the insight came to him, he reportedly leaped out of the bath, shouted “eureka!” (Greek for “I’ve got it”) and ran home right away because he was so eager to test his discovery.4

There is much we do not understand about how the brain works and how we form opinions and make decisions. We would like to think we understand why we do what we do—that we are good at introspection and self-understanding. Research indicates, however, that we do not understand our own decision-making processes as well as we think we do.

More often than we realize, we rely on emotion to shape our beliefs. Rather than using our powers of rationality to come to a conclusion based on the available information, we usually work the other way round: we use our powers of reason to justify our already-held, emotion-based beliefs. We decide what to believe based on what “feels” right, rather than a conscious application of any of the five ways for discovering truth we have already discussed above. We start with a conclusion and then reason backwards, after the fact, to come up with a justification for that conclusion, even though we do not fully consciously understand the real reasons why our brains arrived at that decision or belief.5

Cognitive shortcuts such as our feelings and subconscious make us into the amazing thinking beings that we are. At the same time, though, they create mental blind spots and biases that are impossible to see ourselves. Because we lack conscious awareness of this, it is easy to fool ourselves into making bad choices. The scientific method has proven itself to be so powerful because peer review requires that other people critique, evaluate, and test a scientist’s work. On a more personal level, it would thus seem that peer reviewing ourselves—a continuous, iterative process of exposing our decisions and conclusions to others’ critiques—would help us find more personal truth and guidance for how to live.

But how can we do this over the span of a human life about every idea and decision? Turning to friends for advice is a good idea, but friends can only take us so far, since they are usually about the same age as us and share the same general life experience and thus many of the same blind spots and biases. Parents, grandparents, and wise older mentors can offer advice based on a lot more life experience, but each of them has only lived one life. There is only so much wisdom in any one person.

And turning to family and friends for advice is not really peer review, not in the same way that science uses it. It is not a step up from older methods of finding truth because it is one of the oldest ways of finding truth. Humans undoubtedly have been turning to family and friends for advice as long as there have been humans. Peer review implies a systematic, rational, repeatable, and replicable process.

Can science and technology offer a solution? Maybe if we had big datasets with details about huge numbers of people’s decisions and lives; and maybe if there was some computer monitoring everything about you; then maybe there could be a way to compute meaningful information that would be generalizable from other people’s lives to provide good advice to you about your life. But how would we get huge number of people to consent to such intrusive monitoring to create such datasets? And who would want something so cold and intrusive controlling his or her life?

And even if such a thing were possible or desirable, for it to offer good advice for your life, you would have to tell it what kinds of outcome you want. As we have already discussed, our minds are not transparent to ourselves. So how can you even know what kind of life you really want to live? And how can you know what kind of life you should want to live? And how can you predict how that will all change as you grow older and (hopefully) wiser? And how can you avoid making decisions now that will lock your future self into a life you will end up detesting?

How do you peer review what is right and wrong? How do you peer review existence?

When it comes to knowing facts, empirical rationalism has proved itself, but when it comes to finding moral truth—to living the good life, as the ancient philosophers called it—empirical rationalism’s track record is lacking. We must turn elsewhere.

7) Tradition and Religion

Because we understand ourselves so poorly, it is all too easy to fail to understand the real motivations for our desires and decisions, let alone the likely long-term consequences of our decisions on ourselves, our families, and our community. By middle age, almost everyone can look back on their life and remember times when they were certain about some fact that later turned out to be wrong, or when they were sure about a decision that later proved to be a big mistake.

While every situation and person is unique in some ways, there are also remarkable similarities too, more than most of us would like to admit.6 Tradition and religion are two tools humanity has developed to “peer review” ourselves across large swaths of territory and people, and even across huge timescales. And they have worked remarkably well. It appears that the emergence and development of the great universal religions of the Axial Age were the necessary precursors to the rest of modernity that followed.7

Religion and tradition provide generalized guidance that would be difficult to figure out for yourself, especially at the beginning of life, without the experiential wisdom that comes with old age and a life well-lived. They represent the collective body of wisdom passed down to us from multitudes of our forebears, developed slowly over time, based on the lessons they learned the hard way.

Many elements of religion and tradition can seem arbitrary and nonsensical in the moment, only for their purpose to become clear much later, when we are older and wiser. We would all do well to respect the traditions of our ancestors, as voices echoing hard-earned wisdom out of the past to us.8

“What about slavery?”, you might ask (or about any other evil thing in the world that religion at some point encouraged, allowed, or even just failed to eliminate)—after all, every major religion at least tolerated slavery (and some still do). Well, I would first point out that slavery’s end in the West, and then in most of the rest of the world, came about mostly through the long, tireless efforts of fervent Protestant Christians acting because of their religious convictions. Nevertheless, it is true that slavery persisted as a practice for a long time before it was abolished, and that most religions at least tolerated its practice. We must, of course, acknowledge that tradition and religion are not perfect guides. We already discussed in the first chapter how religion has failed us in its cosmology.

Could we not use reason and the scientific method and all of our modern knowledge to create something better, then? Well, two of the major 20th Century attempts at this—communism and fascism—were terrifying, terrible, murderous disasters. And secular humanism is not some new system. It is really just secular Christianity. Moreover, it has failed until now to prove itself as a viable replacement for religion and tradition, likely because it not only removes just the false cosmology, but God too, and most of the rituals, and the community, and the sense of tradition and rootedness, and the awe and transcendence. What makes it so attractive, though, is that it also removes most of the parts that require any sacrifice or difficulty.

Moreover, secular humanism has not proved itself a stable replacement. It appears to be rejecting more and more of its Christian roots and evolving into an incoherent medley of secular nihilism and social justice grievance activism. This is a path leading in the direction of collapse, just like fascism and communism before. If so, let us hope it neither gains as strong a foothold as its communist and fascist intellectual forebears, nor as cataclysmic a collapse.

This question of using science and reason to replace religion goes to the is-ought problem articulated by David Hume: there is a difference between knowing what is and what ought to be, and it is not clear how we get from knowing what is to deducing what ought to be. As Hume said, “let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason”.9

As we have discussed, science is the best method we have found for discovering what is, but it has failed miserably at helping us understand the ought. For guiding us toward right living—toward the good life—religion and tradition have a millennia-long proven track record. They are the best we have. As Professor Jordan Peterson has pointed out:

How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? (If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid? If myths are mere superstitious proto-theories, why did they work? Why were they remembered? Our great rationalist ideologies, after all—fascist, say, or communist—demonstrated their essential uselessness within the space of mere generations, despite their intellectually compelling nature. Traditional societies, predicated on religious notions, have survived—essentially unchanged, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years. How can this longevity be understood?) Is it actually sensible to argue that persistently successful traditions are based on ideas that are simply wrong, regardless of their utility?

Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given their appearance of extreme irrationality?

Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical error? . . .

There appears to exist some “natural” or even—dare it be said—some “absolute” constraints on the manner in which human beings may act as individuals and in society. Some moral presuppositions and theories are wrong; human nature is not infinitely malleable.

It has become more or less evident that pure, abstract rationality, for example, ungrounded in tradition—the rationality which defined Soviet-style communism from inception to dissolution—appears absolutely unable to determine and make explicit just what it is that should guide individual and social behavior. Some systems do not work, even though they make abstract sense (even more sense than alternative, currently operative, incomprehensible, haphazardly evolved systems). Some patterns of interpersonal interaction—which constitute the state, insofar as it exists as a model for social behavior—do not produce the ends they are supposed to produce, can not sustain themselves over time, or even produce contrary ends, devouring those who enact them and profess their value. Perhaps this is because planned, logical and intelligible systems fail to make allowance for the irrational, transcendent, incomprehensible and often ridiculous aspect of human character . . . .10

I will repeat: religion and tradition are not perfect guides. However, “incomprehensible, haphazardly evolved” though they are, they are the best we have got.

And religions and traditions do develop and update themselves in response to changing circumstances and current situations. Christianity today is radically different from the practice and beliefs of Jesus’s followers in 40 AD. Sometimes, though, circumstances change enough that a religion or tradition cannot keep up, and it collapses. This can happen quickly. The paganism of the classical world was strong and widely practiced for centuries, likely millennia. Romans at the beginning of the fourth century AD were born into a pagan world they assumed would continue long after they were dead. But within their lifetimes, Christianity replaced it as the dominant religion of the Empire, and paganism swiftly collapsed.11

I believe we are seeing the same thing happen with Christianity right now.

Even as paganism collapsed, though, there was still much of value in it. The Christians saw this too. Significant elements of pagan belief and practice were thus incorporated into the Christianity that replaced it. Pontiff, Easter, Yule—these words are all pagan in origin, as are many of the practices underlying them, along with many other elements of Christianity.

So too should we use as much as we can of Christianity in what replaces it. This is one of the main purposes of the Triple Path: not to create some new system from scratch, but to provide a replacement religion that keeps as much of our Western Christian practice and heritage as possible. This is what sets it apart from systems like fascism and communism that were “rationally” constructed from scratch, as well as from secular humanism and its offshoots, which increasingly reject as much as possible of Western tradition and Christianity.

Spiritual Feelings, Religion, and Morality

So now let us discuss where emotion intersects with religion. One of the areas where feelings affect our beliefs most profoundly are in matters of religion and morality. People frequently form religious convictions about a religion’s truthfulness based on personal emotional experiences with the religion. Many Christian churches call this religious emotional experience feeling the spirit, or accepting Jesus in your heart. This feeling is often described as a feeling of warmth, peace, and light flowing into your mind and a burning in your heart that makes you want to do good.

The Book of Galatians in the New Testament says that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”.12 In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that “[w]hen the Advocate [or Helper] comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf”.13 From these and other passages, many Christians have come to believe that spiritual feelings are an indicator of truth that “testifies” on behalf of God. But what kind of truth is it testifying about?

Psychologists who study this spiritual feeling have named it “elevation”. They describe it as involving a desire to act morally and being characterized by a feeling of warmth in the chest.14 (Elevation is a big part of spiritual feelings, but not the only part; other emotions such as awe and transcendence and tranquility are also important.) As we will see in the next section, elevation is a common human experience across cultures and religions. This makes it difficult to believe that feelings of elevation communicate knowledge about the material, factual truth of a religion’s cosmological and historical claims.

The Purpose of Elevation

So what is the purpose of elevation?

It appears that one of its functions is to help encourage altruism and community in the appropriate circumstances. Laboratory studies have shown that participants who were induced to feel elevation were more likely to act altruistically afterward.15

There is much research that shows that almost every human behavioral and cognitive trait has a significant heritable component.16 Assuming that it is heritable like most other traits, why would our ability to feel elevation have evolved? Why would natural selection have favored it?

We are social and communal. We band together with others to cooperate, share resources, and provide mutual protection. Altruism and sociality help communities survive and thrive. But too much altruism can also lead to their downfall, as freeriders and sociopaths take advantage of the community’s foolish over-generosity. Perhaps elevation evolved as a way of encouraging us to engage in altruism and sociality at the right times, to guide us toward appropriate moral action within our human environment.

On a less rational note, I believe that there is an element of divine communication or influence involved in it that helps us better understand moral truths.

Whatever the explanation for how and why we developed the ability to feel elevation, it seems to be a valuable way to guide us to moral action. It does not, however, seem to work well as a guide to finding objective facts about the material world.

A Short Experiment—Comparing Different Religions

When I was a youth, I was taught that feeling elevation was a sign I had encountered truth and that feeling it within the context of our religion meant that God was telling me that all the truth claims of our religion were true. When I later encountered convincing evidence that contradicted things I had previously “felt” to be true, I began to question this. What did these spiritual feelings mean? I decided to investigate by comparing what people from other religions had to say about their spiritual experiences.

I searched the Internet for narratives about religious or spiritual experiences that used words describing elevation; I specifically sought writings from people of different faiths. It was not hard to quickly find examples from every religion I checked. Everywhere I looked, people described the same feelings leading them to faith in their religion. Whether it was Christianity, other monotheistic faiths, polytheistic religions, non-theistic religions, or even new age beliefs—adherents always gave a similar story about their emotional conversion to the religion.

If you do believe that spiritual feelings can only be found within one, “true” religion, then try the exercise on the following pages. It contains a representative selection from the descriptions I found17 and lets you test yourself to see whether you can recognize which description comes from which religion.

The following fourteen quotes are from practicing Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, Mormons, New Agers, Protestants, and Unitarians in which they describe how they felt during their conversion to the religion or during important, defining spiritual experiences. Try to guess which quote comes from which of the seven religions (some religions are used more than once). I have standardized the language, with changes indicated by brackets, so that differences in terminology between religions will not tip you off (for example, the Bible and all other religious texts become a [text] or [sacred text]). At the very end of this post, for each quote you can find citations and further explanatory notes about the context of each statement. Following each quote is the list of seven religions to remind you of the possible options. Answers are at the end of the fourteen quotes:

1. “As I read [the sacred text] . . . I felt a burning in my heart that I should come and investigate.”