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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3668 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is religious faith necessary for maximizing happiness in a utilitarian framework? Consider these two thought experiments:

  • Two people are on a deserted island without food or water. Logic tells them that they will surely die, and there is nothing they can do. One of them has faith, the other does not. The one with faith will believe in an ultimately good final destination, and may even believe (in the face of reason) that God will find a way to save him if He so pleases. Of the two dying men, only one man can maximize his happiness in his last days. The atheist, even the most poetic and nostalgic atheist, could not be as happy without a fully fleshed out and trained belief in a final ultimately good hereafter. Maybe he will remember the good in his life, but human happiness is optimal only with hope and desire (the happy man is the man desiring to meet his wife, not the man who remembers the wife who passed away).

  • A man can bear extreme pain with positive feeling if he believes his pain is for a reason. For example, a soldier who knows that his death will save his loved ones and protect his community will die with a certain gladness, which exists in spite of and alongside the pain. Given this, consider a society in which everyone believes that all of their pain and misery is for an ultimate heroic purpose. This is a society in which everyone’s suffering is turned into something positive, and hence a society with greater sum total happiness.

The premise begs the question here, IMO. Reality is a deserted island; there is nowhere you can run to to escape the reaper because he lives inside you (skeleton joke).

I'd say that it is entirely individual. I've seen aetheists shrug off the their inevitable brain cancer end, I've seen Christians kill themselves with stress worrying about loss of kidney function and heart problems.

Is religious faith necessary for maximizing happiness in a utilitarian framework?

No because religion teaches you that many things are outside of your control. I believe that research indicates that having a higher internal locus of control is correlated with being happier.

An atheist can have a trained belief in a final ultimately good hereafter. You can believe that death can ultimately be defeated by humanity. Not in your lifetime but you can contribute to moving humanity in that direction by discovering something that extends the life expectancy of humans (like a vaccine or penicillin). That is your ultimate heroic purpose to get humanity closer to defeating death. If humanity always keeps moving in that direction than death may someday be defeated. You know you won’t physically or consciously live forever but because of your contribution to society a part of you will live on and be part of the reason that humanity was able to defeat death.

Also, it is possible to temporarily chemically achieve states of happiness that are happier than anything that is possible when sober. Or you could achieve non-religious enlightenment by believing you don’t really die (like thinking your real body is somewhere else and this world is just a simulation/dream. You don’t believe that you die upon death, but instead you just wake up somewhere else).

It seems to me this somewhat stacks the deck by making two assumptions:

  1. That this belief has no consequences outside of how the person feels in their final moments, but a lessened fear of death might very well lead to pointlessly shortening your life.

  2. That the consequence in question is positive, but for each man who dies foretasting Heaven, there's probably another who dies in terror of Hell. Similarly, believing your dead loved ones to be damned is probably as distressing as believing them blessed is uplifting.

In general, though, my real objection is that making yourself believe propositions because you benefit from such belief regardless of its truth is extremely dangerous. As the saying goes, once you've told a lie (even to yourself), truth is ever after your enemy. As I wrote in another post somewhen before, deluding yourself for expediency (and I contend that, even if the afterlife actually exists, believing that for any reason other than its factual truth is delusion) is the epistemic equivalent of the naive consequentialist doctor who would kill a patient to save five people with their organs. In the short term, it might work, but on the longer term it will poison your epistemology and make you unable to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Depends on whether the idea of life after death makes you feel better. Not so for me.

I feel the same way, and so arguments like this are puzzling to me. I find the idea of an afterlife incredibly disturbing, and felt that way even when I was a Christian. At the time though, I did enjoy feeling that there was a God looking out for me.

Same. I always hated the idea of living forever, even in paradise. It used to give me panic attacks as a kid. There's an idea that stories about the horror of immortality are just cope because we know we're going to die anyways, so we pretend it's a good thing, but for me it's very real. I have never found the idea of ceasing to exist too frightening (though it's a little creepy), though some people find it utterly terrifying. The only thing that frightens me about death is the possibility that it's not the end.

What about it seems disturbing to you? The idea that it never ends?

That's exactly it. I have a terrible fear of eternity and the infinite. Makes my mind want to crawl into a little hole and shut down.

That's really interesting. Do you like existing currently? We can overthink the meaning of "billions/trillions/quadrillions of years", but the duration is somewhat irrelevant. There's just Now, a moment which all of time passes through, and which I never want to end.

I love existing! But I love existing in this world that I know. Existing in some other form could be terrible and that's very scary to me.

Heaven is essentially defined as perfect felicity, though. And in any case you can imagine some post-life event which does make you feel better.

Sure, but if I'm just making up my own ideal eternal existence and deciding to believe in it I don't know if that really counts as 'religious.'

I'm much more skeptical about the New Atheist "you can have all of the beauty with none of the falseness" view. Been that way for a while now. There are clearly places where a religious worldview would be more comforting.

But you are leaving out all of the downsides here by picking examples with very limited options. What about people who self-deny for no purpose at all, since many of the original reasons for those strictures no longer matter?

What of the people who say the words but receive scant comfort but can't seek alternatives because their culture expects them to be satisfied?

Yep I mean, this is weirdly the framework I took when I decided to look more into Christianity. Strangely somewhere along the way it worked and now I... actually do believe in God for the first time. It's quite confusing and I try not to spend too much time thinking about it.

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