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