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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2705 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 29, 2023

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For other Christians on here, or seriously religious people, how do you handle the paradox of belief? I was talking to a friend today about my recent experience joining an Orthodox Christian church, and it's just so interesting. The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament.

And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. The spiritual water that Christ talks about in the Bible slakes my thirst. It's almost impossible to conceptualize, but damn it I've tried so many different ways to heal my inner wounds throughout my life, and this one works better than anything, by far.

How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?

How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?

You don't, while rationality is independent of one's axiomatic beliefs, there's no way you can reconcile epistemic hygiene with "serious" religious practise.

At best you compartmentalize and delude yourself into having belief-in-belief.

Interesting. The serious religious intellectuals tend to argue that you can't have any sort of epistemic hygiene without a 'first mover' - or in other words that the modern scientific worldview is based on a contradiction given that the a priori assumption is that no belief is ultimately true, which is in itself an ultimate belief.

Anyway I get a bit confused by these super high order epistemological arguments, but that's the steelmanned version of the other side's argument as far as I can tell.

ETA: I guess this is what rehashing the internet atheist wars from the other side feels like... good lord.

There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.

Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.

Why do pragmatic arguments make you uncomfortable?

I think I muddle together various issues

  • the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.

  • fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.

Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.

Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.

But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.

My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.

I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.

tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.

Oh man, I can’t even read all this because it’s so close to my own previous issues. I found a way out by listening to my heart or body or soul or whatever you want to call it instead of my head. Over rationalizing will get you nowhere.

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