What's the harm of believing?

A good friend of mine, who has been reading some of the recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, etc ---the group that is being called the "New Atheists (NA’s)"---recently asked me "Why do they seem so aggressively intense on persuading me that my comforting beliefs are mistaken?" (he is a Christian). He wonders, in effect, "What is the harm of leaving me to my comforting believes, even if you NA's believe I am mistaken?"

My first reaction was surprise, since I have long assumed that truth is the only consideration in religious matters. In that regard, I have been in agreement with the NA's, who have stressed the importance of truth over social or psychological utility.
But on thinking it over more deeply, I realized that my friend's question does not have such a simple answer after all. It requires some in depth analysis. I emerge from this still believing that for me, truth is still of primary importance. However, the answer to the question becomes much less obvious when we consider whether we agnostics and/or atheists or should try to dissuade others from a belief we deem to likely be false.

On that question, I give a qualified "No, in many cases we should not".

But let me proceed with a few considerations:

I think that a great deal of both Dawkins and Harris's polemics are aimed at the social institutions of Christianity and Islam, that I think they correctly perceive as being damaging to humankind at large. This being because the more fanatical factions of these religions become active and influential in trying to dominate society in political issues, lobbying to get their religious  positions encoded in the laws of their nations, and in some cases even resorting to violent, terrorist tactics. Of course, in Islam, where there are so many theocracies, the religion has already been made part of the state, and they apparently are more aggressive in trying to spread their religion into laws of other nations.

Now, my friend might correctly point out that Christians are not so inclined to use violent means, terrorism, that is. And this is largely true today (not so much true in the past though).

Evangelicals still seem to be active politically, and seem to want to insist that this is a Christian nation (which it is most certainly not, at least not in a political sense). They are certainly not noted for being proponents of the separation of church and state, a principle I for one hold very dear. In consideration of this, I would suggest that the aggressive attack my friend refers to is a form of self defense, or at least an attempt to persuade religious zealots to be more tolerant of us non-believers.

One also has to ask, to what extent a religious belief is in fact comforting? I wonder if it always is. In the case of Christianity (and I think Islam also), the believer might subscribe to the notion that a great percentage of the human race will be condemned to eternal torment for having beliefs and engaging in practices that are not sufficiently in line with what he or she believes is true. How could one find that comforting, I must ask?

However, I can see where certain aspects of a religion that holds out hope of a better, or even supremely wonderful, life after death, would be comforting. Of course it would, although I don’t recall ever seeing a plausible depiction of what such everlasting existence might be like. Furthermore, surely one of the most hurtful aspects of our existence is that in many or even most cases, justice is not realized. People can do evil deeds and get away with them, often even profiting splendidly by them. Surely it is a wholesome attitude to want such evildoers to have to atone for the misdeeds, and to eventually feel true remorse for having committed them (although the desire for such punishment to be eternal seems to me to be one of the greatest evil desires to have ever been imagined by humans).

I suppose we must, to be fair, turn this around and ask whether non-believers receive some degree of comfort from their non-belief, and that actually tends to induce them to turn from honestly considering whether a particular religion might be true. Indeed, I think that a person’s motives for his or her beliefs often contain some degree of wishful thinking, and I can see where there are comforting and discomforting aspects to both sides of the issue. Indeed, the aforementioned threat of Hell is absent in atheism, and usually in agnosticism as well. So I suppose one could say it was comforting to adopt that position with respect to any religion that espouses the threat of eternal punishment.

I must admit that I think most (but certainly not all) followers of any religion have suspended critical thinking, and that most people the world around seem to just follow what their parents and their indigenous culture told them was true.

Organized religion is arguably usually---not always, of course--- primarily a social group or clan cohesive thing, in my opinion. When Protestants in northern Ireland bomb Catholics, or vice versa, it is not over differences in theology. It is simply a way to group into my our clan versus their clan. This is the aspect of organized religion that I believe is really what the NA’s are mostly protesting so aggressively.

I cannot speak for the NA’s, but I suspect they would largely agree with me, when I say I can respect the views of someone who maintains his religion is actually true. While thinking that he is, on most counts, mistaken.

But let us not forget that there may in fact be some harm done by trying to convince yourself you believe something that you really do not. Not to mention the wasted time of your precious life (assuming, as the NA’s believe, that it may well be all you have) following what may be the many rituals and requirements of a particular organized religion.

More about the Agnostic Position

A recent comment on one of my earlier posts (“Agnostic or Atheist”) arrived just as the Google blog site experienced technical trouble, and was unavailable. It appears that the comment has been lost on the blog site, but I did retain a copy in the form of the gmail notification I received.

I deemed the comment sufficiently interesting and insightful that I want to devote a new blog entry to it. The writer of the comment was one “Rufus Otis”, who has visited and contributed good comments (some tinged with humor such as his hyperbolic likening of one of his own essays to “Principia Mathematica”) to my blog on other occasions.

Here he wrote:
“I don't consider agnosticism as partway to theism or atheism -- but rather an end position. In my opinion, you can't get past the question of what it is that one does or does not believe in. As you said, it's easy to profess disbelief regarding Zeus, Odin, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Man In Robe in Clouds, etc. I also reject any "God" with whom one can talk, ask favors of, expect to intervene in human affairs, or help my team win the big game. This very concept is offensive to me. I'm not so sure I can equally and summarily reject an "ultimate reality" to which all is connected.”
“But as a human with the limits of human consciousness, I can neither believe nor disbelieve what can't be expressed in terms relative to my experience. In my essay, "What is Faith to an Agnostic", (now considered, of course, one of the primary documents of Agnosticism - much as Principia Mathematica is to classic mechanics), I can accept "that which is", without being able to enclose it in some "ism" that may be believed or rejected. All of our knowledge amounts to explaining one concept with another one, or a collection of concepts... defining words with other words.”

While there is not a lot here that I can take issue with, there are a few places where I have subtle disagreements with Mr. Otis’s position.

In my earlier blog discussing agnosticism, I believe I made the classical, long accepted distinction between two kinds of agnostics. There is one camp, which he appears to belong to, which maintains that not only do they not know whether there is a God, but they further deem that it is impossible to know. However, a second type merely asserts that they do not, at present, know whether there is a God, but they leave open the possibility that they may later decide that sufficient evidence has come to light allowing them to swing one way or the other.

Philosopher Robert Nozick has made the interesting, even to me stunning, observation that there does not seem to be any way that a Deity could demonstrate his existence within the confines of this universe. Anything such as huge writing across the heavens asserting his existence would be plausibly ascribed to some super advanced alien life forms, or to simple trickery on the part of clever humans. So maybe the second type of agnosticism is untenable, that is, no possible definitive data could ever emerge,and Mr. Otis is right in ignoring that branch of it. And as I recall Bertrand Russell, in his famous essay “What is an Agnostic” , also only considers the first type of agnostic.

Now, I believe Mr. O’s “end” position of agnosticism is that the concept of God is sufficiently lacking coherence that he cannot even ascribe belief or disbelief to the existence of such a being. To consider an example that might illustrate his position: suppose Bob asserts “I believe in the ‘Marpled Fleezer’”, and he then fails to give any of this being’s characteristics. Or maybe he does try to, but they lie well outside of any known combinations of properties that we can imagine. Or maybe the properties are nonsensical, or even seemingly contradictory, such as “The Marpled Fleezer can make an unstoppable force that moves an immovable object”. We can see, I believe, that Mr. O. would be quite right in asserting that he neither believes or disbelieves in the existence of the Marpled Fleezer. He might well say something like, “Well perhaps there is a mighty being that might be recognized as constituting the Marpled Fleezer, but I deny that he can have the contradictory and/or incoherent properties that Bob claims he possesses. But as described, I am not even going to dignify the concept by saying I believe or disbelieve its existence.”

But does this really apply to the concept of God, held by the theistic religions Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (perhaps others to that I do not know about)? They do not, to my notion, provide a detailed or definite description of God, only claiming that such a being is infinite (in some sense), good, omniscient (in some sense), and eternal. I see nothing contradictory or incoherent in this. And, it is definitely part of their concept, as far as I know, that such a being does intervene in human affairs, and can bestow certain favors on humans that entreat him to do so, and that further, this being created the universe and us humans. It is not clear to me that these added beliefs involve any inherent contradictions or vagueness (although the idea of communication with God does seem to have an element of hubris in assuming that such an august being would have any interest in us).

Now I am certainly not saying that I believe in such a being. In fact, my belief is that such a God probably does not exist. However, I am by no means certain that he does not, and it is conceivable that such a being does exist having at least some of the above properties. When i say I am an agnostic I mean that I do not know if such a being exists, and feel that I understand the general concept of God well enough to assert that. So when I state my lack of belief in the Judeo-Christian God;s existence, i am asserting something along the lines of saying that I disbelieve in the existence of purple tigers, but can sufficiently well imagine what a purple tiger would be. This is where I appear to differ with Mr. O.

When Mr. O. says he rejects as “offensive” the idea that such a personal God exists I fear he may be confusing his aesthetic ideas of what a God might be like with what might actually exist. The question should be, not whether we find some particular concept offensive or appealing or agreeable, but whether it is in fact true. By the way, Mr. O. is in good company here, as Albert Einstein is on record as asserting something to the effect that he found the idea of a “personal god” as distasteful, and as representing the egotistical imaginings of “feeble souls”. But at the risk of blaspheming one of my intellectual heroes, maybe it should be noted that Einstein also rejected quantum mechanics based partly on preconceived notions of what truth must be like (“god does not play dice with the world”). So incredibly brilliant though he was, he was not always right (unless it turns out that in the future scientists find that quantum mechanics is wrong).

Oddly, a closely related mistake is made by some Christians when they seemingly convince themselves to believe Christianity because they find it comforting, that is, agreeable, not because they deem it true.

I largely agree with his claim that a concept, to be considered respectable, should relate to the common sense level that we humans inhabit. However, it should be realized that most all ideas of modern physics and cosmology involve ideas way beyond the common sense level. Of course, the experiments that must be done to verify these ideas must at some point “come down” into the realm we inhabit. That is, to verify the concepts we must measure a wiggle on an oscilloscope, a flash of light in a detector, a click in an ionization counter, trace in a bubble chamber, and so on.

Mr. O. wades into deep and troubled waters when he asserts that “All of our knowledge amounts to explaining one concept with another one, or a collection of concepts... defining words with other words.”

I do not agree with this. Consider the humankind’s understanding of quasars, laser, DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution...we could go on and on. True, these theories or ideas do have some circularity in that they assume or rely on, in our explanation or understanding of them, other ideas or hypotheses. But there is real knowledge there, it is not just a bunch of word games. While a lot of philosophy (not all!) might involve such word games, science does not. But to be fair to Mr. Otis, he may have intended his remark to apply to only to the realm of metaphysics, where we probably do not have any real knowledge, and it is indeed mostly a word game.

When he says “But as a human with the limits of human consciousness, I can neither believe nor disbelieve what can't be expressed in terms relative to my experience.”, I have to quibble. Take an electron. We have no way of even dimly comprehending what these little entities are like in experiential terms. They are believed to be point particles (having no spatial extent), and all electrons are exactly alike. We only know of these indirectly through theories that seem to hang together and make overall sense. But can I say I “believe” in them. yes, I think so---but I would not be devastated or upset in any way if tomorrow some rival theory and experimental result came along to cast doubt on their existence. My only point here is that we must be careful in insisting that our concepts relate directly to experience. In this case, the idea of an electron does relate to our experience, but in a most indirect way.

His remark “I'm not so sure I can equally and summarily reject an "ultimate reality" to which all is connected” is an interesting one, though I must confess i do not understand exactly what he means from such a short sentence. Let me try to establish a common ground with him here, and say that my own position is what atheist Victor Stenger derides as being “Something-or-other-ism”: That is, I believe in a very vague notion, without being able to prove or support it, that something is behind the universe, and there is some reason, probably least as unfathomable to us as quantum field theory is to a dog, for why consciousness (e.g., us and perhaps other forms of it) and the universe exist. I believe it did not “just happen”, though I recognize that as being a possibility. To what extent this is “wishful thinking”, I do not know, as I have trouble looking at my belief objectively. I’ll leave this to the psychologists, who might indeed, in the spirit of a certain Gary Larson cartoon, decide I am “just plain nuts”.

To conclude, I want to thank Rufus Otis for adding a provocative and insightful comment to my blog. It is to be hoped that he will make many future contributions. And I intend to carefully read his (touted as highly influential) “Principia Agnostica” essay as soon as I can locate it on the web (no success so far).

A few random musings

What is more likely? That there are countless billions of universes, and ours just happens to be the one suitable for life?….or that there is some mind behind the one we are in, and that it is in some sense specifically designed to support life? Probability estimates are not of much use here……but somehow to me the latter seems more plausible. Is the Mind, or Designer, the God of any particular religion? Not necessarily….it could be something totally beyond our comprehension, as far beyond our ken as quantum mechanics is beyond a dog’s understanding.

So many on both sides commit the fallacy of arguing for or against a specific religion based on its usefulness or harmfulness. For example, many Christians seem to argue for their belief on the basis that it is needed to ensure moral behavior. On the atheist side, many argue that a religion has harmful effects, and we’d be better off without it. Both are largely wrongheaded….only the truth matters. If a particular religion is not based on it being true, then one should reject it. Similarly, an atheist that argues that a particular religion has harmful effects should, one would think, regard that as irrelevant it were somehow given that the religion is true. It does not seem to me that many think about the truth on both sides. High points must be given, I think, to such atheists as Richard Dawkins (an evolutionary biologist and author of the brilliant book, “The God Delusion”) and Stephen Weinberg (Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist) for clearly stating that truth is the issue. Bertrand Russell, did, I believe, also often evince this attitude in his writings on religion. On the other side, John Polkinghorne , theoretical physicist and ordained Anglican priest, emphasizes the importance of truth, and quotes David Pailin: “Attempts to defend theism by ignoring the question of truth…are fundamentally atheistic. They worship human wishes rather than ultimnate reality”.

Will we ever understand consciousness? I do not see how that is possible, given that it a purely subjective phenomena, locked inside the skull of each of us, inaccessible to any outside observer. For that reason it will never be understood by the canons of objective science, although conjectures will surely continue to be made as to why it has evolved, how it can be created artificially, etc. But if an entity passes the Turing test (that is, gives responses indistinguishable from a human’s), maybe we will have to give it the benefit of the doubt and view it as having consciousness (and concomitant rights). The implications of this are serious: if we do succeed in creating seemingly conscious robotic systems, then to consign them to drudgery on behalf of the human race would seem to be a form of slavery.

It is interesting to consider who among ones friends, colleagues, and family are optimists or pessimists. There are, I guess, two levels to this way of dividing people. The higher level is a philosophical or metaphysical one, where one asks like whether it is a good thing that the human race exists, whether human life is basically worth living. The more mundane level involves a sort of instinctive every day attitude where an optimist might tend to always try to make the best of things that happen and grumble only occasionally, while the instinctual pessimist would always be seeing the bad side of what is going on around him or her. The practical optimist might often, I suppose, be a metaphysical pessimist, and vice a versa, though I am not sure how often this is the case. And there are probably cases where the two levels merge, and a pessimist at both levels might be dour and grumpy and also hold that it is a bad thing that life and the universe exist.
I would think that the practical optimist would tend to come across as “merry”, with a good sense of humor, but also might quite often—even usually—be serious. The practical pessimist might not always have a sour expression, but probably a key trait is that there are a great many grudges that weigh on him, and he may sometimes come across as angry at the world.
I do not think that a person who suffers from depression is necessarily a pessimist…I see that ailment as being more subtle, perhaps largely a physical or medical shortcoming.
Perhaps here is a practical test: one may ask oneself if he/she is glad to be alive…glad to have been born. Is the realization of the mere fact of existence a happy grateful thought, or is it a “gee, I wish I had never been born”. I guess a suicidal mood would be one in which one decides to act to take oneself out of existence….such as was evident in the musings in Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be…” soliloquy.

Will the human race be here for thousands, millions or trillions of years? Will war be abolished? Will all of the present religions of the earth become extinct, and new ones take their place. Or will all religions come to be regarded as relics of the infantile imaginings of our race. Will we become, as many have imagined, intermingled with artificial forms of intelligence? Will we become intermingled with alien races of other star systems, perhaps occupying ourselves regions of the universe vastly removed from our present region (new forms of space-time travel having been discovered)? Will humans go through some sort of spiritual metamorphosis such as Arthur C. Clarke has imagined in his novels “Childhoods End” and “2001”? Or are humans just an intermediate stage that is only useful for creating another more important form of life, one we would call artificial (perhaps silicon based)?

I must say that I am puzzled by rather oft-quoted remarks attributed to atheists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Weiberg. Both seem to have said, in effect, that the universe strongly suggests that there is nothing deep or meaningful behind it. Weinberg has been quoted as saying that the more we learn about the universe, the more pointless it seems. Huh? What has been learned in physics that even bears on it being pointless or not pointless. I wish he had given examples. Dawkins has said that the universe appears to be just the kind of place that we would expect if there is no deity involved in making it. Hmmm, again. What kind of evidence would there be if there were a creator behind it, one wonders? Also, in Dawkins’ generally excellent book, “The God Delusion”, I think he may have misrepresented the religious views of Albert Einstein. While some of Einstein’s writings do suggest that he was using “the mind of God” in a purely materialistic sense, in other places it seems to me that Einstein was open to there being some actual Mind behind it all. But there is no doubt that Einstein rejected the Judeo-Christian concepts of God.

Concerning putting "In God We Trust" on Coins

A friend sent me one of those “pass this on to everyone you know” emails today. I don’t think I have ever actually passed such an email on, and I certainly did not this one, mainly because I couldn’t disagree with it more.

The post---which turns out to be wrong--- said that there is a new US dollar coin out that does not have “In God we Trust” on the coin (I shall assume that I am not being naïve, and falling for some kind of gag….at first I thought it was something like that). The post went on to urge everyone to boycott the coin, that is, to refuse to accept it for monetary exchanges.

The fact is that the coin does contain the “In God We Trust” inscription on the edge of coin. I think this is unfortunate. It would be better if it were entirely absent.

I claim that whether you are Christian, Deist, Atheist, etc, you should in fact insist that all references to any Deity be absent from all government issues. Now, maybe there are other reasons for resisting the circulation of a new coin---though I cannot imagine what they might be---but one should not resist the circulation on religious grounds, regardless of his or her affiliation.

Here is the main reason why: we have, and should have, a secular government. Having such is in fact a requirement of a state that insures freedom of religion. It is unfortunately true that the “founding fathers” did put the term God into some of the founding documents, but a clear reading of the climate in which these things were created shows it to be a rather generalized term for a common ideal, not a theistically conceived God. In particular, there is, as far as I can tell, no mention of Christianity or Jesus in any of the state papers. The spirit of that age, which gave rise to a free society, and put an end to any justification of there being a “Divine Right of Kings”, was that of the Enlightenment. While many of the framers of the American documents claimed to be Deists, some were Christians, but I believe all felt that religious freedom was vital, and that adherence to a state recognized religion was very wrong.

What is a person thinking that says such things as “Now, especially in these dire times, we do not want to remove God from our coins!” Do they think that God will look favorably upon the citizens living under a government that puts His Name on government property? That He will favor a society that does this, and tend to bring misfortune on a country having a secular government? To me this is absurd, even from---or maybe I should say especially from---a Christian perspective. As I recall, there is a scene in the New Testament where Jesus asks whose image is on a coin, Caesar or God’s----the clear intent of it is that it is Caesar’s. He does not say that it should be God’s--- rather it is, I think, implied that a government is by its nature neutral from a religious perspective. Some Christians may disagree with my interpretation, but I hope they will at least think about mine. (Speaking for myself, I am an agnostic, not a Christian, but I believe I can see things from their perspective).

Do they think they are going to “fool God”, and He will think favorably of people who hypocritically put His name on coins and intone it in state-related oaths? And why pretend that we all have essentially the same concept of God? I am pretty sure that this is not the case, even among the various Christian denominations, even less so among the different religions represented within the United States.

There is the practical issue that it sets a very bad precedent. How will such precedents play in the future? Suppose “God” gets changed to “Allah”. Granted, Christianity is no doubt a majority religion at the present time, but this may not remain true in the more distant future. If you are Christian or Jewish, think how you would feel if the coins were minted with Allah on the face. Not happily, I am pretty sure. And in any case, it is central to the idea of religious freedom to protect the rights of those belonging to minority religions (or to no religion at all).

Everyone should rejoice that we have a government that makes no reference to any particular religion, even allowing for a more generalized concept of a Deity. Look around the world and observe how so many states have a dogma ingrained into their government. There are of course dogmatically infested states that are godless, but these seem to often involve the worship of an “Emperor” or such, and in effect are a sort of theocracy (think of North Korea). Theocracies abound, and the irony is that the US is at odds (even if not actually at war) with many of them. And quite often these theocratic governments are flagrant violators of human rights; I doubt that this is a simple coincidence.

As far as the government is concerned, let it be neutral about the existence of a Deity. This issue should be left to each individual’s conviction (and of course to the churches, denominations, or sects to which an individual freely chooses to belong), even if some decide that there is no such being
God, if He exists, will be able to tell who believes and who does not. Above all, He would not be fooled by a cheap and unjustifiable ploy of putting his name on coins, thus surely making hypocrites of a great many citizens.

Some Skeptical Reflections on Religious Belief…Part 1

Based on personal associations and numerous conversations with religious, church-going people, over the course of my 65 years of life, it seems to me that relatively few of them believe their religion to be actually true. The tendency is to believe it useful, either as way to make one feel secure, or often as a belief that the social ethics demand some measure of lip service to a superhuman, moral code-giving being. Maybe a strong element of hope, usually for a continued existence after death, enters in. I say this at some risk of stating what many skeptics might regard as obviously true. However, let us recognize, right off, that a given religion is either true or false. We cannot, of course, know by the methods of scientific inquiry whether they are true…if one of them is in fact true, I suppose we may find out “later” (upon death).
I’ll lay my cards on the table here, and say that my strong suspicion is that they are all, in essence, false. There might be elements of truth to some or even all of them, but I am speaking here of taking any particular one of them as a whole.
I am an American, born and raised in what might be called “Christian bible belt” regions of the US, so I will also confess to having a limited perspective on all of this. I have had very limited direct social exposure to people of the Islamic persuasion, and here have to rely on what I have read. I have had slightly more exposure to those of the Judaic faith, but considerably more to those within the various Christian sects. Indeed, as a child, I was raised Presbyterian, but rather quickly, in my formative years of college, rejected it all as being largely delusional.
I have no quarrel with those who believe their religion to be true. I will refer to these as “Type 1”, or simply T1, believers, while the ones basing their association on tradition and/or usefulness, I will call “Type 2” (T2) believers. My guess is that T1’s are not the ones committing the atrocities, terror, and wars (recently so thoroughly illuminated and expounded upon by such writers of an atheistic persuasion such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins).
An important element in the faith of many people is the ethnic or family tradition associated with their particular religion. We can scarcely doubt this, can we?---just look at the world. Is it a coincidence that those raised in Christian countries are Christian, etc etc? This group-tribe-family-clan association with a particular belief, a given tradition that one is born into, has surely been a predominant factor throughout all of human and perhaps pre-human history.
It is easy to regard those of a different tradition are somehow strange, bizarre, odd, less good and wholesome than those of ones own tribal belief. Compounding this is the fact that often the religions are associated with groups of humans having recognizably different anatomical features, making it easier to view each other as less intrinsically important, or worthy of being allowed to live in peace. We humans have a very strong inclination to be “group-ish”, a phenomena well investigated by Matt Ridley in his book “The Origins of Human Virtue”, and this groupishness has bad consequences in more global contexts.
Does a T1 really want to kill or injure someone who believes a different religion? I very much doubt it. It is the T2’s, driven mainly by group identity and an atavistic hatred for groups that are recognizably “other”, that gravitate toward violence.
One very strong hint that, in the US at least, Christian T1’s are rare is that death seems to be widely lamented as tragic. Yet Christianity seems to promise, for the “good” believers at least, a blissful post-death existence. Do people grieve because they fear their lost loved one has gone to Hell? I doubt it, though maybe this is occasionally the case. Rather, I imagine, they really hold a deep-down fear that the departed loved one has ceased to exist. In effect, they are “T2’s”.
We often see books of a Christian persuasion asking “Why do bad things [e.g., death from cancer or accident] happen to good [usually read “Christian”] people”. But, come on---if death is a release from this “vale of tears” and fallen world, as they seem to maintain that it is----would they not rejoice at the “good people” being “rescued” from it? The simple explanation for this excessive lamenting—and I of course do not blame them from my point of view, since I think it quite possible that death is non-existence---is that they do not really believe, with their whole hearts, the eschatological teachings of their religion. Yep---T2’s!
Now to be fair, I recall that a Christian philosopher—it may have been Scott Peck---said that he “believed” Christianity [and Heaven] to be true, but did not “know” it to be true. An interesting, and perhaps valid, distinction. We could digress here, and consider what “belief” means, and what “knowing” means, but I shall postpone it.
I also want to draw a sharp distinction between belief in any of the world’s religions, and a suspicion that “there is something behind the universe”. Indeed, the old question “Why is there something rather than nothing” seems to me to be at least a justified emotion, albeit a question that we cannot answer by methods of science (or any other method that I can think of). It does not follow that it is a meaningless question, but I realize I need more space to establish this, and will also postpone that for now. My guess is that there is “something”, but whatever it is as far beyond our comprehension as general relativity is beyond a dog or cat. Is there any kind of continued, post death, existence?---I do not know. Do I hope there is? I am really not sure of that, especially since I cannot really imagine what form that might take. And as Woody Allen has the fantastically advanced alien say, in hurriedly departing in his spacecraft, “we may be asking the wrong questions”, but we may not be able to even comprehend what questions we should be asking.
This is “to be continued” in a later post.