January 30, 2004
In my real job, I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to write about a maddening problem: the limits of reasonable religious belief given the facts of religious diversity.
Think about it. There's a a veritable alphabet soup of religions, all the way from Agon-shu to Zoroastrianism. Given the range of disagreement and the fact that there's no majority view, it follows by simple arithmetic that most believers are wrong about something they care about, though which believers are wrong about what is another matter.
Cynics have an easy answer: religious belief is just superstition and delusion. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. All of us -- a few poor souls in mental hospitals aside -- go beyond the raw data in making sense of the world. We assume that what we remember is generally true. We assume that the people we seem to be talking to aren't projections of our own imaginations. We assume that we can use limited experience to make generalizations that go well beyond the data. And we assume that the world operates according to reliable natural laws, that we can know at least some of these laws, and that they'll keep on working indefinitely. Trying to prove any of these things would end us up arguing in a circle. What they have in common with religion is that they're part of our general but unprovable sense that things make sense. In one sense, disagreements between the religious and the non-religious are over the details.
Unfortunately, the details are where both God and the devil live. We don't just think there really are other people; we think there's cousin Ted and Tia Maria and Tom Delay. We don't just think there are laws of nature; we think there's gravity and the freezing point of water and the impossibility of scratching a match on a cake of soap. And we don't just think (some of us, anyway) that there's a transcendent side to the universe; we think there's Nirvana OR there's the Holy Trinity OR the Tao.
So far, so bland. Even the broad religious difference might be different views of a single Mystery. But then we get down to specifics that leave all the mundane and the hifalutin stuff behind. Some people think the world was created about 6,000 years ago. Some think that the Koran was delivered to Mohammed word for word by the angel Gabriel. Some think (Pat Robertson said this a few days ago) that God has told them who will win the election this November. (It's President Bush, according to God and Rev. Robertson, and by a landslide at that.)
I'm not suggesting that all of these beliefs are on the same level. The point is the astonishing variety of highly specific and conflicting beliefs that religion gives rise to and the tenacity with which people hold those beliefs.
There's the connection with politics. Grover Norquist and a fair number of conservative Republicans are tax-cut fundamentalists: just about no tax is a good tax, and according to Mr. Norquist, the real goal is to shrink government to the point where we could drown it like a baby in a bathtub. (That's his metaphor, not mine.) On the other side of the spectrum, and on a different issue, there are plenty of liberal Democrats who think the Iraq war was (a) clearly and obviously wrong, (b) really all about oil, and (c) that the President simply lied to us all about it every step of the way.
Don't know about you, but I don't find any of this plausible. All of it seems to me to go far beyond what reasonable argument or evidence can show. Questions about just how big government should be, and how much or by what rules we should be taxed seem to me to be really hard. They depend on clarity about goals, and good guesses about very complicated facts. Whether we should have gone to war is a complicated question with weighty arguments on BOTH SIDES. The idea that it's all about oil falls into the category of faith-based conspiracy theory, and even if you think (as I do) that the President exaggerated when he should have spoken in a more measured way, all serious parties to the debate thought that Saddam had bad weapons and that he was playing a long, drawn-out shell game.
Strong views matter because they lead us to act and those actions have consequences for real, breathing people. Religion and politics are two of the areas of life where this is most clearly true. But with religion and politics, the strong views tend to be about maddeningly hard questions.
As David Hume put it some 250 years ago, "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." When it comes to the most general things we think - that there are laws of nature, other people, and maybe even God - evidence won't settle things in any straightforward way. The good news is that at that level, either we tend to agree (there are physical objects, aren't there?) or the disagreements tend to be purely "philosophical". When it comes to the messy details, I have a faith of my own: if more people took Hume's thought seriously, in religion, in politics and in the rest of life, we'd save ourselves a lot of misery.