I came here to exercise but it's definitely not working. The gym's owner keeps coming over to talk to me about God. He's born again. He asked me what I'm listening to and like a fool I told him it's a book about Darwin.
"Let me ask you this," he say. "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
He doesn't wait for an answer. Instead, he wanted to share his beliefs. It's been fifteen minutes now and I'm not getting much of a workout. I've heard this all before, about how God listens to everything and can answer your prayers. How can this guy claim to be such an expert on who's listening? He doesn't even notice that I'm not.
Bless his heart though, he hasn't had my opportunities or education. I know that sounds arrogant but it's true. And besides, if I can remember that, I have patience for him. Because the alternative, treating this like a mature debate about reality is only going to make me combative. His beliefs and those like them are hampering not progress, but long-range rescue efforts that could make the difference to whether our children live or die.
The last few pieces I've written here have been about the conflict between the Right to Believe and the Need to Know. Like the gym owner, we all--bless our hearts--have the right to believe whatever helps us get through the night. And yet these days, in order to get through the crises we face, we need to keep fantastical beliefs from slowing and contaminating scientific progress. Even without true believers throwing obstacles in the way, it is going to be very hard for scientific research to keep up with the crises we face.
I've argued that the only plausible resolution to the conflict between The Right To Believe and the Need to Know is for us all to take to heart what psychological research so strongly suggests:
We all believe untrue things that help us get us through the night. About those beliefs we have to cultivate an ability to say, "I believe it even though its not true. I believe it because it helps me, but I won't try to make the whole world go along with me on it because on some matters, facing reality helps more. And saying this I can still take comfort from my beliefs, as though they were true."
A few readers have commented that this is hardly plausible. I'll grant that. Worse, it's least plausible with the believers who are the most dangerous. You can get a Unitarian to go along with that, but not a militant fundamentalist.
Still, the alternatives are less plausible. We will never collectively surrender to either pure science or pure belief. We cannot pretend that the last several thousand years haven't honed scientific ways of knowing that really do put us more in touch with reality. And we can't pretend that those scientific ways have no bearing on our values and choices.
Sometimes the truth sets us free, and the truth here is that people cannot live by truth alone. Life is short. Death is scary. The universe shows no signs of loving and protecting us from harm. And we've got these amazing inventive minds. We are the first bi-mundial species. Because of language we have the capacity to build elaborate imaginary worlds. This enables us to reference either the world we see and sense, or the world we believe and imagine. This is our greatest gift and our biggest weakness. On the one hand we can imagine a better world and then create it. On the other, we can imagine that we are doing good when we're really doing harm. We can become convinced of untrue things, sometimes for better and sometimes for worst...all of us.
No one gets through life in strict adherence to reality. The burden is on each of us to find Optimal Illusions so that with the right blend of fantasy and reality we can get through both the dark night of the soul and the tough times ahead.
The conflict between science and religion should transition now. Enough grabbing back and forth at the all-encompassing prize. The prize must be split. Let science win the reality prize. All told, even with its fumbles, it does a better job of figuring out what is. Let religion and all other manner of revelation and wishful thinking win the comfort prize.
Then let's transition the science religion debate into shop talk about how to divide duties between illusion and accuracy, faith and reason, hope and honesty, romanticism and skepticism.
For that to occur, the crusaders for science have got to stop pretending that they are somehow immune from believing untrue things. They have to admit that the demand for both hope and truth co-inhabit all of us. Naturally, they won't admit it if it means surrendering science's authority as the best system so far for getting at what's really true.
And the crusaders for religion, revelation, and wishful thinking have got to stop pretending that their way of knowing is as good as science's at discovering what is really true. Naturally they won't if it means having to give up the comfort, joy and community they get from belief.
A few other readers said fine, suppose we could sit down to practical shop talk about how to manage the division of labor between science and faith. How do one pursue optimal illusion?
In the remains of this piece I'll suggest a few angles for thinking about that wonderful and pressing question.
Who says?
Don't take my advice on how to know whether an illusion will prove useful. Or anyone's. Or, at least take it with this grain of salt. We each answer the question under the influence of wishful and accurate thinking. The natural tendency is to say, "my beliefs are useful." So be especially skeptical about all that follows here.
Guesscrow
One should always believe today what worked tomorrow, but since tomorrow isn't here yet, we have to guess what that would be. There are no surefire recipes for deciding which illusions will pay off in the long run and which ones won't.
There's no way to know today for sure whether Google stock will go up or down tomorrow either, but the problem with optimal illusion runs much deeper than mere unpredictability. Hope is, by definition an effort at a self-fulfilling prophecy. Goethe said it well: "The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. ... Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."
If it were that simple, all you would have to do is boldly hope, the universe would confer its genius, power and magic, and you would get everything you hoped for.
Not that simple.
Yes, the universe throws weight behind those who boldly begin things. It has an escrow account waiting for the emboldened. But how much is in there is something we must guess at. I call it guesscrow, the unknowable quantity of momentum that you can unleash by hoping. If the guesscrow proves sufficient, you'll have achieved victory. Your hope and wishful thinking will have proven extra useful. And if the guesscrow proves insufficient, the hope and wishful thinking will have proven extra harmful giving you momentum in a direction that didn't pay off.
Visit opposing scenarios.
To figure out whether a belief will prove extra useful or harmful, make up mirror image scenarios. For example, on the question of whether religious belief will help or hurt our efforts to address climate change:
1. Looking back from the year 2040 we see that around 2010, it became obvious that esoteric religious law was a luxury we could no longer afford. With so many environmental imperatives we couldn't afford to also impose a bunch of irrelevant imperatives that served archaic unrealistic beliefs. As a result we abandoned fantasies, faced reality, exerted ourselves making rational sacrifices and save millions of lives that would have been lost if we dissipated energy on religion.
2. Looking back from the year 2040, we see that around 2010, religions, the only force in history able to sustain persistent international collective action, mobilized a movement that saved millions of lives that would have been lost if we had abandoned religion.
In both cases, lives were saved, but in one by believing accurate, and in the other, inaccurate things. Once you have your two scenarios, cleanly crafted to sound as plausible as possible, try to figure out which is more plausible.
For the big decisions, believe what you want, for the little ones, be accurate.
While there are no sure fire recipes for figuring out what's an optimal illusion, there are some basic guidelines. For example, the division of labor should leave the little decisions to science:
