“A Preference for Facts” January 26, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Philip K. Dick, writer
Because both are foundational to the study of logic.
The translation of this equation is “if p then q, and if q then r, therefore, if p then r. A common teaching application of this syllogism is this: the claim that all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal.
An aspect of logic that is applied not only in mathematics but becomes crucial to research in all fields of science, is the whole realm of trying to figure out probability.
The reliability of any logic syllogism is, of course, rooted, in the reliability of the original assumptions. Therein lies the problem of conflict between the world’s religions . . . Christians have tended to believe that in some manner, God wrote the Bible. Muslims have tended to believe that in some manner, God wrote the Quran. If you start with that premise, then you are obviously going to come down to some pretty seriously different conclusions. Of course, if anyone believes that God wrote either one of those books and then you actually read those books seriously, you will likely conclude that God is quite schizophrenic.
But once you give up on the notion that God writes books, especially particularly self-contradicting, confusing, and largely false books, then you are left with the problem of determining what to believe. Not just the question, “What is true?” but the more nuanced, “What is probably true?” Or, “How likely is it to be true?”
However, by that logic, I could claim that unicorns are real. And none of you can prove that they don’t exist for exactly the same reason that I can’t prove that angels don’t exist. So what is reality? Is it just what we like to think?
So, the more extraordinary a claim is, the more proof we should reasonably demand for believing it. It may seem impossible that a huge aircraft made of steel and filled with people, fuel, and luggage can actually fly through the air but we have seen it, most of us have been in them, we have studied the physics of air displacement and I have even taken the training to become a pilot and have flown light aircraft across the country.
It is an extraordinary thing to claim, and yet, in the miracle of modern flight, the evidence is in and none of us have reason to doubt it. We might very well doubt it if just one or two people claimed to have seen it or ridden in one, but we have compelling firsthand evidence.
So, when it comes to religious beliefs, how do we approach this matter of probability and evidence? It is a vexing problem because, for the most part, the practice of religion is an invitation to assassinate your brains and believe a pre-formed set of beliefs . . . you can be a Jew or a Christian, a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Muslim, and in each instance you can break that down in many ways . . . Christians can be Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox . . . Protestants can be Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, or about a thousand variations all of the way out to the more bizarre beliefs of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists.
But what if you don’t want to just accept anyone’s pre-formed package of beliefs? What if you only want to believe what has a high probability of being true? And while there is not an “ap for that” there is a formula that is remarkably helpful.
I fear that if I wander any deeper into the weeds here that I not only might lose my entire audience but I might become hopelessly lost myself and never find my way home, so let me sum it up this way: the probability that any belief (A) is true, is predicated on the strength of the objective evidence that can be known (B) such that the strength of our conviction about anything should be weighed strictly on the degree of evidence that we have to support the belief.
Churches have often applauded those who have belief without evidence, in fact, there are passages of scripture that go directly to that point, “blessed are those who believe who have not seen.” I have to object. Believing without seeing leaves one on thin ice, logically, with a sketchy relationship to reality.
The evidence for the existence of heaven or hell is based on belief with no evidence. There are those who claim to have seen angels but there are those who have claimed to have seen unicorns, the Loch Ness monster, and who claim to have endured a rectal prob on an alien spaceship, but they never have any corroborating evidence. Thousands of people have similarly described near death visions, most of which can be medically explained through oxygen deprivation to the brain coupled with an extremely active imagination and a desperate need for attention.
The late science fiction writer, Philip Dick, provided our wisdom lesson today. He made his living writing fiction but he was very clear eyed about what is real and what is not. He said: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Where now is the first church of Odin? Of Zeus? We decorate our homes with art work and images that reflect ancient Greek religions but we do not venerate those images because the beliefs once associated with them have evaporated.
Reality, however, doesn’t need a religion to maintain it. The odd thing to me, however, is how religious people will look at facts and just say, “I don’t believe that,” as if reality was determined by whim or personal preference. Try balancing your check book that way and see if your bank is willing to bend through various beliefs about what your checking balance is.
What I am clearly rejecting is the unsubstantiated, if not magical or superstitious aspects of traditional religion but I am still here . . . I’m still a pastor because there are fact based aspects of what it means to be religious that are not only worth living for but, under the right circumstances, are worth dying for.
Where most religious people can find agreement is in the claim that real faith, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or Buddhism, is about love and compassion. We can’t reasonably debate the existence of souls, or an afterlife, or angels or demons, but if we are invested in love and compassion, here is what I do know:
About 1 in 5 children in the richest country in the world is growing up in poverty.
There are more than a half a million Americans who are homeless, and about a thousand of those people live within five miles of this church. We have about 50,000 suicides every year in America now and what we know about them is that almost all of those people died because they didn’t feel sufficiently connected to anyone to want to live. All of these churches and all this religion of love, and tens of thousands of people feel so unloved that they take their own lives. We have about 60,000 deaths from drug over-doses and I’m not sure how many of them would have happened if they felt sufficiently connected to anyone in a loving relationship.
I’m not wanting to blame family members and friends for suicides and over-doses, I’m just saying, for a country that has so much religion based on love, it doesn’t look like there is enough loving going on. Which is why I keep saying that we need to get our spiritual heads out of the clouds . . . we need to stop with the magical thinking and the superstitious stuff that has eaten up so much of our energy, attention, time, and resources, and get seriously invested in what we can demonstrate to be true, real, important and necessary.
In the past few years we have heard a lot about fake news. And, honestly, there is a lot of what passes for news that is clearly not true or is so spun up into propaganda as to be beneath our dignity. Typically, the way that propaganda works is to tell a lie over and over until, in its repetition, most people will believe that it is true.
Trump keeps saying that the Russia investigation is all fake, even though 34 people and 3 companies have already been either convicted, indicted, or have pled guilty.
