I Used to Be Smart.

As I start this off, I want to start by thinking about some of the fundamental assumptions that I’ll be operating under as I write and think about these issues. I think that will be a helpful starting point, and will be a nice way for me to be clear about my intentions and presuppositions.

I thought about trying to find a “beginning,” and start there. However, I can really think of no beginning in a conversation about truth and faith. The conversation just is what it is. So, I’m going to arbitrarily begin where I feel like beginning—heaven and hell.

Here is what I believe: any journey to discover truth in (and even beyond) the world must operate beyond the well-known concepts of heaven and hell. That search for truth does not have to deny their existence. Rather, if heaven and hell exist, their existence, and their nature should not relevant to our conversation.

Heaven and hell operate on the oldest parts of human psychology: risk aversion and reward affection. Appealing to concepts of heaven triggers the instinctual parts of our brain that seek pleasure, and enumerating visions of hell triggers the instinctual parts of our brain that fear pain. In short, I see them as awful motivators.

I believe that any search for truth should be guided by something better than a sheer risk/reward calculation. I believe that, if God exists, that such simple arithmetic is below what that God would be, especially if that God is principally defined by love (as in the Christian tradition). Thus, any questions that I might ask, any conclusions that I might draw, must be drawn outside of this traditional risk/reward framework. Rather, they must be developed with an eye toward something different. They must be developed with an eye toward seeking to be as truthful as possible, even if I think heaven and hell are very real, I cannot allow them to be my motivation.

Perhaps an example with help with clarity. Various religious traditions have conceived of the afterlife in various ways. I’m most familiar with the Christian tradition, so I’ll use an example from there. For the sake of our example, let us pretend that there is a particular kind of Christianity that believes that an absolute belief in the virginity of Mary at the birth of Jesus is a prerequisite for entering heaven.

If I am an intellectually curious member of this brand of Christianity, I may question the so-called Virgin Birth. However, there is a limit to my intellectual endeavor if I’m operating withing the confines of a heaven and hell mentality. I may discover loads of good evidence that suggest that Jesus was fathered by a real man by means of sexual intercourse. However, if my tradition believes that such a conclusion would sent me to eternal perdition, then fear of that outcome does not allow me to be faithful to the conclusions of my mind.

Whether the Virgin Birth is true or not is not the relevant issues for this example. What is relevant is this: the heaven and hell model of motivation utterly destroys the quest for truth. It both limits intellectual curiosity, and does not allow individuals to follow through with their conclusions because of a fear of eternal damnation. For that reason, I feel this journey must move beyond promises of heaven and fears of hell.

It seems to me that such a primordial punishment/reward scenario is fundamentally below God. What I mean is this: it seems to me that any good God’s desire for God’s creation is for that creation to discover what is ultimately true. If what is ultimately true is the creation of a good God, then what is ultimately true is ultimately good. Those things, then, that would serve as impediments to our search for truth are not things that would be favored by God. Because of the way that traditional notions of heaven and hell shackle our intellectual pursuits by their appeal to base psychological notions of pain and pleasure, those notions are impediments to our search for truth, and therefore they are not at all helpful to us. They do not help us to know what is real about the world, or how we should live in the world. They are methods of control and manipulation more than they methods of truth and discovery.

If, then, we are genuine about our desire to discover truth in and about the world, we must first start the work of moving past that base psychology and be willing to pursue what is ultimately true regardless of the promised consequences.

I feel like that’s a great place to begin. Only when we have freed ourselves from the fear of our explorations can we begin to explore with the intensity and candor necessary to discover truth.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 6:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.