Living authentically in the real world – without blind faith or mystery-mongering

Chris Sharples’ picture is a view over the far SW from Mt Sprent … expressing the notion that the world is beautiful and that we don’t need religion to explain that; it’s just our emotional response to the world we evolved in and which sustains us!

After MONA’s Fair for Freedom of Belief and Religion, Chris Sharples, ponders the Great Questions …

There are many aspects of the world we find ourselves in that seem at first sight to be frightening and difficult to accept. That is why our ancestors invented religious belief, and it is why so many still think they need religion1. Religious ideas have been designed precisely to re-assure us about the things we find most worrying. Yet to someone who thinks that reality actually matters, it must follow that one’s life cannot be fully authentic if one uses stratagems such as religious belief to avoid acknowledgement of the manifest conditions of our existence. On the contrary, a life lived authentically must be one that acknowledges the actual nature of our existence – with all its potentials and all its limitations – and finds meaning, purpose and satisfaction within the constraints imposed by that reality, rather than by trying to deny them. Thus, I object to religion for the fundamental reason that it is the greatest obstacle that stands in the way of living a truly authentic life grounded in the reality of the human condition.

Of course, we can ask why authenticity matters? What difference does it make if we adhere to illusions which permit us to blissfully ignore seemingly unpleasant aspects of the world? If living in ignorance makes us happy, what is wrong with that? I think it matters at two levels: it matters at a personal level because a life lived according to beliefs one knows or suspects are wrong is not a life lived true to oneself; and it also matters at a social level because if we persist in entertaining delusory notions about the nature of the human condition we cannot hope to solve the many problems that continue to plague our lives at both the individual and the collective levels. We cannot realistically expect that the greed, denial and aggression that plague humanity will ever be resolved – or at least managed satisfactorily – on the basis of the false notions about their causes that are inherent in a religious view of our existence.

The problem however, is that no matter how simplistic and delusory the religious diagnosis of the human condition may be it nevertheless tells us things about death, purpose and the nature of our being that we want to believe. It was after all designed that way, and the religious have powerful strategies to prevent mere reality from spoiling the fun, no matter how blatantly obvious that reality may actually be.

Whilst religious belief comes in thousands of varieties, there are nevertheless two basic levels or ways in which religious belief can be held, and each of these has a basic rationale for continuing to believe no matter what. One is the “sure and certain” level of belief, in which believers may resort to all sorts of arguments from philosophy, supposed revelations or other religious experiences to bolster their beliefs, but in the final resort – when such arguments fail to hold their ground in the face of critical analysis – pin everything on the ultimate fall-back position of a blind (i.e., evidence-free) faith. It is a measure of the deeply irrational nature of religious belief that a reliance on evidence-free faith, disregarding all rational doubts, has traditionally been held to be the highest religious virtue of all.

The other level of religious belief is agnosticism, whose adherents claim to be undecided but on closer inspection are obviously hedging their bets in the hope that maybe religion is right after all. Agnostics will normally claim to be true sceptics in the scientific sense, unprepared to pass judgement on a matter which they argue can be neither proven nor disproven. However this is only true in the banal sense that there can never be any utterly final absolute certainty about anything whatever. After all, we might all be just brains in vats receiving sensory input from evil demons to make us believe we are perceiving things that aren’t really there. In practice there are many things that we can be sure of beyond any reasonable doubt (despite residual but essentially unreasonable theoretical doubts such as that noted above). I suggest that the delusionary nature of religion is one of these. Indeed, I would turn the argument around by asserting that there never was any good reason to believe religious concepts in the first place: they were literally dreamed up by our distant ancestors as a strategy for coping with the harsh conditions of life as they perceived them. Asserting that religion can never be either proven or disproven is rather like claiming that you cannot prove or disprove that there are three Coca-Cola cans in orbit around Uranus; sure you can’t disprove it, but the real point is that there’s no reason to believe it in the first place.

The aspect of agnosticism that gives away the fact it is a bet-hedging exercise is the tendency of agnostics to support their refusal to take a definite stance on religion with an insistence that certain key aspects of life remain “mysterious”, and thus by implication just might be indications of a deeper religious (i.e., supernatural) reality. The aspects of life referred to are usually questions about the nature of death, consciousness and freewill; the purpose of life; our supposedly transcendent feelings of beauty and love, and the order we perceive in nature. Of course, the nature of these things has been genuinely mysterious for much of human history, which is why the agnostic argument seems superficially plausible. However, with the explosion of scientific understanding of the world and our own nature that has occurred over the last 200 years, any claim that the nature of life, death, consciousness and associated feelings remain – and must always remain – as mysterious as ever can only be based on a failure to acquaint oneself with the wealth of research and insights that have remarkably clarified our understanding of these things. Whilst we may not have all the fine details in hand yet, it is quite reasonable to assert that we are far enough down the road to understanding these things as to be able to rule out any obvious need for supernatural explanations. Claims that these things cannot ‘in principle’ be explained are simply a failure of the imagination.

In a way that is more subtle and thus superficially more plausible than the blind faith of ‘full-on’ religion, the mystery-mongering of agnosticism is an intellectual trick which – just as much as full religious belief – stands in the way of living what I call an authentic life: that is, a life lived in full awareness and acceptance of reality, with no attempts to hide from ourselves the (seemingly) less palatable aspects of existence2.

Demystifying the Obvious

The nature of death is perhaps the simplest and most obvious of the seemingly unpleasant aspects of life that religious beliefs are used to shield ourselves from. We can understand very clearly and straightforwardly what death is – it is simply the end of our individual life and consciousness. We fear that reality, so we convince ourselves to believe death is a ‘mystery’; this allows us to hope that it is something more than what all the straight-forward everyday evidence before our eyes clearly tells us it is.

Closely linked with our ability to understand death is the consequent worry about what the purposes and meaning of our life are. The answer to this equally straightforward and well understood by many – life has no meaning or purpose unless and until we create these for ourselves. And the only meanings or purposes that we can give our lives are practical, mortal, limited things that we can accomplish here in the real world. If we do not do this then our lives are indeed truly meaningless. But many people seem to think they need an ‘off the shelf’ meaning to life, one they don’t have to work out – and work on – themselves. It seems easier to just convince ourselves that life already has a purpose but that it is a mystery – so we can keep on hoping that our life really has a mysterious transcendental purpose even though we fail to do the mental work and give it real purpose ourselves3.

We experience feelings of beauty and love, and we perceive the orderliness of the world; we experience numinous epiphanies and tell ourselves these must be signs of something ‘deeper’ to life behind its superficial appearance. We convince ourselves that it would be somehow ‘insufficient’ and ‘dull’ if these things arose out of purely physical causes. Since we can’t quite put our finger on the source of these numinous feelings, we tell ourselves they are a ‘mystery’. Yet a little understanding of evolutionary psychology easily reveals that they are simply the (evolved) emotional response of a conscious being to its awareness of being in an environment that is conducive to its well-being (because it has evolved to adapt to its environment, and vice-versa), or its emotional response to ideas and insights which clarify its purposes or enhance its ability to live well.

This brings us to the supposed ‘mystery’ of consciousness and the nature of the mind. We know – in principle if not yet in all the fine details – what consciousness is: it is the way we subjectively experience the evolved physical processes by which our bodies function and by which our physical brain processes information and generates awareness of itself and the world. But we think that we want consciousness to be more than just physical processes which in virtue of their physical-ness must someday end. So we convince ourselves that the true nature of consciousness is a mystery so as to be able to entertain fantasies about what we think we would really like it to be.

It is common to read scientifically-defeatist assertions (normally presented without any supporting evidence or logic) along the lines of “there is no way in principle that a physical object or process could be aware of itself”. Such evidence-free assertions are usually made in the apparent belief that an unassailable logical argument has thereby been stated5. As Daniel Dennett5 has pointed out, “…there are many who insist – and hope – that there will never be a demystification of consciousness”. Yet it is actually rather easy to see – at least in principle – the basic process by which conscious self-awareness could emerge in a completely physical brain, namely that a sufficiently evolved and complex physical brain capable of observing the world in some detail and using that information (as is similarly the case for many other obviously physical and ‘unconscious’ machines), can learn to take the process one simple step further by observing itself to be an entity observing other things6. Douglas Hofstadter7 has written extensively on this process by which consciousness can emerge from such a self-referential mode of perception, which he refers to as “strange loops”: feedback loops that raise awareness (of other things) to the next level of self-awareness.

However, by refusing to see the possibility of a fundamentally simple process such as this, and instead asserting on the basis of a scientifically-defeatist argument that consciousness is a deep and ineffable ‘mystery’, we can continue to entertain the notion that ‘maybe’ our minds are actually something non-physical that will therefore never die.

Reconciling with Reality

We hide from what we actually know about the world by convincing ourselves it is a mystery, by telling ourselves “there must be more to this than we can see”, even though we have no actual concrete reason to believe this is the case apart from a desire for it to be so. This allows us to avoid accepting plain realities that are obvious before our eyes, and permits us to entertain comforting fantasies about what the ‘true’ (unending, transcendent) nature of life and consciousness might be (if we are lucky and our desires and fantasies pan out).

But to do so is to deny the essential nature of the human condition, and to permit ourselves to substitute for this with a fantasy. It is a failure to live authentically in the real world as it actually is. To live authentically is to accept the nature of the world and the nature of our own being as they manifestly are, and to derive satisfaction and purpose in life from these, rather than from some hoped-for fantasy. And as many thoughtful people have discovered, it is indeed possible – and in fact, not all that hard – to live authentic, happy and satisfying lives in full awareness of the reality of our condition.

As the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) understood long ago, there is nothing to fear in death; it is a simple state of non-being. Whilst the process of dying may (or may not) be painful, this remains the case whether or not there is an eternal life thereafter. But in the state of being dead there is plainly nothing to fear; there is no ongoing misery or pain involved in no longer existing. It is simply the ending of one’s own chapter in the story of life. And that can be quite acceptable if we did give our lives purpose, so that we did contribute positively in some way to the ongoing chain of being. Our own self may cease, but what we have contributed to the greater pageant of life can endure. The words reported to have been written by Epicurus to his friend Idomeneus on the day of his death sum it up:

“I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions8.”

The poet John Keats voiced the fears of many when he accused science of “unweaving the rainbow”, a reference to Isaac Newton supposedly ruining the poetry of the rainbow by showing that light can be reduced to prismatic 9colours . This notion expresses a widespread fear that by unravelling the mysteries of the world, science supposedly destroys the wonder of existence. But Keats was wrong. If the world appears beautiful to us, then it is beautiful regardless of its origins. Anyone who has experienced the epiphanies that accompany finally understanding (scientifically) how some formerly intractable-seeming aspect of the world works will know this10. The notion that it is important to remain ignorant of how the world works – by insisting that certain things remain ‘mysteries’ lest we find their true nature to be depressing and bleak – is a fear-driven choice which some people make, but it is nothing more than a choice.

One can instead choose to be inspired and uplifted by understanding more of how the world works. I know this because my own gradually increasing understanding of what we (science) actually already know about such things as the emergence of order, life and consciousness in the universe has in fact been experienced by me as a gradually increasing sense that life is intrinsically valuable and worthwhile – precisely in virtue of such an abundance of wonderful things having emerged from chaos. Knowing that I, my consciousness, my purposes and everything else around me have evolved and emerged from the quantum chaos that is the ultimate fabric that physics has identified unpinning reality does not make me feel at all depressed. Instead, it fills me with a sense of amazement that this has actually happened, a desire to make the most of the opportunity evolution has given me to experience this evolved world, and a sense of purpose in trying to play my own part in contributing to the ongoing evolving emergence of still more order and purpose in the world. The knowledge that the order of the world has emerged from the creative ferment of unguided evolutionary processes means that it is filled with inspirational potential precisely because it remains open to the emergence of new things – and especially because I may play some part in that ongoing process of creative emergence. That understanding gives my life meaning; it does not in any way diminish it. In contrast, the religious notion that the world was created by a supernatural “designer” bent on shaping it to some pre-determined end that is entirely beyond our choice or influence is a terribly dull, limiting and indeed totalitarian concept.

Living Authentically

It is easy to find numerous examples of people who understand that the only authentic meanings their lives could possibly have are the sorts of concrete, practical down-to-Earth meanings they give it here and now in the real world, during the course of the one life we really have. Most such people lead quiet, unspectacular lives which most of the world never hears about, yet which they experience as satisfying and fulfilling because they have projects and purposes that matter to them and which in some small way help to make the world a better place. Fortunately, it is not hard to also identify people more in the public eye who provide prominent role models for the sorts of interesting and meaningful lives that can accompany the explicit rejection of religious beliefs. It would be hard to find a better example than the challenging writer Christopher Hitchens, who was a person who fully understood that death is in all personal respects an absolute ending, yet pursued the purposes of his own life – an enthusiastic exploration of ideas – with such gusto that even as he was dying of cancer he devoted his considerable energies to exploring and trying to understand the process of dying itself in his writings11.

It is arguable that religion has been a necessary cultural strategy which has allowed us to cope with what might otherwise have turned out to be a disastrous evolutionary dead-end, namely the evolution of conscious self-awareness. Precisely because evolution is an unguided natural process, our capacity for conscious self-awareness evolved at a time when we did not have the knowledge or the philosophical experience and understanding to cope with some of the aspects of life – such as the inevitability of personal death – that our newly evolved awareness made apparent to us. Fortunately for us, we were able to devise coping strategies, in the form of religious beliefs which re-assured us that it’s all OK. Religion kept us relatively sane, relatively emotionally stable, while we went through the long process of consciously learning and acquiring the knowledge and understanding that we would need to eventually be able move beyond the need for such coping strategies.

Now, after over 50,000 years of cultural evolution, we have finally reached a stage at which it has become possible for at least some of us to live meaningfully and happily without needing the comforting illusions of religion. We now have the philosophical capacity, the historical experience, the scientific knowledge and the understanding of our own creative capacity that we need to live authentically. It is time to put the childhood of humanity behind us and grow into a collective adulthood in which we begin to live authentically without relying on myths and illusions to sustain us emotionally in the face of the realities that our conscious awareness reveals to us.

Religious believers often rhetorically assert that “you must believe in something!” I believe in reality. More precisely, I believe that a life lived authentically in a full acceptance of the manifest nature of the world around us is better than a life lived in that denial of reality which religion provides. I believe this for two basic reasons.

Firstly, I find it self-evident that we will never be able to satisfactorily resolve or at least manage the many problems that hold us back, both collectively and individually, unless we acknowledge clearly and directly their real (evolutionary) nature and origins. We are not selfish, greedy, aggressive and prone to denial because we have ‘rejected God’. We are that way because we evolved those behaviours; they no doubt improved our fitness for survival as small bands of hominids on the African savannah of 10 million years ago. However those same behaviours are now manifestly problematical in the large complex societies that we have created over the last 10,000 years, at a rate far too rapid for organic evolution to significantly modify our evolved behaviours accordingly. It is clear that we cannot hope to find ways of resolving or coping with these problems unless we recognise their real underlying causes, and stop blinding ourselves with illusory religious explanations such as ‘original sin’ and useless solutions such as ‘accepting Jesus’. It comes as no surprise to me to find that there is abundant empirical data to support the observation that in the modern world, it is the societies least influenced by religious dogmas that are the most socially stable and secure12.

Secondly, I believe it is better to live authentically because I cannot in honesty blind myself to the fact that religious ideas are manifestly false. That is to say, I hold certain moral values13, and one of those values is that truth is better than falsehood; hence I cannot live a satisfying life if I base it on what I know beyond reasonable doubt to be falsehoods. For me, to try to preserve a ‘hope’ that religion might be true after all, using the mystery-mongering strategies of agnosticism or the blind faith of full religious belief, would simply be to live dishonestly with myself, to continue to deny the manifestly obvious real world in front of me. I would be untrue to myself, and to what I know about the world14.

In an exploration of the process of dying, Bronnie Ware15 found that the greatest regret of many dying people is that they had failed to be true to themselves: they had acted and thought as others expected them to, and had set aside other goals and lifestyles they aspired to but had avoided for fear of disapproval. In a word, they had failed to live authentically by their own lights. As (seemingly) ironically as it may sound, living in the knowledge of what death really is – our personal ending – can therefore be an important element in living a fully satisfying life; satisfying because it is lived authentically in a full awareness of reality, not in-authentically behind a veil of what one suspects to be but avoids recognising as comforting delusions (by telling oneself that rejecting doubt is a ‘virtue’).

It is not even particularly hard to be entirely satisfied – and in fact, inspired – by the art of living authentically. Living authentically involves understanding that we have no need for imaginary, mysterious and hoped-for transcendental purposes or meanings for our lives. We live our lives at a human scale, not a supra-cosmic one, and it is only real, concrete human-scaled purposes and projects that we can create ourselves, and exert our efforts towards here and now in the real world, that can actually give fulfilling and satisfying meanings to the one short but real life that we actually know we have.

It involves understanding that we are part of the real, physical universe that we already see all around us; we are not some sort of transcendental souls somehow forced to reside here for a short while before taking our rightful places in an imaginary ‘higher state of being’. We are that part of the physical universe that has finally evolved to the point at which consciousness has emerged (evolved). We are a part of the universe that has woken up and begun to look around and understand itself. We have discovered that our existence is not part of some pre-ordained cosmic plan that we have no option but to comply with or be damned for all eternity. On the contrary, the world is a constantly evolving and emerging reality with no pre-planned end in sight, in which our own choices and actions can determine outcomes that are not pre-ordained, and which may be as inspiring – or as terrible – as own conscious choices determine. We are creative beings, not the slaves of some totalitarian God who has already decided what we must do and will frown on any deviation from his16 plan.

That simple and obvious fact should be enough to inspire and give us a desire to make the most of the life that evolution has made real for us. To live authentically is to understand that this makes our brief and finite lives quite special enough; to want more is just greedy and quite un-necessary.

Chris Sharples is a Research Associate at the University of Tasmania where he dabbles in geomorphology and the effects of sea-level rise on coasts. He is also interested in trying to spot elephants in rooms and state the bleeding obvious about them.

Refs

1 I define religion as a belief that there is some greater supernatural scheme of things that over-arches the physical world we perceive, that our lives are given purpose and meaning by being part of that supernatural scheme, and that amongst other things this involves our minds or consciousness being some sort of non-physical thing which is therefore not subject to the limitations of physicality, such as death. This is a paraphrase of what religion has always meant to most people, and it is simply a misuse of well-established words to claim that atheism (or any other ideology) is a form of religion. Such misuses are generally made for rhetorical reasons – such as when a religious believer rhetorically states that atheism is “just another religion” – that serve only to confuse the issue (after all, if the believer is calling atheism “just” a religion in order to weaken its credibility, does not that also simultaneously weaken the credibility of the believers own religion?).

2 It should not really need stating that there remain many genuine mysteries about the world and the nature of life; it’s just that things such as the nature and meaning of death are not amongst these.

3 If one wishes to believe that life has some transcendental religious purpose, it pays not to examine that claim too closely for fear of becoming aware of the inherently paradoxical and irrational nature of such beliefs. Ideas of transcendental religious purposes for our lives are generally tied closely to the notion that these purposes involve some sort of eternal life after death in the sense of some sort of personal immortality – since after all it is a desire for death not to be ‘the end’ which drives much of religious belief. However as Ronald Lindsay has pointed out, if we examine the notion of eternal life too closely, we are soon confronted with an uncomfortable paradox that we may call “Lindsay’s Dilemma”. The straightforward notion of existing as some sort of sentient being for ever and ever…and ever…and ever…without end… sounds inherently meaningless. We would have to occupy ourselves with…something…forever, infinitely, with no end in sight. And if there’s no end in sight, just an infinite tedium of trying to stay unendingly occupied with something, where would be the meaning or purpose in that? The theologian or sophisticated believer may assert that this is too simplistic a notion of eternal life, what it really would mean would be to exist in a timeless state, in a sort of eternal ‘now’. However as Lindsay notes, the thing that existed in such a state could not be ourselves in any sense we might recognise. We are time-bound creatures; we do not live in a timeless ‘now’ but rather experience life and construct our consciousness in terms of a flow of events and memories. If we were to be somehow transferred into such a timeless state after death, the ‘being’ that existed in such state would not be in any recognisable sense the ‘self’ that existed in time prior to death. So, Lindsay’s Dilemma for the believer in personal immortality is that what is on offer is either something that condemns one to a meaningless existence without end, or else a timeless existence that entails the annihilation of anything that we would recognise as ‘the self’. However, annihilation of the self is exactly what the believer in personal immortality wants to avoid. (See Ronald Lindsay, editorial in ‘Free Inquiry’ journal Vol. 33, No. 3, April/May 2013).

4 A typical example appeared in the “Australian Rationalist” Journal for Autumn 2014 (“Whither Humanity”, p. 16-19), in which the anonymous author repeatedly asserted (without offering any evidence or logic) that no machine could be aware of itself, and indeed stated: “’Why does consciousness exist at all, why aren’t we zombies?’ No obvious answer appears”. This unsupported statement, typical of many, completely ignores the large amount of work and thought that has given us at least the fundamental outlines of understanding consciousness and how it could indeed have evolved as an emergent property of physical structures (brains) without any supernatural interventions being necessary (e.g., see the works by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter below).

5 Daniel C. Dennett, 1991: “Consciousness Explained”; Back Bay Books, New York, 511 pp.

6 Daniel C. Dennett, 1991: “Consciousness Explained”; Back Bay Books, New York, p. 225-226,

7 Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1979: “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”; Basic Books, New York, 777pp. (1999 edition); Douglas Hofstadter, 2007: “I am a Strange Loop”; Basic Books, New York, 412 pp.

8 From: Diogenes Laertius: “The Lives of the Philosophers” (Translation by C.D. Yonge, 1895; quoted on Wikipedia: accessed 3rd May 2014).

9 Cited by Richard Dawkins, 1998: “Unweaving the Rainbow”, Penguin Books, page x.

10 For further discussion of the appetite for wonder that scientific understanding of the world nourishes, see Ursula Goodenough, 1998: “The Sacred Depths of Nature”; Oxford University Press, 197 pp.; and Richard Dawkins, 1998: “Unweaving the Rainbow”, Penguin Books, 337 pp.

11 See his posthumously published final book: Christopher Hitchens, 2012: “Mortality”; Allen & Unwin, 104 pp.

12 See the important studies by: Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart, 2004: “Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide”; Cambridge University Press, 329 pp.; and Phil Zuckerman, 2008: “Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment”; New York University Press, 226 pp.

13 For those who wish to maintain the unsupportable notion that morality is only possible if we believe religion, please see my previous Tasmanian Times essay entitled “The Moral Irrelevance of Christian Doctrine”; not to mention a wealth of writing on this topic by many others.

14 Being true to oneself and what one knows about the world is an important element in living an authentic and thus satisfying life for many people who have come to understand the delusory nature of religion. A thoughtful exposition of this outlook on authenticity is provided by Kevin J. Zimmermann (2014) in an article entitled “Commonalities between Homosexuality and Atheism: Authenticity, Thinking Critically, and Social Equality”, in “Free Inquiry” journal Vol. 34, no. 4 pages 49-52

15 Bronnie Ware, 2011: “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”; Hay House Inc., California, 245 pp.

16 There is no need for gender-neutral language when referring to ‘God’; religious belief is nearly always patriarchal.