"How could it be anything but the most shameful ignorance to think one knows what one does not know?" — Socrates

"When the intellect begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then its judgment is something proper to itself — not something found outside in the thing." — Thomas Aquinas

Dear Denise, Bill Meyer and —— (name deleted upon request),

I am offering an idea here because we all seem to be involved in the same interesting discussion, only not with the same person at the same time. —— and Denise had a conversation Sunday afternoon; Bill Meyer and I had a wonderful talk late Sunday night; Denise and I had a running conversation Monday evening; then Bill Meyer and I talked again Tuesday. So this e-mail is a way to bring those threads together and see what happens. Probably nothing, but that's OK. (See response below.)

I think that in this group of four —— and I represent the extreme poles. —— represents intense, absolute belief, while I represent rabid agnosticism across the board. —— thinks he knows enough about God and religion to say that I am going to hell, while the only hell I believe in is the one created by our recent computer-system upgrade.

In light of this four-way discussion, it might be interesting to conduct a thought experiment on why one person thinks his judgment about religion is infinitely better than another person's because that's what it boils down to: personal judgment. Actually, we could expand the thought experiment and ask: Why does any person think his or her judgment is infinitely better than another person's judgment in regards theology, philosophy or psychology?

KANT WEIGHS IN

Last year I had some rewarding realizations about judgment and spent a lot of time jamming them all into a couple e-mails. Just last month I found that Kant had pretty much reached the same conclusions a few hundred years ago. I will quote him instead of myself since he's about 100 times smarter than me. This information comes from an essay by Sir Karl Popper written in 1960 called "Knowledge Without Authority."

Popper tells us that Kant's "principle of autonomy" expresses the idea that we must not accept the command of an authority, however exalted, as the basis of truth, morality or action. "For whenever we are faced with a command by an authority, it is for us to judge, critically, whether it is moral or immoral to obey."

So in regards truth and morality Kant believes: "The authority may have power to enforce its commands, and we may be powerless to resist. But if we have the physical power of choice, then the ultimate responsibility remains with us. It is our own critical decision whether to obey a command, whether to submit to an authority."

EXTENDING THE IDEA

Popper says Kant boldly carried this idea into the field of religion, and here Popper quotes Kant directly: " ... in whatever way the Deity should be made known to you, and even ... if He should reveal Himself to you: it is you ... who must judge whether you are permitted to believe in Him, and to worship Him."

Kant and Popper are saying that the rules of human nature, and also the rules of most religious belief systems, including Christianity, require individual judgment. It is not "the truth of the matter" but human judgment (intellectual, moral and even "emotional") that is most directly responsible for our subsequent choices, actions and assertions, some of which may take the form of, "Jon is going to hell."

So to be very clear: In the face of complicated and conflicting theological information and powerful spiritual experiences, we as human beings are always thrown back on our attitudes and judgments about those things. We may talk about truth, but we're really talking about some judgment we've made, some value we place on scriptural information or personal experience. And a judgment based on a feeling is still a judgment of sorts.

I am not saying we shouldn't have beliefs, trust our judgment or listen to our feelings; I am not saying we shouldn't make choices, take actions or form relationships based on gut instinct or "the best of our knowledge so far." But I am saying that human beings are notoriously poor judges of their own fallibility and that we regularly lose track of the way judgment creates belief. We say "truth" is the cause of our belief when belief is really a product of judgment.

BACK TO THE EXPERIMENT

Now we're back to our thought experiment: Why does one person believe his judgment is infinitely better than another person's, that he is infallible in matters of faith? Has he made an accurate determination that his judgment can't be wrong   ...   but how do we make such judgments about judgment? Or is he simply trusting some powerful feeling to assure him he's infallibly correct ... but how do we know when our feelings give us the truth?

To know how this works would carry us a long way toward understanding the nature of belief; however, we might find some disturbing possibilities along the way.

WE MIGHT FIND ...

... that some people actually know the truth. This would be the hope and expectation of the devout believer.

We might find that truth has more to do with psychology than religion, which would help us understand why so many people believe in so many incompatible and incommensurable theologies absolutely.

We might find that absolute belief is fundamentally physiological and almost irresistible as described in "Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief."

We might find that religious belief is popular because it simplifies, and therefore falsifies, something more complicated transpiring behind the scenes of human awareness.

We might find that people follow a religion, not because they are afraid of going to hell, but because psychologically they're already there and religion helps them endure it.

We might find that people stick with their beliefs because it's the only way they can make sense of some powerful, disturbing or profoundly moving feelings they've experienced.

We might find that when we talk about religion, philosophy, psychology, mythology, science and the arts we're really talking about a variety of techniques for the relief of pain and suffering, and that different things work for different people in different cultures and at different periods of history.

And we might find that personal judgment, which judges itself to be infallible, is the most common form self-comforting behavior on the planet.

We might even find something that includes all those things and more, something that totally revolutionizes our thoughts on the nature belief and the consequences of certainty. Strangely enough, the actual "truth of the matter" might stagger the imagination.

I admit that the confusion surrounding belief is harder to navigate than a four-way street, but I find it a lot more interesting than a one-way street.

Jon

PS. The essays Vanity and Judgment and Certainty RIP are my earlier attempts to uncover the secret role of judgment in the formation of belief. They are on my 2004 Web site.

A RESPONSE

In case you think I am exaggerating the issue of judgment, here's a response to my e-mail from an undisclosed recipient.

"You miss the whole point. It is not a matter of my personal judgment. It is a matter that God is real and simply is who He says He is.

"And as I've told you before, my only obligation is to tell you the truth. You are not obligated to hear it. Once I have told you, my obligation is ended.

"I won't debate it. There is no need to debate it. Debating it over and over is a total waste of time. If you want to know how you can know that God is real and who He says He is, I will be glad to tell you.

"If not. Have a nice day."

MY REPLY:

I totally agree; there's no point in debating this, and I have no interest in doing so. Also, I don't have any interest in stirring up hard feelings, but I have an interest in making myself clear, so I will take a chance and add this point:

I don't think you'd say that god forced you into belief; Christianity says you have free will, a choice in the matter. But you can't make a choice without making a judgment, so it comes back to personal judgment after all. Saying that it doesn't simply throws you out of accord with the very theology you're trying to defend. Also, if as you say I am "not obligated to hear" the truth, then I must have a choice in the matter, too, an opportunity for judgment.

Certainty doesn't come from truth, or people would only be certain about "the one true thing" if there were such a thing (and perhaps there is), but not certain about hundreds of different things: that Jesus really was the son of god, that Muhammad really was a prophet of Allah, that Joseph Smith really found and translated golden tablets, or that Nietzsche was right and god is dead. Take your pick from among countless belief systems or ideas: judgments, certainty and faith will follow.

I was recently told that faith heals. But if faith means forgetting about judgment — or thinking it's infallible  — or if faith means letting some powerful experience forever rule your views, then I think we're more likely to be wounded than healed by it and more likely to wound others as well. Religion, which is supposed to be all about god, is in many (or all) cases really about something else altogether.

And don't forget that absolute truth fuels the world terror machine. I read an article last night in The New York Times Sunday magazine about a Muslim who's trying to get people to back off from their absolute Islamic beliefs; he faces prison, lashings and beheading for his trouble. I plan to post this article on my Web site soon.

So I am trying to find out what's going on behind the scenes of true belief, whether it's true belief in some religion or science or some other ideology, and this is how it looks so far:

Some information or experience jumpstarts a buried network of emotional power lines, and suddenly life lights up like the Las Vegas strip. And we think, "Only total truth or right relationship with God could do that." And to keep the lights on we try to stay in the same frame of mind that got them going in the first place. We're afraid that doubt will dim the view, and we despair of being thrown back into darkness, so we become rigid, absolute believers. All this gets glorified with reams of theology, of course, but it's really more about keeping the lights on than understanding "the truth of the matter."

To put it bluntly, we should be less enamored of "the truth" and more interested — even wary — of the power of ideas to control thoughts and feelings.