faith

I’ve been trying to nail down why I get so mad at the condescension towards spiritual practices. I’ve decided it comes down to the very obvious and petty thought, “you aren’t as smart as you think you are.” But let me explain.

Whenever someone who is a rational agnostic (read: an atheist who doesn’t want to deal with the stigma) is dismissive of things like astrology, or tarot, I try to explain my point of view through existential philosophy. Their eyes glaze over, “I don’t really care that much, I just know science is real, and this shit is bunk. It’s all confirmation bias and placebo.” And, that’s fine (she says through gritted teeth), but if you want to take the “rational” intellectual high ground, indulge me in opening your ears for one logic-based assertion: By the rules of your own skepticism, your belief in the physical laws that we intuit through sensory perception, as part of what we ASSUME is a shared material reality – is faith. And do you know what a faith based belief is? It’s subjective! Just as much as any spiritual experience! 

The matrix problem is kind of a meme at this point, but it successfully conveys a true limitation humans have. All we can say for sure is that the world we experience seems to have internally consistent rules. It does not disprove the existence of something more that influences us in ways we don’ t understand- “you can’t prove a negative” is logic 101. 

Now, there are very compelling pragmatic reasons to have a science first approach – medicine and technology are overwhelmingly more effective in solving material problems. However, if the angle is pragmatism, spirituality has just as much utilitarian benefit. Even many atheists will admit our brains seem hard wired for spiritual connection – the optimism and sense of meaning/purpose it provides is difficult to replace. Those atheists will accept the suffering of existential dread because they would rather live in the “harsh truth” than believe in fairy tales, but their truth has no more objective basis than any religion, at the universal scale. At best, it is possibly an incomplete truth – which we know can be just as dangerous as pure ignorance if you assume you know more than you do. 

There is an important argument to address in how the metaphysical could interact with the physical, if by definition it is outside it. I’ll give a metaphor that is from Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Imagine a triangle, who lives in a perfectly flat 2d world. What would he see if a cone came down and intersected that plane? An ellipse would appear from nowhere, and change in size and shape for no reason he could discern. If he told anyone about the experience, he would sound crazy, and certainly no science in flatland could explain the experience. 

Should the citizens of flatland throw out their science entirely, then? No, of course not. Should they completely dismiss the experience as a hallucination, to fit it neatly in that established scientific framework? Also probably not. In general, trusting the rules that govern their 2d world is going to serve them, but being open to mystery, particularly when it has a material benefit, is more rational than letting skepticism blind you to unexplainable wonders. Maybe that cone just wants to be your friend. 

You only get to choose what you believe. We are such tiny, limited beings, we will never know the truth. Pragmatism is all we have, and it’s scary and humbling but also freeing. Ditch the false sense of intellectual superiority. Yes, there is a very real problem with manipulative charlatans, but tech/ai bros have shown us the actual problem is greed and malicious self interest. Much of the aversion to witchy ritual is vibes based, and dare I say rooted in some level of culturally inherited misogyny……but that’s a whole other conversation.