Thor's Day: Believing what makes us feel good

We're not free to do it

By Morris Dean

Something I said last week has been on my mind a lot since. I mentioned that I come from a large family of true Christian believers, and that's a big reason religion has played a pivotal role in my own life, going right back to Mother's knee, where I was schooled in emotional Pentecostal religion.
    It wasn't Father's knee. My father wasn't inclined to go to church, and I suppose that he probably didn't "believe," although I think it possible – maybe likely – that he wanted to believe, that he may have worried about it. He didn't say much. I got the impression that his own family had believed in the Church of Christ way, and I gathered from something my mother told me (more than once) that their way was relatively "high church." What my mother told me was that her mother-in-law once shook her finger in my mother's face and told her, "You ain't nothing but a Holiness!" I could tell from the theatrical way my mother told me this that my Grandmother Dean had delivered her pronouncement with a lot of energy, and it had hurt my mother deeply.
    One thing I've realized during the week is that my attempts to believe were likely motivated by the simple, natural need to fit in and be a part of my family – or, more precisely, to support and comfort my mother. At times, in fact, I thought that I almost did believe. But I never could quite get there. And then, in 2005, my mother died and was beyond comfort. I was free of that constraint.

Last week I indirectly quoted someone who said that people can believe what they want to believe if it comforts them and makes them feel good. It would have made me feel good to believe as my mother did and by so doing support and comfort her. But even my desire to feel good about this wasn't enough to make me believe.
    The fact is, I couldn't believe something – you can't believe – something just to make yourself feel better. You have to have reason to think it's true. That's what believing something means: you think it's true.

As sometime happens, this week I serendipitously re-encountered that section of Sam Harris's 2010 book, The Moral Landscape, that deals with freedom of belief, where he writes that "people do not knowingly believe propositions for bad reasons."

A belief – to be actually believed – entails the corollary belief that we have accepted it because it seems to be true...we must also believe that we are in touch with reality in such a way that if it were not true, we would not believe it. [p. 136]

    Conveniently for my discussion, Harris had had a debate with someone who "thought it reasonable for a person to believe a proposition just because it makes him 'feel better,' and [this person] seemed to think that people are perfectly free to acquire beliefs in this way."

Let's see how this might work. Imagine someone making the following statement of religious conviction:

I believe Jesus was born of a virgin, was resurrected, and now answers prayers, because believing these things makes me feel better. By adopting this faith, I am merely exercising my freedom to believe in propositions that make me feel good.

How would such a person respond to information that contradicted his cherished belief? Given that his belief is based purely on how it makes him feel, and not on evidence or argument, he shouldn't care about any new evidence or argument that might come his way. In fact, the only thing that should change his view of Jesus is a change in how the above propositions make him feel. Imagine our believer undergoing the following epiphany:

For the last few months, I've found that my belief in the divinity of Jesus no longer makes me feel good. The truth is, I just met a Muslim woman whom I greatly admire, and I want to ask her out on a date. As Muslims believe Jesus was not divine, I am worried that my belief in the divinity of Jesus could hinder my chances with her. As I do not like feeling this way, and very much want to go out with this woman, I now believe that Jesus was not divine.

Has a person like this ever existed? I highly doubt it. [pp. 137-138]

My mother and sisters and a good number of aunts, uncles, and cousins (and some nephews and nieces) believe what they believe because they think it's true. I don't believe it, because I don't think it is. Whether our beliefs "make us feel good" seems beside the point.
    In any case, it appears that I was never going to be able to comfort my mother in that way. I wish now that I could have talked with my father about what he didn't believe either. We might have been able to help one another not worry about it. But we never had a conversation like that.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean