IS IGNORANCE BLISS?

Imagine for a moment that God does not exist.  Would you nevertheless want to perpetuate belief in God on the basis that some take comfort in the false belief that there is a God who protects them, provides them guidance, and promises them an eternal life filled with joy?

First, it isn’t at all clear that relinquishing belief in God leaves individuals any less happy.  If you were to stop believing in the existence of God, you would understand that the sense of God’s presence that you formerly experienced was actually self-generated.  Would that realization leave you less happy?  That certainly was not my experience.  When I realized that I no longer believed in God, I experienced a great sense of relief.  I no longer had to deal with a conflict between what I had been taught by my parents and religious teachers and what I had come to understand about the nature of the world through independent study.  I also understood that the sense of protection and guidance that I had earlier attributed to God was instead simply a personal feeling.  I was not troubled by the fact that I was on my own.  

But even conceding that for some individuals losing belief in God might be distressing, the question comes down to this: Is it better to maintain a false belief if that belief brings comfort?  I think it depends on the consequences of that belief. 

Assume you have a friend who believes in the Loch Ness monster.  He believes that at some point in the past sea creatures got trapped in Loch Ness and that they exist in small but sustainable numbers in the cold and murky waters of the Scottish lake.  He points to the discovery in the 1930s of living examples of another sea creature, the coelacanth, previously thought to have been extinct for millions of years.  Your friend enjoys reading accounts about Nessie, as well as other cryptozoological creatures, such as Bigfoot and yeti.  If he ever goes to Scotland, he would love to visit Loch Ness with the hope of catching a glimpse of Nessie.  Otherwise, his belief in Nessie does not seem to play any significant role in his day-to-day life.  You do not believe that the Loch Ness monster exists, and you have mentioned that to your friend.  How important would it be to you to dissuade your friend from his belief?

Assume that you have another friend who believes that she can win consistently at casino gambling.  In conversations your friend has variously claimed that she has figured out a winning system or that she has great intuition or that she is simply lucky.  She points to the times that she has won big and claims that because of her skill/luck, she is way ahead in winnings.  Your friend spends a good deal of time (and money) at casinos.  You care about her and believe that she simply doesn’t understand how casino gambling works, that she may have an addiction, and that she needs to stop gambling.  Would you point out that, regardless of how successful she thinks she has been, in the long run she is virtually certain to lose money?  Do you believe there would be merit in supporting education regarding the dangers of gambling?

Wait a minute, you will say, it is wrong to draw an analogy between a false belief in a nonexistent god and having a gambling habit.  Excessive gambling is clearly harmful, whereas belief in God, even if false, is not harmful.  That argument is fair enough, as far as it goes.  The bare belief in a god that does not exist, standing by itself, is not the problem.  If an individual believed in, say, Zeus, but that belief did not inform any of her other beliefs or behaviors, then belief in Zeus would not in and of itself be a problem.  Rather, it is the consequential beliefs, the trappings that generally accompany belief in God that are the concern.  Does one’s belief in a particular version of God require favoring scriptural authority over scientific principles, creationism over evolution, faith healing over mainstream medicine?  What about attitudes toward the LGBTQ community?  And would a false belief in an afterlife affect how one leads this one and only life?

The percentage of people who state that they have no religion continues to rise, both in Europe and in the U.S.  It seems clear to me that this steady decline in religious belief is not occurring because older generations of believers are being persuaded that God does not exist.  It doesn’t work that way.  Rather, it is that younger generations have witnessed the continued absence of objective evidence of a theistic god who supposedly intervenes in human affairs.  Instead, they find themselves on their own to conduct their lives.  Moreover, they have witnessed that it is science and technology and not religion that have helped us to understand and control our world.  Increasingly, younger generations are finding God and religion to be irrelevant. 

© 2018 John M. Phillips