I Am Not Just A Stubborn Atheist

Listening: "Après Moi", Regina Spektor.

I've been debating a lot. Religion, philosophy, government; anything. I think now that my MIT application is due in (gulp) seven days, my body expects some intense stress; since I'm procrastinating the essays I have to write, I'm putting the stress into argument. People don't like it. The same form inevitably arises: I present an outlandish idea that my outlook happens to support, and my opponent starts attacking the whole of my philosophy. I guess that's normal, but the fervor with which they deny my ideas is so uncomfortable. The common theme among their objections isn't even a certain syllogism: it's a worry. They're worried that I think I have everything figured out, and so I won't be able to deal with anything I haven't already considered. They each think I have some rule that I apply to every problem: Paula thinks it's a refusal to apply rules at all (which she insists is a rule in itself), my mom and my sister Allie think it's just a half-baked agnosticism, and my other sister Melissa thinks it's a dependence on logic. They all insist that there are things outside of the domain of logic, or that logic is as fallible as any other human invention.

And there's the question. I always start to answer it by asserting that mathematics is completely objective: even if you don't have words for "two", "three", and "five", it is still true that the concatenation of "II" and "III" is "IIIII". And that would be true even if no one existed to count objects. Why? Because mathematics is universal, rather than particular. You apply particular problems to it, like "How many apples are there in a uniform grid of apples whose sides number 6 and 4?", and get answers with units: "24 apples". But six sets of four things together always contain twenty-four things; we write that statement shorthand as "6*4=24", a statement without units. Of course "6" and "4" don't exist by themselves. They're hypothetical; they're symbols. The whole beauty of mathematics is that manipulation of symbols can mimic exactly the much messier manipulation of real objects, and thus the mathematician can solve a physical problem in the abstract. If it doesn't work, all it means is that his system of symbols didn't represent the situation exactly enough.

So did humans invent mathematics? Not any more than we invented fire. Invention is the application of a truth into a method to solve a particular problem. Writing "4+6=10" is a method. "4+6=10" is a truth. So while the human application of a mathematical truth to a situation might be prone to human error, mathematical truth itself is flawless.

The same is true of logic. Take the basic modus ponens syllogism: "The belief that a certain fact is true, combined with the belief that the same fact implies a second fact, causes belief in the second fact." (Or, in short: "If A is true, then B is true. A is true. Therefore B is true.") Notice that I wrote "belief" and not "knowledge". "A" doesn't have to be inherent, or empirically demonstrated, or even popularly accepted. If somebody believes A, and the implication from A to B, then he believes B. In that way, the application of logic (that is, discourse) is subjective. In fact, misapplication of premises to syllogisms is the idea we know as "fallacy". But the truth of the relationships among different kinds of syllogisms, just like the relationships among different kinds of mathematical operations, is inherent.

The problem I run into is this: I rely on logic. Where other people evaluate arguments based on their religious convictions, or their emotional reactions, I evaluate them based on their merits: whether they are fallacious; whether I believe their premises; whether their forms are valid. And life makes sense to me, doing that! And yet faith, which is supposed to be such a desirable virtue, consists entirely of denying a conclusion that you would otherwise believe.

Now, when people say that spirituality is outside of the domain of logic, there are two different ways to interpret them. One is that they have been convinced, by their younger selves or by a religious compulsion, that their beliefs are simply not to be challenged; that the only way to protect their beliefs, and the happiness that rests upon them, is to deny all attempts to undermine them.

The other is that spirituality is a way of dealing with the emotions that come with being human that cold logic can never be: logic can help you to understand, but not to feel better. And so we adopt religion, superstition, unsupported categorical assertions. We trust people despite the knowledge that they will fail us; we love life despite the knowledge that it will end. These things fly in the face of logic, but we accept that and agree to integrate a contradiction into ourselves in order to balance logical understanding with emotional contentment.

By breaking out of the first interpretation, and adopting the second, a person may not even change his actual system of beliefs: the important thing is that he understands them and is not afraid of challenges to them, because he does not rely on them. He knows there's really no deep meaning in the frequencies that comprise music, but he listens and plays anyway because he loves the way it makes him feel to imagine the meaning that could be there. The judgment he develops throughout his life fine-tunes his ability to decide when this kind of escapist placebo is appropriate.

Maybe my sisters are right. Maybe I've spent so much time defending the merits of atheism that I haven't stopped to consider the fact of my own emotions' control over me. But I will say this: If the world is the same for everyone, and yet we are all predisposed to different personalities, then our beliefs ought to be correspondingly different. So now I'm searching for something to believe, to accept in the face of contrary evidence, and it better be something good.