What compels belief

As usual, BG’s question got me going. Watch out. When I wrote that I was having trouble with the god question, I meant that I was stuck, logically, perhaps linguistically, even structurally with the long essay that I’ve been working on for months now, “A Buddhist looks at the proofs for the existence of god.” Setting my personal beliefs aside as much as possible, I have been examining how a Buddhist deals with “the god question” instead of what we might consider the more non-theistic position of more Buddhist philosophers until they are in the shrine room chanting away.  My starting point was what we call the “Unmoved Mover” then extending up, or back, through the Ontological Argument. I look at each argument and see if I was moved to belief or ontologically convinced. Very objective. I am happy to say that I am still a qualified agnostic until you lock me up in the shrine room or hand me some personal crisis I will need help with.

Then BG suggested that I try on the Gaia or Goddess model, and my first reaction was why would I do that? Is there something intellectual, spiritual, or material lacking in my life that “believing” in the goddess, however we define that act, would remedy? But suddenly I was thrown into another world. Of course, beliefs have consequences, and after a lot of self-examination, I realize that there are a lot of beliefs, assumptions about reality, and even prejudices that I carry around that do influence me even though I am not entirely aware of their existence much less influence and inner workings. However I can google the scientific effects of believing on serotonin levels, and it will show that in the long run, I am probably happier if I surrender some of my mad neurotic desire to control, and hand it over to a Higher Power as we say in 12 Step work. I can do that as long as you don’t require that I bet the farm. So I am stuck in a “practicum” belief system: If I believe that the early bird catches the worm, I get up earlier, catch people when they are more alert, probably make more money, and thus be happier. But maybe not.

So yes, beliefs do have real-world consequences. My mother stopped seeing a Doctor who was the father of one of my high school buddies, the only Jew at Fairfield Prep when she found out that he was an atheist. I asked why and she said that she had to know that her doctor believed that his hand was guided by the hand of God before she would go under the knife, So she switched to Doctor Mack who with his wife, also a physician, had nine kids, They were devout Catholics who never mastered the rhythm method, a hot topic in Catholic circles post WW 2. Then she switched over to another Catholic doctor who was not much more than a pill pusher. He nearly killed me with a dose of penicillin without checking if I’d become allergic, dangerously so, after an extreme treatment after an accident during my freshman year at college, but he supplied the valium she thought she required. 

Then when she faced major surgery in the last years of her life, she turned to a team of Indian doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital. I didn’t ask if she had checked their religious credentials but I suspect that it probably fell into the “They believe in something” category--Krishna, Jesus, it all tends to blend into one, especially as we age. (Yes, and among those beliefs are that Indian doctors make a much better living in New Haven than in New Delhi. Perhaps a motivational belief when applying for medical residency in the US, but it turns out to be a fact. (An Indian doctor in the US makes between 125-180,000 USD, whereas in India, he or she would only make about 50,000 USD. A compelling belief).

But still “Something is better than nothing.” Or the philosophical statement: Why is there something rather than nothing?’ I have argued that I consider this a junk statement, but it persists and I have to qualify it. What kind of belief statements does it encompass, and how are these statements changed or strengthened or “made true" by a personal assertion that they are always and everywhere true despite any evidence to the contrary? 

In the Germany of the 1930s, the belief that the Arian race was superior to the rest of humankind was gaining appeal. This belief had such dire consequences that it would probably be best left on the junk heap of intellectual, spiritual, and moral history. But enough people assented and it devolved into a horrific war as well as the attempted extermination of the Jewish race.

Some have argued that when Augustine talked about the Lord giving mankind domination over the earth and its creatures in his comments on Genesis 1, he set the stage for the exploitation of the earth that has led to the climate crisis. The burnt earth thesis probably extends further into the early Fathers, and it is even harder to prove that as a belief it was partially responsible. Adopting some notion of Gaia, or goddess consciousness might be an antidote to this kind of thinking and nudge us to treat the material world with more respect and even reverence. Thank you Gerta Thunburg for capturing our imagination. You show us that belief takes more than just intellectual assent. Imagination and dreams carry some weight.

Most people, at least in the West or among the intellectual elites, believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Again, the statement or definition was not “a given” before the end of the Second World War with Germany and Japan. Most of the male governing class agreed that any statement would include civil and political rights, but it was Eleanor Roosevelt who convinced the United Nations to include social, economic, and cultural rights. Her belief changed the way we think and argue about the structure of human society on earth. 

But I fail to see that assenting to a personal belief in a god being, he/she/it, god or goddess, has any value. In fact, I will argue that it has the opposite effect of mudding the waters and making us “deluded” to borrow a Buddhist virtue. It might be time to go back to Saint Thomas and Anslem to disentangle the mess I got myself into.