A Casual, Drowsy Grasp on the Almighty

On my flight home from GR Wednesday night “The Life of Pi” was playing. In an early scene Pi’s uncle has told the Canadian reporter to hear Pi’s story and then he will believe in God. That got my attention.

Unfortunately for me, and my capacity to review the movie fatigue from my business trip overcame me and I slept through a good amount of the movie. I’ll make a point to see the movie in its entirety when I have time. I knew enough about the movie to know that it would take a fairly common, syncretistic approach to the question of God.

For many people in our culture cosmopolitan pluralism governs their casual grasp upon the Almighty. The implicit approach I think goes something like this.

1. Religious groups have their confirmation biases firmly entrenched by their histories, social and familial pressure making a less biased observer duly hesitant to embrace their assertions.
2. Because humanity has been unable to arrive at consensus regarding the question of God the matter is still open for debate and we can safely assume that no religious camp has gotten the whole thing right so far.
3. Because personal experience is so often so determinative for a person’s religious commitment and because these commitments are so diverse we might suspect that religious beliefs are partially a matter of taste, not knowledge or fact.
4. Because the rise of science and technology have both displaced some answers previously given by religious groups (origins, psychology, etc.) and have proven more reliable at achieving controllable and predictable results than religious practices (medicine works better than prayer for most health concerns) all religious claims should be considered subject to a more scientific level of scrutiny.
5. Given points 1 through 4 if a reasonable, modern person is to dabble in religion at all the most prudent approach would be to a. Hold your beliefs loosely, always subject to further information b. Keep your beliefs fairly private, not trying to impose them on others, or even suggest or recommend them to others and c. survey the breadth of religious assertions trying to find what various religious camps hold in common, account as much to anecdotal perspective as possible and try to construct for yourself a “least common denominator” approach to anything that might approach “fact” or “knowledge”.

The SAT 

Millions of high school students every year in America take the SAT. Many invest a great deal of themselves into this test because they believe that

1. a high test score can make the difference between getting into a top college or not
2. Failing to get into a top school will likely impact their ability to reach the highest levels of power or income earning potential in their career.

Let’s imagine that in our anxiety you discovered that a relative of yours had influence in the College board. This relative offered you a choice of two different “cheats” in order to secure you a perfect score on your test. You had the choice to either:

1. Receive an answer key
2. Get to roam around the testing room to look at what other students are answering

Which one would you chose? It’s pretty obvious. Crowdsourcing SAT answers might be helpful, but you’d rather have the answer key.

Knowing Something More Complex

One might rightly protest my SAT illustration by saying “God isn’t something like a standardized test. God is at least as complex as a person (the personal nature of God is of course a subject of religious disagreement). Could you reflect know a human being by the kinds of answers from a standarized test?”

The answer to that would be “yes” and “no”.

Let’s imagine that we wished to get to know Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln is a historical figure of which much has been written. He did not live THAT long ago, historically speaking, there is an abundant amount of physical and documentary evidence regarding his life including personal accounts, things he wrote, photographs, etc. How could such a man be known?

Some of the man would be known in a way that could be accounted for by an SAT type test. This man is surrounded by a world of “facts” the likes of which are not subject to how we might feel about him. If I asserted that Lincoln was born in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln” I would be wrong. Even though the state’s license plates say that Illinois is the land of Lincoln he was in fact born in Kentucky, the Blue Grass state.

Other bits about Lincoln would defy this kind of methodology. If I were to say “Lincoln was a good man” a rush of opinions might be offered to either support or deny my assertion. His goodness is of course a value judgment asserted on my part.

We might take a survey to decide if Lincoln was a good man but if pressed many of us would agree that such a survey would simply yield an opinion poll of whether or not he was a good man and depending where we took this survey (the Northern vs. the Southern US, white or black participants, etc.) we would get different results.

What I am attempting to show is that in fact crowdsourcing might not be the best way to obtain information either regarding simple things, the kinds of things that a standardized test pursues, nor even things at least as complex as a human being is. So why would we crowdsource knowledge of God and think that what we would arrive at would be anything worth anything, much less something that may be more important than any other area of your life?