I recently did a post about how even though faith is often defended by Christians claiming that it gives people hope, that faith is actually a very poor outlet for hope.  Afterward, Ben from War on Error asked me to make a positive case for how hope is better found in reason.  Ok.

Personally, I think this sentiment can be explained in two sentences:  It does not matter how good a belief makes us feel, it will not unmake the realities we are trying to escape.  However, if we have the courage to be honest about unpleasant things, we can make reality more comforting.  However, I’m sure that people will want more elaboration, so here we go.

There is an enormous difference between false hope, hope that doesn’t rely on an accurate assessment of reality (in fact, it exists only by closing our eyes and ignoring reality), and actual hope that if the facts of the universe are not what we want them to be, we can change them.  Through the last several thousand years, we have hoped for cures to diseases, technology to take us to the moon, plentiful food, clean water, etc, and through looking at these problems bravely, without trying to shield ourselves from the unpleasant fact that we lacked those things, we were able to turn our hopes into realities.  However, first we had to admit that we did not have the things we wanted, and we had to take a long, dispassionate look at our problems.

When we hoped to reach the moon, we did not know how we were going to get there, but we didn’t just close our eyes and imagine we had already made it and call it a day: we worked, we thought, and we actually made it happen.  But in order to make it happen, we absolutely had to open our eyes and understand the circumstances before us, whether they were comforting or not, as they truly were.  Faith merely allows people to ignore the very variables of reality we must acknowledge in order to fix them.  It is the panicked shriek of a coward that they cannot bear to look at what frightens them, they cannot bear to face it, and so they just imagine that it’s not that way.  Such people are never held in high regard elsewhere, but yet we consider such behavior to be noble when applied to the finite nature our very life.

Believing that death is not the end of our ability to experience things will not make it so.  But by acknowledging that fact, we can begin to make as much our of our time as we can, rather than sitting around and waiting for the paradise we’ve dreamed up.  We can even join other doctors in dedicating our lives to finding ways to prolong our time on Earth.  In short, we can begin to make the universe the way we want it to be, and we can seek the best possible solution as a reality – not merely imagine we’ve already found it.

In this way, faith – the mere belief in things when reasons fail – is the purest conceivable distillation of false hope.  Because it hinges on not acknowledging reality for what it truly is, it is actually antithetical to genuine hope.

So the next time a Christian tries to paint you as a bad person for taking away their hope, remember that false hope can only be benign at best, and can often make your actual circumstances worse.  Also, remember that genuine hope is not merely a sentiment of an individual; we have collective hopes as families, as societies, and most importantly, as a species – and false hope is merely going to drive us into ground, which is not at all worth the trade off of flimsy comfort we get by ignoring reality.  True hope only comes from having the courage to be honest about unhappy facts and circumstances – it is the only way we can truly conquer them.  Ultimately, we can close our eyes and pretend the train isn’t there, or we can admit we’re in deep shit and at least try to jump out of the way.

Hope doesn’t come easily – you have to have some moxy.  Faith offers us false hope that is easy; it’s for the lazy and the cowards.  You’re upset that I’m pointing out that you have false hope but that there’s actual hope available?  Ok.  I can live with that.  Maybe it will toughen your skin so that you can survive the brush with reality that genuine hope requires.

One of the worries that inevitably gets raised when criticizing faith is, “Where do we get hope if not from faith?”  I’ve made a somewhat egocentric mistake in thinking that because the answer seemed obvious to me, that it would for others.  I will now take the opportunity to rectify that mistake.

First, hope does not equate to truth.  The truth sometimes can be downright unpleasant, since it does not conform to our sense of wishful thinking the way religions do.  So you need to ask yourself what your priority is: do you want your beliefs to be true or simply positive?  They cannot always be the same.  There is a very large (and consequential difference) between hoping you have won the lottery and believing you have won the lottery, and failing to draw that difference would be quite a costly mistake.

Second, hope can be found most abundantly not by embracing unreason, but by mapping out reality as accurately as we are able.  Every 200 million years on average an asteroid of sufficient size to annihilate most life on Earth will strike the planet.  No amount of hoping otherwise will alter this fact.  However, by acknowledging this fact, we can then set our collective minds to finding a solution.  It should be clear to anybody that hoping to find a solution through effort is a much more full and meaningful hope than simply hoping the collision event won’t happen.  The hope of religion, in opposition to the unpleasant facts of the universe, is merely the hope of closing one’s eyes rather than facing the oncoming problem.  That is not hope; it is ineffectual cowardice.

Third, an examination of Christianity will reveal that there is very little hope to be found.  We have this idea of Hell, this eternity of suffering so great that every second the agony of it escapes human comprehension millions of times over, exists because god allows it to (he could easily unmake it, being omnipotent and all), and the only way to avoid it is through a lifetime of groveling and thanksgiving followed by an eternity of the same?  This is hope?  These are very similar to the current conditions in North Korea with the cultish atmosphere of worship created by Kim Jong Il.  If you do not grovel and thank him for your very right to eat and live, you are to be punished.  Is this tyrant benevolent because he allows those who bow and scrape to escape the prisons and mortal punishment that are there by his command?  If this is love and benevolence, it is hard to imagine tyranny.  But god’s punishment is infinitely worse, and his standards infinitely more unfair.  To pass god’s test, I must not merely prostrate myself before the dictator, I must also believe that events took place that are admittedly impossible by their very definition (miracles) – a feat that I argue is impossible.  This is hope?

And even if the situation weren’t so terrible, even if Christianity did offer something that really did sound appealing, is it really hope if it’s based on an untruth?  I would argue that hope based on a lie is just false hope, and that it’s nothing to be proud of – especially when actual hope, the kind that can help us face the unpleasantries that exist whether we have the courage to acknowledge them or not, is attainable through intellectual honesty.  We just need to learn that we can run faster without the crutch – as scared as we are to let go of it.

When “truth” is to be weighed by scales of faith, no belief is discernible from another in terms of credibility. As Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

On a daily basis you can find numerous cases of people doing insanely stupid, dangerous things because they were driven by faith. So often we hear cries that the atheist has caricatured faith by pointing these things out. The charge is that we are highlighting a handful of extremists (of course, there’s far more than a handful), and we are admonished to accept that these people have somehow gotten faith wrong. This statement is usually followed by a pablum of condescending sighs and an insistence that the moderate’s faith teaches something completely different than the lunatic in question. But what are religious people really expressing when they say that a particularly dangerous person’s faith is not their faith? Here are some options.

1. My faith is more likely to be true than theirs.
2. My faith is not more likely to be true, but it is more benign.

I can’t think of any other implications we could glean from that sentence. Can you? Leave a comment and I’ll add them if you can.

I think the second option once thought through defaults back to the first. Maybe god wants us to kill certain people (if you’re a Christian, you must admit that he has wanted it before), and if faith can lead us to truth then you must be aware of why your faith is more likely to be true than the extremist’s faith, since you think god wants something different than what the wackos say god wants. Therefore it’s not enough to simply say that your faith is different from that of the extremist – you must show us how the extremist gets faith wrong – you must show how your faith functions on a different mechanic that is “right”, and how that makes your belief about what god wants more likely to be true than theirs. After all, you’re both trying to act in accordance with god’s will, right? You just think that god wants us to do something different.

Of course, faith does not eject the false and keep the true – the notion of faith can embrace any belief. Faith is a horrible tool by which to acquire truth (think of all the people who follow faiths that aren’t yours…most people on Earth must be wrong if you’re right). Faith is a means to circumvent reason and reality. A single person in the 21st century believing that a man walked on water 2,000 years ago would be considered crazy, it is merely the number of people who believe it that rescues the believer from that assessment. As Sam Harris put it, “It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.” Because faith is a means to reject reason and reality when they threaten to obliterate a belief, faith disarms us of our only tools to separate credible truth claims from non-credible truth claims, and often makes bad ideas it allows us to adopt immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. It is clear that the moderate’s faith is no more likely to be true than the extremist’s because they operate on the same mechanics, even if the moderate’s faith is thankfully less dangerous.

Because both faith that leads to murder/discrimination and faith that leads to charity operate under the same principle, it is impossible for me to criticize one but not the other. I am a critic of lazy thinking, and both sides of the theological coin are equally guilty. Citing to me that your faith is different does not rescue it from this accusation, and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not the nutjob got faith wrong – perhaps god really is talking to him and not you.