My argument is roughly that religions uniquely provide a source of meaning, community, and life guidance not available elsewhere
Why is it good to obtain a source of meaning, if it is not based on sound epistemic foundations? Is obtaining an arbitrary “meaning” better than living without one or going with an “interim meaning of life” like “maximize option value while looking for a philosophically sound source of normativity”?
Why is it good to obtain a source of meaning, if it is not based on sound epistemic foundations?
It would, in theory, be nice if meaning was grounded in epistemic, rational truth. But such truth isn’t and can’t be grounded in itself, and so even if you find meaning that can be rationalized via sound epistemic reasoning, its foundation will not itself be ultimately epistemically sound because it exists prior to epistemic reasoning.
Now this doesn’t mean that we can’t look for sources of meaning that comport with our epistemic understanding. In fact, I think we should! We should rightly reject sources of meaning that invite us to believe provably false things.
Is obtaining an arbitrary “meaning” better than living without one or going with an “interim meaning of life” like “maximize option value while looking for a philosophically sound source of normativity”?
Tricky question. For many people, I think the answer is yes, they would be better off with some arbitrary meaning. They would simply live better, happier lives if they had a strong sense of meaning, even if that sense of meaning was wrong, because they aren’t doing the work to have good epistemics anyway, and so they are currently getting the worst of both words: they don’t have meaning and they aren’t even taking actions that would result in them knowing what’s true. I contend that this is why there’s a level of discontent with life itself in the modern era that largely seems absent in the past.
The idea of an interim source of meaning is interesting, because arguably all sources of meaning are interim. There’s nothing fixed about where we find meaning, and most people find that it changes throughout their life. Some people spend time finding meaning in something explicit like “the search for truth” or “worshiping God” or similar. Perhaps later they find it in something less explicit, like friends and family and sensory experiences. Perhaps yet later they find it in the sublime joy of merely existing.
When I say that religion uniquely provides a source of meaning and other things, perhaps what I mean more precisely is that it uniquely provides a door through which meaning can be found. The meaning is not in the religion itself, but in living with the guidance of a religion to help in finding meaning for oneself.
Why is it good to obtain a source of meaning, if it is not based on sound epistemic foundations? Is obtaining an arbitrary “meaning” better than living without one or going with an “interim meaning of life” like “maximize option value while looking for a philosophically sound source of normativity”?
It would, in theory, be nice if meaning was grounded in epistemic, rational truth. But such truth isn’t and can’t be grounded in itself, and so even if you find meaning that can be rationalized via sound epistemic reasoning, its foundation will not itself be ultimately epistemically sound because it exists prior to epistemic reasoning.
Now this doesn’t mean that we can’t look for sources of meaning that comport with our epistemic understanding. In fact, I think we should! We should rightly reject sources of meaning that invite us to believe provably false things.
Tricky question. For many people, I think the answer is yes, they would be better off with some arbitrary meaning. They would simply live better, happier lives if they had a strong sense of meaning, even if that sense of meaning was wrong, because they aren’t doing the work to have good epistemics anyway, and so they are currently getting the worst of both words: they don’t have meaning and they aren’t even taking actions that would result in them knowing what’s true. I contend that this is why there’s a level of discontent with life itself in the modern era that largely seems absent in the past.
The idea of an interim source of meaning is interesting, because arguably all sources of meaning are interim. There’s nothing fixed about where we find meaning, and most people find that it changes throughout their life. Some people spend time finding meaning in something explicit like “the search for truth” or “worshiping God” or similar. Perhaps later they find it in something less explicit, like friends and family and sensory experiences. Perhaps yet later they find it in the sublime joy of merely existing.
When I say that religion uniquely provides a source of meaning and other things, perhaps what I mean more precisely is that it uniquely provides a door through which meaning can be found. The meaning is not in the religion itself, but in living with the guidance of a religion to help in finding meaning for oneself.