In what sense is religion true? 

Even if you restrict your view of religion purely to a set of symbolic representations of an underlying reality, a sort of mathematics for human existence, there’s a lot of meat there to digest. But m why is that? Is it because they’re actually true in the most basic way of representation? Or should we understand them on a more archetypal rather than a literal level? Despite their immense archetypal significance, the Biblical stories for the most part certainly represent themselves as being caught in actual history, and present us with a tapestry of very real and human lives, mistakes, twists and turns, and texture. Poetry and mythology make appearances, but the general frame of most of the content is, here’s what happened to us, with all its petty and disappointing detail.

Setting aside this question, in what other way might we say that these stories are true? I think you could argue that there’s also a large element of empirical, experimental truth to them. The truth of lives lived and attempts at way of living embodied, consequences faced and rewards reaped, all filtered through the winnowing power of selection, that consigns some lives and stories to extinction and moves other forward into the future.

The Biblical stories seem to represent and embody the direct empirical study and experience of generations upon generations of human lives, thousands of years of experimentation and results, and working theories based on those results. In some sense that’s what all religions are. A symbolic representation of the forces that shape human existence, a physics of living. A good physics should map well onto the underlying reality and provide agency and efficacy within it. One way we measure how good a particular theoretical perspective is, is to see how well it predicts the actions of its subjects and how much practical power it grants in the world we inhabit. Does the theory give accurate predictions of what you’re likely to see in the world? Does it help you navigate and survive and manipulate and transform the world as a result? Then it’s probably a decent theory.

Much like with physics, there are numerous competing theories about the world in religions. Religion differs from physics in that its subject, rather than being some subset of human experience, such as the physical forces that govern bodies, takes as its subject matter human experience as such. The world as it presents itself and as it is represented within us to the kind of creatures we are. The totality of being.

A religion can be either simple or complex. There are some religions that reduce all understanding, all subsets of human experience, to a single dimension. We usually think of these more as philosophies rather than religions. It’s hard to say where the line is. The degree to which a set of symbolic representations about life is extrapolated and explicated to cover and touch all areas of human existence and expression often serves as a conventional line for making the distinction. We recognize that a philosophy has fully flowered into a religion when we see that it has gone from mere theory to having practical adherents and representations in culture (art, music, stories, dramatic ways of communicating the central symbolic elements of the mythos). It has become a living system, not just an idea.

But the complexity of development of a religion, the degree to which a philosophy has grown into a fully extended organism of ideology, action, and representation, is a quite separate matter from the complexity of its symbolic theoretical system. There are some weakly developed philosophies that have a very complex theoretical structure, as well as there are some very extensively developed philosophies that have a very simple theoretical structure. The idea that life is illusory (whether you assert it in a more mystical sense like some eastern religions or a more scientific sense like some materialists), or that all categories of human experience are social constructions, that’s a very simple theoretical system. There’s only one type of thing in the symbolic system. But you can still build that theory out into a very large and complex living system with lots of working parts.

So there’s a sense in which all religions have both a theoretical claim and a test of practical livability. They’re presenting a theory about what the world is and how to interpret it, and then build that out into a practicum for how to navigate, survive, and manipulate the world. So all religions can be evaluated philosophically as well as psychologically to see how good they are at mapping and representing the underlying reality and predicting and explaining what we will encounter.

They can be evaluated empirically because, in a way, they are practical theoretical constructs whose purpose is to provide an empirically useful body of knowledge. The stability a religion provides to a society, the way it harnesses and directs our strengths, the way it helps us foresee and navigate problems we face, the way it helps us survive setbacks, the way it helps us transform ourselves to adapt to changing conditions, the way it conserves the essential strengths of our society, these are all part of the practical outworkings of a religion.

Our course, one of the weaknesses of any religion, like any life, is that there’s no way to predict what you will have to work with, either as adherents (the Jews were notoriously bad, by their own admission, at following their own symbolic system and ideals), or as an environment (the Jews, again, have often found themselves in some pretty tough environments that presented exceptional barriers to success). So the actual results of any religious system will always be a bit mixed, because its followers will always be a bit mixed, as will the conditions under which they’re attempting to do the following.

It’s a testament to the empirical validity of the religion of the Jews that both it and they have survived and thrived across deep time despite having, by their own argument, some of the worst adherents and some of the worst conditions. Purely from the standpoint of someone like Piaget, it must be a pretty good game they’re playing, if it can be played so poorly by so many across such differing and terrible conditions, across such a vast array of time and space, and still have yielded so much success. Purely from a Piagetian psychological standpoint, there’s a huge argument that Judaism must, at least psychologically, when evaluated as a framework of games played across time, be remarkably close to the truth (mapping correctly onto the underlying realities).

I recall my first time reading the speculations of Socrates as he neared his death in the Phaedo, making educated guessed about the afterlife and the moral structure of the universe, and noting how similar they were in many ways to Judaic and Christian (and many other cultures’) ideas. Something like this must be true, was his deduction. He didn’t make any claim to have a special revelation or direct experience, he merely noted that reflection on the nature of life and humanity and morality had led him to the theory that something like this must be the true about the underlying moral nature of the cosmos.

So, if there are many religions and each one is a bit like a working theory of the world of human experience, how do we test them, if these theories are themselves the primary way we represent reality to ourselves and interpret our experience? On the one hand, that’s a terribly difficult question, because the world and people are so complex. The divide between what we say we believe and what we actually do is so great and confusing, and we don’t have access to a God’s eye view of reality. In other words, our humanity is a real problem.

On the other hand, it’s quite simple how we test them. The thing is, it’s not exactly like this is a new problem. It’s not like humans are discovering for the first time that there are different people out there, even whole groups of people, with different ideas and strategies than our own. Any human who had any siblings at all could probably tell you that. The Bible makes the point using the story of literally the first two people naturally born on the planet Earth: Cain and Abel. Those two disagreed so much that one killed the other. It’s the first society ever, and the first two people born into it immediately find themselves in an irreconcilable conflict. I think it’s fairly clear that such facts of life hardly escaped even the most ancient of peoples.

The Greeks noticed this problem and developed their own system for addressing it: logical argumentation. Test the claims for internal consistency and logical validity, pit the ideas against one another and consider the logical consequences. Of course, what you get out of argumentation depends a lot on your fundamental assumptions, premises, and prejudices. That understanding is built in. That’s why the Greeks attempted to detail and systematize it, so our own thought processes could be revealed.

Even with a good logical system, the problem of convincing people and settling all disputes has hardly been hardly resolved. But there’s still a lot of be gained from just getting a clearer look at what a thing is, even if you can’t compel people to to accept any specific conclusions. Simply seeing an issue more clearly and seeing how it fits together and what its implications are can result in a lot of shared consensus. Assuming that there is some underlying reality that everyone is getting ahold of in different ways, even after accounting for differences in individual perspectives and temperaments, there’s not nothing left.

Systemic disconfirmarion, the efforts of everyone to point out everyone else’s weaknesses, as well as systemic confirmation, the assemblage of moderate confidence in conclusions shared by people coming from a wide variety of perspectives, do have some real value. Truth isn’t defined by a majority vote. But the collective sharing of resources for discovering truths and fallacies can have some practical and theoretical validity. If they don’t, then the whole rational project is really just rationalization and power politics, after all. And there’s no real point pretending otherwise. But if there’s any hope that we can get a view of the truth by running mental simulations instead of relying on force or having to resort to bare empirical experimentation (buying survival with pain and death), we should seek it.

If we can’t gain access to any real knowledge just by thinking and talking, human experimentation is always an option. But the price of ongoing sacrifice will be high.

Religions are both very practical and very theoretical. Is there ultimately so much difference between saying that the knowledge contained in them was learned by direct experience of and interaction with the nature of man, the world, and the underlying ideals and structures that govern human experience, or that it was literally given to us by God, the defining structure and character behind reality? I’m not so sure. No one that I know of has ever argued that the laws of God are purely arbitrary. Rather, God is the structuring logos of the world, and to know him is to gain the theoretical and practical knowledge that is necessary for navigating and understanding the world. All religions may not equally understand God, but all of them at least recognize that this is the most fundamental undertaking of mankind.