Written in response to a discussion about religion, specifically criticism towards committing to religious belief, believing in grand claims, and believing in one religion despite the possibility of being wrong. Alongside typical stuff like evidentiary burdens, proof vs. disproof. I find these lines of thought tend to hold religious concepts to standards we don’t apply to other forms of learning, part of a broad trend to have religious and secular parts of communities otherize each other. So, this comment is principally opposed to the otherization of religion.

Religious learning isn’t really that different from other forms of belief and learning. Like in any science, it’s not so much about having a perfect answer, but getting the best answer available to you, given your capacity to learn, plus the learning communities and resources which you can access, and of course, your own intuition and biases.

An earnest godseeker will usually favor a religious ideology or institution based on how well it connects them to religious growth (and that growth can be in terms of conduct or ideology).

Religion is full of deeply complicated questions. Some questions give rise to serious divides between faith groups, others don’t. But people have their sense of reality, accurate or not, but that’s hardly exclusive to matters of faith. Consider how government leaders don’t have the option of verifying empirically how their every act is going to play out; leaders have to commit to an ideology and courses of action well before they can understand the implications of those decisions. In the sciences, interminable debates rage over interpretations of quantum theory, mathematicians debate over whether and to what extent math is real, Freud is still debated in literature despite his being abandoned by psychology, and so on. Scholars take their position realizing, but never believing, that they could be wrong. We hear all about the rugged scientists who stuck to their positions until they were finally proven right, but for each such story, there are 20 scientists who just turned out to be wrong.

Another illustration: geocentric models of the solar system are only marginally less accurate than heliocentric ones (and much of that difference would not exist if we had refined the geocentric model over the past centuries). Geocentrism wasn’t abandoned because it was inaccurate in a predictive or prescriptive sense. Rather, heliocentrism was simpler mathematically and human intuition grew to favor it.

So in a world where even accuracy, modeling, and empiricism can’t answer all our questions, even when we need answers and must act, and we must rely on intuition and preference, religion is not peculiar. It is not even peculiar in terms of how grand its claims are. When you consider how you and I will never count the stars, nor measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, nor witness Julius Caesar’s assassination, nor view the functioning of our organs, but we believe what others tell us about these startling, almost incomprehensible things. We can personally verify parts of the great mysteries, but 99% of our abstract knowledge will always be something we’re told to believe and must take on faith.

For myself, I subscribe to my religion based on certain phenomena I have experienced which genuinely aren’t covered by secular psychology, plus an intuition that I am on a productive course of inquiry and learning. I very strongly feel that i am much closer to the truth thanks to my religion than i would be if i relied on my own powers. Also, while not a foundation of my faith, studying advanced mathematics very much impressed upon me how arcane knowledge and reality are: even understanding it, i am tempted to call it magic.

I would also note how there is no dearth of evidence for the existence of some form of divinity. Consider how many people, over history, have claimed to have communicated in some form with a god. Certainly, a good number of them were off in some way. But if even one of these people told the truth, that’s it. Thousands of witness testimony should not be discarded hastily. And I can personally add that I know some very well grounded people who have offered testimony of some kind.