This reflection on useful delusions is admittedly a delusion of sorts, and it may not even be of the useful sort. Who knows?

I listened to a recent debate between Chris Hedges and Sam Harris on religion and politics. The Sam Harris rhetoric was in fine form, excoriating religion, and portraying it as the scourge of the earth. I think Chris Hedges did the better job, particularly if one is interested in arriving at truth rather than skewering religion. When I ran across Lack of Moral Imagination and Softness of Head from Woodmoor Village , the seed germinated into this article.

The Harris rhetoric was better than his thinking. He damaged his arguments in a very serious way by his almost obsessive focus on the ills he lays solely at the feet of religion. It is a narrow view, unsupported by a rational view of the cultural and historical landscape. Religion is NOT the great disease of mankind, and its eradication will NOT solve mankind’s problems. The world in which we live is much more complex than that. If you choose to watch the video, and if you’re interested in truth rather than ridicule (some deserved) of religion, then watch the entire debate.

While Harris bemoans the damage religion has inflicted on the world, he ignores the massive carnage that can directly be laid at the feet of secular humanist societies like recent examples of the the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and even the Nazi regime. The number of casualties in those social structures are staggering compared to Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and all the recent terrorism combined. The fact that these human tragedies were not Anglo-Saxon derivatives may make them less painful to Americans, but that lack of pain shows tribalism bordering on racism rather than a comprehension of what took place.

Harris argues that morality should be anchored to rational reasoning rather than religion. And evidently (according to the debate material) in his recent book, he argues that torture may be needed in some circumstances, and that dictators may be the best solution for the Muslim world, who evidently he sees as the biggest threat to mankind. This is the kind of secular humanism that the Bush administration can embrace. No moral constraints — just whatever the government has rationally determined to be in the best interest of the world. So, the Soviets reasoned. So the Red Chinese reasoned. So Pol Pot reasoned.

Harris quickly dismisses the argument that religion should be given quarter because it is useful. It is this argument that is related to the topic at hand - useful delusions. If you have the time, you will probably want to view the video by Richard Dawkins, The Universe is Queerer than We Suppose. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, the last 5 minutes might be enough for you to understand the reference.

Dawkins’ talk points out that our world is filled with incredibly useful delusions. The solidity we perceive in ordinary objects is a concrete example. There is no such solidity at all. The “real world” is incredibly empty; only the Pauli exclusion principle applied to quantum probability space keeps atoms from slipping by each other without any interaction at all. At the subatomic level, electrons and other particles are only defined by characteristics of the interaction. Quantum mechanics says the particles may not exist at all in any form until an interaction occurs. Even time may be a delusion. (A recent article in Discover magazine recaps the some of the latest thinking on time.)

The point at the end of the talk is that evolution has given us a world in which our sensual interpretation of it is incredibly efficient and useful — even though it may be totally and incredibly wrong. The notion of solidity is extremely useful, while the subatomic truth has very limited use for our immediate survival. Our senses adapted to percieve useful truth, and left it to our leisure mind to eventually explore actual truth. The notions of purpose, intent, values, etc. we impute to human psychology may be incredibly useful, while from the scientific point of view, it is not clear they represent truth at all. And to his credit, Dawkins acknowledges that there may be things that will simply always be unknowable.

Benjamin Franklin — agnostic, womanizer, philosopher, scientist, founding father, failed parent, manipulator, and master civic leader — did not think much of religion as a source of truth. He did not have Karl Marx’s cynicism that it was an opiate of the people that they should be denied. He saw its value almost solely in its utility in cultivating morality that he felt essential to any civilized society. So while he personally was doubtful of its truth, he promoted it within society on a universally inclusive basis that included Muslims, Jews, and a variety of Christian expressions. The fruits of Franklin’s view were a funeral attended by denominations that outside that context could hardly stand each other, and seeding of an American society that was respectful of religion while not succumbing to its potential tyranny. The fruit of Karl Marx was the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.

In a nutshell, I am convinced that religions may for our evolutionary state as humans, be the same sort of useful delusion that solidity is. They may be the imperfect distillation of non-rational moral truths that are in some sense unknowable, at least for ordinary humans. Just as it would be stupid to try to eradicate the notion of solidity, it is probably stupid to attempt to eradicate religious beliefs because they imperfectly articulate the moral truth at their core. While the belief in a specific deity may be erroneous, the Declaration of Independence is probably not far from truth when it states that liberty is an inherent endowment of our Creator rather than a mere notion of mankind. There is no basis that I can see in history to conclude that man has fared worse because of religious delusions of morality than he would have fared if he had depended solely on his rationality. And without religion, I think he would have missed his best opportunity for knowing Truth for himself.

Religion is not an evil to be eradicated. Secular humanism is not a reliable authority to be substituted for the moral truth in religion which is sometimes imperfectly expressed and nearly always imperfectly followed — even if religion turns out to have been only a useful delusion.

Buddhism almost implies that it is a useful delusion with its teaching that even the Dharma is only a raft, an expedient means to finding unkowable Truth for oneself. Rafts are good things though, particularly in the middle of a raging river.