The Meaning of My Existence

I live each day where I find myself and carry my solace with me. I do not feel a need to control my environment nor have it control me. There is no prewritten script that we ignore to our detriment.

I also do not look at life as a quest dictated by arcane and ancient mythologies. There is no grand, mysterious prize hidden from view that we must find through much hand wringing and reading of the tealeaves. There is knowledge to be gained and progress to be made. However, the vast majority of real progress made by our species has occurred at the likes of Pasteur's workbench, Edison Labs, MIT, and Johns Hopkins. Clinging too tightly to the past, listening only to one's emotions, and living in the future tends to result in events such as the trial of Galileo, rejection of medical advances, and refusing to look at mountains of scientific research.

I find enjoying each day, contributing, and being engaged is where life really is. Once upon a time, I lived my life in some nebulous future state but found that I was not living at all. Invariably when the future finally arrived with each passing second, if I bothered to notice at all, it was often not the existence my imagination had conjured. At that point, in my life I assumed that this meant I was somehow unworthy or had not acted according to the rules of the game. If only I had spent two more minutes a day in silent mediation, or read one more verse the outcome would have been so much different. What a painfully legalistic existence that. What omniscient deity would be so petty and punitive?

Attempting to control in minute detail the course of one's own life and those around us is similar to trying to grasp a wave as it crashes on the sand. We can adjust our position as the waves continue to arrive but arrive they will and in the way the local environment directs. We can hope for a different shape to the waves and grasp at them with our tiny hands. However, we will find that the water merely slips through our fingers as the waves hurry on to their destination.

I choose to walk through the waves when it is fitting and enjoy the constant rhythm of life's ocean that it has followed for billions of years. There is no imperative to stand in the way of the ocean and attempt in vain to bend it to my will. The ocean and I are fellow travelers in a complex walk sculpted by our milieu. I will live today and share the gift of each fleeting moment with my sojourning companions.

Evolution and Religious Belief

There is no reason why humans would evolve to think logically. Humans are definitely pattern matching animals which is a low effort method of making sense of the world. It is efficient and it often works well. This is particularly true for hunter gatherers when it is necessary for survival to figure out the patters in the seasons, vegetation yields, migration patterns of animals, etc.

Religious thinking and magical thinking may also have an evolutionary advantage. Because natural selection favors those who are able to adapt and cope with their environment then the ability to find some plausible explanation for hardships can be adaptive. Stated directly, the people who get depressed and give up are going to starve to death. However those that exhibit hope and perhaps faith may be more inclined to press forward and thus are more likely to survive.

Chimps do not have sufficient neural matter to think in the abstract ways required for religious belief. However chimps, dogs, cats, mice, etc can exhibit superstitious learning. This is a result of the pattern matching nature of all animals. When a stimulus and response are linked via some other mechanism or happen at a high enough frequency separately that they appear to be connected superstitious learning can take place.

A belief system does not necessarily need to be true or necessarily based in reality to be advantageous. Religion seems to fall into this category. Religion seems to fail all logical tests but it helped to cement communities together which had survival advantages and as mentioned above it provided hope in the face of daunting challenges. There are some negative side effects when the hope and faith placed in a deity leave the person in a dangerous situation that they should rightly escape. However our planet and our interactions with our environment are complex enough that a degree of erroneous decision making is not catastrophic or necessarily harmful in many instances.

So on question might be what role should religion play including what level of commitment, and what particular belief system or systems are adaptive? It really depends on the state of the world at any given point in time. I think it also depends on the belief system. Fundamentalist belief systems often lead to intolerance and destructive behavior. I am not convinced there is any perfect balance between believers and non-believers percentage wise at any given time either. Even in our modern world where religion is not so essential for dealing with troubles the more liberal faiths seem to provide benefits for many people. We have yet to fully address all of the challenges facing society (i.e. poverty, illness) thus there is often a role for the support and hope that can be provided by religion. Atheism and agnosticism are more logical but can be difficult positions to hold when faced with a serious illness or the death of a close friend or family member. Some people have the emotional resources to cope sans religion and others not.

There is also the issue of societies regressing as well as progressing. During the stable and advanced states of ancient civilizations such as Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Persia the religious tenor seemed to be more liberal and somewhat on a par with liberal mainstream Protestants, liberal Judaism, etc in terms of acceptance of others and general lack of dogmatism. Definitely differences but overall rather liberal in comparison to some of the surrounding societies. When each of these societies slipped back into a more primitive state it seems that religion regained a state of importance and level of interpretation fitting to the society.

A more fundamentalist approach likely created survival advantages in situations where there were not enough resources to feed and shelter two separate populations for instance. The moral issue is important but from a pure issue of survival defense of the in group at the expense of the out group resulted in the survival advantage. I am not convinced that we have seen such a situation in the last several centuries although we as a species continue to act in many instances like that is the case.

So a short answer would be it really depends on each individual's current internal and external state in addition to the general state of the society. It also depends on the belief system in question and the level of adherence to the given belief system.

Creating a dangerous world

Reminding believers that they are in a dangerous world increases stress and emotional arousal.

"...stress and emotional arousal narrow attention, making people 'more susceptible to poorly supported arguments, social pressure, and the temptation to derogate nongroup members'" this in turn leads to the loss of "access to counterarguments....Because the cult frowns on or punishes disagreements, the apparent consensus helps eliminate lingering doubts." (Meyers, 2004).

It is an ever tightening spiral into reinforcement of illogical and indefensible arguments. This is common in many belief systems and also in politics.

Answers to prayers

Here is a potential reason that many believers are intelligent. An intelligent person is more likely to "receive answers to their prayers." Not because there is a supreme being answering those prayers but because they are able to make things happen in their lives. They may also have better metacognitive skills and perhaps subconsciously chose to pray for things that they implicitly know are within their capabilities.

People who prayed and ended up homeless, chronically unemployed, institutionalized, or generally failures by society's standards generally do not have a voice in society. So we hear the small fraction of one percent of the population that have been "blessed"/lucky/won the genetic lottery and the other 99.99% of the population does not have a voice.

A similar situation likely occurs in those who become religious in a war zone. People return from a war zone or other calamity and recite how they prayed and their lives were spared. We do not hear about those who were "righteous" and prayed during these calamities and died because they are...well...dead.

Magic? Blessings? Nope...just luck and having a chance to talk about said luck.