Pray All You Want, But Swim For Shore

Perhaps it all hinges on belief in the Afterlife. If you can swallow that, the rest of the God business goes down pretty easily.

Thinking about those two planes makes it clear that so far as the natural world is concerned — the one we live our lives in — even if there is a God, there might as well not be. Presumably believers in the plane that crashed were praying just as hard as believers in the other one. They might as well have done mental arithmetic.

All the responses from believers boil down to saying: “No, it didn’t do them much good in this world. But this world is not the whole of reality. There’s more; and in that more, your naturalistic standards don’t capture much of the truth.”

I’m not unsympathetic to that. The instinct to believe in another place is very strong and very human — I feel it in myself, sometimes with great force. Trouble is, there is no evidence for the other place but that instinct; and the instinct itself is susceptible to naturalistic explanations (see Atran, Boyer, & the rest of Mr. Hume’s reading list).

Once all that’s sunk in, the only reason to think there’s another place is biological humility: acknowledging the fact that all our concepts, all we know, is contained in a crinkly one-eighth-inch-thick rind wrapped over a 40-ounce lump of meat. As Prof. Joad said: “The human brain is a food-seeking mechanism, with no more access to Ultimate Reality than a pig’s snout.”

-Secular Right

What is, is. And when you can handle that responsibly and thoughtfully, you needn’t worry about the other.