faith and fact
As our echo chambers become more insulated, and the number of things we 'agree to disagree on' grow in number, I'm convinced that faith is more powerful than fact. more capable of moving us to action than any amount of reasoning or quantitative data. We pride ourselves on being rational but like any learning machine, our minds are only as good as the data it is fed; And whether we like it or not, our experiences are painfully limited and our internal value systems are notoriously prone to all kinds of cognitive biases.
We distract ourselves from this insignificance (the human condition?) by weaving stories that make us feel like part of something; imposing meaning where there's none, and crafting the most spectacular illusions about the world around us. When intricate enough, I think such fiction can be irresistible. In fact, it was Kafka who said, “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
We've built seemingly timeless structures such as religion and countries on the basis of such beautiful lies that only exist because we choose to collectively agree upon them. Much better articulation of our dual realities in this ted talk by Yuval Noah Harari.
For an atheist, I think about god a lot — not one that 'created' us but ones created by us; diverse in form, but unified in their purpose to give us a purpose. We all believe in something — myths or idols, sports teams or brands, CEOs who might save the world, or politicians that might be the end of it; And while half the world remains convinced that religion is dying, the other half votes governments into power on its very basis. We cannot even agree about that, but what remains true is the unknowable nature of the future. And nothing fuels faith more than this unpredictability — a self-fulfilling prophecy that allows both religion and conspiracy to thrive.
The more out of our control the future appears, the more we are willing to suspend our disbelief. Sometimes, I fear being vulnerable enough that faith in something supernatural begins to feel safer than the ever evolving beauty of reason and science. But until then, the material world, with all its gravity, will suffice.