In the previous post, we looked at what it might be like to express our beliefs as hopes, at least those beliefs about which we cannot be certain.
We don’t have a complete understanding about the nature of reality – the meaning of life, the possibility of afterlife, the nature of human consciousness, and so on. As it stands right now, our best scientific, rational understanding of these topics is incomplete. Despite this uncertainty, we all make choices about these things in how we let them guide our lives, and we often treat these as firmly held beliefs.
The result is that we’re believing in things that we can’t know are true, but we still expect with confidence to be the case. In other words, we hope these things are true.
In the previous post, we looked at an example to see how this works. That example was about the meaning of life. For another example, consider the “hard problem” of consciousness. It is considered a hard problem because we still know so little about it and it is so different from all other physical things that the path to better understanding is not at all clear.
Given this uncertainty, it’s interesting to think about how people with different worldviews would describe their beliefs as hopes.
An atheist might say: “I hope that consciousness and self are no more than aspects of material complexity, such that we are complex machines with no special nature or value beyond that complexity.”
A Christian might say: “I hope that there is more to me than just the material, that I am an image of the creator with an intrinsically unique, inestimable worth.”
Both of these perspectives can lead to opinions of self worth and the value of other people, and may be expressed in the life choices that a person makes.
In any case, I think that expressing these opinions as hopes, while being more accurate, also makes it more clear that we necessarily live our lives with a certain amount of uncertainty. We may want to believe we live by proof, logic and reasoning, but even when those are all used properly, we simply do not have enough information to be certain about some metaphysical things.
Seeing these beliefs as hopes also highlights that we are making a choice, not just agreeing to something because it is proven. This is where reason comes in – guiding us to make choices within the range of rational possibilities, rather than selecting a specific possibility.
I think it would be helpful for discussions about these topics to use the hope terminology because it might lower the temperature of such discussions, help remind us that we shouldn’t be arrogant in our assertions. Then discussions might be more useful and result in better understanding instead of increasingly entrenched opinions.
We certainly could use more reasonable conversations these days.
Kelvin's Clouds 