Belief, Life, and Understanding: An Engineer’s Effort to Clear Fog and Add Light

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Despite appreciation for both the modern and not-so-modern conveniences made possible by engineering — cell phones, computers, vehicles, air conditioning, electric lights, plumbing, heating systems — most prefer not knowing “how the sausage is made.” Hopefully, however, a few will consent to follow this engineer on a short journey of discovery, an outing where a little engineering-type thinking gets applied to some fundamental aspects of life. The journey involves three stages: A foundational belief overview; a way of conceptualizing life that provides a facilitating viewpoint; and our objective — better understanding of ourselves and the world about us.

BELIEFS

1. The world has order (i.e., the physics of the universe are consistent)
2. We can grow our understanding (self-evident)
3. Understanding is good

What makes understanding good? Better understanding generally means we can better anticipate the consequences of our actions, which then leads to better decisions.

In engineering, as in most disciplines, such thinking permeates the work. Wherever it doesn’t, an opportunity for improvement exists. Take, for example, religions. Within them you tend to find those who believe we should be constrained by the beliefs and understanding of persons long gone. Untold numbers have paid dearly at the hands of the “righteous” for violating such constraints. But what if ancient writers conveyed erroneous thoughts, or what if we now incorrectly interpret their writings? What happens if words put down with a figurative intent are picked up in a literal sense?

To enable better decisions, and thereby reduce life’s problems and suffering, understanding must be nurtured.

LIFE

To gain a useful perspective on life, consider the concept of resonance. Put simply, a resonance is a repeating pattern of energy that sustains itself by drawing energy from its environment. Example: A grandfather clock’s swinging pendulum, powered by its coupled weights.

Now imagine stepping back in time and visiting your maternal ancestors — mother, maternal grandmother, mother of maternal grandmother, etc. One could, in thought, step back through 10 generations, 100 generations, 1,000 generations, or a million or more generations. A continuous path extends back to antiquity and what would certainly be an alien world. With each generation, a female was conceived and born, grew up, became pregnant, gave birth, and died. Beyond those basic milestones, we can also be sure each individual life in our maternal lineage would have had its ups and downs and struggles as life proceeded from birth through motherhood and beyond. Some did not live to see their offspring mature, but each carried the next generation of life within themselves long enough for that offspring to survive, mature, and become a mother herself.

Just as with every swing of a clock’s pendulum, every one of our maternal ancestors, enmeshed in their groups, drew energy from their surroundings to both sustain their own life and create the next generation. Each of us alive today plays a role in the current cycle of mankind’s resonance, and thus forms part of a natural World-Wide-Web — the amazing, intricate, inter-connected resonance encompassing all life on Earth.

UNDERSTANDING

Beginning with Ourselves

Life is not analogous to a resonance; life is a resonance. That recognition helps us step back and consider life from a detached, but concerned, perspective. On a broad scale, we can expect the strength and sustainability of mankind’s resonance will be impacted by environmental changes — either self-inflicted or externally imposed — along with how well we both use and manage our resources. Focusing in, individuals can be seen as incredibly complex beings that make their way through life by sensing their environment, sensing their own status, and then, from among the considered options, deciding how best to proceed.

In every decision, we must evaluate expected outcomes and assess each option’s “goodness.” The difficulty here is that making a choice necessitates a common scale. How do we decide between eating a cookie and drinking some water? How do we value each option’s possible outcomes? What scale do we use?

Freud considered pleasure and then something beyond pleasure. Nietzsche thought everyone’s driving motivation was “will to power.” While disagreeing with his “power” idea, I see Nietzsche as spot on with his thought that if one crawls “into the very heart of life and into the very roots of its heart,” a singular objective presents itself.

People strive for control of the world in which they live.

The phrase, “world in which they live,” means each person has, in effect, their own personal world. That world shifts with time and consists of one’s own being and the particular aspects of their environment on which they focus and interact. “Control” implies the ability to effectively deal with circumstances in which a person may find themselves.

The baby crying when hungry, the child racing down the field with a soccer ball at her feet, the high school student taking the SAT, the suicide bomber hoping to wreak havoc, and the security people watching for suspicious activity are all driven by our striving for control of the world in which we live. Just to be clear, having control over my world doesn’t mean I need to tell Joe Shmo down the street how to live his life; it does mean Joe’s activities and decisions don’t unduly dictate or interfere with how I live my life.

Humanity’s Fundamental Conflict

Combining what we strive for with a basic fact of life brings us to a key point, our fundamental conflict –

We strive for control but know we will die.

What do we do? How do we try to resolve it? One approach has been religion and the creation of concepts — God, heaven, eternal souls, reincarnation — aimed at denying death. St. Augustine wrote, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Does the truth found by many in those words reflect religion’s ability to deal with our conflict?

To this engineer, religion’s power, pervasiveness, and diversity around the world and throughout recorded history testifies to the perpetual tension of our fundamental conflict. Others, admittedly, have different viewpoints. Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, argues our religious concepts arise from our cognitive inference systems. Perhaps, but that doesn’t explain the immense influence religious beliefs have exerted on society. In The Social Conquest of Earth, E. O. Wilson sees creation myths, whose acceptance “binds the members together,” as the core of organized religion. Many groups — a football team’s fans, worker’s unions, political parties — have their “story” that binds them together, and their fanatical supporters, but if we consider the artistic and architectural wonders created in the name of religion, and the death and destruction perpetrated on the same basis, religions are in a league of their own. Generating the level of passion associated with religious beliefs requires more than an origin story.

Concept Creation

The prior striving for control examples all involved the physical realm, but when we work in the conceptual realm, our root desire does not disappear. Striving for control not only explains why we do what we do, but also why we think what we think. We create and utilize concepts in our efforts to gain at least a sense of control.

Consider the Christian extraphysical¹ concepts concerning man’s place in the universe in the year 1500, a time before the observation-based concepts of heliocentrism and evolution. The Earth was the center of the universe; mankind, given dominion over the Earth, was the pinnacle of God’s creation; and each person via his or her soul was an eternal being. The idea that some people’s eternities would be heavenly, and others’ otherwise, served to strengthen the message: We were important and, through the grace of God, we had control. Now, 500 years of scientific progress and 25 generations later, views have changed. With the perspective enabled by the above hypothesis, we additionally see that those previous beliefs were not merely randomly wrong, but rather were extraphysical concepts born of our striving for control and enabled by a lack of knowledge.

Religion’s Appeal

Religions do a great deal more than just help us deal with death. Sticking to the benefits side of the ledger, they:

1. Give people, through a genesis-type story, a sense of their beginnings and place in the universe;
2. Create a broad cross-section of people with a common belief system, thereby facilitating cooperative behavior;
3. Form a structure around which life can be organized and significant life events can be either celebrated or recognized;
4. Provide a means to comprehend and deal with death;
5. Enable the possibility of helpful intervention by a supreme being relative to either this life or a postulated afterlife.

Religions, although built upon extraphysical beliefs, provide real benefits. If non-religious groups had dominated during mankind’s past, the religious ones would have been sidelined. Societies drew strength from religion-based coherency, and thus ultimately from our fundamental conflict.

Some might argue that rather than directly addressing our conflict and providing comfort, religions often do the opposite. Our logic says we should not have expected otherwise. Religious leaders would have quickly learned how they could strengthen their role. Graphic depictions of hell and Elysian ones of heaven arose for a reason. In our striving for control terminology, death was made a bigger part of the world in which people lived. Thus, while religions at their core are powered by the need we have to deal with the flame of our fundamental conflict, it is not to a religion’s advantage to dampen the fire, but to fan it with one hand while offering, on condition of conformity, a cooling drink with the other.

Fading Religion?

Throughout history, religions have played a prominent role in creating coherent groups. While they have stumbled at times, the present-day participation dropoff in many parts of the world appears unprecedented. Multiple factors are contributing. Science now offers a genesis story and secular governments address benefit #2 (creating a common belief system that facilitates cooperative behavior), but those are likely secondary.

A pair of key reasons flow directly from the striving-for-control hypothesis.

• Risky environments should strengthen religious beliefs — “There are no atheists in a foxhole” — while benign ones should weaken them. Relative to the latter, modern societies have managed to put a little space between themselves and the shadow of death that has so often been a close companion.
• “The world in which we live” no longer consists of isolated enclaves. With a connected world, and religions that tend to regard themselves as exclusively correct, there is a spreading sense they are all fictions. That especially applies to the heaven and hell stories used to inflate sensitivity to our fundamental conflict.

(With religious benefits and believability diminishing, and recognizing the modern world reality of a fast-paced, consumption-driven life, a question arises: Have we substituted diversion for denial in dealing with our fundamental conflict? Has shopping replaced praying?)

The framework for understanding outlined above may find support among the non-religious and perhaps a few borderline believers, but will be quickly dismissed by most everyone else. With both logic and what we perceive as “truth” generally subservient to our striving, religious benefits #3 — #5 (structure for our lives, a means to deal with death, and help from a supreme being) will continue providing sufficient draw to retain believers even in strongly secular societies.

Religion’s Place

The preceding discussion must not be misunderstood. Given the real benefits, and the fact that extraphysical beliefs cannot be proven wrong, there is — with one caveat — neither reason nor basis to regulate or disrespect the religious practices of those who desire the associated benefits. The caveat: Religious practices based on extraphysical beliefs should never be used to justify subjugation or abuse of anyone, whether in-group or out-of-group. Extraphysical beliefs, weightless even in comparison to “thin air,” are acceptable as building blocks for benefits, not as a cause or justification for suffering.

SUMMARY

For those who see the concepts presented above as a challenge to accustomed thought patterns, your guide has a simple request: Ask yourself if those concepts help make sense of things that previously seemed perplexing. Do the ideas help the puzzling pieces of life fit together?

For myself, one nagging discomfort since my teens concerned how to make sense of religious claims? How could the followers of each religion believe their particular beliefs were true, while the claims of all others throughout history were false? In light of the above, I have my answer. Religions have existed in countless variations because, throughout history, they arose to help satisfy fundamental human needs, not because any of them are the literal truth. For a religion’s followers, the fulfillment of needs, combined with a comfortable familiarity dating back to childhood, creates a “world in which they live” that commands allegiance. Not wanting to risk being thrown out into the dark, we accept the local doctrine.

For those who do discover themselves outside, where might they find a new home? Humanism, which takes an observation- and reason-based approach to our needs, is one possibility. However, no matter the landing spot, developing and dispensing the understanding necessary to help us get beyond our chronic problems of religious conflict is paramount. Resistance will surely come from those with a parochial view of the world, but making straight and extending the path of understanding, enabling those individual worlds in which we all live to be a little more encompassing, merits the effort. Humanity, ultimately united by both our uniquely human needs and our dependence on the life of the world around us, may in time come to appreciate an alternative to the too often traveled paths of conflict and subjugation.

¹(extraphysical, often defined as “not subject to physical laws or methods,” denotes things disconnected from observable reality)

REFERENCES:

• Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained, New York: Basic Books, 2001.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche, (W. Kaufmann, Ed., & W. Kaufmann, Trans.) New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Wilson, Edward. The Social Conquest of Earth, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012.
• St. Augustine. St. Augustine Confessions, (H. Chadwick, Trans.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.