The Truth of a Religious Belief is Not Important | The Big Slice

Yet over 3.6 billion people belong to the Abrahamic religions and subscribe to all or some of these beliefs. That’s half the population on the planet; a fact I can’t simply ignore. So I’ve come to the more balanced perspective of being an instrumentalist. Now this might be a stretch but indulge me for a moment longer.

From Wikipedia, “In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that a scientific theory is a useful instrument in understanding the world. A concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality.”

Although this definition applies to science where evidence is paramount, I’m using it on religion because it takes us out of the realm of describing objective reality and into the realm of “predicting phenomena.”

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In this case, instrumentalism is about the practicality of a belief. I.e., its usefulness. In other words, I can forgo the need to reach a conclusion on the truth of a religious proposition and look to its capacity to predict phenomena, for instance “help believers.” And I cannot argue against the reality that religious belief does help believers.

Of course the next question that looms into view is, “what does this kind of help look like?” Or to be more precise, “help to do what.”

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But I must admit, my argument, like many, is a hall of mirrors. If we apply the work of Jacques Derrida, the French postmodernist philosopher, when we deconstruct meaning far enough down to its origins, we find nothing there but what other human beings put there. And when we deconstruct that, we find aporia; a confusion in establishing the truth of any proposition.

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You see, our faith in the truth of all propositions depends on how firmly we believe in the truth of supporting propositions. In the end, they’re all human propositions. Do they help or hinder the people who believe them and the people they influence? To me that’s the only question worth asking.

The Truth of a Religious Belief is Not Important | The Big Slice