Religious Belief and The Pursuit of Truth

Becoming open to spirituality against my will.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Global Atheist Convention. Image credit: Rocco Ancora for the Atheist Foundation of Australia, Flickr.

Three years ago, I was a freshman in college, and I ran into the director of the Coalition for Christian Outreach on my campus. We began meeting weekly, just to chat for an hour, as he did with many other students. I've been an avowed atheist since I was twelve and have a strong bullshit detector—I trusted him because it became clear he wasn't out to convert me. He was genuinely curious about my way of thinking. My friends made fun of me, understandably, for spending my weeknight talking about the Big Questions with a forty-something minister. I wasn't oblivious to the fact that it was a little weird, but as a kid, I invested so much time in defining my worldview and my epistemological beliefs that I was enthralled that someone cared to ask what I thought. 

I don't remember what question he asked, but I remember explaining to him that I was ultimately oriented toward the pursuit of truth.

“What if someone isn't interested in truth?” He asked.

I gave him a baffled look. I couldn't imagine anyone who didn't value the truth and desire to know it. “I guess I wouldn't know what to tell them,” I said. 

Now I am the very type of person I was baffled by three years ago: truth is not my sole guiding principle and…I might even be beginning to describe myself as spiritual.

Truth is still important to me. Having knowledge of the truth allows us to orient our lives better. If I know it is true that the human mind has a positive reaction to a diet with plenty of fiber, protein, vegetables, and whole foods; sunlight; and exercise, that will allow me to live a more fulfilling life. I also think leaving untrue cults, conspiracy theories, and other potentially harmful beliefs behind as we understand that they aren't true is important because when we act on these lies, we are often infringing on the agency of ourselves and others. 

For many, truth remains the central concern of their lives. It's what we are taught to value from the beginning—in school, we are always asked for the right and true answer, and in social situations, go-to icebreakers include “two truths and a lie” or “truth or dare.” Philosophically, the entire field of epistemology and Cartesian skepticism goes back to the question, “what is true? What is knowledge?”¹

So, why the move away from truth as my north star?

The simplest answer is because I was unhappy. 

Even when I was unhappy, I felt a sort of duty to the truth for a long time. I thought if I just found the ultimate truth, it would make me happy, or if I was unhappy still, at least I knew my beliefs were true and that such knowledge was more trustworthy than emotional states, which change on a whim. 

But my allegiance to the truth was barely tolerable. 

So when I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's essay “Why I Am Now a Christian” I understood what she meant when she said, “I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”

Ali is famous for being an ex-Muslim who escaped a civil war in Somalia, immigrated to the Netherlands, where she then escaped an arranged marriage, and was taken under the wing of figures like Richard Dawkins. The New Atheist movement, which had been a boon to her as a refugee, now had much to say about her newfound Christian beliefs. Many critics ensued, saying that atheism was never meant to provide meaning to one's life and that she doesn’t claim to believe the tenets of Christianity insofar as she believes that Jesus rose from the dead, etc., and profoundly missing the point. They aren't wrong. She called herself a Christian without actually defending any of the key beliefs of the religion, and that warrants critique, but, in my opinion, they overlooked the much deeper issue—atheism was intolerable for her. The sentence is quickly brushed over in her original essay as she delves into western values, but I immediately latched on to it as something I had long recognized within myself. 

I agree with the critics that Ali didn't articulate herself masterfully. I think it's because she got caught up in the defense of her position. She had a mindset shift and knew she would have to justify it to not just her cohort, but her mentors, people who welcomed her to a new home. And this cohort isn't particularly fond of emotional appeals—they've prided themselves on debate, rhetoric, reason, logic, a defense of truth—that's the whole shtick. But her argument didn't stem from logic, nor did it from an emotional whim. Call it spiritual, call it metaphysical, call it a primitive evolutionary need—I’m not sure I have the language for it. Maybe the best term is the Sanskrit phrase “neti neti” translated as not this not this—meaning we are not the ego nor are we nothing; neti neti is a third space that is not logic nor emotion, maybe something akin to intuition. Neti neti is what Ali discovered, I believe, and what led her to religious belief. Believing in something felt right—not in a superficial emotional way that made her temporarily happy, nor did it feel right only in her head; it felt right in her chest all the way through her toes.

Though I quickly understood Ali's grievances with atheism, at the time of her essay, I didn't yet understand the turn to religiosity. I didn't understand how someone steeped in the atheist movement could become a believer without, well, divine intervention. I couldn't see myself becoming a believer without a distinct and profound personal experience. It's easy, when her account lacks that, to dismiss it as an evolutionary need for purpose, for moral community, for tradition and narrative, but Ali is an intellectual giant who had pointed to those very purposes for years. 

When you experience a certain level of intelligence, there is, in some ways, a tension between what you know and what you need. You can recognize these beneficial elements of religion—purpose, community, tradition, objective morality—and deprive yourself of them, pretending the knowledge of the needs makes you above needing them. 

I used to think if I knew every fallacy and cognitive bias, I could avoid them, but the human brain was not wired for truth-seeking, and this too, I know. If you believe in natural selection, then you know that our traits and the way our brains are wired is to promote survival. This provides us with a negativity bias and anxiety, for example, because it is always more beneficial to believe there is a tiger behind that bush or that we shouldn't eat those berries ever again, even if they only made us sick once, because these things promote our survival even if they don't hold true. 

One of the most interesting arguments against a naturalistic worldview, actually, is that when we refer to natural selection, we admit we are using a flawed system, the human mind, to provide evidence for natural selection. Essentially, if we aren’t equipped with the tools to find truth, how can we claim that natural selection is true? If you had asked me to respond to that objection a year ago, I would have said, “Just because the human mind has flaws in its ability to discern truth does not mean that we cannot find truth. If we are aware of our own nature and try to account for its flaws and still collectively find that natural selection is a viable theory, it's fairly likely it is true.” Now, I would simply respond, “Yeah.”

It's not that I've stopped believing in natural selection—it's that I no longer hunger and justify and hem and haw about the truth—instead I prioritize living in alignment with oneself. Self-knowledge and the adaptation of one’s life to their quirks are more fulfilling than starving oneself by looking for some secular, higher-order objective principle. 

I can't pinpoint the moment I shifted away from truth, but when I began to learn about eastern religion and meditation, for a moment I forced myself to suspend my analytical, logical mind and to try it, free of judgment, for two months. The positive effects from meditation are backed by science and physiology, but something from my core, from my neti neti, told me there was more to it than a physiological response. It's hard to explain where it came from but where I used to ask, “What is there other than truth?” I now asked, “Why was I so obsessed with truth?” What is the harm in living in alignment with oneself? That's not to say we should act like our most primitive selves, tribalistic and violent, or that we should abandon sound thinking for conspiracy, but that I became painfully aware of how much energy I expended fighting myself.

Like Ali, I was constantly defending my beliefs intellectually, and I only let my emotions into the picture insofar as they were useful to the argument. I tried not to feel, lest it cloud me like a cognitive bias. I didn't try to eliminate my bias—I knew that was impossible—but I did try to control for it by viewing issues through many lenses. It wasn't a mere interest in understanding the other side and crafting a good argument; it was an existential obsession with reaching some sort of end goal of “the truth”—something that would never be satisfied. The pursuit of something unachievable was making me miserable. 

The new north star became living in alignment with myself, which meant honoring my interest in intellectual and philosophical subjects but treating them as an interest rather than a life-defining pursuit. When I say living in alignment, it isn't purely hedonistic, either. It isn't my short-term wants, but it's what my neti neti directs me to—my dharma (duty). I used to think the idea of some sort of cosmic duty was absurd. Without God, it didn't make sense to say anyone was put on earth to carry out any particular mission, and I still believe that, but I don't have a better word for this thing that undoubtedly exists—someone's calling, their desire that doesn't come from anywhere in particular; it feels at once internal and external and bigger than one's self.

All of this might be a trick of natural selection encouraging us to survive, maybe my first guess was right and “spirituality” is an illusion. I don't know the truth, and it doesn't matter much. 

My obsession with “why” diverted me from the simple acceptance of the neti neti third space. Any intuition was a bias; any dharma was something I crafted for myself based on my experiences that my brain imagined with more grandeur than it warranted. I don’t have any logical arguments to offer about why that view was untrue; all I can really say is this view, one a little less concerned about truth, feels right. 

I realized fighting with myself, trying to correct my natural way of viewing the world because it might be fallacious, was exhausting. So, I stopped fighting and started wondering what I could do for myself—how I could build a life that would suit my tendencies—rather than the pursuit of an abstraction. For so long, I had centered this idea that truth and knowledge existed out in the world somewhere, without also acknowledging I exist and that is worth something. I was looking for something external and objective to tell me that existing was worth something because my logical brain was uncomfortable with any assumptions. But this idea—that I am worth something—I know it in the fiber of my being; it’s neti neti, and once I stopped trying to justify my own intuitions, everything changed. I didn’t feel detached from my body, which was frequently in a state of distress. Body, mind, and whatever else makes me myself, became a team rather than adversaries jockeying for attention. Maybe it’s wrong to lean into something just because it “feels right” or “clicks with me”—I know how it sounds—but I am also trying to be less concerned about sounding logical and more concerned about how I feel in my daily existence, which is more fully embodied, aligned with myself, and at peace.

1. One proposed definition of knowledge is justified true belief. In other words, something that is true and you have reasons to believe it is true. However, this definition was problematized by Edmund Gettier in 1963 with the “Gettier Problem.” In short, Gettier argues that you can be justified in believing something and be right, but for different reasons than you predicted. For example, Gettier posits that Smith applies for a job and is told Jones will get the job. Smith observes that Jones has ten coins in his pocket and concludes that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job. However, Smith ends up getting the job and he finds ten coins in his jacket pocket. So Smith was justified in believing his original statement and it turned out to be true, but not in the way he intended when he made the statement. Gettier’s objection kicked off many amendments by philosophers to the JTB definition of knowledge.