Faith and Truthiness

Stephen Colbert is a genius. Truthiness, not truth is what matters to humans.

I’m reading up on intuitionist logic today, just for shits and giggles, and I find it to be quite interesting. Check out the section on truth and proof - it’s a lot to wrap one’s brain around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionism

I interpret it as saying that we judge whether or not something is true by whether or not it satisfies our intuitions - regardless of it being true. So, within this framework, it doesn’t matter whether or not God exists, but how the concept feeds into how we understand derived truths. Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether or not Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, nor do a host of holes in the official 9-11 timeline matter, because it’s all filtered through a pre-existing set of biases and beliefs, and we select in favor of evidence for our beliefs while nearly discounting evidence to the contrary.

If God exists, He has a set of properties (for someone to be God, they would have to be omnipotent, etc., etc.,), and we are the ones who set these properties according to how they satisfy their intuitions. If one decides it is not necessary to be perfect in order to be God, and if it can be shown that God Himself is not perfect, then I suppose any of us can say we are God.

One common way of going about this is to first claim that God is perfect, then identify an ‘imperfect’ quality he possesses such as jealousy. The next step is to then show how, in the Bible, God is a jealous God. For God to be God, He must be perfect (or so we intuit). Jealousy is generally an imperfect quality. God is a jealous God, and therefore he must be imperfect. (I would immediately point out the benefits of jealousy - it can be a good thing).

Who are we to place conditions on God, should He exist?, We are the ones who claim that “for one to be God, they must be perfect”, probably because for something to be “not man”, it must have certain characteristics man does not have. If God has characteristics we do not have, then in what way can it be said we are “made in His image?”. If it can be shown that God has imperfections, then God himself is not God, but something else. But who are we to say what is perfect and what is imperfect? For God to be God, he’d probably have the property of absolute sovereignty, and if he wants to be imperfect, I say we let Him.

There must be a non sequitir in there somewhere. I’m an Economist here, not a Nobel Laureate Logician.

So maybe, for the most part, we just incorporate our notions of God into our broader belief structure according to our intuitions, which may not be rooted in any objective reality. Thus, the economist in me would say that belief structures suffer from a problem of self-selection bias and path dependency. In other words, Christianity was adopted in the West because it served useful ends, whereas Confucism thrived in the East because it also served similar ends, particularly the entrenchment of one man’s power over another. In like manner, belief structures suffer from path dependency: I was raised in a Christian home, which probably has a lot to do with why I identify as a believer. Were I to be born to some Confucians, I would most likely be a Confucist.

Perhaps it’s possible to construct a system of knowing that has no basis in truth, as long as it seems internally consistent. One might judge Confucism or Christianity or Realism or any other way of knowing as “internally consistent” because each element of the belief structure does not alarm our intuitions. So, really, we self-select into belief structures by evaluating the underlying truths based on how they satisfy our gut instincts.

So if faith is built on truthiness, what does truthy Christianity look like?