A few months back, the book /Crazy For God/ by Frank Schaeffer made a splash because it gave an inside account of the rise of Evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer (Frank’s dad), who helped turn abortion into a major political issue for Protestants. It’s actually a lot more than that, and an all-around fascinating read, but there’s one thing that made me go, “no… that’s not right…”:

The irony is that we all – secular or religious people alike – make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well. So we make a leap of faith when it comes to what we should believe in, who we will marry, and our careers. Who we happen to meet, one conversation when you were eighteen, the college course you happened to sign up for, the teacher you liked, the elevator you missed and the girl you met in the next one, decide whole lives. You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified to make any big decisions. And since we can’t do that, we trust to luck, religion, or the kindness of strangers. Only the trivialities – say, buying cars, washing machines, or airline seats – are chosen on the basis of good information. I’ve always known I like aisle seats, but what does one really want in a wife?

[Quote ripped off from here.]

Schaeffer, it should be explained, left behind evangelical Protestantism, but is now a serious adherent of Greek Orthodoxy, which he defends as not crazy the way evangelicals are, yet having a strong sense of tradition (stronger, he would actually say, than the evangelicals). I don’t want to take issue with any of that. What I take issue with is the blurring of the distinction between belief and action.

Start with basic, boring stuff: with actions, you either do them or you don’t. To quote the great philosophical minds behind the band Rush, “If you choose not to decide/ You still have made a choice.” You can’t chose to neither do nor not do something.

Belief isn’t like that. With belief, you have the option of just saying “I don’t know.” And within that option are sub-options, like “total agnosticism,” “probably, but I’m not sure,” and “I doubt it, but maybe.” How many sub-options we have is a matter of debate–I like the numerical probability approach because it means not having to shoe-horn everything into a few categories, but I think those philosophers (*cough* Richard Chappell *cough*) who think we can assign a /precise/ number to all our levels of certainty are taking the model waaay to literally.

Debating Bayesian probability isn’t the point of this post, however. The point is something that still seems to obvious to state: if you have no idea whether something is a good idea or not, you have to either do it or not do it. But there’s no law saying you have to adopt an opinion on whether you’re making the right choice.

This is no doubt this is psychologically difficult for most people. The experts will tell you all about how people tend to be overconfident, rationalize arbitrary decisions, etc. However, I’m convinced that it’s a mark of emotional maturity to be able to live with uncertainty. One benefit is obvious: having the most accurate possible view of how the world is will let you base decisions on reality, rather than fantasy. I don’t deny overconfidence can have benefits: I firmly believe that I have personally benefited from wild overestimation of my own abilities. But the benefits of such false beliefs can be gotten other ways. You can try new things because you believe you’ll be wildly successful, or you can take the attitude, “if I want to do something, and can think of no reason I won’t be successful, I will try it, because I will at least stand a chance to learn that reason.” Depressing, but it’ll up your chances for the second attempt. I think.

Also, false confidence can fall short of being a real belief, and end up as what Hume called an “unaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief and conviction, but approaching much nearer the former than to the latter.” You can think to yourself you’re a chick magnet, but if knowing deep down you aren’t keeps you from actually propositioning any girls, you won’t get anywhere. Better to think, “this probably won’t work, but if I keep trying it may work eventually!”

There’s also an altruistic reason for realism: often, the way an exaggerated sense of self-worth helps you is by justifying self-serving behavior. And none of this is to say that under-confident people shouldn’t adjust for greater realism in the other direction. In my experience, people who have *too little* confidence in themselves are rare, but they do exist and benefit from being confident about themselves.

I am not entirely satisfied with this post’s title, as I have vague memories of seeing the phrase–or something like it–thrown around in favor of the following view: no one knows anything, so accept the fact that we’re stuck believing anything you want. (If anyone can find an definite example of this line, it would make a lovely entry in the stupidity section.) To really deal with uncertainty, you must be able to assign the “total agnosticisms” and “probably, but I’m not sures” and “I doubt it, but maybes” in a reasonable manner, and then be okay with it. It means losing the need to pretend to believe when you know you don’t know, just for your peace of mind.

This post started talking about religion, and then segued to general life advice, but I’d like to segue back. I suspect that the invocation of life’s uncertainties to support religious belief isn’t just a superficial apologetic move, but rather it’s life’s uncertainties that are a major driving force behind religion. I remember reading somewhere (I think it was Pinker’s /How The Mind Works/, though I can’t find the quote) that in primitive societies, there is no notion that the spirits are absolutely omniscient, but there is an idea that they are omniscient with respect to the uncertain world of social interaction. If they give you advice in that area, it’s a sure thing. And it’s well-established that attempts to influence the world through superstitious means are used when and only when the matter is uncertain, a finding that extends even to baseball players.

A good example of childish things we need to put away.