This is the first posting in what I hope will be a series, marked, as this is, with the subject "Life Skills." Although I write openly and honestly as a theistic Christian, much what I hope to say in these articles -- at least the initial ones -- should, I hope, be of general use to most people, no matter where they're coming from.

The idea that we all share a single objective reality seems pretty obvious (intuitive, even) to many people, but I think I should write about it anyway, given the number of philosophical, educational, and religious systems which oppose it today.

The Homing Mechanism

Sometimes, when debating religions, people will say: There are so many religions in the world! So many ideas concerning God or reality. Given that diversity, and the difficulty of direct experience, how can we ever know which ones are true and which ones aren't?

To answer this question openly, as a theist, I believe that when our creator put us here, no matter what religion we were born into, or continent we were born on, he didn't leave us stranded. I believe the creator built, into every single person, a "homing mechanism" which anyone can use, if they wish, to find their way back to that creator, and truth in general. In my view, this device consists of reason, conscience, and the ability to perceive reality.

Conversely, if you want to lead people into error, one needs to attack these very same mechanisms. If you can perceive reality, and use reason, you can double-check a con man. If you have a conscience and good moral reasoning, you will want to do avoid doing wrong. If you have knowledge of history (a subset of reality-perception) you will be able to avoid certain kinds of very ancient and popular errors.

So cult leaders, for example, work to undermine these vital props: they will convince you reality and/or history isn't really as it seems, attempt to confuse their followers' consciences using wrong information or relativistic/situational arguments. They will appeal to ego to cause the conscience to be overridden. They will use logically fallacious and factually untrue arguments to achieve their ends.

And strangely, it seems these exact same mechanisms are under attack in modern society, in academia, and in religious and philosophical systems around the world. It's almost as if "the world" (or, as some more paranoid people would say, "the system"), in general, has something to hide, something it doesn't want most people to notice.

Undermining Reality: Brains in a Tank & Stove's "Worst Argument"

When I was a kid, we would talk about The Twilight Zone and ask each other: "Did you ever think that maybe we're all just brains in a tank?" Indeed, if we were, how could we know otherwise?

Bach's Johnathan Livingston Seagull was an enormously popular book. Not long after it came out, there were even church bible study groups reading it as instructional material. Bach's follow-up book, Illusions taught people that reality was whatever we want it to be: all we had to do is realize this. (To demonstrate this, the protagonist "swims" in the ground, the soil becoming like water around him.)

In popular culture, The Secret is a runaway best-seller. It presents a view of reality as infinitely malleable: There are no scarce resources, and no economic laws. Our failure to have whatever we want only happens because we think the wrong thoughts, and our thoughts determine reality. If you don't have the Hope Diamond, it's not because there's only one of those: it's because you didn't think the kind of positive thoughts which will alter reality and bring it to you.

And you might laugh at the foolish people who fall for that, but also consider: In academic culture, a huge amount of the "liberal arts" and "social sciences" have now become vehicles for teaching David Stove's "Worst Argument", which essentially boils down to: "We have eyes, therefore we cannot see."

Of course, nobody would believe it if were presented that bluntly, so it is sold rather subtly: We cannot perceive reality directly since all of our experiences are "mediated" in some way. For example, if I want to learn about history, I must read a history book -- written by a historian who will unintentionally inject all sorts of biases, assumptions, and cultural preconceptions into their retelling. So I cannot really know about history because what comes to me comes though an unreliable medium.

Or, more abstrusely, another academic might draw distinctions between "signs" (our words and mental images) and purported real things being referenced -- with the subtle end goal of arguing, since all we have are abstract mental representations, we cannot really know "things as they are, in and of themselves." (More here.)

Finally, one can't help but turn an eye to religion: Many of the religions of the world have the removal of objective reality as one of their foundational precepts. Hinduism, for example, teaches that the world is maya -- illusory or misleading. (And we are liberated when we realize this.) Some sects of Buddhism also echo this belief. Christian Science teaches us that there is no disease, just wrong mental states. Scientology teaches we cannot perceive reality because of harmful "engrams" which possess the mind, and can only be removed through "church technology." "Pentecostal" strains of Christianity are riddled with the "word of Faith" movement, which says essentially the same thing The Secret teaches ("Name it, claim it!"). And Liberal and "postmodern" strains of Christianity echo the academic argument that although an objective reality exists, we cannot absolutely know it.

Out of the Woods

That's true, of course: We cannot absolutely know reality. We can't even be sure, for example, that we aren't actually disembodied brains, floating in a tank somewhere, wired up to a Matrix-like computer system which simulates our every experience.

For many people, such admissions are quite unsettling. Reasonably so.

So how am I sitting here, arguing this, unperturbed, a theist who believes in absolute reality, and God, even? There are several bits of advice I can give.

First, we should believe in reality simply because that works.

We all approximate reality by building mental models: We don't know how our friend, spouse, or boss will react to this or that idea, but we have a mental image of how that's going to work out. We use that model to help us select the best course of action. When our model doesn't represent reality, we get surprising and unwelcomed results.

Thus, we never know for sure if our mental model is completely correct, but we can find out if it was wrong in certain ways. If we have a mental picture of our living room, and we're walking though our living room in the dark, we'll find out we're wrong only when we bang our shins on the coffee table, or step on an errant toy. When that happens, we revise our model, we hope, to be more accurate.

Perhaps we are brains in a tank. Perhaps we are a butterfly, dreaming he is a man. Perhaps we are just thoughts in God's mind. No matter: Whatever game we're in, these are the rules, and we might as well play along because that is how everything is working. People can't swim in soil like water, on demand, or we'd see a good bit more of it in the news. Suffering isn't totally in the mind, or I wouldn't know so many ex-Christian Scientists who found it didn't work. (And if you think I'm wrong, go ahead and try to mentally alter reality in some major way.)

The second bit of advice I'd give is this: None of the people making such arguments believe them anyway. I believe that we should be truthful, in that we should not profess things we don't actually believe. Yet people who expound this doctrine violate that rule. Allow me to illustrate:

A friend of mine was approached at a party, in college, by a man who insisted there was no objective reality. My friend stepped on his foot as he spoke. The man objected: "Hey! Why are you stepping on my foot?" My friend insisted he was doing no such thing. The man persisted, pointing to his foot, saying my friend was stepping on it. (Which he was.)

My friend pointed out that he had just argued the two were sharing an objective experience, an objective reality. The man who just argued ardently that there was no objective reality also clearly expected that his experience of having his foot stepped on would be shared by the one he thought was doing it. He said one thing, but he actually believed quite another.

And, unsurprisingly, if you look at the academic and cult-leader crowd (but I repeat myself) you'll find that both use the argument that 'we can't know things' in order to teach the very things we cannot know. Similarly, those who use arguments based on moral relativism often are quick to follow with all sorts of highly moralistic (and shrill) pronouncements and demands.

It's a slick one-two punch, and most people aren't well inoculated against it. I'm hoping, by reading this, that you will be, or will now be of more help to others who aren't.

The final thing I'd point out is that, yes, although we cannot know absolutely what's true, we can get so close to it that it's not worth quibbling about. As a conservative Christian, I find my critics frequently accuse me and my kind of "all or none" thinking. But, in truth, it is those critics who often have trouble with levels or shades of distinction.

This topic is a classic illustration: It's true we cannot completely know reality (or morality). And so postmodern academics act as if it's an all-or-none proposition: we should retreat into moral or objective relativism, as if no ideas can be "truer" or "better" than any others.

But of course that's complete nonsense: Yes, we all make mental models, but no, all mental models are not equally good. The mental model most people use when driving is so good that auto accidents are actually amazingly rare, considering the vast number of people and amount of danger involved. You can get "close enough" to reality that your mental model always "works". (When I drop things, they fall. And yes, that rule even includes an unstated exception for zero-G environments, should I find myself in outer space someday.)

So when you hear somebody arguing we cannot completely know (or cannot know at all) what is morally or objectively true, or pushing a belief which has the effect of undermining our connection to reality, the more salient question to ask yourself is:

What are they selling, and why?

Look closely in that direction, and you'll usually find that where there's smoke, there's fire.

(To cite another often-helpful heuristic.)