In Jest

Richard Feynman published a collection of his essays and interviews which he appropriately entitled, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out." It's a great book, and everyone interested in science and math should read it. But the best part is perhaps the title itself. There really is some kind of addictive and strangely unique pleasure that comes from suffering through a problem and all of its brambles, suddenly rising above the thicket, and seeing the expanse of the journey from problem to solution laid out neatly. If there was anyone who understood this, it was certainly Feynman.

A couple of nights ago, I had been struggling through a tricky physics problem. For various reasons, I rarely work with other people on problem sets: I like to start working on them sooner in the week, I like be able to completely exhaust my creativity before resorting to that of others, and I think I learn better that way. An end result is that I'm horribly inefficient compared to most people. So I had probably spent two or three hours thinking about this problem, and was at an impasse. Walking back from the library around 2 AM, I had this sudden epiphany. Lo and behold, when I sat down in my room and reformulated my approach, the correct answer popped out.

As I put down my pencil, my clock hit 3:02 AM. A box enclosed my equations of motion, and the pleasure of finding things out finished washing over me. Anyone used to doing heavily analytic activities, like math or physics or writing, knows that the brain does not quite function normally at this time of night, after it has been subjected to many hours of work. Things seem strangely different.

I dropped into my armchair and stared at the wall for a moment. Now, I realized that the reason that physicists do physics instead of philosophy is mainly because they're not very good at the latter. I don't think the philosophers are very good at philosophy either, but they're certainly a bit better than the people who study physics. There is a lot of evidence for this claim, but a good example occurs when physicists learn Hamilton's principle. It basically states that particles always travel in a manner that minimizes a certain quantity. If you listen carefully, you can hear aspiring physicists arguing before and after lecture about how on earth these particles could possibly "know" the exactly correct path to take. The knee-jerk reaction is to slap these anthropomorphizing dummies in the face and demand to know why they suddenly think that particles are sentient beings. They've already learned mechanics once, but when we teach them the exact same thing over again using different words, they start thinking that dirt clods have brains.

I was thinking about this, and for the sake of argument, I supposed these people were right. Suppose there is some reason for the particle's motion. God would be one possible reason. I don't like thinking about God very much, because most of the relevant arguments are extraordinarily banal, but I suspended my moratorium on God for a moment.

Most major religions associate an afterlife with God. These religions usually privilige adherents with some sort of eternal bliss following death. Accordingly, nonadherents and sinners are punished to endless misery in some variant of hell. There are all sorts of terrifying analogies that Catholic schoolchildren can tell you to relate the meaning of spending "eternity" in hell. The Koran remarks:

"Know they not that whoever opposes and shows hostility to Allah and His
Messenger, certainly for him will be the fire of Hell to abide therein? That
is extreme disgrace". (9:63)

Now I think that all rational people agree that we cannot be certain of the existence or nonexistence of all this stuff. In the most simple terms, a logical person can choose to believe or disbelieve without being technically wrong. So we can attribute a utility stream to each outcome:

Case I: God exists. Nonbelievers face a very, very large negative utility after death. I hesistate to call it infinite (who knows, there might be some sort of diminishing marginal (negative?) utility of misery here...), but it is certainly so large as to render all mortal utilities vanishingly small. From what I hear about heaven, adherents receive some equally large positive utility upon death.

Case II: God does not exist. There is no afterlife, and the adherent has the same fate as the nonadherent. Post mortem utility is zero.

Now there are certainly costs associated with belief and disbelief in religion, which we must consider in our decision calculus. I argue that they are negligible for two reasons. First, the costs/benefits of belief and disbelief probably average out to be about the same for both groups. Disbelievers don't have pay for the gas to go to their place of worship, and they don't have to bother with all of these arbitrary moral injuctions. Believers feel good about god being "on their side," and they have the smug satisfaction of feeling more enlightened than all the unwashed heathen. Secondly, these mortal costs are trivial compared to the grand, cosmic costs in the afterlife. This is true unless the probability of the existence of god is vanishingly small, which we already asserted to be unknowable anyway.

The upshot, you ask? A simple glance at the figures show that it is clearly irrational to not believe in God. I'm disobeying the lessons of elementary economics.

At this point, I decided that it was time to go to bed. So I did.