Testimony

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name is Nihilist

"Religion and Hidden Variables"

There is an observation in Ibn-Khaldoon's "Introduction" that is pure genius and that has unfortunately been ignored by Arabic culture. He notes that there is little use in teaching religious stories and poetry and the like to children (as was done in his day) in order to ingrain good morals and truthfulness. Instead, he suggests that if you want a child to learn to always say the truth, teach him/her mathematics. When the child gets used to the way mathematical proofs proceed, his mind learns to follow paths that have no place for falsities. I could not agree more.

I would further extend Ibn-Khaldoon's idea to say that teaching science and logic trains one's mind to assess the arguments that are presented to him/her and detect those arguments that are not backed by sufficient evidence. This is an extremely important faculty that one needs in order to consider the intellectual merit of any system of thought, including religion.

In that vein, I see religions as examples of what is called in physics: "hidden variable theories". Let me say a word about what that means. Thermodynamics deals with the energy transformations in bulk matter, crudely put, things that you hold in your hand. The variables that it deals with are things that we are familiar with like temperature, pressure, volume, etc. The equations of thermodynamics deal with the relations between these quantities. However, we know that matter is made of microscopic entities, atoms, molecules, etc. In the end, every bulk piece of matter is made of atoms in constant motion, and the macroscopic properties must follow from the motion of these atoms. The variables associated with these atoms are an example of "hidden variables". We do not have access to them, we cannot measure them directly, but all the macroscopic themodynamic properties should be derivable from them.

Religions, in that sense, are hidden-variable theories. The data that we have consists of the apparently random happenings in our everyday life. Bad things sometimes happen to good people and vice versa. Will Durant once said that religion is not needed to explain why evil exists, but why evil happens to good people. If Hitler got a brain tumor, no one would have felt sorry for him. But when an innocent three-year old girl gets a brain tumor, one thinks that things aren't making sense any more. Here religion enters to suggest an underlying substratum to reality, or hidden variables. When one takes these variables in consideration, everything makes sense. For example, religions in the Ibrahimic tradition (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) posit that all things that happen to us are part of a moral test that we are being subjected to. Some questions in the test are easy and some are difficult. The outcome of the test are then made known to you in an after-life that we have no way to observe or examine in this life. Eastern religions posit transmutation of souls, that bad things happen to us as a punishment for sins committed in previous lives (hidden variables) that we cannot remember or examine (except for the lucky few).

Thus in assessing a religious system one should examine these underlying assumptions, these hidden variables.