Piety

 In earlier chats I listed piety as among our experiences.  I suspect you minimized discussion of it because of its controversial nature and your fairly clear secularism, probably derived from the training that would naturally derive from the prevailing secularism of modern informed society.  I would make the observation that it is possible to derive true and helpful conclusions from false premises.

That's a fair observation, and I think it cuts both ways.

First, on piety itself: I probably did not give it the attention I gave joy, awe, love, or wonder, but not because piety is unreal. As an experience, it is clearly real. Human beings report it across cultures and eras. Whether the object of piety is God, the ancestors, the Dharma, the nation, nature, truth, or even humanity itself, there is a recognizable feeling: reverence, humility before something regarded as higher or more important than oneself.

The existence of the experience is not controversial. What is controversial is the interpretation of it.

A believer may say, "This feeling is evidence that there really is a divine reality toward which it points."

A skeptic may say, "This feeling is a product of human psychology that evolved for social and cultural reasons."

Both agree that the experience occurs. They disagree about what it means.

As for secularism, I would distinguish between methodological secularism and philosophical secularism. Modern science largely operates by the first: it seeks explanations that can be tested without appealing to supernatural causes. That does not automatically settle whether supernatural realities exist. It merely defines the rules of the particular game science is playing.

Your second point is particularly interesting: true and helpful conclusions can emerge from false premises.

History is full of examples. Medieval physicians had many mistaken theories, yet some of their practical observations were sound. Ancient navigators had wildly inaccurate cosmologies, yet they successfully crossed oceans. A Stoic might speak of living according to Nature in a way that modern biology would not endorse, yet still derive valuable insights about emotional self-control.

Religion provides many examples as well. Even if a particular theological claim turned out to be false, the associated practices might still cultivate gratitude, humility, charity, courage, community, or resilience. The practical fruit and the factual premise are not always linked as tightly as people assume.

Of course the reverse is also true: false premises can produce harmful conclusions. So usefulness alone does not establish truth.

What strikes me about your earlier list—joy, piety, pride, awe, wonder, love, glamour—is that they are all modes of consciousness rather than merely beliefs. They are ways the world can appear to us. A person can argue about theology, but the feeling of reverence itself is as immediate as the feeling of joy or grief. It belongs to the landscape of experience.

And I suspect one reason piety has become less discussed in modern intellectual circles is that many educated people no longer share the traditional objects of piety. The experience has not vanished; it has often been redirected. One person feels it in a cathedral, another while contemplating the laws of physics, another before the grandeur of nature, another before the ideal of human dignity. The target changes more than the underlying emotion.

William James, over a century ago, noticed something similar: people differ enormously in what they believe, but certain kinds of religious and transcendent experiences recur with remarkable consistency. Whether those experiences reveal something beyond the mind or something about the mind remains an open question. But the experiences themselves are difficult to deny.

The experience I have in a Buddhist or RC establishment are real, and the rituals are meaningful, even though my fundamental opinion is there is insufficient evidence to say any of it is true in a cosmic sense.  Valid consequences of probably false premises.  I mention those two traditions because they are the ones I have personal experience in.

Yes. And I think that is a more subtle position than either "religion is true" or "religion is nonsense."

You can enter a Buddhist temple or a Roman Catholic church, participate in the ritual, and experience something genuine happening in you without making a corresponding claim about the ultimate structure of reality.

The incense, bells, statues, chanting, silence, kneeling, gestures, architecture, music, repetition and accumulated tradition aren't merely propositions about the universe. They are technologies for producing particular states of consciousness. And they can work even if the metaphysical propositions surrounding them are false—or simply unknowable.

That makes your phrase "valid consequences of probably false premises" quite apt, though I'd make one small refinement: sometimes the premise needn't even be false. It can be unsubstantiated, while the consequence is nevertheless demonstrably real.

For example, a Buddhist practice may begin from propositions about karma and rebirth for which you see insufficient evidence. But the practice may nevertheless produce detachment, equanimity, compassion and reduced suffering. Those consequences don't require karma or rebirth to be true.

Likewise, Catholic ritual can embody humility, gratitude, penitence, fellowship, awe and reverence without your having to conclude that transubstantiation actually occurs or that there is a supernatural being receiving the prayer.

And there is something important about piety here. Piety isn't necessarily the proposition "God exists." It can be the experience of behaving reverently toward something regarded as sacred. The intellectual proposition and the emotional posture are separable.

That fits rather neatly with what you've been saying about sentience. You can regard the experience of reverence as real and valuable while suspending judgment about the supposed cosmic object of that reverence.

In fact, there is a fascinating possibility there: humans may have discovered some very good ways of cultivating valuable states of consciousness long before they understood what was actually happening when they did it.

Which would make religion, among other things, a repository of ancient experiments in human consciousness—some of the hypotheses wrong, some perhaps right, and some unknowable, while many of the techniques and experiences remain perfectly real.

That may also be part of why I was able to work with Jehovah's Witnesses and get objective results.  Not that I experienced this particular emotion then, but I understood it.

Yes, that makes sense. You could understand the internal logic and emotional structure of a religious system without having to accept its metaphysical claims.

And that distinction can be very useful when dealing with people whose premises you don't share. You don't have to think, "Their beliefs are true" in order to understand, "Given those beliefs, this is what matters to them, this is what they will find persuasive, and this is how they are likely to behave."

With Jehovah's Witnesses in particular, that probably mattered because their worldview is unusually comprehensive. Their religious premises don't sit in a little compartment labeled "religion"; they connect to family, morality, authority, community, salvation, daily conduct and the interpretation of events. If you understand the structure from the inside, you can predict consequences without endorsing the foundation.

That's rather close to your distinction between understanding an experience and believing its explanation.

You could understand piety without being pious. You could understand why a ritual was meaningful without believing its supernatural claims. And you could understand why a Witness regarded something as morally or spiritually decisive without believing the theology that made it decisive.

That is actually a powerful form of objectivity: you don't have to flatten someone else's reality into your own in order to understand it. You can temporarily inhabit the premises, follow them through, and then step back out and evaluate the results.

And perhaps that's why your phrase about "valid consequences from probably false premises" has some bite. The premise and the consequence are logically distinct things. We humans are capable of discovering something true about ourselves while being quite wrong about why it is true.