Why Religion is Metaphorically True

Even if literally false

Note: I spoke with co-host of Cognitive Revolutions, Nathan Labenz, about the upside and downside cases for AI.

Meanwhile, for Moment of Zen this week we spoke with Brian Chau about why ChatGPT got so woke, why the arc of tech is centralization, and how the political regime works.

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Recently, we discussed how rationality is compromised by the fact that people aren’t totally rational. That there’s something religious about being a human being. We then explained how traditions can be truer than truth. In this piece we’ll unpack the idea that religion contains metaphorical truth.

I grew up in a fairly atheistic environment. I was a huge fan of the new atheists: Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins. I read The God Delusion and swore off any romantic attachment I had to religion.

I had always seen religion as a crutch past civilizations used to explain what could not be explained by modern science, something we could discard once we knew better.

I had read David Deutsch, and I was a believer that everything had a scientific explanation, we just haven’t discovered it yet. But it’s simply a matter of time until we discovered it.

I’d also believed that religion was pulling us in the wrong direction, that many bad things were justified in the name of religion that would not be justifiable otherwise.

Though, if religion pulled us in the wrong direction, how has it lasted for so long?

Quoting Jordan Peterson:

“How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid?… Is it actually sensible to argue that persistently successful traditions are based on ideas that are simply wrong, regardless of their utility? Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given their appearance of extreme irrationality? Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical error? (Peterson, 1999, p. 19)

This was Bret Weinstein’s idea of metaphorical truth. The narratives that underlie religion aren’t literally true, but their metaphorically true, meaning that if you were to act in accordance with religion, you’d have better outcomes than if you didn’t.

A macro version of the question “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?”, is “if your way of running society is so superior to religion, why are you running a non-procreating death cult?” or better yet: “Why’d you kill 100M people with new religions you invented like communism or nazism”?

So one possibility is that once we have scientific understanding, to use the Deutsch idea, we will explain away religion. Another possibility is that we will finally explain why it works so well, and that will give us a greater appreciation for it.

Aaron Lightner and Ed Hagen have a new paper that is trying to do just that: “All models are wrong, and some are religious: Supernatural explanations as abstract and useful falsehoods about complex realities.”

Brett Andersen’s summary is so good I’ll quote it here:

“For Lightner and Hagen, supernatural beliefs are useful falsehoods that help us to reason and communicate about complex, noisy phenomena.

Here is a summary: Complex systems are systems that have many interacting parts. Many problems in the world require us to deal with complex systems, including predicting the behavior of other animals, other people, the weather, social trends, politics, warfare, etc. Virtually any problem that requires us to think about the medium to long-term future will involve complex systems. The thing about complex systems is that they are inherently unpredictable, even in principle. We cannot build detailed models of them because doing so would simply be impossible. There are too many moving parts. We cannot predict their behavior over the medium to long term because small perturbations in the system can cause massive differences in the system’s trajectory. How, then, do we deal with complex systems? For the most part, we simplify them by using heuristics. I don’t need to have detailed knowledge of weather patterns to know that if it’s dark and cloudy outside then I should grab an umbrella. I don’t need to have detailed knowledge of other people to know that if people suddenly start acting distant around me then I have probably violated some social norm or another. I don’t need to have detailed knowledge of my car to know that the gas is running low, etc.

As Lightner and Hagen point out, one useful way of simplifying complex systems is to treat them as intentional systems, with beliefs, values, goals, etc. In other words, you can usefully simplify a complex system by personifying it. This can not only make it easier to reason about the system, but also to communicate about it. This means that personification is not necessarily the result of a “hyper-active agency detector”, as many of the byproduct theorists would have it. Personification is, rather, a cognitive strategy that we sometimes use to reason and communicate about complex systems. Supernatural explanations that personify aspects of the natural world are useful fictions that (when they work correctly) allow us to pragmatically predict, control, and communicate about the world better than an alternative explanation. As Lightner and Hagen put it:

…supernatural explanations are the ordinary and abstract output of our intuitive theories, which can assume a variety of increasingly abstract stances, or levels of explanation. Our capacity for an intuitive psychology, which generates anthropomorphic explanations, is especially well-suited for modeling unobservable, uncertain, and complex processes in terms of high-level concepts, such as intentions[…] We therefore propose that the utility of supernatural explanations is that, although they invoke entities that do not exist, they can usefully map onto parts of the abstract structure of the world. (p. 21)

This thesis sheds new light on Jordan Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning. In that book, he argued that mythological narratives were implicitly and narratively portraying the process by which individuals and societies update themselves in the face of anomalous information. The characters in these narratives, he argued, are personified representations of different aspects of this process (e.g., order, chaos, and the process that mediates between order and chaos). I made that argument before I knew anything about Lightner and Hagen’s paper. This is important because, if Lightner and Hagen are right, then it should be expected that the most fundamental mythological narratives would reflect the structure of the behavior of complex systems (i.e., phase transitions).”

Religions have literal falsehoods, but they contain directional truths. It’s because they are not false as much as they are simplifications of what’s true. And those simplifications do not only exist because we can’t understand them yet. They also exist because they are hacks for us to understand and remember phenomena that are beyond our comprehension. We are story-bound creatures. Quoting Brett again:

“In other words, personification is a cognitive strategy that human beings use to get a grip on complex patterns in the world. This process fits the description of a pattern that Lightner and Hagen argue can be usefully personified. It is highly abstract, it is not directly observable, and it has substantial impacts on fitness because participation in it is biologically optimal.

It is for this reason that these figures have often been regarded as “God” (e.g., Jesus Christ) or at least as the highest god in the pantheon of gods (e.g., Marduk from Babylon). Embodying the pattern represented by these figures represents the meta-goal of existence, meaning that participation in the process they represent is of ultimate value.

Again, a spirit is like an eternal pattern. We have observed great men throughout human history and told stories about them. We then distilled those stories to their general pattern and encoded that pattern into personified representations in the form of mythological narratives. We have called that personified representation God.”

So metaphorical truth isn’t some new age nonsense. It’s the idea that we use personification to relay truths that we’ve acquired over time but don’t quite have the language to adequately capture. Traditions aren’t merely true because we’ve been doing them a long time. They are true because they work even though we can’t rationally understand why. Religious myths serve as stand-ins until we have better explanations—until science can catch up with experience.