Good Question Bad Answer

Religious people think that their beliefs are not only true, but also provide answers to important questions. Not so disbelievers. Positivists thought that religious propositions were not just false or unknowable, they were meaningless. Marxists were less radical. They thought that religious beliefs answered to certain human needs, but not very salutary ones. They were opium for the masses. Douglas Adams (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) kept looking for an answer to the question about the meaning of life. He finally found one and it said “Forty two”. He still thought it was a good answer to an obscure question.
I beg to disagree. I think that religion provides answers to important questions, perhaps even philosophical questions. Questions like:
1) “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
2) “Why is there so much suffering, if everyone would be happier without it?”
3) “What is going to happen to all of us, sophisticated people with so much imagination and mines of information?”
4) “How should one live?”
5) “Why is there so much subjectivity in the world?
6) “How did the world arise?

Not all these questions are very clear, that’s right (1 and 5 are not). But there are all very good questions, prephilosophical, prescientific even.

On the other hand religious answers are almost disappointing in their clarity. How did the world arise. It was created by a powerful being. We must obey him, or else, because he is so strong. But if we are obedient, we will not die and continue to live forever.

Religion is a disappointment. I would like to know what I am doing here and why I was thrown in with all those human animals. Instead I am told a fairy tale about a God who was virgin born, can transform water into wine and part the Red Sea. There is nothing hard to understand here, these are childish stories.

Still, religious people deserve respect, because their quest is legitimate. Some of the questions 1-6 will be answered by science, some not. But it is better to have no answer, than a shallow one, potentially untrue.

Marek W.