Emotion, belief, and reality

By Mano Singham

In the film Contact, the scientist Ellie Arroway who discovers the ETI signal (played by Jodie Foster) is an atheist/agnostic who has a romantic relationship with a theologian Palmer Joss (played by Mathew McConaughey). The film's creators were clearly trying to strike a middle ground between these two competing views, presumably to not alienate any potential audience segment. So they tried to soften the agnostic implications of the novel by trying to find a way to put religious beliefs on a par with science. To do so, the film essentially resurrects the convenient (but dubious) argument that science deals with the physical world while religion deals with the spiritual world.

In one scene, Arroway explains to Joss why she does not believe in god. She says it is because there is no evidence of his existence. At that point, he asks her whether she is certain that she loves her late father and she says she does. Then he asks her to prove it. Of course she can't and he looks triumphant, as if he had made a brilliant insight.

I hear this argument a lot and it frankly puzzles me. As a justification for believing in god it makes no sense at all. The argument seems designed to make the point that there are things that are real whose existence we cannot prove and that god is of this nature. But as a justification for believing in god, it is silly. The fact that the smart scientist Arroway does not promptly destroy Joss's argument shows how far the filmmakers were trying to strike a middle ground between belief and non-belief.

I think of 'love' as the label we give to a complex mix of physiological and neurological phenomena that occur in our bodies and brains as a result of particular kinds of interactions that we have with other people in specific emotional contexts. So it is 'real' in the same way that other emotions like anger, pride, sadness, etc. are real. We can relate the emotion to actual physical phenomena.

But why is this an argument for the reality of god? All it implies is that when we talk about 'belief in god,' all we are saying is that it too is just a label we give to a 'complex mix of physiological and neurological phenomena that occur in our bodies and brains as a result of particular kinds of interactions that we have in specific emotional contexts.' If this is what people mean by believing in god, then I would agree with it. After all, there is no doubt that when people experience something they like to call 'spiritual', there will be some corresponding physiological changes in their bodies, as there is for any emotion.

But we cannot extend this to assert that just because our bodies experience a real physiological change due to a belief, that therefore the thing we believe in has a reality and existence apart from us. Just because belief in god is a real experience does not mean that god is real. It would be like arguing that the love (or whatever emotion) I feel for someone or something, because it is real to me, therefore also exists independently of me.