…To Dawkins, it doesn't really matter whether a belief in God or the afterlife is beneficial or useful or consoling. "How can it be consoling," he says, "to believe in something which is just straight counterfactual? Just simply goes against the facts?" Dawkins mocks those who contend for God and immortality because, without these, life for them "would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaningless and insignificance." Dawkins says, so what? "Maybe life is empty." He gives the analogy of a man who, refusing to come to terms with his wife's death, insists that this cannot be true because it would make his life intolerable, barren, and empty. Dawkins observes, "Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren, and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead.
Dawkins's commitment to standing up for the truth even when it is unpalatable seems noble and admirable. Like freedom, truth is one of those core values of our culture, one that makes us automatically want to stand up and cheer. But the philosopher Nietzsche did not join in these accolades. He raised a surprising question: why is truth important? Why this fetishism of reason? Why should we care about veracity without regard to the consequences? To see what Nietzsche is getting at, imagine if the Nazis came and asked you where the Jews were hiding. I hope you would not respond by saying, "I may not want to tell you, but I have to. I am committed to the truth." Or imagine if you took your 15-year-old daughter for a routine medical checkup, after which the doctor informed you privately that she had a terminal illness with only a few years to live. Would you feel obliged, in the name of veracity, to tell your daughter about this death sentence? I'm not sure whether I would do it, but my decision would have nothing to do with some bogus requirement to disclose the truth. Rather, I would decide entirely on the basis of whether or not this information would be good for her life. Truth would take a back seat to practical considerations. The virtues of truth-telling are not, as Dawkins would have us believe, self-evident. Situations exist where it is better to remain silent, or perhaps even to ignore the truth. Nietzsche's argument was even more fundamental. Truth, he stated, is for the enhancement of life. It is not life that must serve truth, but truth that must serve life.
Hume put the point somewhat differently. Perhaps more penetratingly than anyone before him, Hume used both speculative and empirical reason to raise powerful questions about how we can claim to know anything. Just because the sun rose yesterday, how can I be sure it is going to rise again tomorrow? Just because A is followed by B, how do I know that A caused B? Although Hume insisted on skepticism as the proper mode of thought, he rejected skepticism as the proper mode of life. Hume recognized how absurd it would be to try to live as if you don't really know whether the sun will come up the next day. In a tellingly candid passage in his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume says that he would write philosophy for a while, and then he would put his papers aside and say, in effect, I'm done with that. Then he would go and play backgammon, or have drinks with friends, blithely ignoring the gloomy skepticism of his writings. Hume called his approach “mitigated skepticism” by which he meant skepticism left on the shelf. Basically, Hume would carry on his day as if philosophical theories were one thing, life quite another.
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