E.G.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

The point that Lewis makes here is psychologically deep. Paradoxically, it is possible for a claim to be excessively plausible. Of course, that doesn’t mean that implausibility always enhances believability. There’s an art to this.

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I think there are two sorts of contexts where a claim’s high degree of plausibility can reasonably arouse suspicion. First, there are contexts where you have antecedent reason to think the speaker might be inclined to try to manipulate you by telling you just what you expect to hear. Second, there are contexts where you have antecedent reason to think that, whatever the truth of the matter is, it’s likely to be something weird. As it happens, religion exemplifies both sorts of contexts. By the way, so does philosophy.

I have previously discussed how (i) what Dennett called credal athleticism, and (ii) the incoherence of mass appeal, can both help to explain why absurdity is typically abundant in religions. To this list we should add CS Lewis’s point that (iii) implausibility can sometimes enhance believability. 

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In her book about UFO belief, Diana Walsh Pasulka observes that in some religions, “the absurd is intentionally cultivated to an extreme degree,” as in the koans of Zen Buddhism such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” And she asks whether the UFO phenomenon might be a kind of “mass koan.”

Broadly, Pasulka’s idea is that UFO belief is a kind of religion or at least a “spirituality.” It differs in all sorts of ways from traditional religions like Catholicism and Zen Buddhism, partly because it is emerging in a time of photography and newspapers and (now) the Internet. These forms of information technology both constrain it and liberate it in novel ways.

And Pasulka thinks that, in our modern information environment, religions of the traditional sort will not emerge anymore. We won’t see the likes of Christianity again. But Pasulka thinks that UFO belief and traditional religions are both instances of some kind of broadly human religious or spiritual tendency, which persists.

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Russell wrote:

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Some people will say that philosophers earn their absurdities, because they hold themselves to certain rules, like this one:

A Russellian rule: An absurd claim can be made only after it has been shown to be derivable by means of valid inference from highly plausible premises.

Theologians and UFO believers do not usually bother with this rule. You might say they are undisciplined in that way.

It would not be entirely fair to say that. Theologians and UFO believers have their own rules. Many forms of theology have been highly disciplined. This might also be true of UFO belief, for all I know. Also, philosophers don’t consistently abide by the rules they purport to have.

But I think it is probably fair to say that, for those who are in the business of making sense of things—a group which I’d say includes theologians, UFO believers, philosophers, and many others—something like the Russellian rule given above is a good ideal to strive for. 

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Many of us share the optimistic feeling about philosophy that Parfit expresses at the end of Reasons and Persons:

Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

The optimism here is about agreement. Parfit is expressing hope that, as philosophical ethics develops, we will reach a point where we converge on the same general moral outlook. I take it that Parfit thinks that such convergence would be good because it would be a sign that we’ve gotten things right, but one may also think that there would be further advantages of such convergence.

I am interested in a broader optimism, too: an optimism about convergence on all of the main questions of philosophy, including the sorts of questions about “the meaning of it all” that religion addresses and that I think UFO belief, in its own way, also tries to address. We might say the Parfitian endpoint is the worldview we’d have in that hypothetical moment of future convergence.

There is a view according to which the Parfitian endpoint will be an outlook that lacks the sorts of absurdities that have marked all religions and that mark modern forms of “spirituality,” a category which includes (on Pasulka’s account) UFO belief. And then there is a view according to which the Parfitian endpoint will embrace some small selection of judiciously-selected, well-justified absurdities. I’m a fan of the latter view. I reject CS Lewis’s Christianity, but I like the idea that, when it comes to the main questions of philosophy that we’re all worried about, whatever the truth turns out to be, it’s almost certainly going to be weird.