Faith: The Unicorn in the Closet

The 2001 film cartoon Monsters, Inc. imagines a corporation of monsters that feed off scaring children through doors that are portals to their bedroom closets. This is a variant on the motif of the monster under the bed. In both cases, a presence is felt but never seen. It’s the opposite of the refrigerator light that seems to be always lit. Just as we never see the light off, children in the cartoon world never see the monsters. They can never confirm or disconfirm the existence of beings who exit through magic portals whenever closet doors are opened.

Despite their ontological indeterminacy, the monsters do frighten children. They power Monstopolis with juvenile screams, so there's clearly a psychic drain caused by the children’s belief in monsters. But if monsters are unfalsifiable, why should children believe in them at all? Why scream needlessly? Shouldn't they imagine more pleasant unfalsifiable creatures in their closets? Shouldn't they imagine, say, magical unicorns? There's no reason not to. Given two equally untestable premises, isn't it smarter to believe in the one that makes you feel better?

So we come to a lower-case version of Pascal’s Wager. Won't you live a happier life believing that at the heart of out universe there is a powerful and loving supernatural power. Won't you be happier putting your faith in beneficent God? The answer may be yes even if God is no more real than a unicorn. And any number of other supernatural ideas may also make the answer yes. A child may equally well believe that her closet hides a guardian angel or a wish-granting genii. 

It’s no accident that religions are called faiths, but it's still disconcerting to connect religious faith with childish make-believe. Aren't we more grownup than that? A belief adopted without evidence because it makes the believer feel better is what I call a Unicorn Wager. No doubt, we all go through life clutching such beliefs like Linus’ blanket because their opposite is repellent.

On the other hand, we may actually care whether life has meaning. Even if Schrodinger’s quantum cat is, for us today, both dead and alive, we may wait agnostically for the day when the box is opened and truth is revealed. If we yearn for a Kalashnikov revelation--a truth persuasive to anybody regardless of ideology--then make-believe may be deeply unsatisfying. Suppose that we are aware that we are “believing” just because it makes us feel good. Is that really belief?

Arguably, the demand for real knowledge may be hubris, a demand for omniscience, setting ourselves up as little gods. Certainty seems to be beyond human capacity. Besides, in one application of the closet analogy, we are forced to wager. The sensible parental position, that the closet contains only clothes, evades the child’s urgent question: are the closet’s contents friendly or unfriendly? In the religious application of the metaphor, many religious people regard a clothes-only closet—an insensate mechanical or chaotic universe of things—as a monstrous idea, more frightening than a shaggy, blue cartoon figure with horns.

Personally, I’ve given up on any hope that Moroni will lend me golden plates of scripture, that Gabriel will bestride every horizon dictating suras, that Jesus will speak to me on the road out of a blinding light, or that a talking bush will burn and not be consumed. Having read the teachings of mystics, encouraged by claims that they experienced God, I still wonder if such subjective experiences—however utterly persuasive to the experiencing them—prove anything but that extreme mental states (some of them very seductive) are part of human experience. This chills me, but I can’t escape it. 

Of course, there are claimed objective elements in the four revelations above, all accepted by some major world religions. Witnesses signed off to seeing shiny plates in Joseph Smith’s possession. Muhammed, said to be illiterate, delivered great literature and recited it brilliantly. Fellow travelers are said to have heard Paul’s divine voice. And Moses’ burning bush initiated, according to Exodus, a cavalcade of miracles, including ten plagues that nobody could miss.

The claims of Smith, Muhammed, Paul, and Moses, however, do introduce another kind of "truth," a kind associated with miracles but not limited to them. I’ll call this a Burning Bush Truth. It produces signs in the external world where others witness it, but it may happen only once and, like a beautiful sunset, cannot be replicated at will. All that is left when it is over is a verbal claim, a witness. 

Scientific claims—those rising to the Kalashnikov level—render themselves falsifiable by claiming that events pointing to their truth can be replicated. If they aren’t replicated, the claims considered disproved. But not all claims can be held to this standard. Witnesses to a murder may testify persuasively that an accused is guilty. We don’t have to wait for him to kill on camera before convicting. Even the best history recounts events that can't be replicated. And, despite the fact that hallucinations happens and eyewitness testimony may be false--that private experience never rises to the level of objective proof--I'd believe I’d encountered the supernatural if I had an experience like those attributed to Smith, Muhammed, Paul, and Moses. Furthermore, if there were material evidence, even if transitory, I would take my belief claim more seriously than if the evidence were purely visionary.

Closer to a Unicorn Wager but making a stronger claim is what I’ll call a Heart Truth. If you are in love, you know you are. For the lover, the “I love you” claim is beyond question. It is a direct experience. Moreover, there may be outward and visible signs impossible to hide. A Heart Truth also differs from the Unicorn Wager in that it is seldom a willful choice. It is experienced by the lover as almost indistinguishable from a sensory experience—again, say, like a beautiful sunset—and so may seem to the lover very much like a Burning Bush. However, unlike the experience of a sunset or a burning bush, a Heart Truth is not co-experienced with bystanders. 

A friend once complained that he was desperately in love with a woman, and I was astonished. She looked ordinary to me. A Heart Truth is subjective. Even if it can be shared in words, it can be only indirectly verified by anyone other than the lover. Its signs may even be faked for motives of lust, ambition, loneliness, or greed. Significantly, a Heart Truth does not depend on a real relationship with the beloved or even the beloved's existence. True love is famously unrequited, and it's possible to fall in love with a false image, say, of a movie star or a writer long dead. The truth of the statement, “I love her,” need not require that she exist. Heart Truth is real in the experience of the lover—a direct, obsessive fact—but elsewhere it is open to doubt. Pascal famously wrote, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (423).

  So, between Kalashnikov Truth (at which level I suppose every honest person is an agnostic) and the Unicorn Wager (which is little more than wishful thinking), I see at least two tiers of religious belief supported by less rigorous evidence. A Burning Bush, in its fullest form, is a miraculous supernatural break in mundane reality, like a ceiling collapse in Plato’s cave. It occurs rarely (if at all) and devolves quickly into hearsay, where the motives and veracity of the witnesses are in question. The Heart Truth is a personal experience, involuntary and utterly convincing--maybe expressible but supported by no objective evidence.

Of course, these are only bands on a spectrum. Kalashnikov Truth, Burning Bush Truth, Heart Truth, and the Unicorn Wager are gradations of evidentiary force that, as benchmarks, explain many religious disagreements. Some people are driven to avoid false positives, others to avoid false negatives, and these emphases lead inevitably to different conclusions. In a criminal trial, for instance, the highest priority is to avoid punishing the innocent, a false positive, so the system demands proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Similarly, your the highest priority is to avoid believing in a false religion, also a false positive, you'll demand that religious claims be supported with Kalashnikov rigor. This is an impossibly high standard (otherwise open-minded people worldwide would accept one religion just as armies worldwide carry assault rifles), so you must remain agnostic.

On the other pole we have Pascal, driven to avoid a false negative, convinced that disbelief in the Catholic God of his day may result in infinite loss. In his Wager, this overrides all evidentiary concerns. Pascal describes unflinchingly the  impossibility of knowing for sure that God exists, a Kalashnikov agnosticism, but then shifts the burden of proof—passionate to avoid a false negative—which leads him to endorse unproven religious belief as supernatural fire insurance. Unicorn make-believe, for him, is advisable if no firmer basis for belief is available. Pascal then goes on to propose that visualizing a magic unicorn in the closet (damn the preponderance of evidence) will yield a Heart Truth of actual belief (418).

Work Cited

Pascal, Blase. Pensees. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Books, 1995.