Sean Corcoran

I’m currently driving around the Rocky Mountains living out of my 4Runner pondering the meaning of life.

I am not a very religious person but the past few days I’ve taken a special interest in better understanding Christianity and my relationship to it. I’ve found a novel approach for this relationship that I’d like to share here. The aim of this essay is two-fold:

Help me articulate my thoughts
Possibly help anyone reading who might be similarly confused about their relationship with religion.

Logic & Religion

I grew up a Chreaster and the main barrier that stopped me from exploring my religion deeper was the requirement to believe in supernatural claims without direct evidence. Particularly the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the existence of an interventionist God we can communicate with through Prayer. To me, supernatural claims require supernatural evidence and I never found that evidence. As a result, I largely ignored religion throughout my childhood and early 20s.

Last year, I started to explore my relationship with religion again after I was led to it by a mix of falling in love, asking existential questions, and friends going to church. I found that a lot of the wisdom and lessons resonated deeply and I genuinely enjoyed going to church. Honestly, I felt like it could be a positive force on my life.

However, I still could not wrap my mind around the supernatural claims and everyone’s convicted belief in them. I would find myself deeply inspired by a Pastor’s Sermon and then the enchantment would wear off as all the supernatural claims poured out. I guess it just felt intellectually dishonest to me. I couldn’t reconcile this dissonance and so once again the relationship fizzled out.

That takes us to a few days ago when I decided to try and figure it out once and for all. I conducted a Spiritual Study Speedrun™: I dove into the bible, researched historical arguments for the resurrection, talked with a Pastor, volunteered with a church, and talked with a minister friend. After all of this… I came to the exact same conclusion as before: I find a lot of value in the lessons, community, and experience of church, but I don’t see there being any logical argument for the supernatural claims that is sufficient to me (emphasis to me).

I thought that might be where the story ends but rather, it’s where it starts.

Manufacturing Belief

This morning I went to a Starbucks in Coeur' d'Alene, ID (where I’m currently writing this essay) and while organizing my findings from the past few days, the following idea popped up into my consciousness:

“What if I just act as if there is an interventionist God I can communicate with through Prayer?

What if I just … pretended?

Would praying everyday and believing someone is listening create better outcomes in my thoughts, behaviors, and interactions?

Would my intellectual honesty be maintained by openly acknowledging that I’m just telling myself an internal narrative rather than building a logical argument?

Would it not be more rational to just choose the belief that gives the best life outcomes given that evidence seems inherently unavailable?”

Hm… intriguing thought. Thanks brain / universe.

Interestingly, William James (the “Father of Psychology”) wrote about this pretty extensively in an essay titled The Will to Believe in 1896. He basically says:

In situations where evidence is inconclusive, yet the choice is “momentous” (matters deeply), “forced” (you must choose), and “live” (either option is viable to you), it is entirely rational to choose belief pragmatically based on the benefits of holding that belief rather than empirical proof alone.

This might sound like lying to yourself, and in some sense, perhaps it is. Yet, if there is no deterministic way to know what is “objectively right” and choosing to believe one thing offers meaningful benefits over another, then exploring the more beneficial belief seems both rational and worthwhile.

Spiritual Engineering

Ok so what does this look like in practice?

Define Yourself

Be clear on what your values are and who you want to become in 5 years. Few questions to get you started:

What do I value in myself and in my life? What would make me sad if it was taken away?
What does the ideal version of me look like in 5 years? What does the unideal version of me look like in 5 years?

Experiment

Choose some set of spiritual beliefs that you feel will get you closer to the ideal version of you and further from the unideal version. Remember, the decision to adopt these beliefs is not based on logic. The decision is based on what is pragmatic and will give the best outcome.

Live out those beliefs in your day to day and pay attention to how they change your thoughts, behaviors, and interactions.

(If this feels too abstract I give my own example below.)

Repeat

Not sure if you ever really finish this process

Example (abridged):

My Values: Integrity, Family, Freedom, Fitness, Fun, Community, Adventure, Impact, Discipline, Grit, Curiosity, Simplicity

Ideal Me in 5 Years:

Incredible relationships with SO, family, friends, and community.
Physically & mentally fit.
Working with people he likes on a mission he is energized by and making enough money to support a family comfortably.
Creating music / expressing artistic side.
Having “an impact”, i.e. reducing unnecessary suffering or inspiring people.
His life feels like an adventure: not always pleasant or easy, but fulfilling, meaningful, and positively challenging. His path forces growth and learning.
He is honest and simple. Open book - no skeletons.
He is rarely (if ever) over-identified with his thoughts, depressed, weak, lacking passion & zeal, or otherwise being incompetent and a source of unnecessary suffering for those around him.

My experiment:

I am going to believe that there is an interventionist God I can communicate with. I will live this out through daily prayer. I feel that this will get me closer to the ideal me regardless of any objective truth. I’ll do this for a few months and see how it goes.

Wrapping Up

This essay was feverishly written in one big go in an Idaho Starbucks on a Tuesday so apologies if it’s a little rough. I’d call it a slightly refined brain dump of a deep spiritual exploration. One that has been going on for the past 18 months and has come to a head in the past 72 hours. Finding an approach to religion and spirituality that allows me to separate logical reasoning from beliefs while maintaining intellectual integrity felt like a breakthrough and I wanted to capture it in the moment of the discovery.

I call the concrete practice that comes out of it “spiritual engineering” because it is intentionally building your spiritual beliefs based on a desired outcome rather than just taking them off the shelf or ignoring the notion as a whole. Neither of those latter options ever worked for me. We’ll see where this new approach leads...