Bootstrapping a Relationship With a God You Don't Believe in

You make beliefs by playing make believe and observing what happens

If you’re convinced that belief in God is a useful fiction, but you don’t actually believe - here’s how you can get to a place of actually believing. You need evidence. That’s how brains work. We believe things because of prior evidence we’ve encountered that belief will work out for us.

Consider a new business “bootstrapping” itself without outside investment. Say you plan to start a new restaurant. You could start by inviting friends to dinner and seeing their response to your meal. If they’re not excited, well, maybe the food business isn’t for you. But if they love it - hey, maybe you’re on to something. You could then try again, offering to prepared catered food for a small gathering for a friend. Then, see what happens: how much do the guests really like the food? If they’re thrilled about it, this means you’re likely on the right track. You might then take a slightly bigger step. If you’re feeling really confident, maybe you buy a food truck. If not, maybe you take on a few more catering gigs.

At each step in the process, what you’re doing is investing. You’re putting capital at risk in the expectation of a reward. That “putting capital at risk” part is the same as “taking a leap of faith” - you put a bit more weight on an idea that has worked, at some level, in the past. If the investment pans out, now you’ve got more capital to invest, on even bigger experiments. When you put your faith in God, and it works, that makes it easier to try again next time with an even weightier matter. This is how you can grow your relationship with God from “it’s a cool idea but I doubt it’s real” to “hey it actually seems to work…” to “how far does this go?”

The Feedback Loop

Growing a belief in God works exactly the same way. You don’t have to believe God is real to act as if God is real. You can pretend - as long as you’re willing to maybe feel a bit silly afterwards. Any business venture requires to risk capital, and you can’t grow faith without risking a bit of self confidence.

Then, see what happens. This is important!

The ‘seeing what happens’ part is how you get the evidence. The evidence you’re accumulating is evidence that belief in God is a viable strategy. You can’t possibly believe God is real until you’re convinced that the strategy actually works, consistently. You’re not going to come to a place that you think someone is at the other end of your prayers, until you’ve seen, enough times, that it works - and that it works in ways that are consistently surprising. Once you get far enough along in the act of pretending, what happens is that you start to encounter coincidences and ‘surprising’ occurrences that eventually stop being surprising because you come to find that you can rely on them.

If smaller steps work - like spending a day away from social media, you can try a slightly bigger step - like starting each day with a prayer of gratitude for your life and intention to live that day well, and see if the evidence you collect reinforces the same set of benefits. Once you’ve become convinced these little strategies work, you might try taking on an even bigger step - like when you’re feeling hurt by someone, trying to think about how they are feeling and maybe ask if you’ve played a role, and trying to be loving even when you don’t want to. Or, you could try asking God to help you be a bit more loving. Sure, it might cost you in that you could feel a bit sheepish or silly - but hey, it’s a lot cheaper than buying a taco truck!

You could say that this starts out with pretending - but I’d use the term ‘make believe.’ Rather than be a game for mere children, I’d note that playing make believe - if you play it a certain way - has the tendency of actually making beliefs. In a certain sense, a scientific experiment is a form of disciplined make-believe. You have to be “pretend” a hypothesis is true - at least a little bit - in order to do the work of setting up the experiment. To leave a glass of water outside overnight and watch it freeze in the winter is trivial. That’s a cheap experiment. The value of the knowledge you gain will be proportional to what you’re willing to invest in the experiment. If you were to, say, measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, you’ve got to build expensive equipment. You won’t be able to do if you’re not convinced that some good will come of it. That conviction scientists have today was built upon centuries of prior experiments and the value that came from the evidence they generated.

If you want to believe, you have to start small. Start with the simplest experiment you’re willing to run. This is the path I took, without realizing it was bringing me towards God. I just wanted to stop being so stressed and frustrated all the time. Working with an ‘attitude coach’, I started performing an experiment.

A Simple Experiment.

At first, the experiment was just ‘assume I can always learn about it from any difficult situation, and make an effort to to do so’ So, I tried that out. I found that there wasn’t a single incident where I tried to learn something valuable from a difficult situation, and failed to do so. It never happened. On top of that, I felt that I finally had some measure of control over my life. Maybe not what was happening to me, but, at least, to how I was reacting to events around me. It wasn’t always easy - sometimes it was humiliating or embarrassing - but I was able to stick it out, and gradually became convinced the hypothesis was true. I really could always find something to learn from any situation.

So, I figured, that hypothesis can stick around. But this seemed to raise a question: “I can always learn from any situation” isn’t just a property about me - it has to also be a property about the situations themselves. My capacity to learn implies that the world is learnable, and that I can’t ever rightfully claim there’s nothing to learn. If I can learn in a way that I will benefit from any difficult situation, it then becomes plausible that the world actually has a kind of deep structure to it. If the world were made for my learning, that would explain why I was always able to find some worthwhile lesson in any challenge.

So, I tried playing around with the idea that the source of all my experiences was actually guiding me towards a set of experiences that were better for me and my family. I tried that experiment - trusting things to work out, even if I didn’t know how or why - and I found that when I did so, I was both calmer and more persuasive. Even when I messed things up, whenever I kept coming back to trying to love and forgive over and over, things would eventually get better. When I had a serious problem, I’d try the “Ask God tearfully to help me” - and it worked. It didn’t make the problems go away the way I wanted them to - but the situation improved. Every single time. Yes, my Dad still died young. Yes, all kinds of other problems seem to keep coming back up. It’s not a magic wand. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. I don’t ask God to make my problems go away - I ask him to help me have a better attitude about them, and that has the effect of making many either go away, or become a lot less bad.

The more I did this kind of experiment, the better my experiences became. The better my experiments came because of simple experiments, I tried more elaborate experiments, like going to church every Sunday even though I often found it boring and frustrating. I tried following rules that I thought were unreasonably strict. But what kept happening was, changing the way I acted would improve my life. I could see how the rules that I didn’t think made sense were producing outcomes in my life that I would not have predicted.

Eventually this process stopped being an experiment and became something that I’ve come to rely on, the way I’d rely on gravity and not question it. Are there times when I’m not too sure if this ‘God’ character really exists and has a consciousness and loves me? Yes, absolutely. When that happens, I remind myself that those properties are additional claims being made about the source of all my experiences. That source clearly exists, and I’m probably wrong about it a number of ways, anyhow. I know this relationship strategy has worked for me, and especially for my family. So instead of mulling and doubting whether or not this thing really is conscious and has a plan for my life, I focus instead on the benefits I’ve gotten from this series of experiments.

Cultivating an intentional trust relationship with the source of your experiences ultimately serves to reduce the role that fear, anxiety, and stress play in your life. Now, maybe you don’t need that. But I know I did. I know I still do. I know that, despite my rational mind knowing a situation is fine, my lizard brain screams that I have to control and get it just right or else it’ll all go bad.

Cultivating an intentional trust relationship with the source of my experiences has made it easier for me to let go of attempts to FIX IT NOW by means of speaking with emotionally charged words, in an attempt to JUST MAKE IT BETTER - even though my rational mind knows, that will only hurt the relationship.

When I’m hurting, and I think someone else is hurting me, and anger tells me to hurt them back, I can now pause. Not always - but often. I remember it’s just me and the source, and hurting that other person would do not good. I can now choose to endure that hurt, patiently, out of love and respect for the source. It’s pretty cool when I can avoid swearing at my kids because I’m just tired and they’re just being kids. This ability came as the result of collecting evidence about the viability of a simple strategy.

Every time you try to do the right thing even though it hurts, you get evidence about the likely outcomes of acting that way.

I heard the craziest hypothesis once. It sounds insane. But you can test it via experiment!

All you have to do is:

• PRETEND that the word ‘good’ means something real, independent of what you feel right now, even if you don’t understand precisely what

• TRY to be as good as you can

• ACKNOWLEDGE that you’ll fall short and that’s OK

• TRUST that when you do this, your life will get better

The hypothesis says, if you try this experiment, and you keep doing it over and over, your life gets exponentially better. My own experience has born this out. That’s why I’ve left my job to blog and write a book.

What’s the theoretical basis for such an experiment? It’s simple: the idea that the laws of physics - the thing generating your experiences - are Good, and that our own moral senses are flawed approximations of what Good means and are therefore frequently wrong. The hypothesis is that reality itself is good, but that we tend to substitute our own imaginations for reality, and that this ends up causing us to suffer because we pursue goals that don’t exist, run away from nonexistent threats, and try to hold onto things which are inherently transient.

Don’t just take my words for it. You don’t have to. Try the experiment yourself and see what happens.