Wishful Thinking?

From page 158,159 of
(Conscience and History in a World Civilization
1: The Classical Age of Islam) (1974)
by Marshall G.S. Hodgson


There seems opportunity to take issue with many of the statements in these two paragraphs,
but as a whole, it seems worth chewing on.



"It may be said that the religious impulse is ninety per cent wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is, indeed, rooted deeply in us. Unlike other animals, human beings live by their illusions: our very words, it has been said, point to what is in fact not there. Human beings alone are artists. Over and beyond the immediate stimulus and response, we want every moment to make sense in some larger whole which our lives form: people cannot stand living with sheer absurdity. If we refuse to make a conscious choice of what sense to make of life, we are told, we will in practice adopt some pattern of sense unconsciously and without consideration. Hence even intelligent people may persuade themselves to believe almost anything that seems to make hopeful sense of life. And since life is largely a tissue of miseries, we are under pressure to discover some sense which will give the misery a positive meaning. The logic of wishful thinking then, is not to be despised: that if something is possible (though proof or disproof is unattainable), and if it is desirable, then it may be presumed true until disproven.

But what is remarkable about human beings, in distinction from other animals, is what we have done with our illusions - with our free imaginations. Artists deal, in a sense, with illusion; but if they are disciplined, they can evoke reality by way of the illusion. In religion also a disciplined imaginative response can touch reality. The component of sheer wishful thinking in religion is large, but is still not the whole of it. What is most interesting about religion is not the wishful thinking as such, but the creative insights that come along with it, which open new possibilities of human meaningfulness and expression. To identify these expressions of religion in particular, the observer must sometimes penetrate into motives and implications not immediately apparent to outsiders in the words used in religious discourse. But this need not mean distortion. What serious and intelligent persons over many generations, and in preference to many available alternatives, have held to be significant rarely turns out, on close investigation, to be trivial."