Truth Is Not Everything

I constantly reflect on myself to see if nonsense has crept into my thoughts. I try to be rigorous and commit myself to the axioms of logic. A statement cannot be both true and not true at the same time. If it is, the statement is not precise. However, sometimes contradictions arise. For example, I believe in an all-good and all-powerful God. This contradicts the existence of suffering in this world. I am aware of this contradiction and know that either the all-goodness, the omnipotence, or the reality of suffering in the world must be false. I am just not ready to decide which assumption is false, though I tend to let go of omnipotence.

In my everyday and practical life, however, it is different. In reality, there are phenomena like "positive psychology" or "placebo" in a non-religious context, or "proclamation" in a religious one. These are statements that demonstrably have an effect but must be considered logically false because they contradict the current reality. These speeches are described as performative in speech act theory. They are judged based on their effect. Yet this happens in the same German language.

Suppose we have two people: the performer and the logician. The performer says, "If you really believe in it, then you can do it." The logician disagrees, saying this is not correct. If the logician has no humor or understanding of performance, he will say, "Try to firmly believe that you want to be both alive and dead at the same time. You can't do it." And of course, the performer's statement is logically false. But the performer also has something to criticize about the logician. If the logician says, "The universe is almost unimaginably larger than I am, and my existence has a negligible impact on the entire universe," the performer would criticize that these statements have negative effects on the person. And both are right. Logically, we have no problem here.

We just have to judge from our values which statements we can hold simultaneously. Personally, I try to classify statements as either performative or logical and therefore accept contradictions because their claim is different. Thus, the aforementioned all-goodness and omnipotence are not only purely logical statements (although they are that too) but also performative. Believing that God has these attributes influences my worldview and optimism. That is why I do not want to give up either term because their performance is important to me.

So why not simply outsource the entire realm of religion to performative language? Because reality has the strongest performance. True statements have power. No matter which government or force fights against them, the truth remains. If a performative statement is also true, it becomes practically unshakable and reliable. I believe religion is not a collection of performative statements but an attempt to unite the two worlds of language. Thus, statements in the Bible about God remain vague and mysterious, while statements about the consequences of wrong behavior are very vivid.

The only value of truth is that it makes the statement more performative. Correct predictions of events are only relevant if we can adapt our behavior to the prediction (adapting our behavior means having an effect). By this, I mean that if we as humanity have no performance, we will go extinct. If we have no truth, we may lose some performance.