Truth is a Means, not an End

I'm not a Christian. I'm not religious at all actually. I grew up Catholic and some of my family is still religious, but I'm not an atheist. I'm not even agnostic, I'm just not religious. The reason for this isn't some long winded explanation of my deep personal examination of the validity of different metaphysical theories. Religion just doesn't do anything for me personally. It doesn't make my life any better.

This argument is intuitive but it strays from the usual debate around religion. What you'll see on facebook or pretty much any other place that lets people disseminate their terrible ideas is two people who clearly have no intention of changing anything that they think about because they think it would reflect poorly on them as a person. They think that the locus of religion or "religion vs science" as people so often frame it, is truth. But very rarely does anybody consider what this truth actually does for them. 

The truth might be what somebody truly values, and that's fine. But most people take it for granted that they value the truth and they don't realize that they don't truly care about it. It's something you're told to value, people take it without question that something is good simply because it's true. So if you have truly considered what you value and you still value truth for its own sake, then this is not for you. What I'm saying here is that I do not value the truth for its own sake.

Science is great, science is amazing, and all of the things that make life so easy and the reason the human condition gets better everyday is because of science and technology. Loving technology does not mean loving truth. I love technology because it gave us airplanes and iphones and birth control and a million other things that have made my life infinitely more livable. 

If I wake up tomorrow and scientists all of a sudden have a consensus that there's no way planes should be able to fly, but they do anyways, why would I care? 

Science doesn't yet have an explanation for countless things, but it doesn't make those things less useful to us or stop them from functioning the way that they do.

This gets to the heart of the argument here, and that is that truth is a means, not an end. Whether something is true or not is not the important thing. Its functionality is the thing. Whether or not reality exists independent of human consciousness is at the very best trivial and at the very worst an endless debate that derails important work. 

When someone gives you advice in the impersonal "you" and acts like it applies to all people and it resonates with you and helps you out of a tough moment or gets you back on track, you don't sit there and think of all the theoretical cases where this advice may not be "true." And if you actually do that then you're a prick. 

You just take the advice and you decide if it's useful to you or not useful to you. And if it's true to you in that moment, then you use it.