Can only what we see make us happy? The apostle Paul suggests differently: "We live by faith, not by sight."

The Constitution of the United States of America declares that one of our inalienable rights is the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately happiness may be more elusive than it first appears, and we do much more pursuing of happiness than being happy.

One wonders, too, what is it that I am to pursue to be happy? Some say that if they only had more money they would be happy. Others would say that happiness is being married and having children. Still others like being single and carefree. Yet most of us find that once we achieve the situation in life that we thought would make us happy, we just don't feel as happy as we thought we would.

According to Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness, that has a lot to do with our mind's inability to accurately recall our feelings of happiness in the past or predict them in the future. If I'm reading Gilbert correctly (I confess I'm not a psychologist), many studies of human behavior suggest that our mind tends to "cook the facts" when it comes to remembering our past feelings or predicting future feelings.

Gilbert's solution to this dilemma is "surrogators." A surrogator is someone who is currently experiencing what we hope to be or experience in the future. We then use a surrogator's report of how he or she feels to predict how we will feel in the future. According to studies Gilbert quotes, those who have done this have predicted their future feelings of happiness with much greater accuracy.

Gilbert's data on how our mind works is intriguing, but I do find myself disagreeing with the conclusions that Gilbert draws from the findings. For example, Gilbert writes, "The brain and the eye have developed a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees and not to believe what the eye denies. So if we are to believe something, then it must be supported by—or at least not blatantly contradicted by—the facts" (Stumbling on Happiness, p. 163). Does this mean that only what we see can make us happy? The apostle Paul suggests differently: "We live by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7).

On the other hand, what Gilbert has discovered about the human mind makes some sense. In a fallen world with a mind that has been infected by sin, it's not surprising that our once perfect minds are not reliable. Just being truthful without embellishing or "cooking" things we've done is difficult for us. It's a human failing.