Introduction
Introduction
Why believe? Surely this idea is a relic from the past, a hangover from a superstitious age that is totally out of place in today’s rational and science-led culture? The dominant social rhetoric of our age now dismisses any form of belief as lying somewhere on a dark spectrum between weird and toxic. While the Age of Belief may linger on in primitive societies, it has been discredited and displaced in the West by the Age of Reason. We don’t need to go beyond the realm of reason and science and, if we do, we end up in the Badlands of superstition and irrationality. Belief is weird, a symptom of mental deficiency, an inadequate education, or a fundamental incapacity to reason properly.
Perhaps more worryingly, belief is toxic. If you believe something that is unevidenced, you will end up believing anything that is unevidenced, falling victim to a kind of ‘blind faith’ which is socially and politically dangerous. Maybe it is faintly amusing that some less evolved human beings believe in a sky fairy. But what if this delusion leads them to fly airplanes into buildings? Surely something needs to be done to eliminate such backward and destructive ways of thinking? Richard Dawkins expressed the deep cultural anxieties of many about belief and faith which crystallised around the turn of the millennium: ‘I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.’
Inevitably, the tone of the discussion of belief shifted as a result of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Many political commentators saw this as the outcome of American foreign policy and military interventionism in the Middle East, which generated a demand for retribution in this region. One analysis suggests that western sanctions against Iraq in the period between the two Gulf Wars caused more deaths than ‘all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.’
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, reframed this event as a demonstration of the dangers of religion. Religion was denounced as the ‘opium of the people’, impairing proper mental functioning and thus inducing extremism and violence. They say that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come; for many, these were the prophets of a new worldview that had been waiting for its moment in the sun.
New Atheism encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric which turned a longstanding academic discussion on the reasonableness of religious belief into a political lightning rod in which conventions of thoughtful debate and personal civility were set to one side. Bumper slogans appeared, unconstrained by any consideration of truth or morality. ‘I think, therefore I am an atheist.’ Or, ‘God doesn’t kill People. People who believe in God kill People.’ The target of these denunciations was no longer simply religious ideas, but religious people. These, it was argued, are deluded and dangerous and therefore should be socially marginalised, excluded from positions of influence. Perhaps it was inevitable that religion, as the writer Marilynne Robinson observed, has ‘dropped out of the cultural conversation’. It seems that religion has been shamed into the margins of our culture, embarrassed out of the public square.
Not everyone greeted this development with equanimity. Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain to Harvard University, was one of many who protested against shaming people for their faith.
While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in God and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.
There now seems to have been a shift in the cultural mood, however, partly in reaction against this unnecessary dehumanisation of religious believers. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from her more dismissive colleagues who suggested that ‘people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected’. Atheism had become, in her view, tribal. ‘We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.’ Looking back on the meteoric rise of the New Atheism, the New Zealand blogger and cultural critic Giovanni Tiso wondered how ‘such a transparently flawed intellectual project’ managed to hold sway ‘for so long among so many?’ For a while, this view seemed to represent the future, only to end up relegated to the long list of discarded pseudo-certainties that didn’t make the final cut. It is an idea whose time is gone.
Yet perhaps a deeper, if less obvious, shift was taking place at the intellectual level – the growing realisation within reflective atheist circles that the great eighteenth-century Age of Reason must now be seen to have failed in its quest to provide meaningful universal truths.
There was also some discomfort arising from how the rhetoric of ideas was being policed and manipulated before our very eyes and with no higher standard of proof. While many remain sceptical of Nietzsche’s view that there are ‘no facts but only interpretations’, there is a suspicion that many of the alleged ‘certainties’ of our age are simply influential opinions which have become benchmarks of cultural acceptability today, but may well be abandoned in the future.
In her scathing assessment of the credulity of western culture in the closing years of the twentieth century, the novelist Doris Lessing denounced the ‘great over-simplifiers’ who imprison us in facile and shallow accounts of the world, ridiculing those who suggest things might be more complicated (and interesting) than they believe. For Lessing, recent developments within western culture represent a series of ‘boilings up of emotion, of wild partisan passion’, that everyone knows will one day be seen as ‘ridiculous and even shameful’ – but which nobody seemed able or willing to challenge at the time.
This book argues for a recalibration of the notion of ‘belief’, and a more nuanced understanding of the positive role this plays in the lives of individuals and communities. I shall explore why certain unevidenced beliefs are much more acceptable than others. As might be expected, this is not a simple question; facing up to its complexity, however, helps us better understand what it means to be human, and the challenges we face inhabiting a world of uncertainties.
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I grew up in Northern Ireland during the 1960s and experienced at first hand a culture characterised by ingrained political, religious and social divisions. My first love was the natural sciences, evoked by a profound respect for the world around me, a longing to understand both how it functioned and what it meant. Perhaps because I was intolerant of uncertainty, I believed that the natural sciences might provide me with indubitable answers to life’s big questions. I went on to study chemistry at Oxford University, specialising in quantum theory, and followed this with a doctorate in the biological sciences.
Yet the natural sciences served another purpose for me as a teenager. To study science was like stepping into another world, governed by rules of evidence and the courteous disagreement that is essential to scientific progress. Here, political and religious tensions could be put to one side; what mattered was the quality of your proofs, furnished by experimentation. A classic example of this eirenic role of the natural sciences can be seen in the role of natural scientists in building bridges across political and religious divisions, which helped heal the cultural wounds caused by England’s Civil War.
I was an atheist back in the late 1960s, with a strong interest in Marxism. Although I took the stubborn austerity of my teenage atheism to be a reliable indicator of its truth, I began to have anxieties about the stridency with which I now began to assert my views. The force of my conviction of the non-existence of God seemed to me to bear an inverse relation to the evidence available. I began to have private doubts, not simply about my atheism, but about any beliefs, in that these seemed to lack rigorous intellectual justification. So, for a time I condemned myself to some form of agnosticism, conceding that nothing could be known.
While reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at eighteen, I came across this remarkable statement that seemed to hint at a more gracious way of making sense of our world: ‘To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.’ Russell helped me realise that it might be possible to hold beliefs without being able to prove them, opening the way for me to create a grander view of life than was possible by relying only on the sciences.
At Oxford, I came to appreciate the intellectual merits of Christianity and have since spent my career reflecting on its core themes, and particularly how science and faith can be brought into a meaningful conversation. Having grown up in the politically and religiously polarised context of Northern Ireland, I came to doubt those with strident views, believing it was possible to have civilised conversations despite divergent beliefs. I forced myself to talk to people with whom I disagreed across disciplinary, religious and ideological frontiers. The aim wasn’t to achieve consensus, but to understand the issues more fully.
A key question for me was how it was possible to maintain my own beliefs with integrity, when I could not prove them. Russell’s comments led me on a journey of discovery, in which I began to appreciate how it was possible to live meaningfully in a world of uncertainties. This is precisely what I hope to explore in this book.
Somewhere along the way ‘belief’ became synonymous with ‘religious belief’, thus unleashing a predictable torrent of anti-religious invective directed against ‘belief’ in general, rather than being attentive to the multiple specific forms that belief takes, and its important and legitimate place within humanity’s attempts to make sense of our world. Belief, as I shall argue in this work, is ordinary, a routine aspect of the business of living and reflecting.
Ambivalence towards religious institutions or ‘organised religion’ has led many people in recent decades to identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ or as ‘religious Nones’. In both cases, these groups tend to avoid labelling themselves as ‘religious’ or affiliating with religious organisations such as churches. However, scepticism about religion need not lead to the rejection of the category of ‘belief’. Many of the twenty-two per cent of Americans who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ turn out to have sophisticated personal belief systems. For example, eighty-eight per cent of this group believe that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world and fifty-five per cent believe that deceased individuals can provide assistance, protection or guidance to the living. The issue is not belief itself, but rather the type of beliefs considered acceptable.
As Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, I have had time to reflect on the scientific study of beliefs, which calls into question the cultural oversimplifications of recent polemics. One of the most fruitful outcomes of recent scientific research in the field of belief is the clear indication that ‘belief’ is a generic category, which includes religious and secular forms. To draw on biological taxonomy, belief is the genus, and religious belief one of its many species. From an empirical point of view, the evidence suggests that it is the act of believing – rather than the substance of what is believed – that is of critical value for human existence. Despite their obvious differences, religious and secular beliefs both play similar psychological roles, and often lead to the same benefits – such as giving structure to life, providing reassurance, reducing anxiety and facilitating social integration. This suggests that ‘any belief system that provides explanations of the world will afford comfort and assurance’.
This book explores the nature of belief and maps out some approaches which I think might be helpful – not necessarily as firm conclusions, but certainly as lines of thought that have the potential to be illuminating. It explores the phenomenon of belief as integral to living. Although I shall explore some religious themes, this book is not a defence of the generic notion of ‘religion’ or of any specific religion, or even of my own beliefs. It is a reflection on what is perhaps the greatest paradox that we face as human beings: that we only seem to be able to prove shallow truths, but not the great truths of meaning, goodness and significance that lie at the heart of our existence which give order and meaning to our lives. Accepting the ambiguities of existence and respecting their complexity may not solve all our problems, but it might at least help us avoid slick and superficial answers to life’s deepest questions, and cope with the plurality of beliefs and values. Our world is strange and hard to make sense of. This does not mean we shouldn’t try to find meaning in our brief time here.