3 The Case of Religious Belief

Chapter 3 The Case of Religious Belief

It is fatally easy to believe that something that has been named is something that is understood. Everyone thinks they know what ‘religion’ is. Perhaps this is why it remains such a viable category in public discourse and everyday life. But cultural familiarity is not the same as intellectual stability. We are all familiar with the term ‘love’, but people profess and embody this notion in vastly different ways from one culture to another, across age groups and even within the same home.

What is Religion?

Religion, we are often told, is a universal human phenomenon. This may be true, but the popular conceptualisation of ‘religion’ is decidedly western, shaped by the social and intellectual history of modern western Europe and North America. Allegedly ‘global’ definitions of religion are generally based on the views of present-day WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) populations, overlooking the views of as much as eighty-eight per cent of humanity today, and reflecting a disturbing disregard for how the concept was understood in the past.

So, what do we study when we study religion? After all, a psychologist of religion or a sociologist of religion needs to know what they are meant to be investigating. Yet to speak of ‘religion’ is to enter a definitional cloud of unknowing, a miasma of personal opinions, cultural prejudices and questionable inherited intellectual habits which shroud the landscape like a dense fog. For example, while Judaism can be described as a ‘religion’, and Jews understood as adherents of this religion, there is growing scholarly evidence that Jews are better understood as a ‘people group’ with ancestral practices and beliefs that have become normative over time.

Take Ancient Rome. The Latin word religio did not originally refer to a set of beliefs, but rather to a social and cultural obligation to perform certain actions, such as worshipping the gods in certain ways, or perform certain cultural obligations which were deemed ‘venerable’ or ‘appropriate’, yet which many westerners today would not regard as ‘religious’ in any sense. Religio in its classic Roman form focused on practices, rather than beliefs.

The problem here is ‘essentialisation’ – the belief that ‘religion’ is a real thing which has certain fixed features that allow generalisations, both subtle and crass, to be made across the religious world. Happily, a good knowledge of history and the scientific study of religion can help correct this influential misjudgement. Religion is not a ‘natural kind’ – a grouping or categorisation that reflects the structure of the natural world, rather than the interests and actions of human beings. The modern western category of ‘religion’ is clearly inadequate.

In an influential study of how we should define religion and distinguish it from its alternatives, the social psychologist Jonathan Jong argues that the empirical evidence suggests there are good reasons for ‘abandoning the deep-seated and intuitive assumption that religion is a natural kind, a category with an identifiable essence.’ ‘Religion’ is not a ‘thing’ that can be observed and precisely defined. Where many people hold that individual specific religions (such as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism) are examples of this ‘thing’, ‘religion’ as a category must be seen as fluid and historically contingent. For this reason, the anthropologist Talal Asad argues that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.’

Asad’s point about the social location of definitions of religion is reinforced by the magisterial historical analysis of the notions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ developed by the Australian intellectual historian Peter Harrison, who points out that modern western discussions of the notions of ‘religion’ and ‘the religions’ represent an objectification or reification of what was once understood as an interior disposition. To adopt an ‘essentialist’ understanding of religion is to assume that it is defined by some intrinsic qualities. Yet, as Jong points out, those qualities can also be found beyond the accepted understanding of ‘religion’.

The term ‘religion’ was originally framed in terms of the possession or enactment of certain interior qualities, such as piety or devotion; yet the rationalising tendencies of the early modern period led to it being seen as referring to adherence to bodies of doctrine or knowledge. This helps us understand one core feature of the New Atheism – its ‘Americanized understanding of religion as an iteration of knowledge’. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offer a highly cognitive view of religion, defining it virtually exclusively in terms of ‘belief in God’. Yet a more reliable description of religion would acknowledge its multiple aspects, which include knowledge, beliefs, experience, ritual practices and patterns of social aﬃliation and personal identity.

While philosophers in the past may have thought of faith in terms of propositional belief, such as ‘I believe that there is a God’, in recent years there has been a significant shift towards thinking of faith in terms of allegiance, trust or hope – notions that are more easily aligned with Christian notions of faith as a trusting relationship with affective and cognitive dimensions. New Atheism, however, has gone in a different direction. It has degraded and rationalised ‘faith’, treating it as a set of beliefs, as if it is simply a form of data.

Perhaps the inevitable outcome of this process of rationalisation is Yuval Noah Harari’s vision of the religion of the future, already emerging within Silicon Valley – a ‘Data Religion’ whose algorithms will decide how we will be governed. Religion, once seen as a form of humility in which we live our lives and align ourselves with something that is greater than ourselves, has been redefined by modernist thinkers simply in terms of a quest for a controlling set of beliefs.

Some have argued that we need a new definition of religion to find our way out of this mess. I’m sceptical about this. Too many recent attempts to redefine religion are constructed in the pursuit of unacknowledged agendas and vested interests. My solution is inadequate (but less so than its alternatives) – to recognise that what we have come to mean by ‘religion’ is more complex than any single definition can encapsulate.

I recall a meeting in London that I attended, discussing the future of religious communities in a changing culture. One speaker argued for the public repudiation of all forms of religion, based on the behaviour of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jews and Hindus present in the audience vigorously objected to the vilification of their religious traditions based on the speaker’s views about a different religious group. ‘You’re religious,’ the speaker responded to these objections. ‘You’re all the same.’ We see here both a somewhat uncritical formulation of the Enlightenment’s belief that individual religions are representative of a universal concept of ‘religion’, along with the negative reaction that such crude stereotyping rightly provokes.

How did this influential misrepresentation achieve such cultural dominance? Why do so many still buy into this outdated idea that religion is a ‘thing’?

How ‘Religion’ became a False Universal

It is well known that the concept of ‘religion’ varies from one historical and cultural context to another. Some historical examples highlight the problems in assuming that the term ‘religion’ is an unproblematically valid universal category. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican inscriptions do not contain any words that can plausibly be translated as ‘religion’. Yet following the Spanish colonisation of this region, the Spanish term religión seems to have been used by early modern ethnographers working in seventeenth-century Mesoamerica as a self-evidently appropriate term to refer to a variety of indigenous cultural practices, which were then assimilated into this western cultural phenomenon. A European template was thus imposed on indigenous Mesoamerican ways of thinking.

A century later, Britain established a commercial base in India, which eventually led to the colonisation of the region. Once more, western observers, noting certain Indian cultural beliefs and practices that did not easily fit into existing categories (such as ‘philosophy’), designated these as forms of ‘religion’, and created the English term ‘Hinduism’ to enfold the variegated phenomena they witnessed in the Indian religious landscape.

Many have argued that the very idea of Hinduism was a construct of the colonial enterprise, ‘fabricated in the service of foreign interests, whether by European Orientalists or the British colonial regime.’ Others have argued that colonialism gave a new significance to indigenous Indian religions as a means of preserving Indian cultural identity during the colonial period, thus encouraging the idea that Hinduism was a multi-dimensional unitary faith. To this day, Hindu scholars regularly (and rightly) complain that a group of Asian cultural beliefs and practices are still being assimilated to European categories.

The same pattern can be seen in the western construction of ‘Confucianism’ as a religion, when it is better seen as a philosophy of life than as a religion. Yet again, an indigenous cultural movement was forced into the preconceived ethnocentric framework of a colonial power, which misrepresents its historical particularities (above all, its own understanding and experience of the nature and social function of ‘religion’) as normative and universal. The universal concept of ‘religion’ is ultimately an outdated remnant of a colonial past, and needs to be recalibrated and rehabilitated, if not set aside as unhelpful and unreliable.

Defining Religion: The Problem of Platonism

It is often assumed that the recognition of a supernatural realm or transcendent dimension to life (such as belief in God) is a distinct characteristic of religion, and that the term ‘religious’ can be applied to anyone holding such a view. In conversation with Gary Wolf (the journalist who introduced the phrase ‘New Atheism’ in 2006), Richard Dawkins identified the key issue with religious believers as ‘supernaturalism’ – belief in something that lies beyond the empirical world.

Yet Dawkins’ use of the word ‘supernatural’ is puzzling. People have believed in gods since the dawn of time, and developed a vocabulary adapted to this belief. Yet the Latin term supernaturalis only came into use in the thirteenth century to designate a ‘mental geography’ in which events or entities could be assigned to two possible domains – the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’.

Yet this belief is held, whether it is implicitly assumed or explicitly articulated, in the writings of many scientists and mathematicians who are struck by the remarkable ability of mathematics to represent the contours of reality. In his important work Our Mathematical Universe, the physicist Max Tegmark sets out his ‘mathematical universe hypothesis’: our universe is not simply described or represented by mathematics; it is mathematics. To many, especially those who believe that human beings construct our realities, it seems deeply counterintuitive to suggest that coherent mathematical structures exist beyond the human mind. Some rationalists have even used the argument that this seems religious, presumably assuming such an association might discredit the notion (it hasn’t).

The mathematician and theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, does not self-define as ‘religious’; he nevertheless aﬃrms the existence of a transcendent realm on the basis of his interpretation of the role of mathematics in the successes of the natural sciences. Penrose argues that we need to expand our concept of ‘real existence’, refusing to limit this to physical objects by including mathematical structures which seem to exist before they are discovered. While Penrose is open to these mysteries being explained (in ways that we presently do not know), his view that there exists a ‘real’ mathematical world that we discover rather than invent is a helpful reminder that such beliefs about a transcendent world exist beyond the world of ‘religion’, and that there are non-religious considerations that underlie their acceptance.

The same basic idea lies behind Plato’s celebrated ‘theory of forms’, which emerged during the classical period of Greek philosophy. (Penrose’s position is sometimes described as ‘Mathematical Platonism.’) Yet although Plato proposed a world that lies beyond that of everyday experience, this was not seen as ‘religious’ in the terms of the classical age. The gradual transformation of classical Greek religion from reflective social practice into a form of belief system dates from a later stage of classical antiquity. Plato’s approach was seen as philosophical at that time, offering a reliable way of seeing reality (which Plato expresses using the Greek term theōria) which leads into an appropriate way of living.

It is diﬃcult to see how Penrose’s ‘Platonic world’ can be assigned to any category other than something that lies beyond nature, particularly given the distinction he draws between this ‘Platonic’ world and the ‘mental world’ of reflective human beings. Dawkins, as we saw earlier, identified supernaturalism as a core concern in his controversy with religious people. So, are Platonists religious? Forms of mathematical Platonism – such as that of Penrose – certainly have their critics, particularly social constructivists, but there is no doubting either the quality of the reasoning that leads them to their conclusions, or the intellectual resilience of this position. Yet I have not met a mathematical Platonist who equates their belief in a Platonic world with being ‘religious’. There are no grounds for considering this to be a religious position, other than the lingering presence of discredited notions of ‘religion’ within less informed sections of western culture. Mathematical Platonism is a philosophical doctrine about a real world that is held to exist beyond the human mind.

There are, however, some who have found their way from a transcendent world of Platonic ideals to a specifically religious belief. The American philosopher Paul Elmer More, for example, was initially fascinated by the ideal world of beautiful Platonic forms, the silent and impersonal world of the purely ideal. However, More began to experience a sense of unutterable bleakness and loneliness in this still and faceless realm. ‘To be satisfied I must see face to face.’ More’s yearning to find a personal reality was finally met through the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which allowed the ‘face of God’ to be seen.

More’s comments chime in with Salman Rushdie’s declaration that it is diﬃcult to describe or define human beings ‘in terms that exclude their spiritual needs’. More’s personal narrative also helps us see how individuals are often drawn to religious faith for quite different reasons, reflecting the diversity of human needs and aspirations. While some flatten the spiritual needs of humanity, the evidence suggests a more complex set of factors that have the potential to draw individuals to faith. More’s desire to see ‘face to face’ in a world of abstractions may not be representative; it is, however, illustrative of the many factors that incline people to explore religious faith.

Religious Belief: A Preliminary Exploration

Our familiarity with the word ‘religion’ has created a false sense of security in its capacity and legitimacy to represent the many complex human attempts to make sense of our world. The term cannot bear the weight that has been placed upon it in contemporary discussions about the place of religion in our world, and we have yet to find a way of dealing with this problem.

Suggesting that there is no defensible intellectual category of religion does not in any way disparage or devalue individual religions – whether we use that specific term or not – such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. If anything, it allows us to focus on them as individual movements with their own distinct identities and histories, instead of feeling we have to force them into the predetermined (and problematic) category of ‘religion’, with the inevitable simplifications, associations, accommodations and distortions that this process of forced assimilation entails. Instead of offering anodyne and contrived generalities about religion, we can focus on appreciating and understanding specific faith systems, and on their own terms.

This consideration is central to the approach to religion that I shall adopt in this book. I will not offer potentially misleading religious generalisations, but will primarily reflect on Christianity, which I know and understand well. This focus on the world’s largest religion as a worked example enables me to deal with most of the issues and concerns relating to religious belief by using the faith I have embraced, which is likely to be familiar, at least to some extent, to many of my readers.

This worked example allows me to look at many of the issues and concerns about religious faith in general, and I invite those who are members of other faith communities, or have knowledge of these, to supplement my own reflections with theirs. Let me make it clear that I have no institutional authority or representative status in this matter. I am simply an informed and reflective Christian who is well placed to explore the question of belief, and hopes to help others do the same. With this point in mind, we turn to consider the question of what it means when I say ‘I believe …’ from a religious perspective. And how might this differ from the use of this phrase in an everyday context?

One of the more frustrating aspects of discussing issues of belief, whether in friendly and productive discussions with academic colleagues or in sometimes fraught public debates with atheists, is that fundamental words like ‘faith’ or ‘God’ are conceptualised in completely different ways by both parties. I used to inhabit an atheist mindset and know its contours, its appeal. But I often wonder whether some of my atheist colleagues comprehend religious belief’s purpose, often presenting their misapprehensions as if they are self-evidently true, lying beyond question or challenge. (I am sure the same problem emerges with atheism, which is much more diverse than many beyond this community realise.)

The philosopher Thomas Nagel once asked: what is it like to be a bat? The point he was making remains important. If you aren’t a bat, you can’t tell what it’s like to be a bat, as this demands a comprehension of the bat’s first-person subjective experience. We may understand something about bats (such as the way they locate objects through echolocation), but that is an external third-person perspective, which doesn’t clarify anything about what it feels like to be a bat. Thomas Metzinger made a similar point, emphasising the divergence of two completely different ways of thinking or experiencing: an ‘inner’ account (a ‘first-person perspective’) and an ‘outside’ account (a ‘third-person perspective’).

I often feel that some atheist critiques of religion are based on uninterrogated external assumptions about what religion must be and how religion must feel, lacking any sense of intellectual curiosity or cultural empathy that might motivate them to understand what religious people think and mean by words such as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. Terry Eagleton is one of many cultural critics to make this point: ‘imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’ Philip Pullman is much more alert to the complexities of faith than Dawkins, highlighting the importance of a ‘sense that there is a power bigger than us’ which is ‘deserving of attention and respect’, while at the same time rightly expressing concerns about the entanglements of organised religion with money and political influence.

This tendency to misunderstand or misread religious terms may help us understand why atheist critics of religious faith often focus on purely propositional understandings of belief, or interpret God in terms of imagined teapots orbiting distant planets, or ‘sky fairies’ that do not match up with either the self-understanding or experience of religious believers. As has often been pointed out, ‘what the atheist rejects is seldom what the theologian or believer professes.’ The outcome is inevitable: the dialogue partners misunderstand each other, shooting past each other rather than engaging in a meaningful conversation.

Thinking of religious beliefs in terms of ‘cosmic teapots’ suggests that they are essentially a form of ‘knowledge through description’, along the same lines as scientific statements, making no personal claims on the person who holds these views. This view of religion as a misguided and outdated form of science, set out originally in James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), misses the point completely.

As Wittgenstein reminds us, we need to listen to how people use key words, and appreciate that they may understand them in ways that differ from our own intuitive sense of what they ought to mean. In discussing beliefs in public debate, I often find that my opponents present a mangled and muddled account of Christianity, sometimes derived from a somewhat uncritical reading of oracular atheistic writers (Christopher Hitchens seems to be a favourite) – not, I think, because they deliberately misrepresent it for polemical reasons, but because they don’t quite grasp what it is all about in the first place, or assume that it is so obviously deficient that no further investigation is needed.

Most religions don’t have any form of creeds – formal statements of the main points of faith. Judaism, from which Christianity emerged during the first century, has a simple aﬃrmation of faith in God known as the ‘Shema’ – but not a detailed list of specific beliefs. The main forms of Roman and Greek religion at this time do not appear to have felt the need for formal declarations of faith. Yet while Christianity is not typical in its use of public statements of faith, all religious traditions (and, of course, their secular counterparts) rest on certain beliefs, whether these are publicly aﬃrmed or personally appropriated.

The so-called Apostles’ Creed is thought to have emerged gradually within early Christian communities, particularly in Rome, apparently in response to the need for brief personal articulations of faith on the part of people who presented themselves for baptism. The Creeds set out the Christian vision of reality in dull, terse statements, each of which encapsulates an aspect of this greater vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true and made to be meaningful by a community of people, who have passed down in the Creeds their collective witness to what they discovered.

Back in the 1980s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor introduced his idea of ‘articulation’. Every attempt to live a good life or develop a viable moral system depends on a set of background assumptions which need to be identified and put into words. ‘Articulation’ is about the ‘bringing to light of that which is unspoken but presupposed’. Taylor’s point is that we need to put into words the grander vision of reality which shapes the way we think and live, despite the obvious inability of words to do justice or fully express this vision. A similar point is made by William James, who argued that religious doctrines are subsidiary to the way that religious people experienced the universe and felt about their place within it.

The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed; yet paradoxically that very act of expression both diminishes and restricts that vision, precisely because it is a rich imaginative reality that cannot be reduced to words. These statements – such as ‘I believe in God’ – are too easily misunderstood as purely (and uninterestingly) propositional, when they are really descriptions of something that is to be encountered and explored, a map of a new territory to be inhabited, both intellectually and socially.

For Christians, faith is thus not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God, but a luminous vision of a God who brings meaning, coherence and joy. It is about ‘getting’ what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of seeing a oneness at the heart of things, allowing us to put everything together. Faith is about existential commitment. This is what I believe to be right and trustworthy. This is how I see the world.

The New Testament presents Christianity primarily as a trustworthy way of thinking and living; the Creeds subsequently expressed this more formally, focusing on the content of belief, rather than how it is to be lived out, and the difference that this makes. The Creeds are thus not so much a demand to believe as a description of what other Christians have found, an aﬃrmation of its capacity to satisfy and sustain, and an invitation to explore, discover and inhabit this new world. To believe in God is to place trust in God and take up the responsibilities and expectations that come with this relationship.

Thinking of Creeds in this way allows us to see them as expressing frameworks of exploration and discovery. There is a constant and creative interplay between faith understood as a response to a vision of God on the one hand, and as a formally stated belief about God on the other. Rather than presenting us with a set of verbal formulae as ‘givens’, the Creeds point to a rich landscape that we can explore, identifying its landmarks that deserve our attention. They are like guidebooks, telling us what to look out for – and thus countering our natural tendency to limit ourselves to the familiar by pointing out what we have yet to discover.

While it is important to have verbal articulations of faith, these can too easily be misunderstood as defining the essence of faith when they are signposts to its core vision, which cannot be adequately expressed in words. For William James, religion is about ‘felt knowledge’ – an experience that isn’t a thought, but feels as if it is.

If the Christian faith can be compared to a landscape, then its best guides are those who live there, having internalised its contours and incorporated them into their lives. There is a necessary and proper synergy between the statements of the Creeds and the personal experiences of Christians. The Creeds map the landscape of faith; yet individual Christian believers are best placed to explain and unpack its features, and the difference that this makes to their lives. The primary witnesses to the vitality of faith are ordinary Christians, who can connect the landmarks of faith with their personal journeys of discovery and living out their faith, and explain how these credal statements affect the way they live not merely how they think.

Let me gather together these reflections, and show how they help us give a Christian answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to believe in God?’ Is it like believing in an extra moon orbiting the planet Uranus – a factual statement about something just being there? No. For Christians, faith is trusting that there is a viable ‘big picture’ of life, leading into a decision to step inside this worldview, and live it out. The Latin word credo (I believe) has the root meaning ‘to trust or confide in something or someone’. While we now tend to think of belief in terms of a hesitant theoretical judgement, the creeds see it as a confident personal commitment. I cannot prove that this is true, but I know there is something here that I cannot let go of without losing my identity, significance and meaning.

Historically, early Christianity did not see itself as a ‘religion’ (as many now use that word) based on a set of beliefs to which we must assent, but as a way of imagining and living which we can trust, and are invited to enter. Perhaps for this reason, the early Christians were initially known as both ‘believers’ and ‘followers of the way’ – people who thought and acted in a new way.

What is the difference between a ‘religious’ belief and an ‘ordinary’ belief? To begin with, there is an obvious similarity: like ordinary beliefs, religious beliefs lie beyond proof. Yet they are not individual disconnected aﬃrmations; they are elements of a greater scheme of things which we are invited to trust, and make the basis of our way of thinking and living. Earlier, I mentioned the philosopher of religion Keith Yandell’s definition of a religion, which captures this point without falling into the error of assuming that belief in God is integral to the identity of religion. His ‘neutral definition’ of religion needs to be quoted more fully.

A religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions and practices.

Yandell chose this definition with some care, aiming to avoid bias in terms of its outcomes. Where the New Atheism defined religion in terms that were designed to facilitate its ridicule and destructive criticism, Yandell does not presuppose anything about the truth or falsity of religion, nor fall into the error of assuming that a religion necessarily involves belief in a god or gods. His concern is to place religion upon a conceptual map, and try to clarify at least some aspects of its distinct identity and functions.

One aspect of Yandell’s analysis is particularly significant: his clear recognition that a religious ‘conceptual system’ leads to the creation of moral values and the emergence of a manner of living which is not based on some allegedly universal human rationality, but is an appropriate expression or enactment of the internal logic of this religion. We now know enough about the emergence of human rationalities to reject the notion that there is some universal normative pattern of reasoning, outside the specialist realms of logic and mathematics; cultural rationalities emerge historically, and are shaped by their social contexts.

Some believe that you can judge religions objectively – as, for example, in the Enlightenment’s appeal to a universal human rationality, which transcends the limitations of any religious worldview. Yet there is no such neutral standard or standpoint, and we must always judge religions in light of some ultimate truth-commitment that lies beyond external proof. Judging a religion often seems to involve assessing one belief on the basis of another belief. Wittgenstein rightly points out that rationality has a history, and that it takes different forms in different social locations: ‘What men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters. At certain periods, men find reasonable what at other periods they found unreasonable. And vice-versa.’

Although Yandell does not engage Pierre Hadot’s call for the revitalisation of philosophy as a set of practices arising from theoretical discourse, his approach suggests significant points of connection with the theme of ‘finding spiritual nourishment’. Yandell rightly sees that conceptual systems create and inform ways of life – one of the most characteristic aspects of major religions. This insight is aﬃrmed by recent psychological studies of the distinctive role of religion in human life. In general terms, religion engages three deep human needs that seem to be essential for our flourishing.

Religion is unique in that it can inform all three components of existential meaning for individuals and cultures: religion provides a coherent, encompassing narrative that has great explanatory power; it outlines specific values and goals that are to be pursued; and it conveys a sense of transcendence that goes beyond the mundane and the ephemeral.

Religious Belief: Grasping a Vision,

Not Just Accepting Ideas

Yandell’s definition of religion as a ‘conceptual system’ suggests that it is something that is apprehended primarily (if not solely) through rational reflection. For many, this aspect of faith is of decisive importance. G. K. Chesterton, for example, returned to Christianity primarily on account of its capacity to make sense of the world. Yet there is ample evidence that many are primarily drawn to religious belief or commitment for imaginative, emotional, aesthetical or existential reasons – and subsequently discover, appreciate and internalise its rational virtues.

In an important reflection on the nature of belief in God, John Cottingham argued that the core divergence between atheism and theism does not lie primarily in matters of theoretical belief or philosophical argument, but rather in their differing affective responses to reality, and in the adoption of certain models for living. An atheist and a theist live in the same physical world – a ‘world of pain and loss, of vulnerability and danger, and, even in the case where the individual comes through unscathed, of eventual inevitable physical and mental deterioration and, finally, death.’ Yet they each see, understand and experience this world in very different ways, as a result of the different perceptual frameworks they use to interpret it. Although this statement needs to be treated with caution, we could say that these two observers live in different worlds, in that each has a quite distinct vision of the world and their place within it. And this affects how we feel about ourselves and the world.

It makes no difference to me how many moons the planet Saturn has, or whether the scientific consensus about the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years or 13.797 billion years. These don’t affect me. I don’t connect with them. From a religious perspective, God is not an item of information but the basis of a meaningful life, evoking worship and adoration rather than an indifferent mental assent. Faith is affective, not simply cognitive, offering transformation and not merely information.

Religion in general has the capacity to create a new and intensified engagement with the natural world and the fundamental questions of existence. My Oxford colleague Mark Wynn has explored the ways in which religious ideas or frameworks can help stimulate and shape our sensory experience. Wynn channels the Harvard psychologist William James, who noted that an individual’s perception and experience of the world often shifted radically as a result of their religious conversion: ‘It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music.’

This emphasis on a new way of seeing things, or a new quality of apprehending the world, needs further exploration. David Cooper suggests that a religious teacher or tradition offers not so much a set of ideas to be accepted but a ‘vision’ that is to be apprehended and inhabited – a way of beholding our world which, once it has been ‘properly absorbed’, leads to a new attitude towards the world. While Cooper explores this question from a Daoist perspective, the same point is made repeatedly from other religious standpoints.

One of the most important recent discussions of this point is found in Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘social imaginary’, which shifts attention from abstract theories and ideas about reality to the way in which we imagine our world, and locate ourselves within it. The way we imagine the world is prior to what we believe about it, which is ‘not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends’, more easily and naturally expressed using the language of ‘seeing’ than ‘thinking’.

The Oxford philosopher of religion Austin Farrer saw this point as central to understanding why C. S. Lewis’s way of commending Christianity was so effective, particularly in comparison with more abstract rational defences of faith. Lewis, he suggested, was not setting out an evidential case for Christianity, appealing to the human reason. He was rather depicting and projecting its vision of reality, that it might capture the imaginations of his audience. Lewis allows us to ‘think we are listening to an argument’, when we are actually ‘presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction.’

For Farrer, this vision is encountered and experienced as real, significant and imaginatively desirable – and so people are drawn into it, absorbing rather than merely accepting its core themes, and finding that these inform and motivate their existence. We do not simply observe this vision as spectators; we find that we are caught up in it, and participate in its account of reality.

From a religious perspective, this leads to actions that express and enact this core vision of reality – in the case of Christianity, to prayer, adoration and worship, which are seen as authentic and natural ways of celebrating and expressing this ‘religious imaginary’. This once more highlights the need for outsiders to empathetically ‘step inside’ religion, and try to grasp how it changes the way people see and experience the world, and offers a framework for living. We will have more to say about this later, as we turn to engage the role of belief in exploring the great human questions of finding meaning, value, significance in life, and developing ways of living that express and embody them.

Yet we now need to reflect on a question that many will see as essential to any discussion of beliefs, particularly religious beliefs – namely, how can these be evaluated? If a belief is something that cannot be proved to be true, what evidence can be set out in its support? We shall explore these questions further in the next chapter.

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3 The Case of Religious Belief