5 What Difference Does Believing Make?
Chapter 5
What Difference Does Believing Make?
The lingering influence of Freud in the twentieth century has until recently discouraged attempts to study the phenomenon of belief empirically, or to try to understand ‘normal’ belief, as opposed to its ‘pathological’ manifestations in various psychiatric disorders.
Many have noted that psychology’s past preoccupation with disorder and dysfunction led it to ignore the ‘normal’, and as a result failed to provide a reliable account of human potential. A focus on what causes ‘abnormal’ belief has led to a neglect of research into the grounds and consequences of non-pathological beliefs.
In his 1954 work Motivation and Personality, Abraham Maslow coined the term ‘positive psychology’ to highlight the contrast between the approach that he proposed and the traditional focus on ‘abnormal psychology’. Martin Seligman and others introduced the discipline of ‘positive psychology’ in 1998, seeing this as a ‘science of human flourishing’ which could counter the dominance of psychopathology in the field.
When viewed as ‘normal’, belief can be seen as significant to human functioning and wellbeing at several levels. We hold certain beliefs to be true and reliable, and see these as providing a basis for us to understand the world and act within it. Beliefs – individually, or more usually in the form of belief systems – provide the ‘mental scaffolding’ that human beings need if they are to appraise the environment, explain new observations and experiences, and construct a shared meaning of the world.
While we regularly speak of human ‘reason’, ‘emotions’, or ‘imagination’, it is important to realise that these three are interconnected within the sense-making apparatus of the human brain. It may be helpful to distinguish them for some purposes; yet in reality they cannot be separated.
A further misunderstanding, which has unfortunately marred research on human believing, is that belief is something distinctly religious or spiritual, and thus is of no interest or relevance to people who are nonreligious or generically secular. Astonishingly, these people have often been assumed to have no beliefs. Happily, such misunderstandings are now largely behind us. It is now widely appreciated that both the human act of believing and its outcomes are of importance for everyday human existence.
While some forms of belief are purely cognitive (for example, the average distance of the moon from the earth is 238,855 miles or 384,400 km), others straddle the boundaries between the realms of the cognitive and affective. Recent innovations in brain research have called into question views of emotion and cognition that treat them as noninteracting and isolated silos. ‘Emotional information not only engages the whole brain during an emotional experience but also tunes what we see of the world and helps determine how and what we learn and remember.’
The philosopher John Cottingham has argued that the specific nature of religious belief allows it to provide a ‘conceptual home’ that can accommodate and interpret human experiences such as awe and thankfulness in which value and significance are already implicit. For Cottingham, religious conversion often appears to involve some degree of emotional upheaval as well as cognitive realignment. Yet similar patterns can be observed in other areas of human existence, such as the dynamics of persuasion in political beliefs, in which emotional and rational considerations both play prominent roles.
‘Belief’ is now seen as relevant for both secular and religious domains, encompassing a rich spectrum of possibilities. Religious belief may be distinct in certain ways, but all human beings are ‘believers’ in some sense of the term. Both atheists and religious people can have ‘crises of meaning’ in their lives. The study of the process of believing is of wide and general interest, especially in understanding human flourishing.
So why do we believe? The anthropologist Agustín Fuentes suggests that it is a bit like asking why human beings have five fingers. We just do. It is the way we are. It is part of the human condition, and it needs to be affirmed and embraced.
We believe because we are human. Just like our large and complex brains, our ability to walk on our hind legs, our nimble fingers and hands, and our ability to make tools, the capacity for belief is part of our distinctive evolutionary history. To be human is to be able to believe.
While nobody is really sure, we can certainly explore how both the act of believing and specific beliefs help to shape and influence the distinctive ways in which individual human beings engage with each other and the wider world. Belief is an ability to make connections that are not directly given in our observations, which open up a grander vision of our world, or to learn to see through the eyes of others, and thus extend the range of possibilities at our disposal.
It is important to make a distinction between believing and beliefs. Believing is a human mental process; beliefs are the outcome of this process, often developing and changing over time, through interaction with others and exploration of our surroundings. Although we can ‘articulate’ – to use Charles Taylor’s helpful term – the intellectual content of our beliefs, they are not restricted to the realm of human reason.
Beliefs actively shape the way in which we see and experience the world, and the way in which we enact our lives. Once a belief is acquired, a process of reflection and adjustment sets in, as the believer explores how this belief shapes their lives, often in dialogue with others who already share this belief, and have acquired a settled understanding of its implications and consequences. Let’s begin to explore the difference that belief makes to our understanding of reality, our modes of experiencing reality, and our way of living.
We start by considering an aspect of believing highlighted in Colin McGinn’s stimulating study of ‘mindsight’ – the ability of certain beliefs to refocus the ‘mind’s eye’, enabling us to see the world in a new way.
Re-Imagining Reality: Seeing Things in a New Way
Hannah Arendt is one of many philosophers to note that thinking has often been thought of in terms of seeing. Recent studies have suggested that the human ability to see things in a new way is important to our evolutionary development, allowing us to solve problems through imagining alternative ways of thinking or acting. The western scientific, religious, philosophical and literary tradition draws extensively on our experience of sight and vision for its metaphors of truth and meaning. As we saw earlier, the modern term ‘theory’ derives from the Greek theōria, which means ‘beholding’.
The writer Henry Miller, reflecting on the development of his own thought as he wandered through exotic landscapes, once remarked that he found his destination was ‘never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’ Miller’s comment points to the fact that we inherit or acquire, often without realising it, certain ways of ‘seeing’ the world which we treat as fixed or self-evidently true. Philosophers of science speak of ‘theory-laden observation’, meaning that what we think is a ‘natural’ understanding of the world is often informed and to some extent predetermined by an assumed or presupposed theory. Scientific advance often proceeds by demolishing these assumptions, and replacing them with something more reliable. The first step in theoretical development is to identify our inherited or assumed theories, and subject them to critical examination.
Ideological enforcement, however, proceeds by imposing a ‘sound’ or ‘rational’ map that invalidates others, and allows us to see only what the ideologues want us to see, normalising what would once have been seen as strange and perplexing. Theories can too easily prevent us from seeing things fully, by declaring that only the deluded and irrational ‘see’ certain things, which wiser and more theoretically informed individuals know cannot exist, and thus discount any suggestion that they should be taken seriously. This crass intellectual condescension is perhaps an inevitable outcome of modernity’s highly restrictive account of human rationality. We are only allowed to see what our theoretical precommitments permit – what our theoretical maps tell us.
The economist E. F. Schumacher highlighted this in his final work, reflecting on how his education constricted his grasp and appreciation of reality. ‘All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance for the conduct of my life.’ His moment of liberation arrived when he realised the solution to this impoverishment. ‘I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’
Theories ought to be neutral; all too often they are not. Social conformity often influences us to use intellectual maps that were designed to control us, to limit us, to subjugate us – to persuade us that there is nothing more to reality or life than they allow. Yet other maps are available. One of the most important decisions we can make in life is which map we use to interpret the landscape, and guide us as we journey.
The map we use shapes our interpretation and evaluation of many aspects of our physical and social worlds. For example, consider religion. As Bernard Williams points out, from the standpoint of humanism, understood as ‘a secularist and anti-religious movement’, religion is a ‘terrible thing’. Those involved in the scientific study of religion, however, see it as an integral aspect of human identity and nature, that its study illuminates the complexity of human nature. And those who are religious see it as vitally important to their identity, wellbeing and self-understanding. So which map do we use?
Yet there is an obvious question here: do we really need to depend on a single map, becoming slaves to its limitations and hidden agendas? Earlier, we noted the work of the British public philosopher Mary Midgley, a trenchant critic of theory-driven reductionism. For Midgley, the solution to such cartographical privileging was to reject a single totalising map, and instead use a series of maps, each adapted to its specific domain of inquiry. No single map can show everything; to rely on a single map is thus to limit oneself to what it is intended to disclose.
By using a series of different maps, each grounded in a different intellectual discipline, Midgley argues that we can gain a deeper understanding of ‘what the outside world is actually telling us’. We need to avoid an imperialist map, which tries to colonise other disciplines, and instead find a way of bringing together the insights offered by multiple maps.
Science: The Importance of Paradigm Shifts
The philosophy of science highlights the importance of informing beliefs in determining how the natural world is seen and understood. Yet observation is not a neutral process, but is shaped by a set of beliefs, whether explicit or implicit, about what is being observed.
Most societies develop classifications of the natural world – such as birds, animals and fish – which are treated as universal, but are clearly culturally specific. European naturalists found their biological categorisations could not cope with the discovery of the platypus in Australia during the 1790s, which suggested that the category of mammals had to be expanded to allow that some might lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young. It was easier for leading British scientists of this period – such as the Scottish anatomist and ethnologist Robert Knox – to believe that the platypus was a ‘freak imposture’ created by some unscrupulous taxidermist than that the biological maps of their day might require revision.
Belief change arises when individuals find that their existing understandings are called into question – for example, through a reconsideration of their evidential basis, or increasing unease at their moral or existential implications. An inherited, imposed or apparently ‘natural’ belief is displaced by another, followed by a process of imaginative exploration of this new way of seeing things. In what follows, we shall look at some scientific, religious and philosophical examples of this process, and reflect on how they help us understand the role of beliefs.
In 1714 John Flamsteed, the British Astronomer Royal, observed a faint star in the constellation of Taurus, only just visible to the naked eye, which he catalogued as ‘34 Tauri’. In March 1781, however, the British astronomer William Herschel observed the same object through a telescope, and realised it was not a star; it was a planet, now known as Uranus. Herschel realised it was a planet both on account of its faint disk, and its motion against the fixed stars in the short interval between his two observations. Neither its disk nor its slow motion could be discerned by the unaided human eye. Herschel was able to observe both because his more advanced telescope provided increased resolution of the night sky.
We see here the classic function of a good theory – to act as a lens which enables us to see things in a new way. What was once seen as a star was now seen as a planet – a new addition to the solar system, which had hitherto been assumed to end with Saturn as the outermost planet. The historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn introduced the influential idea of a ‘paradigm shift’ to describe such radical re-imaginings of the natural world.
Kuhn’s studies of the history of science suggested that there were two different types of scientific development. The first was gradual or incremental developments within the framework of what he described as ‘normal science;’ the second was the radical changes brought about by ‘scientific revolutions’, in which an accumulation of gradual changes bring about a tipping point – a changed way of thinking that Kuhn described as a ‘paradigm shift’ – such as Copernicus’ theory of the solar system.
Before 1500, the scientific consensus held that the sun, moon and planets rotated around a fixed earth. Yet the more accurate observations of the sixteenth century suggested that this way of looking at things needed revision. The older geocentric model simply could not cope with the weight of this new information; a new model was clearly needed. Kuhn’s point was that scientific progress cannot be thought of as a purely linear process of accumulating facts and observations. At times, these force radical shifts in the way in which we imagine reality, inaugurating a new phase of scientific understanding.
For Kuhn, a paradigm shift involves seeing the world through a new theoretical lens and appreciating the difference this makes to what we think we are seeing. A new theory allows us to imagine our world in a different way. Before Copernicus’ theory, ‘the sun and moon were planets, the earth was not. After it, the earth was a planet, like Mars and Jupiter; the sun was a star; and the moon was a new sort of body, a satellite.’ Kuhn’s point is that the phenomena were unchanged; they were, however, seen in a new way. What was physically seen did not change; the change took place within the mind of the observer, who interpreted what was seen in the light of this theory. A pre-Copernican observer might ‘see’ the sun rise and set; a post-Copernican would, however, ‘see’ the earth turning on its axis, leading to the apparent motion of the sun across the heavens.
Religion: The Role of Conversion
Many consider religious conversions to be one the most striking examples of how a new set of beliefs changes the way people see themselves and their world, often reflecting a growing disillusionment or dissatisfaction with an existing way of thinking that is found to be inadequate and unsatisfying. Consider the case of Paul Kalanithi (1977–2015), a promising Stanford neurosurgeon who died of metastatic lung cancer at the age of thirty-seven, before he was able to practice as a fully qualified surgeon. His bestseller When Breath Becomes Air, written during his advanced illness and published posthumously, tells how he became a neurosurgeon because he wanted to learn about ‘what really matters in life’ – only to discover that science failed to engage, and could not engage, the deep and urgent existential questions that mattered to him, and which became increasingly important as his illness progressed.
Science, Kalanithi concluded, might ‘provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so must be set against its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life.’ This is no criticism of science; it is rather a penetrating diagnosis of what humans need, which lay behind Kalanithi’s reappraisal of the importance of literature (especially Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot) in reflecting on meaning, and Christianity in providing it. His rediscovery of Christianity reflected his realisation of its capacity to engage these ‘ultimate questions’ in a time of crisis and need.
Kalanithi’s moving narrative of reflection on how we cope with trauma and uncertainty also illuminates an issue that is of recurring importance to thinking about belief. How can we live on the basis of beliefs, when we crave certainties? Kalanithi found himself drawn to seven words of Samuel Beckett: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ We are caught in the insoluble enigma of the human situation. We can’t reason our way to infallible truths that are existentially meaningful – but we can’t live fully and authentically without such beliefs. Intellectually, we feel we can’t go on; existentially, we know we have to go on.
Kalanithi found that his reaffirmation of a once-rejected Christianity gave him a new lens through which he could see his own situation. The Harvard psychologist William James, who recorded many personal accounts of religious transformation, noted how these often spoke of the world being experienced and encountered in a new way: ‘everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world.’ This is about more than a change of opinion about things; it is about the divine transformation of the perceiver – and hence of the appearance of the sensory world, and its practical inhabitation. The whole way of experiencing the world is transformed, affecting the observer’s reason, imagination, emotions and actions.
In the case of Christianity, stepping into its ‘big picture’ radically alters our ways of thinking and imagining reality. The Greek word metanoia, used in the New Testament to refer to this re-imagination of reality, is often translated as ‘repentance’. Yet it fundamentally means a rational and imaginative transformation in which we see things afresh in a new light, experience them in a new way, and reappraise them accordingly. ‘Metanoia calls for a fundamental change in human reality through a holistic “change of mind” … a reshaping or “re-forming” of mental structures which is at the same time a new “form” or ”shape” of a human life.’
The New Testament uses a wide range of images relating to the human capacity to see to describe this change: people’s eyes are healed, that they might see properly; a veil is removed to enable a fuller vision of God and the world. Developing this point, Augustine of Hippo wrote of ‘healing the eyes of the heart in order that God may be seen.’
In some important way metanoia designates what Kuhn designates as a ‘paradigm shift’ – a new way of thinking, beholding and experiencing reality which is seen to offer a more satisfactory account of reality than its predecessors. Religious conversion often involves the setting aside of existing understandings of reality, displacing them with a new vision, and relocating the individual within this new imaginative framework which demands new habits of thought and theological visualisation. Perhaps these are best expressed poetically rather than analytically.
In her analysis of the theological poetry of George Herbert, Sophie Read points out that Herbert understands metanoia as ‘a fundamental cognitive reorientation’ that is needed if we are to see and inhabit the world in a Christian manner. Metanoia thus denotes the ‘reconceptualization on an intellectual as well as an emotional plane of an individual’s relationship with God.’ A ‘natural’ beholding of the world is inadequate to discern its spiritual aspects and significance; a new ‘mindsight’ is needed, adapted towards this end.
This process of visual or imaginative recalibration is explored in ‘The Elixir’, one of Herbert’s best-known poems, which envisages metanoia as God’s tutoring (or transforming) of natural human vision to enable the perception of the divine presence and activity within the natural order.
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
To do it as for Thee.
Herbert’s concern was that everyday human modes of engaging the world are trapped in a naturalistic mindset, which needs to be disrupted or reset to allow an alternative way of beholding and inhabiting this world. Conversion is about stepping into this new way of seeing reality, adopting a transforming paradigm through which things can be seen and interpreted afresh.
Moral Philosophy: Iris Murdoch on Attentiveness
The British moral philosopher Iris Murdoch held that any attempt to live properly and meaningfully within the world depended on the ‘just and loving vision’ of that world, and the people within it. Yet this vision is not passively received, but actively created. We do not simply look at our world; rather, we try to develop attentive and disciplined ways of intentionally seeing it, which lead us to redescribe and recategorise what we think we see, in order that we might see things as they really are.
Murdoch is acutely aware of the importance of responding properly to people in their different situations. She illustrates the process she has in mind through her example of a mother and her daughter-in-law. Although this analogy is rooted in the social realities of a bygone age, the point that Murdoch wants to make remains clear and significant.
A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement… However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.’
Murdoch’s point is that M realises that her initial attitude towards D (she believes her son ‘married beneath him’) is the outcome of her own prejudices, which skews her perceptions. She determines to reappraise D.
Murdoch argues that when M is ‘just and loving’ – in other words, when she sees justly and lovingly – ‘she sees D as she really is.’ As a result, ‘D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous.’ The same empirical reality is observed, yet is interpreted – is seen – in a new way, thus leading to a transformed perception of D’s value. Murdoch helps us grasp how self-criticism and self-exploration allows us to confront our initial prejudices, thus altering our perception of a person or situation.
These three examples from the worlds of science, religion and philosophy help us appreciate how beliefs shape the way we understand, envision and experience reality. Given the importance of the world of human subjectivity for many people and the growing interest in ‘emotional intelligence’, we need to reflect on how beliefs interact with feeling.
Beliefs and Feelings:
Connecting-up with Experience
The relation of belief and emotions has long been a subject of discussion, recently given added depth through a growing scientific interest in the relation between human emotion and thought. For our purposes, the important point is to affirm the interconnection of beliefs and feelings. T. S. Eliot put his finger on the critical role of great poets in helping us to discover ‘what it feels like to hold certain beliefs.’ Poetry has the ability to allow us to access, perhaps even to intensify, our most profound emotions, Eliot argues, making us ‘from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate.’ Wordsworth earlier made this point in a much-quoted observation: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ At times, poetry helps us to articulate certain ideas or feelings; at others, it creates them, offering us a new way of seeing and experiencing the world and our personal existence.
These themes are echoed in the rise of existentialism after the Second World War, responding to a perceived neglect of the inner world and a growing anxiety about humanity’s meaninglessness. The rise of depersonalizing ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism in the 1930s and the brutality of the Second World War created a new passion for rediscovering and reaffirming the significance of the individual. During this ‘existentialist moment’, the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre led a wave of reaction against an excessive objectification of human beings. Sartre’s protest highlights the importance of human subjectivity in the quest for meaning and truth – and the intimate connection between our beliefs and our deepest desires. We are free to choose what we consider humanity ought to be, and create ourselves as we believe we really are.
Although this interaction is often presented as religious in nature, it seems clear that the importance of experience is appreciated in both spiritual and secular contexts. In October 1916, Bertrand Russell wrote to one of his lovers, the actress Constance Malleson, disclosing an inexplicable and seemingly meaningless sense of longing which haunted him.
The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain, a curious, wild pain, a searching for something beyond what the world contains. Something transfigured and infinite. The beatific vision – God, I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life. It the actual spring of life within me.
Russell’s intellectual motivation to discover the grounds of a powerful and indefinable experience of ‘curious, wild pain’ – something that seemed to point beyond ‘what the world contains’ – has parallels throughout human history. We might think of Isaac Newton’s reflection, dating from late in his life, in which he imagined himself standing on the threshold of something that was signposted by this world, yet which tantalisingly lay beyond his reach:
I seem to have been only like a small boy playing on the sea-shore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
William Wordsworth expressed this idea in the phrase ‘spots of time’ – rare yet precious moments of profound feeling and imaginative strength, in which individuals sense that they have grasped something of ultimate significance within or beyond themselves. I can still recall vividly such an experience when, as an Oxford scientific researcher during the 1970s, I was travelling in the depths of a moonless night towards the Iranian city of Kermān on a dilapidated coach. Its sputtering engine finally failed, leaving the passengers to stroll around the ruins of an abandoned caravanserai while the coach driver tinkered with its fuel pump.
I saw the stars that night as I had never seen them before – a solemn and beautiful brilliance amid a dark and silent desert landscape. I experienced a ‘rapturous amazement’ (to borrow a phrase from Albert Einstein), an inexpressible sense of awe, the memory of which still sends shivers down my spine. I felt very small and insignificant that night in comparison with the untamed immensity of the heavens, experiencing a strange intimation of transcendence in the face of the overwhelming vastness of the natural world that I, as a scientist, had once hoped to master.
Richard Dawkins also recognises the importance of such experiences. ‘The great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it’s exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe – almost worship – this flooding of the chest with epiphanic wonder, that modern science can provide.’ Yet this experience is neither ‘religious’ nor ‘scientific’; it is simply an experience, until and unless it is connected with a conceptual framework, a network of beliefs that illuminates its nature and endows it with meaning. Psychological accounts of the origins of an experience of awe can easily be given. These, however, are simply explanations of how an experience of awe arises within the human consciousness; it does not explain how meaning might arise from it, or what that meaning might be.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James drew extensively on personal testimonies to the perceived significance of religious experiences, which he framed in terms of intense and brief ‘privileged moments’ that carry an ‘enormous sense of inner authority and illumination’, transfiguring the understanding of those who experience them, often taking the form of disclosures of ‘new depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.’
For James, it seemed as if there is ‘in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.’ Truth is something that needs to be felt, that needs to resonate with our experience of life.
Examples of these experiences would include the exquisite sense of longing for something undefined and apparently unattainable, often referred to using the German term Sehnsucht, which Matthew Arnold glossed as a ‘wistful, soft, tearful longing’. In his Prelude, Wordsworth similarly pointed to a ‘dim and undetermined sense’ of ‘unknown modes of being.’ These liminal experiences hint at a new world beyond a limiting threshold of human vision. Virginia Woolf once spoke of experiencing privileged ‘moments of being’, which seemed to her to be ‘a token of some real thing behind appearances’ which constantly eluded her attempts to find and possess it.
More recently, the term ‘epiphany’ has come to be used for such moments of disclosure or insight – an ‘overwhelming existentially significant manifestation of value in experience, often sudden and surprising,’ which ‘feels like it “comes from outside”’ and allows us to grasp something new.’ While such epiphanies are not necessarily religious, they are often linked with what is usually described as ‘religious experience’.
These experiences of ‘partial and fleeting realisations’ are seen as life-changing, possessing both weight and significance. They are like ‘bolts of lightning on a dark night that brilliantly illuminate everything in a single, instantaneous flash.’ These ‘epiphanic’ moments of disclosure illuminate what was once dark, obscure or out of focus, bringing a ‘sense of clarification, which seems to allow us to understand things in their true nature’. Something of vast yet unassimilated significance seems to be shown to us in a dazzling moment of illumination – something that we proved unable to discover for ourselves by extended reflection and reason.
What, then, do such experiences mean? Is this deep sense of longing a genuine response to something that lies, dimly glimpsed and partially apprehended, beyond the world of appearances, or is it simply a trick of the mind that points to nothing – a cypher without a key? Might there be a conceptual scheme that can unlock its meaning?
Scientific study of such human experiences is often predetermined by the decision to adopt the principle of the ‘Methodological Exclusion of the Transcendent’, which presupposes a naturalist set of working assumptions, which inevitably focus on the mental mechanisms by which such experiences might arise, assuming that there is no transcendent referent for such experiences. The outcome of this is a premature foreclosure of a potentially important conversation, in which one possible explanation – some transcendent reality – is excluded in advance on methodological grounds. The parallels with J. B. S. Haldane’s naturalist dilemma can hardly be overlooked: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.’
One influential interpretative framework originates within the Christian tradition, which proposes a dialectic between humanity being intended to relate to God, but presently being alienated from God. In consequence, human beings experience a general sense of longing which nothing seems able to satisfy, in that this both originates from God and is designed to lead to God. The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury expresses this interpretation in one of his meditations: ‘Lord, give me what you have made me want. I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired. Perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for.
Other interpretations of this sense of longing are, of course, available. Richard Dawkins suggests a ‘general theory of religion as accidental by-product – a misfiring of something useful’ within our evolutionary history, in which religious experience can be explained reductively by anyone with ‘the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.’ It is a fascinating hypothesis, although lacking evidential substantiation.
Yet Anselm’s reflections show the importance of a specific belief in understanding both the origins and goal of what is otherwise an undirected and inchoate experience. The Christian tradition offers a unified philosophical frame of reference which enables these puzzling experiences to be interpreted, and seen within a broader context. While the Christian ‘big picture’ was developed for reasons other than engaging the world of experience, it proved capable of offering an interpretation of this otherwise puzzling experience, locating it within a ‘landscape of desire’.
Human beings experience a sense of emptiness and restlessness in this life, perhaps reflecting an impaired or impoverished relationship with God – an idea expressed in Augustine of Hippo’s fifth-century prayer: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’ This framework offers an interpretation of the origins and goal of this experience. It originates from God, takes the form of a ‘homing instinct’ for God within us, and is intended to prompt us to find our way back to God.
But what is the status of this line of reasoning? Let’s be quite clear: this does not, and was not intended to, constitute a rational proof for God’s existence. Perhaps C. S. Lewis’s idea of a ‘supposal’ might be helpful here – a provisional assumption, proposed as a possible explanation of puzzling observations or experiences, which requires testing. Suppose there is a God, such as that which Christianity proposes. Does not this fit in well with our experience of reality? And is not this resonance indicative of the truth of the supposal?
The approach is clearly not compelling; it is rather suggestive, hinting that the best way of testing a worldview might not be to assess its individual components, but to step inside the larger vision of reality that it enfolds, and test its quality and depth.
One of the most important functions of a worldview is to inform and give stability to notions of meaning and purpose. In the next section, we shall consider how beliefs undergird these two important themes, which are of considerable importance to personal and social existence.
Meaning: On Finding Significance and Purpose
While some philosophers, such as Susan Wolf, appreciate the importance of the question of meaning, the most significant engagement in recent years with the pervasive human desire to find ‘meaning in life’ has come from psychology, which has sought to establish both what people understand by ‘meaning’ and the difference that this makes to their lives. The psychologists Login George and Crystal Park concluded that whether life is perceived as ‘meaningful’ or not is shaped by ‘the extent to which one’s life is experienced as making sense, as being directed and motivated by valued goals, and as mattering in the world.’
Detailed surveys persistently indicate that human beings consider it to be important to have a perception of coherence in life allowing us to make sense of the world and our own personal existence; a sense of purpose, in which we discern core aims and aspirations for life; and a conviction of significance, in which our lives matter and are seen to have value. A helpful distinction can be drawn between ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning. The former is about making sense of one’s experiences of life, while the latter concerns the feelings of satisfaction, fulfilment and happiness that result from our belief that we are living and acting meaningfully.
Is this human longing for meaning in life a ‘want’ or a ‘need’? Is meaning something that some feel they would like, an optional extra that might add something to their existence? Or is it deeply rooted in our fundamental humanity, without which we cannot flourish – especially in the light of the ‘existential nihilism of the scientific worldview’? While this debate continues, an excellent case can be made that this is something integral and essential to human actualisation.
Beliefs are important in grounding our frameworks of meaning – those complex webs of opinion that let us determine ‘how things are in the world’. I experienced this when I was drawn to Marxism as a teenager. Looking back on that distant and bygone cultural world of the 1960s, I can now see that I was tuning into the three elements of meaning – comprehension, purpose and mattering – proposed by George and Park, without consciously framing my response to Marxism with those specific terms.
Marxism seemed to make sense of the complex and seemingly random flux of history; it gave me a sense of purpose as an agent of change who could end the oppression of the working classes, allowing me to feel I had significance in the grand scheme of history. I experienced both the ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning, taking pleasure in being able to make intellectual sense of the world, and experiencing a sense of peace or fulfilment resulting from this perception of meaning and personal mattering.
How does this work in a religious context? How does the threefold account of meaning set out by George and Park work out in practice? Given the diversity of religious beliefs, I shall explore how a Christian might respond to this, and leave space for others to make their own connections.
1. Comprehension. We want to make sense of our world, grasping the oneness that lies behind the plurality of our experiences and weaves them into a coherent whole. Christianity has a deep belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things in God, who is seen as the focal point of its threads of meaning (a major theme in Dante’s Divine Comedy). The letter to the Colossians, a New Testament writing thought to date from around 60 CE, speaks of all things ‘holding together’, having a fundamental coherence grounded in the Christian faith (Colossians 1.17). No matter how fragmented our world of experience may at times seem, there is a half-glimpsed bigger picture which holds things together.
2. Purpose. A core theme in the outworking of Christianity is the idea of a ‘calling’. This articulates the principle that doing something purposefully for God or for Christ invests the action with a deeper value that transcends – without diminishing – its utilitarian functions and benefits. The poet George Herbert engages this theme in his poem ‘The Elixir’:
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.
3. Significance. Many feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the universe and the depth of cosmic time, which seems to make human beings utterly insignificant. This point is explored by the novelist Marilynne Robinson, in a theologically engaged essay entitled ‘Psalm Eight’. Robinson here explores the deep human feeling of insignificance in the face of the temporal and spatial vastness of the universe by drawing on the opening verses of this psalm:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3–4).
Robinson suggests that the fact that this ‘infinite distance between God and humankind’ is intentionally and graciously bridged by God. In the act of incarnation – the distinctively Christian idea that God enters and inhabits human history in Christ – God ‘visits’ humanity, deeming us to be worthy of such a divine act of humility and compassion.
If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him.
Beliefs shape our understanding of meaning, in a way that bare facts do not. Each worldview will articulate significantly different understandings of the nature and grounds of coherence, purpose and significance. The point is that beliefs can make human existence existentially viable. Yet while some beliefs liberate and ennoble, others enslave and impoverish. Wittgenstein’s dark broodings on the risk of being ‘held captive by a picture’ express a genuine concern, which I shall consider in the next chapter.
Yet we need to move on to consider a further question: how can we understand how beliefs are best enacted in life? What is the most authentic or appropriate expression of certain beliefs? If beliefs make possible certain ways of life, where can we find models of such lives? What exemplars of embodied belief can be identified, that help us grasp both the impact of beliefs on human existence, and the forms of life that they inform and enable?
Saints and Sages: Exemplars and a Meaningful Life
In her important reflections on the growing importance of moral exemplars in a postmodern context, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod highlighted the importance of having someone we can observe or imagine who lives up to and lives out an ethical ideal, rather than simply being presented with an abstract theory that is detached from real life. ‘To lead a moral life one does not need a theory about how one should live, but a flesh and blood existent.’
Beliefs are not limited to the realm of the mind, but are capable of being lived out through the realities of a life which they both inform and enrich. An exemplar is someone who has internalised a way of thinking so that it becomes their way of living. Instead of telling us to be good, they show us what a good life can and should look like. We need a definition of goodness that is not framed in the language of ideas, but in terms of the character, and an exemplar shows us what goodness is like, rather than telling us how it is to be understood.
There is an important connection here with Pierre Hadot’s account of some schools of ancient philosophy. While there is a degree of overstatement in Hadot’s analysis, he has clearly identified an aspect of earlier philosophical practice which has not found its proper counterpart in post-Enlightenment thought – the development of certain personal disciplines which help people assimilate and enact their vision of a good life. These transformed modes of seeing and being in the world were exemplified and lived out in the figure of the sage. In the ancient world, philosophy was eminently concerned with self-criticism and self-improvement. Plutarch spoke of ‘weaving’ or ‘painting’ our lives; Plotinus suggested we see ourselves as a sculptor, chipping away at a block of marble to allow the statue within to be seen. Philosophy is about seeing our potential, and guiding us as we try to achieve this, in company with appropriate mentors and exemplars.
While ancient schools of philosophy were concerned with the development of argument and reasoning, they also developed what Hadot calls ‘spiritual exercises’ as a means of enacting their ideas and values. Aristotle’s discussion of the question of how we should live focuses on the idea of eudaimonia, a Greek term often translated as ‘happiness’, but which perhaps is better rendered as ‘flourishing’ or ‘fulfilment’.
During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was seen as enfolding a single coherent manner of thought and life, valid for all places and times, so that its leading representatives might be regarded as sages – figures of wisdom with universal appeal and significance. Today, as the limitations of a purely rationalist worldview have become apparent, there is much greater interest in respecting the distinctiveness of different human understandings of rational and spiritual virtues, and retrieving older ways of thinking that had been sidelined during the Age of Reason.
British Enlightenment philosophers – most notably, John Locke and George Berkeley (and to a lesser extent, David Hume), have also been scrutinised and reappraised in the light of their involvement in the slave trade. This does not, in my view, discredit the philosophical beliefs of such leading representatives of the Enlightenment, although it certainly complicates attempts to present this as an emancipatory social movement, and raises some awkward questions about the connections between its philosophies and forms of life.
The diversity of belief systems is such that an exemplar of one philosophical or spiritual tradition may be viewed as deficient or unacceptable from the perspective of another such tradition. Edward Conze, a noted scholar of Buddhism, remarked that he did not think that any Buddhist could fully approve of the lives or teachings of Roman Catholic saints. ‘They were bad Buddhists though good Christians.’
A ‘saint’ is best seen as an authentic embodiment and expression of the distinct manner of life and thought of a particular religious tradition. Although the popular sense of the term is that of a highly moral person, it is important to realise how moral values reflect the core themes of a tradition of belief. To ask that people should be ‘good’ is of little value without a lived example of a good life. We want to be shown a good life, not merely informed about an abstract idea of ‘goodness’. Life is something that we want to live, not just talk about.
Christianity, as might be expected, has its own distinct take on the nature and means of achieving an authentic life. The primary source and focus of Christian identity-making is the person of Christ. For New Testament writers, Christ is both the ground of salvation and the model of the redeemed life. To be a Christian is to aim for ‘Christlikeness’, in that Christ is both the ‘noble exemplar’ of Christian existence and ‘the very source which empowers the Christian to imitate the Lord.’ The New Testament encourages Christians to desire to emulate (and thus to imitate) Christ’s behaviour and attitudes, especially in relation to how he treats other people. Christ makes visible and makes possible the distinctively Christian understanding of a good life.
Linda Zagzebski notes that admiration often leads to emulation. People are attracted to the quality of life exhibited by such exemplars, and are drawn to attempt its replication. Encountering an exemplar may lead initially to eliciting admiration for them and subsequently to the enabling of emulation. In effect, this leads to beliefs being assessed at least partly on account of their enactments and embodiments, rather than their purely intellectual virtues. ‘I want to be like that’ exists in a complex and multi-layered relationship with ‘I want to think like that.’
This highlights the need to reflect further on human belief acquisition and formation. Too often, our evaluation of beliefs is presented in terms of the Age of Reason – as a rational calculation. Can it be justified by reason? Yet this represents a one-dimensional evaluation of belief. If someone’s beliefs are rationally defensible, yet allow them to become involved with the slave trade, there are clearly some other questions that need to be asked of their beliefs.
It is little wonder than many philosophers are now using the language of virtue and character in discussing how beliefs are developed and enacted. Knowledge is not gained through a mechanised and impersonal process of rational calculation, but often involves making judgements in the absence of conclusive evidential warrant – judgements that ultimately reflect the character and wisdom of the thinker.
In this chapter, we have considered how beliefs shape individuals, and opened up new ways of seeing the world and behaving within it. Yet what happens when those beliefs appear to falter, or even to fail? What happens to those who hold them?