True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  No? No. Because the idea of atheism as an extravagant faith-driven deviation from the null case goes against one of the most cherished elements in the self-image of polemical unbelief: that atheism is somehow scientific, that it is to be adopted as the counterpart in the realm of meaning to the caution and rigour of the scientific method. Flirting with a picture of yourselves as passionate enthusiasts of God-denial would obviously fuck this right up (as we like to say in the Church of England). The contemporary atheist shtick even has a meme prepared to cover this exact eventuality. Try saying that atheists have a faith position, because they believe in the absence of God, and seconds later, as sure as eggs is eggs, as sure as Richard Dawkins knows a great deal about evolutionary biology and fuck-all about religion, someone will pop up to say: no. Atheists do not believe in the absence of God. Atheists do not ‘believe’ in anything. Atheists merely lack a belief in the presence of God. The defining feature of atheism is its calm, principled non-participation in the whole crazy business of taking positions about entities you can’t see. Phew. That’s the flattering reflection in the mirror saved. (Though I’m sure your nose is longer than it was a moment ago, Pinocchio.) But it does indeed rule out the alternative possibility of seeing atheism as theism in negative; of atheists as a kind of glorious reverse-Trappists, devoted to noisily celebrating the non-existence of God, soaring free from the factual, just gone – solid gone, baby – on the poetics of absence. I guess the hugging will have to wait.

  In any case, over here on the believers’ side, we don’t spend that much time fixated on the question of God’s existence either. Religion isn’t a philosophical argument, just as it isn’t a dodgy cosmology, or any other kind of alternative to science. In fact, it isn’t primarily a system of propositions about the world at all. Before it is anything else, it is a structure of feeling, a house built of emotions. You don’t have the emotions because you’ve signed up to the proposition that God exists; you entertain the proposition that God exists because you’ve had the emotions. You entertain the proposition, and perhaps eventually sign up to it, because it makes a secondary kind of sense of something you’re feeling anyway. The book I’ve written in defence of Christianity, Unapologetic, starts off with our current cultural bust-up over religion, but then swiftly goes somewhere else; and this is because, from our side, the address at which the argument usually seems to happen is not in fact the address at which belief happens. Belief, I want people to see, is made of real, human-normal experiences. It is not an extension ladder of supposition propped on the wobbly dowelling of conjecture. Christianity (which is the form of belief I can speak about from the inside, from within its pattern of experience) is a way of dealing with the territory of guilt and hope and sorrow and joy and change and tragedy and renewal and mortality on which we humans must live. And not necessarily an infantile, or contemptible, or craven way of dealing with those things: one with a certain emotional realism built in, we’d like to think, and a certain generosity of imagination, whether or not (which nobody can know) it happens to be true. So, we’re busy too. Our belief is a concrete thing, grown from habit and memory and perception rather than from abstractions. It’s a weight of experience which pushes us away from the indifferent middle of the scale on the God question.

  And yet, of course, we don’t know, and not knowing matters. The ultimate test of faith must still, and always, be its truth; whether we can prove it or not, the reality of the perspectives it brings us, and the changes it puts us through, must depend in the end on it corresponding to an actual state of the universe. Religion without God makes no sense (except possibly to Buddhists). So belief for most Christians who respect truth and logic and science – which is most of us, certainly in the UK – must entail a willing entry into uncertainty. It means a decision to sustain the risks and embarrassments of living a conditional, of choosing a maybe or a perhaps to live out, among the many maybes or perhapses of this place; where conclusive answers are not available, and we must all do our knowing on some subjects through a glass, darkly.

  This is the basis on which it is, on the whole, rather easy for us to enter imaginatively into your position. For the most part, the attitude of contemporary British Christians to contemporary British atheism is one of sympathetic respect. Empathetic respect, even: I’ve never met a Christian who didn’t recognise the experience of finding God absent. A lot of us have been atheists at some point. Most of us still are, from time to time, it being a recurrent feature of faith that you pass periodically back through doubt again. No, that does not mean that we secretly think you’re right, deep down; that on some semi-conscious level we know we are only building pathetic sandcastles to be washed away by the surging, inevitable, in-bound flood tide of Reason(™). It means we recognise that you and we are both operating where we cannot know we’re right. The appropriate response is humility, an adherence to a sense of ourselves as fallible, and yet possessed of the convictions we’re possessed of, the experiences we’re possessed of, the hearts we’re possessed of.

  Maybe too – all teasing apart – this might be the basis on which believers and atheists might manage to declare peace, and to talk to each other a little more productively. On both sides, we check our certainties at the cloakroom, and then settle down, fellows at decision-making under uncertainty, to compare the advantages and disadvantages of the houses of emotion our positions enable us to inhabit: both real, in the sense that both are built from experience, and both ultimately resting upon the unknowable. You bring out the dignity of materialism, and we put next to it the Christian acknowledgement of the tragic, the wasted, the unmendable. You bring out the decentring power of the discovery of humanity’s smallness and contingency in the cosmos, and the recentring power of finding that human life nevertheless preserves meaning. We put next to it the egalitarianism of human failure, and the hope for a way out of humanity’s endless game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. We show you ours and you show us yours. And together we admire the patterned gambles that nourish us.

  However – and now it’s back to the teasing again – before we do that, I really think you lot need to be a bit clearer about what the emotional content of your atheism is. You are the ones who claim to be acting on a mere lack, on a non-belief, but, as absences go, contemporary atheism doesn’t half seem to involve some strong feelings. It isn’t all reading Lucretius, or thinking about the many forms most beautiful. For many of you, the point of atheism appears to be, not the non-relationship with God, but a live and hostile relationship with believers. It isn’t enough that you yourselves don’t believe: atheism permits a delicious self-righteous anger at those who do. The very existence of religion seems to be an affront, a liberty being taken, a scab you can’t help picking. People who don’t like stamp-collecting don’t have a special magazine called The Anti-Philatelist. But you do. You do the equivalent of hanging about in front of Stanley Gibbons to orate about the detestability of phosphor bands and perforations. You wait for someone to have the temerity to express a religious sentiment, so you can spray them with scorn at fire-extinguisher pressure. It’s as if there is some transgressive little ripple of satisfaction which can only be obtained by uttering the words ‘sky fairy’ or ‘zombie rabbi’ where a real live Christian might hear them. Now this, dear brothers and sisters, cannot be good for you. It is never a good idea to let yourself believe that the pleasures of aggression have virtue behind them. Take it from a religious person. This, we know.

  (2012)

  CONTRA DAWKINS

  Speech at the Faclan Book Festival, Isle of Lewis, November 2012. Richard Dawkins was due to speak next, and was sitting near the front of the audience.

  This is an unusual situation. I’m used to being one of the very few Christians in the room, and to be trying to build a careful bridge of words between what the world looks like to me, and the experience of people who are often a couple of generations away by now from any direct familiarity with belief from the inside; people who usually don’t even have a Sunda
y School familiarity with Christianity’s central ideas and stories and personalities. Now here I am suddenly part of a majority, a Christian among Christians. I am probably a more liberal Christian than a lot of you, with different views about a bunch of things including the authority of the Bible: but theological differences are not in the end as important as this truth, which makes us one. I am a sinner, whose hope lies in the love of God, and in the blood that Christ Jesus shed for me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see. My redeemer liveth. I hope you will hear the rest of what I have to say in the light of that.

  Meanwhile, Professor Dawkins there, who is usually (when in Britain at least) part of what David Robertson yesterday correctly called a majority of ‘functional atheists’, and who in fact is at the agitating edge of that majority, the people who really hold to atheism as a positive virtue, not just a drifting accident of modern life, impatiently pressing for the last vestiges of religion to be removed from public life, trying to stamp into place a consensus that belief doesn’t have any legitimate or respectworthy role in the serious business of our culture – suddenly, he’s on his own. One solitary lion in a whole den of Daniels. Unfortunately that’s not my joke. Oscar Wilde said it. For anyone who’s listening to this on the radio on the mainland, or watching it as a YouTube clip later, Daniel was somebody in the Bible.

  The book I’ve written about faith, Unapologetic, is aimed at that other order of things, where the lions outnumber Daniel, not this one. It is itself an attempt at bridge-building in words, so that people who have never believed can get from it, for a little while, a sense of what Christianity, or rather one man’s Christianity, feels like from inside. Books are powerful things. They let you borrow experiences, they let you try out being other people: and the biggest gulf between belief and unbelief now, in my opinion, is a gulf of experience, not of ideas. For a lot of people now, the life of faith is literally unimaginable, except as a caricature. Usually a caricature of fanaticism, intolerance and bigotry. They do not know what it is like to believe. But you do – a lot of you. So I’m not sure how relevant my book can be to you. It isn’t written to face towards you. The main thing it has to tell you is something you know already.

  In honour of the occasion, then, I’m going to talk about the parts of my book which are a kind of response to The God Delusion, although that’s pretty marginal as a preoccupation of mine. I certainly hope that Unapologetic isn’t one of the fleas feeding parasitically off Richard Dawkins’ fame, as he puts it so charmingly. Yes, it’s billed as a ‘riposte’ to The God Delusion, because my publisher wants to shift copies, and so do I, because I am a working author with a living to make. But it is not really a reply to him. If anything it is an attempt to deal – a little bit – with the situation the success of The God Delusion has created. In my opinion, Richard Dawkins is so wrong about religion that there is scarcely any point of contact between his argument and actual Christian faith. They go straight past each other.

  I do not agree that The God Delusion is a useful book because it makes God more prominent, more visible, and thus moves belief up the agenda. I’m not as generous as that. In fact, I’m not an especially nice person altogether – which is one reason why I need Christianity. I think The God Delusion has been profoundly destructive. It is one of the rare books with the power to make those who read it stupider. It leaves people thinking they understand what they do not, and that they are therefore justified in contempt for the thing that they do not understand. It has helped to make the public conversation about religion substantially cruder and nastier than it need have been. It has deliberately set out to undermine the state of mutual respect that largely existed between believers and atheists in Britain until the past decade, by suggesting that any – any – public acknowledgement, or sympathy, or civility, or curiosity towards religion represented an inherent betrayal of science, tolerance, enlightenment, human dignity. Worse, it succeeded. It worked on people not at the level of argument, but at the level of perception, of vague assumption about what is sensible and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, what is dangerous and what is not. I do not think it could have done this if more people in Britain had been in a position to say, hold on, this is a description appropriate to Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition; if I try to apply it to Mr Smith up the road who goes to the Baptist chapel, it looks ridiculous. But they weren’t. And neither did the author bother to inform himself before he put pen to paper, apparently thinking that if you’re sure God doesn’t exist, you can treat all statements about him as equally nonsensical. He’s on record as comparing theology to ‘fairyology’, saying that, since there aren’t any fairies at the bottom of his garden, he doesn’t see why he should waste his time on learned discussions of whether they have green wings or yellow ones. But whether or not you think that God exists, religion certainly does: and the idea of starting an argument without even bothering to find out what your opponents think is just astonishing. As one critic said, Dawkins on theology is rather like someone writing a book on evolutionary biology having once, long ago, seen a copy of The Observer’s Book of British Birds. That isn’t fearless, it’s careless. And the content of the book is careless too. It’s an assemblage of two centuries’ worth of anti-religious old chestnuts, with one new idea in it, which is wrong. That idea being that God is improbable because he couldn’t have evolved before the universe began in order to create it. If Professor Dawkins had bothered to check whether we think God is a creature like us, only more complicated – hint: no – he might have saved himself some embarrassment.

  For all these reasons, The God Delusion in my opinion is a blot on its author’s reputation: and all the blacker and inkier a blot because he is, otherwise, a wonderful writer, and someone I very much admire. I have learned a huge amount from him, both about biology and about how to communicate complex ideas. When he’s writing about science, he has the most delicate, scrupulous awareness of language. He knows that biological processes can only be brought into view for the lay reader through comparisons, and that your comparisons have to be vigilantly managed to respect the complexity of what you’re explaining. Somehow when it comes to religion he ceases to know this. Metaphor goes out the window, nuance goes up the chimney, imagination lies trampled on the mat. An account of religion without imagination is defective from the start. I’m coming back to imagination later.

  The God Delusion gets a lot of mileage from a highly questionable assumption about religion and science being incompatible. I’m going to talk about this a bit, because I guess, going by the quotation from him in the programme, that Professor Dawkins is going to as well. I mean this one: ‘I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.’ He seems to think that religion is in the business of offering certainty at the price of ignorance; comfort, on condition that you look away from the richness of the world, and see instead only the deceptively painted inside of some theological container. We Christians don’t want discovery, which is the essence of science, because we think we know everything that matters already. Well, no. If you’re a Christian, you believe that God knows everything already, not that you do. You believe that the Bible contains essential knowledge, knowledge vital to human flourishing, vital to salvation: not that it contains all knowledge, or sets the bounds on what human beings are allowed to know. It does not tell you how to build a boat, how to bake bread, how to play the trumpet; it does not tell you whether a problem in computer science is NP-complete, how to calculate the relative velocity of galaxies, how to calculate the rate of propagation of a genetic trait through a given population. But finding these things out can be a form of reverence, and often has been. If you are a Christian, you believe that the breath of God – that’s what the Holy Spirit, pneuma, means in Greek: breath, wind, life – blows continually through every detail of this glorious, wretched, intricate universe. Yes, Professor Dawkins: that is a statement with no verifiable factual content whatsoever. But it indi
cates an orientation towards the world, a way in which we can be facing: a way in which for us to be curious, to want to know all we can, to be hungry for all the truth in our reach, is to be appreciative of a gift. And, accordingly, a great many scientists who happen to be Christians have done just that, from Newton working out the laws of motion to Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project: people who treat the scientific method in all its rigour as a form of praise, a never-ending canticle to the physical world. I know that Richard Dawkins thinks there ought to be a contradiction here; that such scientists must be at best compartmentalising their minds, and at worst behaving as if they’ve got two heads – a sensible scientific head, interested in proof and evidence, for use from Monday to Saturday, and a silly spiritual head for the Sabbath, which is willing to countenance any old rubbish. But there is no necessary contradiction, if you believe that the human capacity to think – to hypothesise, to experiment, to deduce and to conclude – is a fitting response to the generosity that placed us here, among so many things to think about. Laborare est orare, to work is to pray, as the monks of the middle ages said. And the work of science, like the work of baking, can be an expression of faith. It doesn’t have to be, of course. The scientific method works just fine whether you’re religious or not, just as the bread will still rise. Conversely, there certainly are versions of religion – of all religions – which are hostile to free enquiry; that would rather you spent your time inside a painted cardboard carton three feet by three, when just beyond lies the million-mile strand of the great ocean of truth. But the two circles of faith and reason do overlap. There is a generous area of human understanding which is fully faithful and fully reasonable at the same time.