True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  The God Delusion also assumes, like most of the New Atheist books, that religion makes you servile: inclined to truckle to authority. The reasoning here seems to be that the very act of worship is revoltingly submissive. I must say that this does not correspond to my experience at all. I feel humility, I hope, when I pray, but I do not feel humiliated by the greatness of God, any more than I tend to feel humiliated by the height of mountains or the depth of the Atlantic. Leave that aside, though, because it is true that the majesty of God has been assimilated into human hierarchies, has been used to legitimate the power of a variety of men (usually men) in golden hats. But Christianity carries inside it its own critique of this kind of easy confusion of God with kings, in the shape of the unsettling little voice which whispers that human power is an idol we’re not supposed to worship. And Christianity, consequently, has always been available in morally egalitarian versions too. In this very place, it is a tough, undeferential, independent-minded religion; a religion for people living in a hard place that throws you on your own resources. The Free Presbyterian Church is not my church, and I differ from it theologically in a number of important ways, but you really can’t say that they truckle to worldly power: that their understanding of the sovereignty of God inclines them to obey any old order or suggestion that the world gives them. No. You can call that quality stubbornness if you like, or integrity, but really not servility. Instead, if you’re being honest, you should acknowledge that one of the powers in Christianity, one of the possibilities coded deep in it, is that it can underwrite self-sufficiency, by showing people that their relationship with God, when it comes to the crunch, is more important than any duty to go along or get along. It can be maddening; but this version of Christianity is one of the taproots of the English and Scottish revolutions of the seventeenth century, and the American Revolution of the eighteenth. It’s the background to much of the modern idea of a human being as a morally autonomous creature, answerable to God, and therefore in this world primarly answerable to him- or herself. This is why our puritan forefathers are worth claiming as our own, even if we find ourselves elsewhere or nowhere on the present-day religious map. Their stubbornness has a lot to do with our freedom. I say in my book that if you’re glad Darwin is on the English £10 note, you should hug an Anglican, the Church of England’s acceptance of evolution having been one of the factors sparing us an endless American-style culture war over the issue. In the same spirit, if you’re glad that it’s King Conscience who really rules in your head, and not some little onboard image of a man in a gold hat – hug a Presbyterian. But you should probably ask first.

  This brings us to a major problem, though. Here I am asserting the absolute compatibility of science and religion – but what if this admirable stubbornness manifests itself as a loyalty to creationism? Shows itself as a commitment to Ussher’s 6,000-year chronology for the globe? Which it sometimes does, I understand, around here.

  Let me make my own loyalties clear. [Unbuttons top to reveal ‘I ♥ Darwin’ T-shirt underneath.]

  If it were up to me, I would say: Brothers and sisters in Christ, your defence of a world in which promises are kept, and the world possesses a human-sized meaning, and the Ark of Scripture carries us safe across a stormy sea, is admirable. But it makes its defence on the wrong ground. It is not trusting enough. It limits the sovereignty of the Lord by supposing that He can keep his promises, can hold to His Covenant, can carry us to safety, only in the terms of one human understanding of scripture. Whatever Richard Dawkins says, God and His promise and His love unto death for the human race do not vanish in a world in which the seven days of creation are not literal. The Lord our God is mightier than that. The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands prepared the dry land. We need not be doubting Him if we fearlessly ask how. He gave us the Book of Nature as well as the Book of Scripture, and as we look from one to the other, we can read fearlessly, knowing that no truth can contradict the God of truth.

  But all of this is secondary, all of this dancing around the edges of science. Why do we think this is the stuff we should be talking about when we talk about faith? I myself do not think that it makes sense to talk about Christianity in terms of evidence, as if the inward experiences that promote faith were the same kind of thing as a collection of physical data. For me, the most we can prove is that God is not impossible – I’d quarrel with ‘improbable’ too, but that’s a long argument for another time. I see faith and science as being non-competing but very different. Science is question, evidence, answer. Faith is – well, Hebrews 11:1: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ That’s a joke, of a kind. St Paul was as witty in his way as Oscar Wilde. No doubt it will strike Professor Dawkins as gobbledygook, paradox pointing nowhere. I prefer to think it points elsewhere, to the territories where feeling and imagination must be our guides.

  Of course, God isn’t imaginary – and I’m not saying He comes and goes depending on what you believe, either. I am not the kind of ‘metaphorical Christian’ Richard Dawkins refers to in the intro to the book. I don’t think that God is a nice, grandiose way of talking about human aspirations; I don’t think he’s a fancy name for the warm feeling in your stomach when you do good. The Lord of Hosts is either there or He isn’t: coldly, objectively, factually. Christians are people who take the risk of declaring that He is there. But we cannot prove it, so imagination must often be the tool by which we approach Him. Imagination is how we wake the printed words of scripture and discover how to join them to the stories of our own lives. Our whole lives.

  The very worst thing The God Delusion does is to persuade people that religion is abstract; that it’s a set of rather dud ideas, which, says Richard Dawkins, are in conflict with science, and which, says Richard Dawkins, can be proven to be scientifically unsound. Religion does not consist of a claim that God exists. He does – I think – but religion does not consist of going on and on and on about it. I do not rise in the morning and think to myself, ‘Gosh, I wonder if God exists, as a religious person I am very interested in this question’, any more than I wake up and subject my marriage to a cost–benefit analysis. ‘Credit side: she’s kind and lovely and cleverer than me. Debit side: we don’t always get on, and neither of us are as young as we used to be. Yes, there’s definitely a credit balance there – but I’ll be revisiting this issue at dawn tomorrow.’ I don’t do that, and neither do I do the religious equivalent. Religion is as much about what you do and what you feel as what you think in the abstract. It’s about the way we behave to each other. ‘I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me’ (Matthew 25:36). Religion exists in our relationships with each other and in our emotions. We have to feel it to know it. This is something the so-called New Atheists persistently get wrong. They talk as if you have the feelings because you’ve signed up to the ideas (or been brainwashed into the ideas by your evil parents). In my experience, it’s the other way around: you’re willing to sign up to the ideas, or to stay signed up to the ideas if you live in a Christian community, because you have the feelings already. You confirm in ideas what you already possess in experience. You hope, and so you credit ‘the substance of things hoped for’; you see Christ, our God-with-us, our Emmanuel, in the faces of your fellows – your children, your husband, your sister, your enemy – and so you credit ‘the evidence of things not seen’. I do not believe that any old thing can be true, just so long as you feel it. But I do believe that it is feeling that makes the truth live for us. It is feeling that binds our messy actual lives to the truth of our redemption. We are redeemed in practice, not in theory. We feel the grace that carries us when our own strength fails. ‘See how these Christians love one another’ – as Tertullian said the pagans used to say, back in the second century ad. Wars of religion, and bitter­nesses in Christian history which shame the hope we’re supposed to stand for, have made that sentence seem ironic, but never completely. And that’s where w
e have something which is beyond the reach of the atheist critique, outside its scope entirely.

  In a little while, Professor Dawkins is going to be up here, and he’s going to want to talk about science, because that’s what he knows. But those are not the right terms for this conversation. Please, do not dance the literalist two-step with him. Do not agree with him that this is about dinosaur bones, or the age of the Earth, or about design versus natural selection. He will win that argument, and he deserves to, because he is right about those things. Do not agree with him that this is about measurable physical evidence. This is about the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for. This is about love, and sorrow, and suffering, and hope, and despair, and forgiveness. It is about love where logic would say: sorrow; and about hope where the rational expectation would be: despair. And Richard Dawkins has nothing to say to any of that, except: Look! There’s a black hole! With luminous jets of interstellar gas! Isn’t that amazing! And it is amazing. It is. But we need more than that. Man cannot live on awe, ladies and gentlemen, or by bread alone; but by every word that comes from God’s mouth.

  (2012)

  PURITANS

  When Thomas Paine was dying in Greenwich Village in June 1809, two Presbyterian ministers popped by to suggest that he would be damned if he didn’t affirm his faith in Jesus Christ. ‘Let me have none of your Popish stuff’, he said firmly. ‘Good morning.’ Score one to Paine for exiting the world without compromising his convictions. But what he said had made, on the face of it, no sense. Faith in Christ as the path to salvation isn’t ‘Popish’ in the sense of being particular to Roman Catholicism. He was speaking to a pair of impeccable Protestants. What he was doing, here, was to act as a very early adopter of a perception that would influence later atheist understandings of the world enormously. He was suggesting, in one charged and revealing insult, that the original Protestant critique of Catholicism should be extended to the whole of historic Christianity. All of it should be reformed away; all of it, absolutely all of it, deserved the contempt that zealous Puritans had once felt for indulgences and prayer beads and ‘priestcraft’.

  This post-Christian puritanism, largely oblivious now of its history, is highly visible in the ‘New Atheism’ of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially in The God Delusion. Strange indifference (except at the margins) to all religions except Christianity? Check. Sense of being locked in righteous combat with the powers of darkness? Check. Puritanism, it turns out, can float free of faith and still preserve a vehement worldview, a core of characteristic judgements. The world, it says, is afflicted by a layer of corrupting gunk, a gluey mass of lies and mistakes that purports to offer mediation between us and meaning but actually obscures it, actually hides the plain outlines of that truth we so urgently need. Moreover, this hiding, this obscuring, is wilful and culpable, maintained on purpose for the benefit of hierarchs, bullies, men in golden hats everywhere. It is our duty to take up the wire wool of reason and to scrub, scrub, scrub the lies away. For no mediation is necessary. We may have – we must have – a direct vision of the essential state of things. We must see the world as if through pure clear water, or empty air.

  It’s reassuring, in a way, to find this ancient continuity at work in the sensibility of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne. It kind of makes up for their willed ignorance of all the actual emotional and intellectual structures of faith (as opposed to the will-o’-the-wisp ‘Popery’ in their heads). Richard Dawkins may be blithely indifferent to every word ever written about the differences between polytheism and monotheism, when he declares that Yahweh is the same as Odin, and all he wants ‘is one god less’ – but he is also keeping up a 400-year-old campaign against idolatry. That distant clapping sound you hear is Oliver Cromwell applauding.

  However, the project is impossible – as impossible for the New Atheists as for every previous builder of a purified New Jerusalem. Direct, unmediated apprehension of truth is not available, except in the effortful special case of science. That gunk they scrub at so assiduously is the inevitable matter of human culture, of imagination. People secrete it, necessarily, faster than it can be removed. Metaphors solidify into stories wherever the reformers’ backs are turned. We’ll never arrive at the Year Zero where everything has its single right name and means only what science says it should. Religion being a thing that humans as a species do continuously, it seems unlikely that we’ll stop, any more than we’ll stop making music, laws, poetry or non-utilitarian clothes to wear. Imagination grows as fast as bamboo in the rain. The world cannot be disenchanted. Even advocacy for disenchantment becomes, inexorably, comically, an enchantment of its own, with prophets, with heresies, with its own pious mythography.

  I think our recent, tentative turn away from the burning simpli­cities of The God Delusion (and the like) represents a recognition of this. The discovery by Alain de Botton and others of virtues and beauties that an atheist might want, in religion, is an anti-puritan move, a reconciliation of unbelief with the sprouting, curling, twining fecundity of culture. I don’t expect the puritan call will lose its appeal to the young and the zealous, but maybe we’re entering a phase of greater tolerance.

  (2013)

  WHO IS GOD? AN ANSWER FOR CHILDREN

  First of all, here’s who God isn’t: He isn’t a superhero. He isn’t somebody like us, only stronger and faster and cleverer, using His special powers to zip around the world. In fact, He isn’t part of the world at all. He’s the reason there is a world. If you believe in Him, then all the things you see, from the faces of your friends to the stars a million light-years off, and all of the species of living things on Earth busily evolving away, are here because He made them. And He hasn’t finished. He’s still making them, pouring in love every moment to keep them all going. He never began and He’s never going to end, and He never gets tired.

  You can’t prove He exists. (And you can’t prove He doesn’t, either.) But people who believe in Him – Christians and Jews and Muslims – tend to think we can feel Him being there. For us, He’s there in the peaceful stillness of our minds, He’s there in the sound of prayers, He’s there when we don’t feel lonely on a lonely road. Christians tend to feel He comes closest when we’re being loving, and Jews and Muslims tend to feel it’s when we’re behaving fairly, but we all agree He cares about us, and He cares what we do.

  We make mistakes and get things wrong, but He never gives up on us. He’s the person who loves us no matter what. If that sounds like an ideal Mum or Dad, then it’s not surprising, because to people who believe in Him, he is the Mum and Dad of the whole universe. Maybe we invented Him by thinking of mums and dads and then imagining a very big one: but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels more as if the good things about families are a kind of little glimpse of what the universe we live in is really like in the end, despite everything.

  When we do cruel things or destructive ones, we get further away from Him, and when we do kind things or sympathetic ones, we get closer to what He is like. Compared to Him, we’re very temporary little people, looking at the world through the tiny windows of our two eyes. But, oddly enough, thinking of Him doesn’t make us feel small – at least not in a gloomy or discouraging way. It’s more like what you feel if you climb to the top of a very tall mountain, where the sun glitters like a diamond in a dark blue sky, and you can see for hundreds of miles in all directions. You discover that the world is much bigger than you knew it was, and that maybe, just maybe, you can be bigger than you thought you were, too.

  (2012)

  C.S. LEWIS AS APOLOGIST

  It was writing apologetics that made C.S. Lewis famous. Not the Narnia books, which followed after; not his Renaissance scholarship; not the science fiction; not the autobiography. Not even the allegorical fiction that, with The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, became so essential to his imaginative power as a Christian writer. It was out-and-out advocacy that created his connection with a mass audience, beginning wit
h the commission from James Welch of the BBC in 1941 for the radio talks that eventually formed Mere Christianity. The wartime BBC could only record sound on a very limited supply of steel discs coated in acetate, so they preferred to broadcast everything live where possible. Lewis travelled into Blitz-struck London for each talk, returning by train to Oxford in the middle of the night. In this setting of sirens and rubble, Lewis’s voice – drawling, unexpected, one part Belfast to nine parts Oxford – reached hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of listeners, who soon became readers too. The success of Mere Christianity in book form opened the way to the rest of his public influence. Apologetics turned him from an Oxford literary figure to a global one.

  But the apologetic books are now far more important to his reputation in the United States than they are here, because Britain has moved much further away than the US from the situation they were devised for. As Lewis’s friend Austin Farrar wrote in an early and brilliant essay on this strand of his work, ‘the day in which apologetic flourishes is the day of orthodoxy in discredit; an age full of people talked out of the faith in which they were reared’. (And therefore capable of being talked back in, by a refreshment of what they once knew.) This may describe the contemporary American scene, where the theological vocabulary remains available and familiar even to those who think themselves indifferent to it, or hostile; but it doesn’t match the contemporary Britain where faith is two or three generations distant, and the Christian inheritance persists only dimly and cloudily, in faint assumptions scarcely solidified into words. As Farrar went on to say, ‘There can be no question of offering defences for positions which are simply unoccupied or of justifying ideas of which the sense has never dawned on the mind.’ Where defence and justification do matter in Britain, Lewis’s apologetics retain a following. Otherwise, this part of him has gone dormant for us.