True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  For me, Robinson’s Gilead and, in their different way, its successors Home and Lila, are the best, most grace-touched defeats there have been in fiction for a very long time. And the foundation of their power is their scrupulous fidelity to the integrity of viewpoint. They inhabit the viewpoints of John Ames and then Glory Boughton and Lila Ames with more, not less, attention to the particularity and limits of those imagined human selves, because they are trying as well to make an impossible realisation of grace on the page. There is not a word of omniscience, in the narrative sense, in any of them. They do not for an instant exploit the capacity of fiction to condense the hopes of Christianity into direct narrative, on the authority of the author, and to project them onto the screen of the story as if they were present in the same solid way as furniture and trees are present. Which they would be, but only within the terms of the story, only till you put the book down. God would be a special effect. There would be no claim of witness, of observation palpably grounded; only the claim of eloquence. Instead the Christian eloquence of Gilead and Home is directed towards the resistant reality of experience, and towards what we may find in it, and maybe beyond it.

  (2013)

  UNAPOLOGETICALLY YOURS (1)

  After Unapologetic was published in 2012, I found myself in blog-dispute with the American biologist and New Atheist Jerry Coyne, professor at the University of Chicago, author of Why Evolution Is True (2009) and, later, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (2015). This is an edited selection from my side of an impressively bad-tempered exchange.

  Dear Jerry Coyne,

  You say, quote, ‘Along with many Sophisticated Believers™, Spufford remains ambivalent on the question of the role of evidence in religion.’

  Well, no, I really don’t think I do. (But let me pause a moment to admire the economical design of the heuristic which divides the religious into unrepresentative ‘Sophisticated Believers’ and poor brainwashees, neither of whom then need to be taken seriously for an instant. A decision tree with only one fork, and shazam! the landscape simplifies.) I say that the experience of religious emotions causes assent to religious propositions, not the other way around; and then I add that the truth of the propositions nonetheless matters, and that the ultimate test of the value of a religion cannot be how it makes you feel, but whether it does, in fact, correspond to some actual state of the universe. You gloss this as me admitting that faith ‘is based on evidence’, point to an inconsistency with my wild claim that ‘truth is “a willing entry into uncertainty” when we have no answers’, and move on instantly to deliver what you take to be the clincher: ‘If Christians really respected “truth and logic and science”, then they wouldn’t willingly enter into the uncertainty of Christianity, for there is no good evidence for its tenets.’

  But wait. Without I suspect noticing that you were doing it, you just shuffled the three nouns ‘evidence’, ‘truth’ and ‘belief’, substituting them when convenient for yourself. I didn’t say that religion rested ultimately on evidence, I said it rested on truth. And I didn’t say that truth entailed a willing entry into uncertainty, I said that belief did. Evidence ≠ truth; truth ≠ belief.

  This may sound trivial, but it really isn’t, because the slippage of terms in your rewrite of my argument has shifted it back towards the picture of the world you prefer. Evidence is a means of ascertaining truth; an organisation of data as part of the human effort to tell what the truth is, through the scientific method. Truth, meanwhile, is just a state of affairs, something which is so whether we currently know it or not. You would like it be the case that evidence is the only means of approach we have to truth, and that conversely truth is the kind of thing we can only approach through evidence – in which case you can indeed treat them as terms which are effectively substitutable. But this is a philosophical position, not a scientific one. It is a philosophical picture of the world that gives science a monopoly position as the supplier and definer of truth, but that does not make the picture, itself, scientific. It is only one of several possible pictures, all of which are compatible with the known facts of the case, and all of which are compatible with loyalty to the scientific method. So science does not in itself provide a criterion for choosing between the pictures. Neither does holding to an ideal of fidelity to the real compel one to choose your favoured picture.

  The difference between our pictures of the world does not lie in there being different valuations we place on truth. We agree that truth is all-important; that it is the test of all contentions; that it would be shameful intellectual dishonour, trahison des clercs or trahison des savants, to lie knowingly about matters of fact. Where we differ is in our estimate of the obtainability of truth. For me, the things we know – the things we can ever know, even allowing the most generous possible future development of the scope and reach and intellectual power of science, which of course I am in favour of – represent only a fraction of the things that are true about the universe. In particular, we don’t have, and aren’t ever going to have, access to decisive knowledge about questions of meaning and intention. It may be an anthropomorphic projection to suppose that meaning and intention have anything to do with the state of the universe. Then again it may not. It depends on your picture. But, given my picture, it makes sense to suppose that knowledge cannot reach large and important parts of the true state of things. Knowing has limits. A great deal falls within these limits, but some things fall outside. Those things we cannot know are true; and yet, they still are true, or aren’t. This is where ‘belief’ comes in, not as an unrespectable alternative to knowledge, but as the respectable human activity that applies to those areas of truth about the universe to which we cannot have access. Within the limits of knowledge, we don’t need to believe things. We don’t need to believe in gravitation, or natural selection, or the geological history of the Earth. We can just know they are the case, the engine of evidence having brought them within our knowledge. But beyond the limits of knowledge – or rather, beyond the limits of all possible knowledge – radical uncertainty holds, and here believing becomes appropriate, ordinary and essential, and can also be a form of appropriate reverence towards the real. Belief is the condition of holding a conjecture about something which you cannot resolve the truth of; which you maintain in your mind while remaining aware that you may be being absurd, that you may have it got it all wrong. Hence the intimate affinity of belief with doubt, for they share, in two different emotional modes, the same state of not-knowing. Hence the similarity of belief to the state of mind that precedes creativity sometimes, when it is necessary to dwell with, to maintain in fruitful suspension, material you cannot (yet) determine a shape for. (That ‘yet’ indicates an important difference.)

  But I used the word ‘ordinary’ a minute ago quite deliberately. This is not some tiny residual area of unobtainable truth which is so rarefied that it makes no difference for all practical purposes, and can be safely consigned to the metaphysical junkyard. The truths to which we have no access are a large part of everyday experience. The things we can’t know, and must therefore negotiate as best we can by forming beliefs about them, include: what the world looks like for other people; what we ourselves mean by the language we use; how that language is going to be understood; what we ought to do in most situations; what our society should be like; how we ought to vote; what colour we should paint the spare room. Belief in God belongs among this mass of shockingly normal problems, not alongside debates about the value of the cosmological constant. We see ‘through a glass, darkly’ because that is the nature of our relationship to all questions that deal with ‘why’ rather than ‘how’, with ‘ought’ rather than ‘is’. It isn’t a situation that can be improved by better lens-grinding. Nor is it ‘piffle’ to name the situation. It is a matter of paying attention to the experience of being in the world.

  We can’t verify or falsify our beliefs the way we can our knowledge. But that doesn’t mean there are no criteria we can bring to bea
r to distinguish between beliefs. We can ask whether belief pays due and scrupulous attention to what can be known. We can ask whether belief is equipped with, as it were, some of the proper humility owed to the provisional – with a continuing willingness to change, to notice, to be wrong. We can ask whether beliefs are generous or mean, altruistic or self-serving, frightened or hopeful, candid or self-deceiving. We can be intelligent and nuanced about belief. But to do this we need to not dismiss the whole inevitable human activity of belief-formation as nonsense. This is one of my reasons for preferring my picture of the world to yours.

  On the particular issue of evidence for the existence of God. You say that ‘if there is a God – at least a benevolent and omnipotent and theistic one – we should have evidence of it’. Ah, another one of those ‘should’ statements. I understand that you would like to pull religion back to where you can hit it with your evidential hammer, but a demand for evidence that’s based on a normative claim is a move within the domain of beliefs rather than a successful appeal to facts beyond it. Should we have evidence of God’s presence? Why should we? Presumably you mean that a universe featuring God’s presence would be nicer than the one we’ve got; that it would show signs of being unambiguously managed to avoid the dangers, cruelties and randomnesses which palpably afflict the 13.8-billion-year-old place we actually inhabit. Well, it’s an opinion. Specifically, it’s a theological opinion, in the style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when theologians were big on the idea that the details of the physical and biological worlds should reveal the unambiguous signature of a creator. But it isn’t my theological opinion. I hold to the view – very normal in Christianity over the last century or so – that the obviously un-managed, un-regulated, un-nice state of the cosmos poses a never-ending challenge to our understanding of God’s benevolence and omnipotence; but that the lack of management-for-niceness in the universe is a given. Amazingly, Christians have actually noticed that the violence and injustice of the human historical experience, and the ‘blundering, low and horridly cruel’ operations of the biosphere, present faith with a problem. There is a huge imaginative and theological literature about it, many hundreds of years old, under the heading of ‘the problem of pain’. I happen to think that almost all of it is unconvincing. But you are making a mistake if you assume that Christians exist in a naive bubble on this score, which can be popped by the mere mention of a difficulty we’ve never faced. Almost all of us, one way or another, have had to make our individual peace with the issue.

  Just to recap, then: believers don’t know there is a God, God being one of the possible truths about the universe for which there cannot be evidence. We believe in Him in the absence of evidence, not in spite of it. We pursue our belief because it matches our experience: our woolly, subjective, untestable experience. Yet we remain aware that our belief either does, or does not, correspond to the true state of affairs, and that it succeeds or fails accordingly in being justified. Since we cannot (as it were) open the envelope that will tell us this truth, our belief requires us to live indefinitely with the envelope unopened, and to enter willingly into the resulting state of uncertainty. Which is not so different from the many other ways in which human beings find it is worth our while to base our behaviour on not-knowing.

  Unapologetically,

  Francis Spufford

  (2012)

  UNAPOLOGETICALLY YOURS (2)

  A few months later I also corresponded, much less acrimoniously, with the chair of a local British humanist society, who had written to ask which of two theories of the atonement I subscribed to, both of which he thought incoherent or morally repulsive: number 1, in which ‘Jesus’ death was a death penalty suffered on behalf of the human race’, or number 2, in which ‘Jesus’ death is somehow ontologically identified with the consequences of human sin: Jesus on the cross is the rape victim, the abused child, the tortured prisoner, the Holocaust victim’. He concluded, ‘It seems obvious to me that there is mending and forgiveness in the world whether or not we believe in God. Why can’t we just agree on that instead of dragging all of this contentious theology into everything?’ Again, I’ve edited: but not, at least, to make myself wiser or more quick-witted.

  Thank you for your email. I am not a theologian, as you know, but I have read a fair bit of theology, and listened to a fair bit more, so I am not coming to the question of what the cross accomplished entirely unprepared. The statement at the back of the book to the effect that I didn’t check anything before writing it should not be taken as meaning that I went at the job empty-headed, only that I decided to go with the headful of thoughts I already had.

  As I try to narrate the crucifixion in Chapter 5 of Unapologetic I am attempting a descriptive balancing act that may not be fully visible to you. I am trying both to give vivid, dramatised form to what I think happened on the cross, and at the same time to point reliably to a wider bundle of interpretations. This double job may well have the effect of making it harder to tell exactly where I stand theologically. As may the fact that I’m storytelling rather than arguing, there.

  Your theory number 1 is, of course, penal-substitutionary atonement, beloved by contemporary conservative evangelicals, who often assume that it is the single orthodox interpretation, with nothing beyond but liberal waffle. I’ve seen it referred to by them as ‘the scriptural doctrine of the atonement’, as if the Bible unambiguously required this understanding. It isn’t and it doesn’t. Their picture, of sins as primarily crimes, and of a wrathful God transferring his righteous fury at humankind to a substitute on whom our death penalty is executed by proxy, is a radical modern simplification of one strand in traditional understandings of the atonement. As you say, Christians who believe this tend also to believe in hell as part of the same grim theological gizmo. ‘Salvation’, for them, is indeed principally salvation from being sent to hell: which doubles up, for me, on the morally repellent image of an angry God who needs to be bought off by blood, by adding that He also (if not bought off) is the happy proprietor of a kind of cosmic Abu Ghraib, where the torments last forever. Such a God, if He existed, would not be worth worshipping. People’s motives for signing up to penal substitution aren’t always hate-filled – they can buy it innocently, as part of a package marked ‘Christianity’ – but I agree with you that the result is horrible, and morally repellent, and irreconcilable with good everyday understandings of what it would mean to be ‘loving’, or for that matter ‘just’.

  For the record, I don’t think you’re going to hell. I don’t think anyone’s going to hell, hell being a human construct behind which Christians hide from the alarming consequences of God’s generosity. It is a necessary consequence of human free will that people should be able to say a definitive ‘no’ to mercy, kindness, hope; but that is not at all the same thing as saying no to overt membership in some Christian church, or to some package of beliefs. I am fairly sure that you are a humanist because you consider that to be a vote in favour of kindness, mercy, love, tolerance, enthusiasm for the richness and potential of human experience. Irritatingly, I consider twenty-first-century British humanism to be immensely Christian in its ethical assumptions.

  However, though we agree about the horribleness of theory no. 1, I also have reasons for rejecting it which we don’t share, because they rest on theological as well as consequential judgements; and these point me towards an understanding of the atonement which is rather different from your fluffy, ontological theory no. 2.

  For me, the other deep objection to penal substitution as a doctrine of the cross is that it implies a character for God which is radically incompatible with the character of Christ as the gospels describe it: a person inclined on occasion to freak out and lose his temper, especially with cruelty or self-righteousness, and serious to the point of horror about human failings, especially cruelty and self-righteousness, but never, never, for a single recorded instant, willing to discard any human soul as beyond the reach of love, whatever the law says. For
me, it follows from the doctrine of the incarnation that, if Christ is God-like, God must be Christ-like; the picture of the bloke in the New Testament provides our most authoritative portrait of God, and any theory of God’s intentions can be discarded as partial, or incorrect, if it doesn’t match the behaviour of Jesus. Therefore the penal-substitutionary picture of an angry dad with a nice son, ruthlessly dispatched to take the bullet meant for us, makes no sense. I do see that, from your point of view, this piece of reasoning is resting on empty air, or rather upon faith. It requires the prior conviction that the beardy rabbi from Galilee is (in some sense) the same as the maker of the universe, before it gives you any traction on the crucifixion.

  But my possession of faith, and your lack of it, is a given of this conversation; and you are asking about systems of understanding that all, in any case, depend on faith. Grant me the crit­erion that faith gives me, then, and what does the death of God on the cross, at the hands of some not-especially-ill-intentioned humans, following out the ordinary logic of raison d’état, aim to make happen? It can’t be a question of taking a punishment for us, since Jesus was demonstrably not in the punishment business; and it can’t be a question of abolishing, or sopping up, human suffering, since, as you point out, ‘the rape victim is still with us’. I do see a subordinate function of the crucifixion as being an act of participation by God in suffering, a declaration of solidarity, a willing entry into the costs, not of forgiveness, but of creation itself: the biological realm where life implies death, where all possession implies loss. It can’t be the whole point, though, can it?