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 feelings, 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.
It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask totally irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?”
But regardless of whether the emotions precede the belief (William James’s thesis in The Varieties of Religious Experience) or the belief yields the emotions, the belief is still required to channel your emotions into a moral code, a way of life, and religiously based actions. Spufford, after all, has to “entertain the proposition” of God. Aslan reduces the Quran and the Bible to collections of metaphors on which one can base a philosophy, but hardly a religion. One can only imagine what most Muslims would say about Aslan’s contention, in a book about Islam, that it’s irrelevant whether Muhammad was really a prophet of God. Such a statement would get one killed if uttered publicly in some Muslim lands.
It would seem unnecessary to document the importance of empirical claims about God, except for those vociferous and liberal theologians who argue that faith doesn’t depend on statements about reality. Let’s begin with the Bible, which clearly grounds Christianity on the Resurrection, a supposedly historical event that has become the linchpin of virtually all Christian faith: “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”
And this is echoed by modern religious scholars, including Richard Swinburne, one of the world’s most respected philosophers of religion:
For the practices of the Christian religion (and of any other theistic religion) only have a point if there is a God—there is no point in worshipping a non-existent creator or asking him to do something on earth or take us to heaven if he does not exist; or trying to live our lives in accord with his will, if he has no will. If someone is trying to be rational in practicing the Christian (or Islamic or Jewish) religion, she needs to believe (to some degree) the creedal claims that underlie the practice.
Mikael Stenmark, a professor of philosophy and religion at Uppsala University in Sweden, and dean of its Faculty of Theology, is even more explicit. (His book Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life was awarded a Templeton Prize in 1996 for “outstanding books in theology and the natural sciences.”)
A religion therefore contains also (d) beliefs about the constitution of reality. . . . According to the Christian faith, our problem is that although we have been created in the image of God we have sinned against God and the cure is that God, through Jesus Christ, provides forgiveness and restoration. But for this cure to work it appears that at least it must be true that God exists, that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that we are created in the image of God, that God is a creator, that God wants to forgive us, and that God loves us. Hence it seems as if Christianity, and not only science, has an epistemic goal, that is, it attempts to say something true about reality. If so, a religious practice like Christianity is meant to tell us something true about who God is, what God’s intentions are, what God has done, what God values, and how we fit in when it comes to these intentions, actions, and values.
John Polkinghorne, an English physicist who left Cambridge to become an Anglican priest, later became president of Queens College, Cambridge, and wrote several dozen books on the relationship of science and religion. Polkinghorne too won a Templeton Prize, and emphasized the need for an empirical grounding of faith:
The question of truth is as central to [religion’s] concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary exercise in comforting fantasy.
Ian Barbour, who died in 2013, was an American professor of religion (and another winner of the Templeton Prize) who specialized in the relationship between science and religion:
A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.
Finally, we have a joint statement by Francis Collins, a born-again Christian who directs the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and Karl Giberson, a Christian physicist. They were respectively once president and vice president of the accommodationist organization BioLogos:
Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about “the way things are.”
Existence Claims: Is There a God?
Some faith claims are more important than others, but nearly all theists have at least one or two bedrock beliefs that support their religion. The most important, of course, include the existence of a god, whether there is only one of them or, in polytheistic faiths like Hinduism, a panoply of gods with different abilities. Existence claims about gods are clearly empirical claims—claims that require some kind of evidence—and although they can be hard to test depending on the kind of god you worship, advocates of theism argue that God’s interventions in the universe should be detectable. At the very least, those theists should be able to describe what the world would be like had it arisen in a purely naturalistic manner, and if their god didn’t exist.
Many surveys show that belief in gods is universal and strong. A 2011 survey of belief in twenty-two countries, for instance, found that 45 percent of all people asked agreed with the statement “I definitely believe in a God or a Supreme Being.” But there was wide variation among nations, ranging from 93 percent agreement in Indonesia to only 4 percent in Japan. (Besides Turkey and Indonesia, “Muslim countries” weren’t surveyed, nor were any in Africa, though belief in both regions is surely very high.) European countries were on the low side, with between 20 percent and 30 percent of people being “definite” believers, with Great Britain coming in at 25 percent. The United States, the most religious of First World countries, ranked seventh, with 70 percent espousing definite belief in God. (Definite nonbelief, by the way, was expressed by 18 percent of Americans—about half the level found in France, Sweden, and Belgium.)
God, of course, can be construed along a continuum from the traditional bearded man in the sky to the ineffable “ground of being” of modern theologians. But three surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Program between 1991 and 2008 narrowed this down, asking people in thirty countries whether they believed in a personal god “who concerns himself with every human being personally.” This goes further than just assuming that God affects the world. But the results resembled those given above: there was wide variation, ranging from 20 to 30 percent in most European countries to 68 percent in the United States, but there was also widespread acceptance, in studies spanning two decades, of an involved and intervening God. Clearly most of those who accept God are theists, not deists.
Right before I wrote these paragraphs, a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses e-mailed me an article, “The Untold Story of Creation,” which was quite specific
about God’s nature:
God is a person, an individual. He is not a vague force devoid of personality, floating aimlessly in the universe. He has thoughts, feelings, and goals.
The more intellectual believers would sneer at such a description, claiming that God is not at all like a person, and that their own nebulous and impersonal deity is the “correct” description of God. (How they know this is never specified.) But that’s not the take of the many highly respected and nonliteralist theologians who still imbue God with personlike qualities. The list of God’s attributes from The National Catholic Almanac reads like a dictionary definition:
Attributes of God. Though God is one and simple, we form a better idea by applying characteristics to Him, such as: almighty, eternal, holy, immortal, immense, immutable, incomprehensible, ineffable, infinite, intelligent, invisible, just, loving, merciful, most high, most wise, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, patient, perfect, provident, self-dependent, supreme, true.
Here’s how Richard Swinburne sees God:
I take the proposition “God exists” (and the equivalent proposition “There is a God”) to be logically equivalent to “there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.” I use “God” as the name of the person picked out by this description.
Alvin Plantinga is America’s equivalent to Swinburne: a respected philosopher/theologian, once regional president of the American Philosophical Association. What does he say about God?
What [Daniel Dennett] calls an “anthropomorphic” God, furthermore, is precisely what traditional Christians believe in—a god who is a person, the sort of being who is capable of knowledge, who has aims and ends, and who can and in fact does act on what he knows in such a way as to try to accomplish those aims.
For every theological claim that God is a spirit or force about whom we can say little—except that he exists—I can adduce several statements from theologians and believers swearing that God resembles a powerful but bodiless person, with human emotions, motivations, and a loving personality. This view of the deity is not so different from that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses mentioned above, or even the one described to young children in Bruce and Stan’s Pocket Guide to Talking with God:
It’s really important to understand that God is not an impersonal force. Even though He is invisible, God is personal and He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, he hears, he feels and he speaks.
Liberal theologians like Karen Armstrong and David Bentley Hart, who maintain that God is not like this at all, either dismiss the universal belief in a personal God or claim, on no convincing grounds, that it’s wrong. And even if you think that the nebulous “ground of being” God is the most convincing God, you’re ignoring the beliefs of those who actually inject their dogma into the public arena. Certainly one can deal with the “best” arguments for God—which invariably turn out to be the ones so fuzzy that they’re the least capable of being falsified, much less understood—but it’s more important to deal with religious beliefs as they’re held by the vast majority of people on Earth.
Other Empirical Claims of Religion
Beyond God, what are the other truths that religions hold dear? I’ve taken one version of the Nicene Creed—a statement recited weekly in many Christian churches, and one of many such creeds maintained by different religions—and simply put in bold its truth claims. While many Christians may piously mouth these words without believing them, many believers certainly see them as true. And virtually every word in this creed is a claim about the universe:
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
In summary, the Creed claims a monotheistic God, who nevertheless somehow consists of three parts (including Jesus and the Holy Spirit); the creation of the universe by that God; and the sending of his son—born of a virgin—as an earthly sacrifice to redeem believers from sin. It further asserts that God’s son (who was also God) was crucified but resurrected after three days and, although presently residing in heaven, will one day return, raising the dead and pronouncing on all an eternal sentence of either bliss or fire. Baptism is deemed essential for entry to heaven. These are all empirical statements about reality: they are either true or false, even if some are hard to investigate.
These claims, of course, absolutely conflict with those of other faiths. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Muslims believe that those who do so will spend eternity in hell. Doesn’t choosing among such faiths require a way to evaluate whether this dogma is true?
Still, how do we know whether those who recite things like the Nicene Creed take its words literally? Look at the polls, many of which show that such literalism is widespread. The most recent survey of Americans, a Harris poll of representative citizens taken in 2013, shows a surprisingly large number of people who accept supernatural claims. Besides the 54 percent who are “absolutely certain there is a God” (an additional 14 percent are “somewhat certain”), beliefs in things like the divinity of Jesus, miracles, the existence of heaven, hell, Satan, angels, and the survival of the soul after death are all above 56 percent. In contrast, only 47 percent believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution (we scientists prefer to use “accept” rather than “believe” when we speak of scientific theories). Further, 39 percent of Americans conceive of God as male, but only 1 percent as female (38 percent see God as “neither”), supporting the idea that if people see God as a bodiless person, it often has genitalia. As for the veracity of scripture, 33 percent accept the Old Testament as being “completely the Word of God,” while 31 percent gave the same answer for the New Testament. Remember, these statistics are from a sample of all Americans, not just believers. Scriptural literalism is certainly widespread in the United States—in fact, depending on the claim, it’s often a majority view.
Readers from the United Kingdom are undoubtedly thinking, “Well, that’s the hyperreligious United States. We’re not nearly that pious.” And that’s true, but Britain still shows a surprisingly high level of religious literalism. In 2011, Julian Baggini, an atheist philosopher who was nevertheless sympathetic to religion, grew tired of the claims of “strident” atheists, who, he said, wrongly saw Christianity as depending heavily on facts. To get data
on the content of religious belief, Baggini surveyed nearly eight hundred churchgoing Christians in an online poll in the Guardian. Now, this is hardly the kind of rigorous “scientific” poll conducted by Harris or Gallup, and the results could have been biased by a greater willingness of more religious people to respond. Nevertheless, Baggini was astonished at the literalism of those who answered. Asked why they went to church, for instance, 66 percent responded that they did so “to worship God,” while only 20 percent went for the “feeling of community” (so much for claims that the social aspects of religion far outweigh its dogma!). There was also widespread agreement that the stories in Genesis, such as Adam and Eve, really happened (29 percent), that Jesus performed miracles such as that of the loaves and fishes (76 percent), that Jesus’s death on the cross was necessary for forgiveness of human sin (75 percent), that Jesus was bodily resurrected (81 percent), and that eternal life required accepting Jesus as lord and savior (44 percent). Chastened, Baggini retracted his previous views:
So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. . . . This is, I think, a firm riposte to those who dismiss atheists, especially the “new” variety, as being fixated on the literal beliefs associated with religion rather than ethos or practice. It suggests that they are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs.
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 8
