Soon after I finished my review of Thomas Dixon’s book on Science and Religion, Denis Alexander published his very odd “white paper” on Adam and Eve on the Biologos web site. After I commented on that, I decided to visit The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, of which Alexander is the Director. There I came upon the Faraday Papers, of which the one by Alister McGrath I am commenting on now. The paper is called “Has Science Killed God?”, but it is really about the nature of faith, and McGrath clearly thinks it is a slam-dunk demolition of Richard Dawkins. Let’s see.
Alister McGrath keeps telling us that he started out as an atheist and ended up believing in God. I think that he believes that this gives him some street cred, but the truth is that his so-called “atheism” was just a little bit of adolescent “acting out”, and shouldn’t be taken with any seriousness. He had scarcely set foot in Oxford when he began confessing his faith quite wantonly. Clearly, the transition from the troubled streets of Northern Ireland to the dreaming spires of Oxford brought about, not so much a change in belief, but a change in location and environment. It must have seemed easier to believe in the midst of Oxford’s hallowed sanctuaries, than in the troubled homeland from which he came. Yet he never fails to remind us that he was once an atheist just like me.
But with me it was very different. I found it very hard not to believe. In fact, for years I wanted not to believe, and played around the edges of non-belief, but I always came back, unfailingly, to something close to belief. I suppose I never did find out what it was like truly to believe, and sometimes I wonder how people know that they do. For the only thing the believer has to go on are the convictions of others. Sometimes those others will speak about experiences that they think help to give their beliefs content, shape and substance, but like all experiences, they are private and inaccessible — which is why I’ve always wondered why people who do research on religious experience trust that the nuns they have chosen to study with fMRI scans are really studying religious experience. What if it’s only some sort of sublimated sexuality that they’re really studying? Would they be able to tell the difference?
My brother believes — and because of that he’s only remotely fraternal — that he is the reincarnated twin brother of Jesus. He really believes this. He also believes, and says quite confidently, that he can speak to those who have died. It’s quotidian experience for him. “I can do that,” he says without apparent embarrassment or reservation, to the point where we have become completely alienated from each other. His world has very different furniture from mine — and perhaps from most.
As Susan Blackmore says, it’s not immediately obvious what’s real, what is a creation of the imagination, and what is “out there”, nailed down and shared with others (see her Dying to Live, chapter 7). And people whose experience is more labile have more difficulty in accepting that the world has the kinds of limits that, for most of us, it does. This especially applies to people who have had experiences, like Near Death Experiences, that seem more real than real. They will be tempted, at least, to draw the boundaries between the real and the imagined differently to the rest of us.
Now, we come to faith. Dawkins, complains McGrath, has a very strange notion of faith. In The Selfish Gene Dawkins says this:
[Faith] means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of the evidence. [198]
This, however, says McGrath, “is not what Christians think,” (2) and he offers the following (by W.H. Griffith-Thomas) as typical of a long Christian tradition:
[Faith] affects the whole of man’s nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct. [3]
Well, McGrath may think that this definition shows Dawkins’ understanding of what ‘faith’ means to the religious person to be wrong, but this is precisely the kind of thing that Dawkins has in mind. In The God Delusion Dawkins tells us that
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. [308]
Apparently, McGrath would disagree, because Griffiths-Thomas begins with the claim that faith is based, first, on “conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence.” But since Griffiths-Thomas immediately goes on to refer to “confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction”, and ends with the idea that the whole is crowned by this conviction being expressed in conduct, it is clear that we are moving onto dangerous ground, because at no point, apparently, after having assessed the evidence and responded with such heartfelt conviction and confident action is there any room for reassessment of the grounds for the beliefs in question.
Notice how McGrath himself can say, without apology or restraint:
After being an atheist for some years, I discovered God when I was eighteen[!] [3]
Aside from the humour of that, does this not set alarm bells ringing? At eighteen Alister McGrath discovered God. After that, apparently, no question arose. God was as real as the Broad or the Bodleian. McGrath immediately assures us that he has “never regarded this [discovery of God] as some kind of infantile regression,” but are we really ressured?
The point here is the completely infantile level at which this discussion is being carried out. He discovered God. How does one do this? Recall Griffiths-Thomas’ claim that faith begins “with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence.” This is a large claim that McGrath is making. He is saying that, on his arrival in Oxford, he suddenly found evidence adequate enough to say that he had discovered God. Here he is, on the threshold of his post-secondary education, and before it is scarcely begun, he has already come to the conclusion!
No wonder Dawkins was so concerned about faith! McGrath spends most of the rest of his essay on the idea of memes and mind viruses, and we can readily ignore all that, because the real problem starts right at the beginning. McGrath had no sooner arrived in Oxford than he was assailed by a very powerful mind virus. This is evident. He had had no time to assemble the evidence necessary to satisfy Griffiths-Thomas’ first requirement, but it was already established in his mind! And through a scientific education the virus has so successfully colonised his mind that he ends up writing trivial nonsense like this Faraday Paper # 9.
McGrath errs, by the way. He takes memes and viruses as the same thing. Memes are the fragments of information that are passed from mind to mind. Many are not convinced that memetics has an adequate foundation, and they may be right. Though I will use the language of memes because it is convenient, nothing hangs on this use. The point is that memes and viruses are different. Some memes are only tools for helping us come to reasoned conclusions, and if they fail to lead us to rationally acceptable conclusions they are simply discarded. But some memes, according to Dawkins’ very early trial balloon in The Selfish Gene, where he first floated the idea that ideas may be like genes, are very different. While they can be passed from mind to mind, like all memes, they have hooks in them, whereby they attach themselves to the mind whatever the evidence.
For my purposes, the precise details of the theory of memes is unimportant. The important point is that some ideas have a kind of magnetic force which helps them to survive despite the fact that they are multiply challenged and even, one might fairly think, defeated. The memes of religious faith seem to be in that hallowed company. And perhaps, for all that, Griffiths-Thomas put his finger on the reason why. Religious beliefs are based, so the believer thinks, on good evidence, and then they are taken up into a composite in which the heart and the emotions play their part, transforming them from mere hypotheses — that might be overturned on further evidence — to convictions which issue in conduct, which is, of its very nature, confirming.
Too little attention is paid to the last stage of faith. It is said that in training a child soldier, the most important thing to achieve is to get the child to kill. Once that has happened — once the soldier is “blooded”, as they used to say — the indoctrination is almost complete. The same thing holds for religious faith. Belief is only the first stage. The emotions and the heart must also be engaged. It is one thing to sit in a congegation and think that, perhaps, the preacher has it right; it is quite another thing to make the choice to come up front and be counted with those who have answered the call. That is the crucial stage, when all the questions die away, and belief is just a small part of the faith that simply enfolds the faithful like a blanket. So, McGrath is right. Faith is more than just belief in the teeth of the evidence. It is belief which has achieved the status of being its own evidence. And thus it becomes the trust which Dawkins speaks about in his “definition” of faith, which holds fast, though the heavens fall.
I would be interested to know what the nature of the “adequate evidence” was to convince Alister McGrath of the existence of God at 18. I notice he does not share it in this paper.
“The point here is the completely infantile level at which this discussion is being carried out.”
I know. It’s the same with John Haught. The babyishness of it strains credulity, and not seldom. Yet he’s a theologian at a reputable university!
Going back to William James, it’s well known that ‘religious’ experiences are indistinguishable from those induced by psychotropic drugs or other means.
Rational thought, and science, requires one to surmount the huge, counter-intuitive obstacle of discounting those subjective internal experiences in favor of replicable, objective data. e.g. all your senses tell you the sun rises and travels across the sky, even though the data says otherwise.
It’s difficult for people to admit they’re wrong, and the ‘faith’ of supernatural religions is a license to not have to. McGrath’s “evidence” will be the notorious “other ways of knowing”, i.e. his feeling about it.
“Faith is more than just belief in the teeth of the evidence. It is belief which has achieved the status of being its own evidence.”
Beautifully said. How many times I’ve wanted to express that so clearly…
Reminds me of the time I leant my copy of R E Friedman’s ‘Who Wrote The Bible?’ to my dad, who was a conservative Christian preacher. He had attended seminary in the 20′s and early 30′s, when ‘higher biblical criticism’ was in vogue. When he gave it back, I asked him how he liked it. He admitted that Friedman had covered the research and the scholarly critiques very thoroughly, and he agreed that it seemed likely that Ezra most likely had redacted the extant sources in compiling the Jewish bible. ‘But’, he added: ‘I cannot believe that Moses did not write the first five books.’ ‘How did Moses write the last bits in Deuteronomy, that cover time after he was dead?’ I asked dad. He thought a bit, then said: ‘God must have told him what to put down.’ I just let the whole thing go at that point. That’s the sort of faith McGrath is promoting.
McGrath:
He no doubt expects his readers to have some broad familiarity with the apologetic literature, and this provides some clue to the sustenance of faith among the educated. Dawkins says there is no good reason for me to believe. But there are good reasons; I know because I’ve read them.
I think I can understand how someone who grew up with belief could find it difficult to relinquish (though it seems that empathy would demand it), but I can’t figure out how one who has not believed finds it logical as an adult. Francis Collins is another who claims this. It can only be that it somehow feels good to have that conviction, and the irrationality (Tell me again why God had to kill himself so that he wouldn’t have to punish me?) can just be ignored.
http://biologos.org/blog/one-world-science-and-christianity-in-respectful-dialogue-part-i/
Loren Wilkinson takes Eric to task for the usual “if it is not science then it must be religion” nonsense, that there really is religious knowledge (never explained), and only religion gives meaning to the universe. He wants us to believe religious authority is equivalent to scientific authority and accepting authority doesn’t require experience. I think like McGrath, he is very confused about the differences in accepting religious and scientific authority.
Seconded. Very well-said.
Really enjoy reading your thoughts on faith and I identify with a lot of what you say here. I’ve had similar thoughts to you about faith and memes; lines of thinking begun after reading Dennet’s Breaking the Spell. From my experience of extricating my mind from faith during my 20s, what you’re saying about how faith tends to form and take its grip is interesting stuff.
Re: McGrath’s ordering of its different parts, i.e.
evidence –> emotion –> will
For me it was built up from childhood so those three were interwoven over several years. Emotion and will were foundations from the start, with evidence slipped in through small steps, and only ever in support of the claims made by our religion which, to my emerging mind, were in conflict with the world I was seeing and learning about from other sources.
If an ordering must be given, emotion –> evidence –> will is probably a more accurate cycle.
Looking back I’m inclined to think of faith as a special kind of “reason being a slave to passion”, and in a naive way. Adulthood and some disappointments were a trigger for getting out of the Sunday-to-Sunday faith cycle for me. But university did the real damage. It’s difficult to come away from prolonged exposure to the quality of secular evidence on things like psychology, society and evolution and still retain anything like a strong or robust faith. It destroys too many foundations, i.e. the inherent cruelty of nature and the (now) blindingly obvious fact that our morals and desires are culturally and economically shaped, not ordained by some almighty cosmic father.
It’s just too difficult simultaneously hold to the faith while really trying to care about truth and intellectual honesty on questions of origins, morality and death etc. Religious and secular explanations differ so dramatically in terms of evidence and objectivity, I think for a lot of people in that situation it demands some tough choices on which sources to trust.
What you say about you brother is interesting too. The stand off between my family and I is still young. Mostly we’ve learned how to get along by avoiding a whole range of topics of conversation and it seems like the point of trying to persuade each other had ended. Which is good in some ways as that was emotionally draining. But the slow process of alienation appears to be underway and it’s difficult to stop that. This for me is the divisive nature of faith. It can in such circumstances prevent family from properly relating to each other.
I question if W.H. Griffith-Thomas has accurately captured the onset of faith.
I suspect that there is some unconscious emotion/desire to believe and then the conscious mind retrospectively generates an explanation for the feeling. Because this conscious thought is visible it ‘appears’ the prime cause but is actually the second step.
Arguably if you are already inclined to believe, almost any evidence will be ‘adequate’. If you are already inclined to believe, then the appearance of design in the natural could be sufficient. Or a frozen waterfall, or a lucky escape from death, etc.
Once you are inclined to believe and your conscious mind has confabulated some ‘adequate’ evidence, other emotions will strengthen the conviction and inoculate against contrary evidence.
In which case ‘faith’ is the result of an emotional cascade, just like the beliefs of other conspiracy theories.
Thank you Michael. I took your note, went over to Biologos, and, as you know, commented on Wilkinson’s piece. It is, I am afraid, all the usual suspects. Religion really must deal with the elephant in the room — it starts with an ‘E’!
DiscoveredJoys, this rings true:
I think there is no doubt about it, and that is a nice pithy way of saying it. Faith as conspiracy theory. Good thought.
I really appreciate the articles on your website I only discovered it by way of Jerry Coyne. I was a Christian from my teenage years until my late 50′s when a spiritual crisis caused me to re-examining the reasons I gave in support my faith. As I followed where the questions led me I realised that the evidence I thought existed was at best tenuous if not completely absent. In my reading I came across several books by Alistair McGrath, and in “Dawkins God, Genes, Memes, and the meaning of Life” he quotes those words of Griffith-Thomas regarding faith that you refer to in your piece. However McGrath fails to follow through with what he or G-T consider as ‘adequate evidence’. Richard Dawkins had a discussion with McGrath which was filmed for his documentary “Root of all Evil” in which he invites McGrath to explain/expand on the evidence for faith. McGrath’s reply was something like ‘ its difficult to have an evidence based reason, we confirm that there is a God by stepping out in faith’ What a circular arguement. The unedited interview is still available on Youtube.
Eric,
You’re welcome. I thought it would interest you. It would appear that if they want religious knowledge to be of the same form as art knowledge, then they have given up on any universal religious truth. I think you could stretch the art analogy pretty far because what you get with art is that everyone’s take is different and there is no right answer.
Somehow this seemed appropriate:
JAZZ is my religion and it alone do I dig the jazz clubs are
my houses of worship and sometimes the concert halls but some
holy places are too commercial (like churches) so I don’t dig the
sermons there I buy jazz sides to dig in solitude Like man/Harlem,
Harlem U.S.A. used used to be a jazz heaven where most of the jazz
sermons were preached but now-a-days due to chacha cha and
rotten rock ‘n’roll alotta good jazzmen have sold their souls but jazz
is still my religion because I know and feel the message it brings
like reverend Dizzy Gillespie/Brother Bird and Basie/Uncle
Armstrong/Minister Monk/ Deacon Miles Davis/ Rector Rollins/
Priest Ellington/ His funkness Horace Silver/ and the great Pope
John, John COLTRANE and Cecil Taylor They Preach A Sermon
That Always Swings!! Yeah jazz is MY religion Jazz is my story
it was my mom’s and pop’s and their moms and pops from the
days of Buddy Bolton who swung them blues to Charlie Parker and
Ornette Coleman’s extension of Bebop Yeah jazz is my religion
Jazz is unique musical religion the sermons spread happiness and
joy to be able to dig and swing inside what a wonderful feeling
jazz is/YEAH BOY!! JAZZ is my religion and dig this: it wasn’t for
us to choose because they created it for a damn good reason as a
weapon to battle our blues!JAZZ is my religion and its
international all the way JAZZ is just an Afroamerican music
and like us its here to stay So remember that JAZZ is my religion
but it can be your religion too but JAZZ is a truth that is always
black and blue Hallelujah I love JAZZ so Hallelujah I dig JAZZ so
Yeah JAZZ IS MY RELIGION
Ted Joans
Should’t the last word in the Griffith-Thomas quote be “conduct” rather than “confidence”? And “eemtions”?
Thank you, yes. Corrected.
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