This is going to be quite a short post, since I have to go see the doctor this morning. Before reading further, first listen to Giles Fraser’s “Thinking out loud” from the Guardian for this morning, 27th February 2012.
Giles Fraser on the Dawkins – Williams “debate”
Now that you’ve done so, you can see, I hope, how hopelessly adrift Fraser is. It’s not because he says something outré, or anything like that. The problem is that he didn’t listen to the so-called “debate”, which was about as far as you get from what he calls a boxing match style set-piece debate, and the misperception that the truth lies in some sort of ”intellectual muscularity”. Even more difficult, Fraser suggests, is the idea that faith and unfaith exist in some sort of binary opposition, for he cannot see how faith can exist without doubt.
Now, there’s some good sense here, because, for a thoughtful faith, at any rate, is always coupled with doubt, the kind of doubt, for example, expressed by Job, or even, as Fraser suggests, by Jesus on the cross. This sense of having been betrayed, that at least one of the Passion narratives in the gospel expresses in the famous words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” shows, suggests, as Fraser claims, that doubt not only is the constant accompaniment of faith, but is an integral part of it.
So far so good. I, for one, have never doubted this. Faith and doubt are not opponents in religious faith — or at least Christian faith — but correlative and inseparable parts of the “faith experience.” There is always an element of doubt, and it simply won’t go away, no matter how hard you try. You can close your eyes and say over and over again, “I believe,” and the residuum of doubt will always remain. It’s a part, as Julian Baggini might say, of the tone of religious utterances and religious discourse. “I believe, help my unbelief,” as the father of a demon possessed son in the gospel of Mark says to Jesus. It is the response, however, of someone who was not quite sure, and this prompts Jesus to respond with a criticism of the man’s faith. So the man, paying proper obeisance to Jesus, pleads with him to help his unbelief, if belief is what is required for his son’s recovery.
Fraser doesn’t mention this. And it should also be recalled that the words from the cross, from Psalm 22, expressing the kind of doubt that Fraser wants to couple with belief, goes on with these confident words:
Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises.In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.
Again, the emphasis is placed on an appeal for belief. We are weak, unable to keep our beliefs sure and strong. This grace, to believe with all one’s heart, is a gift of grace. But this is something that Fraser ignores.
Yes, I agree, in every “act” of faith, there is an admixture of doubt. It is natural, since, when appeal is being made for faith, one is usually, like Jesus on the cross, or Job on his ash-heap, in a situation which makes faith almost impossible to bear, it after all seeming to have been betrayed. But the doubt here is expressed in the context of a renewed expression of faith, which, by the grace of God, we are to suppose, will be purified and indeed vindicated. No one need question this dimension of religious faith, and still oppose the desire to be more certain, the desire to be given, indeed, the grace of certainty that will subvert the natural unbelief that the religious believer must feel in the face of all the contrary evidence that his senses and goodsense everyday supplies. Like Thomas, who saw and believed, Jesus calls those fortunate who have not seen and yet believed. This story is addressed to doubters in the flock, who are given an example of believing doubt, and are being told, you are blessed if, not seeing, you still believe. The story of the doubting Thomas is an invidious example, designed precisely for people who doubt and are called upon to believe more firmly, without any evidence.
That is the context of the believing and doubt that Fraser sees as lying at the heart of faith, though he leaves the context out. And no doubt there are elements of doubt in faith, so that they are nested together. But this still doesn’t resolve the binary opposition between faith and doubt, for doubt is expressed in faith precisely to ask for grace to believe without this doubt. Indeed, as I have said before, I have a book by an Old Testament scholar entitled, The Faith to Doubt. It’s stored away on a shelf in the garage at the moment, but it was important to me as my own sense of the inadequacy of faith was in the process of breaking down, a process which took several years, until the doubt that had once nestled so comfortably with faith began to supersede it, and replace it with a doubt that overthrew faith.
But to return for a moment to the “debate” between Dawkins and Williams. As I said, Fraser not having listened to the “debate” could scarcely know that it was not at all like a boxing match, but much more like a conversation between two people who regarded each other with respect. There was no pyrotechnic rhetoric, mostly just a quiet reflection on the questions that were being discussed, mutually respectful, and with scarcely an intellectual muscle to be seen in evidence for the whole discussion. Fraser didn’t listen, because he had already decided what it would be like; and it wasn’t in the least like that. There were disagreements, but the disagreements were glossed over as they moved on from one topic to the next. It did seem to me that when the archbishop introduced his theology, it always seemed in the nature of a non sequitur, for there was nowhere that the discussion could go, once the word ‘god’ had been introduced in any sort of robust sense. As the philosopher Richard Rorty said, God is a conversation stopper, and so it was in this context. But, so long as God was left out, the discussion went on in a very reasonable context of point-counterpoint.
What’s the problem? The problem is simply that Fraser is not being completely open about the role of doubt in faith. Certainly, as he says, there is always an admixture of doubt in religious faith. How could there not be? We are, after all, dealing with things that we can never see, and never be confident that we know or experience. There is enough doubt, even at a fairly rudimentary level of faith nowadays, to make doubt an essential adjunct to faith. We need not question this. However, this is a very different kind of doubt from the doubt of the scientist, who addresses his or her doubts to the world, and prods and pokes the world until an answer to the question, until a clear answer yes or no is given. And where the answer is, “I’m not quite sure,” then judgement is suspended until there is a greater degree of certainty. When Darwin left the Beagle after five years, he had an idea that the natural world was much more complex than he had had first thought it to be, but he wasn’t quite sure in what that complexity consisted. It took him several years to find out, test, and then express with great confidence, his belief that life had evolved through natural selection. This process of doubt and testing is entirely different to the role that doubt plays in the context of religious faith, which is always trying to overcome doubt, but not by the means of testing and verifying, but by means of stilling the doubts within instead, so that one can express faith unreservedly and with reverence and devotion.
So the binary opposition between belief and unbelief remains, notwithstanding the role that doubt plays in faith, and it disingenuous, I think, to neglect this striking difference between the two kinds of epistemic approach to the question of believing. And the reason it is disingenuous is because the religious beliefs that Fraser is talking about, however much doubt may be admixed, have real world consequences for real people, as I suggested in a recent post. If Tom Collins, the new cardinal, has any doubt about the “ultimate” issue of pro-life, he’s not letting on, and that belief of his and the pope and the rest of the official Roman Catholic Church has dire consequences for a lot of people, for women who will die because they are refused an abortion, for young girls and boys, hormone driven, who, without intending the consequence, end up with a baby on the way before they are out of their own childhood, and no remedy in sight, because the church has made it impossible to terminate the pregnancy so that they can get on with their lives. Tom Collins might say that playing with sex is playing with fire, but that’s only true where playing with sex and getting pregnant is not permitted the resolution of abortion, but instead holds the young woman, barely an adult, if that, to ransom for her choice to respond passionately, if thoughtlessly, to a situation when hormones just cried out to be expressed. It even applies when the woman has no choice, like the 9-year-old in Brazil. Tom Collins would no doubt prescribe with undue certainty what that young woman should do, and even if it would wreck her chances of the future she had planned, he’d bind her to that decision, because of the certainty that he feels. And if Fraser doesn’t like this pugilistic context, where belief and unbelief very often meet, then he’s going to have to understand how religious faith gets expressed in such a way that it doesn’t hold people to ransom in this way — and I doubt very much that he can do it.
Fraser’s failure is a failure to consider the context of doubt, and how doubt functions in different contexts, and when doubt figures in the context of faith, it is very different to the situation where it is being expressed in the context of science, where it is looking for an empirical resolution. The faith to doubt is one in which faith does everything it can, without the evidence, to subvert doubt in favour of faith, for doubt is, in this context, a failure to believe, and thus a sign of the imperfection of the human soul. It is in many respects, a moral failure, and the effort of faith is to overcome that doubt so that the believer can have joy and peace in believing. Fraser’s contextualising doubt in faith, as though doubt in that context is just like doubt in scientific contexts, is simply a category mistake. Doubt is, as Fraser says, integral to faith, but it is integral to faith because we are fallen creatures, not because that is the nature of human cognition, that demands evidence for an answer. No, for faith, blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.
I never really understood Jesus’ doubt on the cross. Isn’t he supposed to be god, or at least part of the godhead? How could he forsake himself?
Quite. Faith puts you back to sleep. Doubt wakes you up. Much better to encourage doubt as it aids discovery, while faith just bolsters certainty. I’m sure CERN would have had a quieter time if they had just had ‘faith’ that neutrinos go faster than light instead of discovering a dry joint in some wiring, (which I hope your doc doesn’t find in you).
The church promoting doubt? Now that would be something!
The audio link didn’t work for me. If anyone has the same try: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/series/thinking-aloud-with-giles-fraser?INTCMP=SRCH
I liked the poem at the end: though I’m not sure if Giles has quite taken its message to heart.
From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow in the spring.
The place where we are right is hard
and trampled like the yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole,a plough, and a whisper will be heard
in the place where a ruined house once stood
Yes indeed, I go along with the idea of difference between philosophical or scientific belief and religious belief. Religious belief or faith is a kind of trust in others.
And I think there may be yet another type of belief, which actually is a trust in oneself, rather than others, and this self-belief would be those wonderful authentic values that people seem reluctant to discuss.
Giles Fraser does not sound like a wishy washy doubting Thomas type of priest, but someone with enormous self-belief or conviction. It was the self-belief brimming with confidence that dislodged Richard Dawkins, making him appear the winner and Dawkins the loser.
Hence it’s rather ironic and interesting that Fraser wants to dissociate himself from the very confrontational victory that gained him such recognition a few weeks ago.
I think more authenticity is a good thing, and playing within the hands of the media circus almost always means losing your authentic voice, especially when it is misunderstood and misinterpreted by others.
I’m reminded of Bagginni’s ‘tone-deaf atheists’, except that in this case we have a ‘tone-deaf believer’. Giles Fraser, who I think is well intentioned, muses on personal certainty and uncertainty yet fails to ‘hear’ anything that might suggest that there may be no necessity for god.
I’m struck by how easy it is to just let the concept of doubt-with-faith slide.
Why should this be so? If there is a god, and that god wants a “personal relationship” with us, and the way to getting that personal relationship with a person is to perform Task X, then why hasn’t Task X been performed already? And I’m not talking about the fabulous (as in fable) tasks performed by Jesus – I’m talking about whatever Task X Yahweh could perform to convince me living here and now that it’s a real entity.
Doubt on the behalf of believers is yet more proof that their god concept is untenable. Because it acknowledges that at least one of the omni properties of their god is nonfunctioning. A existent god with omni properties would not leave room for doubt. Because it can and would do whatever that individual believer required to make its existence as much a point of certainty as the existence of my coffee cup. It would be part of its very nature to do so — and in fact would not be able to not do so.
Assuming, of course, we’re talking about an omni-god like Yahweh. With Karen Armstrong’s god-who-doesn’t-give-a-crap, this argument doesn’t hold as much water.
Kevin, just for clarification, I think the kind of doubt that is involved in faith is the kind of doubt that is involved in a personal relationship, for that is how faith is, in general, understood, at least in Christianity. And so there can be that sense of the unknown in relationship… the kind of thing that teens do with daisies — ‘she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not,’ and so on. That sense of doubt is intrinsic to faith, I think, and on the other side is the question whether, in fact, one does actually believe, and whether it is possible for someone so lowly to believe, and so on, recursively.
For religious faith includes, as an essential part, a recognition not only of dependence (see Schleiermacher), but also of finitude compared to the absolute ground of all that exists. So, there is bound to be an element of doubt involved, but it is not the kind of doubt raised by those who are asking empirical questions, because, as anyone who knows people of faith will know, empirical questions about God — such as in the problem of evil — are either answered in terms of mystery, or, where that does not work, in terms of unfaith and unbelief.
So doubt is part of the “tone” (if you like) of belief, but it is never the kind of existential doubt that must end in suspension of belief. There is something in the poem that Fraser uses that makes some sense here, for it takes that element of uncertainty, whether because of finitude-infinite, sinful-perfectly good, personal relationship uncertainty, etc., to keep faith alive. It would truly die, and for a good many people it seems to be dead — that’s why they have to declare it so stridently — if there weren’t always that element of question or doubt or reservation. And that is, I think, genuinely, a vital part of what might be called a living faith, and I don’t think it helps to be unfair to people of faith who insist on this dimension of living relationship by insisting that you either simply believe or you don’t. It’s a bit more complex than that, and that’s one reason faith can be so hard to escape. Christianity makes a great deal of what is called “the dark night of the soul”, or the “dry periods” of spiritual life, that are challenges to faith, and have to be worked through patiently and, of course, with faith, with the trust that, at the end, the sense of living relationship will return. Apparently Mother Teresa experienced that kind of uncertainty and dark night for most of her life. But faith perseveres through that. Faith is sticky in that sense, and it’s very hard to let go for many people.
I understand your point, but I think it still hearkens back to the original ‘omni’ concept. My point doesn’t require existential doubt in order to be valid.
If a god is ‘omni’, then doubt about any aspect of it — such as the limits of its love for an individual, what it wants of us individually and as a species, etc. — would not be possible. By definition, doubt demonstrates a failure of one or more of the ‘omni’ properties of god. Assuming, of course, that among the attributes of this god is the desire (not need–need in and of itself is a contradiction to an ‘omni’ god) for individual humans to believe in it, interact with it, worship it, “love” it, obey its commands, etc. Setting aside religious notion of free will, an ‘omni’ god cannot allow any doubt about its intentions for us and maintain its ‘omni-ness’.
That’s why I believe that most of the ‘faithful’ don’t truly grasp the ‘omni’ properties they assign to their god. Or even the concept of ‘omni’ itself.
As I see it, there are only two solutions to the problem of doubt. 1: god isn’t ‘omni’. It’s a limited being. 2: there’s no such thing as a god.
If you choose solution 1, that takes you very far down the rabbit hole, including the questions of the limitations of god’s power. Just how ‘not omni’ is it? Though that kind of ‘not omni’ god is more consistent with the biblical accounts of Yahweh in particular, people like Albert Mohler disagree, so I’ll have to take their word for it.
Solution 2 is more parsimonious so is the preferred.
Kevin, I think this is the reason that Julian Baggini, after getting to the point of accepting that belief is central to religion, ends up talking about tone. Religion is not, when it comes right down to it, about rational discourse. Religious people should acknowledge this and get on with it. The reason they have to talk about rational things is that society today, and especially with its vast scientific reach, is simply awash with the stuff — reason, that is. And that’s been a problem all along. The Roman Catholics, who live in a vacuum somewhere, still think that Aquinas settled all this way back in what we call the middle ages — that is the ages in between the Greek Enlightenment and the European Enlightenment — but everyone who knows just a little bit of science knows that this was not a long terms solution, even though the pope still thinks in terms of Aquinas and Aristotle. He’s pretty old, but maybe he’ll grow up sometime or other. The real problem with religion is that religious people want it to sound rational and grown up, but it’s not. It’s just not. And that’s why doubt plays such an important role in religion. Fraser thinks that Dawkins simply misunderstands religion, but he doesn’t, Fraser does. He thinks religion is rational, but it’s not. And all the talk about omni this and omni that won’t answer to the problem, because those are just philosophical glosses on what is really an irrational way of looking at the world. That’s why accommodationism just can’t get off the ground, and people like Giberson and Collins and others of that genus should realise this. They would, if they didn’t think Christianity was the real truth truth, if you get my drift, but it can’t be, because that’s what Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and so many others think as well. And they call can’t be the real truth truth. Someone’s got to have it wrong, and what they’ve got wrong is that there is any rational defence of it. But, as it stands, and quite aside from issues like omni-omni-ness, if you want to be a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or whatever, you’ve got to lard belief with all sorts of doubt, because doubt is the cushion between belief and reason. It’s not that god is limited or unlimited, but simply that he/she/it doesn’t exist. We know this with almost complete certainty. If god did, then there would be something rational you could say about him/her/it, and there isn’t, try as you might. But then Julian, who is a naturalist or a rationalist and who believes in the necessity of empirical evidence, shouldn’t go on about tone, because that’s just to miss the point, and leave religion hugging its irrationality and pretending that its really really reason after all.
Agreed. My only point is that we tend to let religion get away with its irrationality — enabling it in the way family members enable a drug addict — by not calling them out on such issues as the incompatibility of doubt and omni.
We’re so used to accepting the irrationality — like dear Aunt Edna always wearing a rain hat indoors — that we don’t even see it ourselves.
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