Faith

Theo Hobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317488385
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In "Faith", the theologian Theo Hobson explores the notion of faith and the role it plays in our lives. He unpacks the concept to ask whether faith is dependent on religion or whether it is also a general secular phenomenon. In exploring this question Hobson ranges widely over theology, philosophy, politics and psychology and engages with the writings of Christian and atheist thinkers alike. The book begins by considering attitudes to faith in recent works of atheism. Hobson shows how Richard Dawkins and other writers, while attacking faith in one sense, have exhibited faith in another. The book goes on to explore the wider meaning of faith, including our faith in free-market capitalism, the part faith plays in democratic politics and the role faith has in our psychological well-being. To understand the role of faith in modernity, Hobson argues, we must attend to the specifically Christian concept of faith. Hobson then returns to the religious meaning of faith by exploring the account of faith in the Bible and charting the tension between faith and reason in Christian thought. The final chapter takes an autobiographical turn and relates how the author came to take faith seriously and to question what Christians are meant to have faith in. From the Old Testament story of Abraham to the visionary poetry of W. B. Yeats, from the polemics of Luther to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, the author presents us with a fresh and illuminating meditation on the nature of faith. In doing so, he reveals how trust and faith, the religious and secular, are utterly entwined and how the attraction of religious faith outweighs the intellectual difficulties it presents.

1. Against faith

Recently I met a man at a party and we began talking about religion. I said I was a Christian. He asked me whether I had ever experienced serious doubts, whether my faith had ever been shaken. I tried to explain that it wasn’t like that; that faith, in my experience, wasn’t normally stable; that doubt and shakiness were sort of internal to it; that it was an endless argument with its opposite. Frankly I didn’t much like the assumption behind his question: that my faith was probably something unexamined, vulnerable to a realism that I carefully shunned. Afterwards I realized how I should have replied. I should have asked him: have you ever questioned your assumption that you are a good person? He would probably have replied that he had never claimed to be a particularly good person. Well, I would have replied, I have never claimed that my faith is a stable possession.

My interlocutor had recently read Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (2006). Perhaps it had confirmed his assumption that religious faith is a flight from realism, from honesty. Of course, this book has a negative view of religious faith, but does it see any virtue in faith in a more general sense?

In what follows, I shall look at recent writings by Dawkins and three other atheists. There is a tendency for them to limit the meaning of “faith” to “religious faith”, and belief’s defiance of evidence and reason. There is almost no acknowledgement of the strange, awkward fact that the word has another meaning: trust, optimism, confidence, hope, a belief that the future will be all right, a belief in someone’s ability to fulfil his potential. These atheists might say: that’s another meaning of faith, which should be kept separate from religion. But that won’t do. The two meanings are not completely separate; their overlap should be reflected on.

Dawkins tells us that his aim is to attack “anything and everything supernatural” (ibid.: 36), including every idea of God. He presents religion as the polar opposite of the scientific method, which makes rational arguments about evidence: “The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices” (ibid.: 23). For him, it is easy to show that the God of the major religions does not exist. In early modern times, many thinkers proposed a rational sort of God, who keeps his distance from the world: “The deist God is certainly an improvement over the monster of the Bible” (ibid.: 46), but doesn’t exist either. Can a scientist really enter this famously complex territory with such confidence? Yes: “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other … God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe” (ibid.: 47).

Does atheism mean being absolutely certain that God doesn’t exist? No, says Dawkins, for complete certainty is unavailable on this matter, and the atheist shouldn’t fall into the trap of overplaying his hand. “It is in the nature of faith that one is capable … of holding a belief without adequate reason to do so … Atheists do not have faith; and reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything does not exist” (ibid.: 51). But this does not make him an agnostic: to see God’s existence as very improbable, like that of fairies, is still atheism, he says. He attacks the idea that science and religion inhabit different spheres (especially scientist Stephen Jay Gould’s claim that science and religion belong to “non-overlapping magisteria”). No, he says religion makes claims about the way the universe is, and science ought to argue against these claims.

He embarks on a long discussion of the “proofs” of God’s existence, which gives the impression that these old monkish games are central to belief in God. Then he addresses the claim that many top scientists are believers. No, almost no good scientists are believers, he says, and he quotes a colleague who is astonished to meet any at all, “because I can’t believe anyone accepts truth by revelation” (ibid.: 99).

He then asks why religion is so persistent. How has this gullibility evolved? It seems that human brains have evolved to be trusting of what they are told, and to be receptive to dualism (a belief in a mind–matter split) and to creationism. These traits, which have evolved for various reasons, allow religion its hold on us. But his big proposal is that religion is a collection of “memes” (ideas or cultural habits that work a bit like genes). One of these religion memes is as follows:

Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are. Virtuoso believers who can manage to believe something really weird, unsupported and insupportable, in the teeth of evidence and reason, are especially highly rewarded.

(Ibid.: 199)

A chapter on the Bible condemns the bad moral examples it contains, the moral madness that religious piety can involve. There’s a punchy quotation from the scientist Steven Weinberg: “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion” (ibid.: 249).

In a section on religion and terrorism, he writes that it is a mistake to call terrorists evil: “They perceive their acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith” (ibid.: 304). And the problem does not lie just with “extremist” faith: all religion promotes the likelihood of violent extremism by teaching “that unquestioned faith is a virtue” (ibid.: 306). Of course, moderates call extremism a perversion of true faith, “but how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn’t have any demonstrable standard to pervert?” The very concept of faith is a sort of poison, he maintains:

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them – given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by – to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades … Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

(Ibid.: 308)

So how does Dawkins use the word “faith”? Sometimes it is a synonym for “religion”, but more often it refers to that aspect of religion that legitimizes irrationality and demeans evidence-based knowledge. It is a sort of mechanism whereby believers override the claims of evidence in order to stick with holy teachings. To his disgust, modern society tolerates this mechanism. “If somebody announces that [something] is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to ‘respect’ it without question” (ibid.: 306). So faith seems to be a form of irrationalism that, thanks to the indulgence of society, has an aura of justification, even nobility.

Does he have a sort of faith himself? He certainly has a sort of idealism: on the first page he says he hopes that his book will free some of its readers from the bondage of religion, and he also offers us a vision of a better world: “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world without religion” (ibid.: 1). This possible world, of course, is defined by the absence of religion-related violence. In that song, Lennon explicitly links atheism with a sort of utopian idealism. Dawkins tentatively echoes this.

The rise of atheist polemics over the past few years has been a transatlantic phenomenon. Sam Harris got there a couple of years before Dawkins with The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004). His tone is grave. Religion will wipe us out, if we let it. We must move on from it, as we moved on from old errors such as alchemy. “Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence” (Harris 2004: 14). The phrase “faith-based religion” is significant: Harris defends the quest for spiritual meaning, as long it is fully compatible with reason. “We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives” (ibid.: 43). We need to develop a rational spirituality to help us cope with life. And to this end we need to reject religion in its present form: “every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable” (ibid.: 23). We have erred in tolerating this for so long: the world is in peril owing to “the concessions we have made to religious faith – to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence” (ibid.: 9); “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it” (ibid.: 48). The idea of moderate, reasonable faith is an illusion: the terrorists of 9/11 were “men of faith – perfect faith, as it turns out – and this, it must be finally acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be” (ibid.: 67).

Why is this unreason so persistent? As he has already suggested, faith is fuelled by our fear of “the terrors of this world”, especially death. “Without death, the influence of faith-based religion would be unthinkable … faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave” (ibid.: 39).

Harris has a long section on the nature of belief in which he shows far more philosophical curiosity than Dawkins. Indeed, at the risk of offending him, he shows some degree of theological curiosity. He even bothers considering the etymology of “faith” There is a passage worth quoting at length:

The Hebrew term ‘emûnâ (verb ‘mn) is alternately translated as “to have faith”, “to believe”, or “to trust”. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, retains the same meaning in the term pisteuein, and this Greek equivalent is adopted in the New Testament. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. Read in the right way, this passage seems to render faith entirely self-j ustifying: perhaps the very fact that one believes in something which has not yet come to pass (“things hoped for”) or for which one has no evidence (“things not seen”) constitutes evidence for its actuality (“assurance”). Let’s see how this works: I feel a certain, rather thrilling “conviction” that Nicole Kidman is in love with me. As we have never met, my feeling is my only evidence of her infatuation. I reason thusly: my feelings suggest that Nicole and I must have a special, even metaphysical, connection – otherwise, how could I have this feeling in the first place? I decide to set up camp outside her house to make the necessary introductions; clearly, this sort of faith is a tricky business.

Throughout this book, I am criticizing faith in its ordinary, scriptural sense – as belief in, and life orientation toward, certain historical and metaphysical propositions. The meaning of the term, both in the Bible and upon the lips of the faithful, seems to be entirely unambiguous … Religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern – specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death.

(Ibid.: 64–5)

We shall return to this passage once we’ve looked at the Bible, for it epitomizes the common habit of these atheists of narrowing the meaning of faith. A few pages further on, he approaches the essence of faith slightly differently:

Where faith really pays dividends … is in the conviction that the future will be better than the past, or at least not worse. Consider the celebrated opinion of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1413), who distilled the message of the Gospels in the memorable sentence “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The allure of most religious doctrines is nothing more sublime or inscrutable than this: things will turn out well in the end. Faith is offered as a means by which the truth of this proposition can be savored in the present and secured in the future.

(Ibid.: 69–70)

I would like to know what Harris thinks is really sublime and inscrutable. I cannot think of anything “higher” than a person in near despair determining to go on, feeling that, despite the evidence, life will be good. Anyway, this is an important insight into the nature of faith, particularly Christian faith. It is indeed all about this vision of future well-being. But does this square with his earlier claim that the essential religious motivation is fear of death? A lazy thinker would say: well, it’s all wishful thinking, whether the emphasis is on personal death-survival or some vague utopia. But there are different forms of wishful thinking, from hoping your enemy magically dies to hoping that world peace breaks out. Harris should be clearer about the nature of the wishful thinking he thinks underlies faith. To root it all in the desire for consolation in the face of personal annihilation will not do, if a key part of the motivation is the desire for some sort of cosmic utopia. These ideals might overlap but let us not pretend they are the same thing. In his epilogue he says that faith makes people “eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion, and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come” (ibid.: 223). But this sort of dualism is explicitly absent from the Julian of Norwich quote: “all manner of thing” sounds to me like a very general hope, inclusive of this world. If we are to think and speak intelligently about religion, we must attend to what religious language actually says, rather than assume we already know what it really means.

In an odd final chapter he advocates an expansion of consciousness through rational mysticism. It resembles a New Age tract gone astray. “While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it” (ibid.: 221). This new approach to spirituality would entail “the end of faith”. In the epilogue he calls faith “the devil’s masterpiece” (ibid.: 226).

Like Dawkins, Harris exhibits a certain idealism. He believes that the world can be saved from destruction if faith is knocked from its pedestal. Early on he says, “what follows is written very much in the spirit of a prayer” (ibid.: 29). He exhibits an idealism that is related to faith, in one sense of the word. At the very end of the book Harris says that without God we can “realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbours, that their happiness is inextricable from our own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish”. Fact or prayer?

A similar approach to faith is evident in God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens (2007). He begins with a couple of childhood memories, including some words from his headmaster. “‘You might not see the point of all this faith now,’ he said. ‘But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones’” (2007: 4). This immediately struck him as a dubious defence of religion, and still does. He soon returns to the issue: “As for conso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Against faith
• 2. What else is faith?
• 3. After Abraham
• 4. Faith and reason
• 5. Faith in what?
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• References
• Index