Religion and Atheism

Beyond the Divide

Anthony Carroll, Richard Norman, Anthony Carroll, Richard Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138891890
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315521473
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Arguments between those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not have been at fever pitch. They have also reached an impasse, with equally entrenched views held by believer and atheist - and even agnostic - alike. This collection is one of the first books to move beyond this deadlock. Specially commissioned chapters address major areas that cut across the debate between the two sides: the origin of knowledge, objectivity and meaning; moral values and the nature of the human person and the good life; and the challenge of how to promote honest and fruitful dialogue in the light of the wide diversity of beliefs, religious and otherwise. Under these broad headings leading figures in the field examine and reflect upon:

• Secular and religious humanism
• The idea of the sacred
• The vexed issue of science in both religious and secular accounts of knowledge
• Spirituality for the godless
• Non-western perspectives on the atheism/theism debate.

A key feature of the collection is a dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide will interest anyone who is concerned about the clash between the religious and the secular and how to move beyond it, as well as students of ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies.

Part I
A dialogue

In a collection about dialogue between religious believers and non-believers, it is appropriate that the first contribution should be an actual dialogue. This conversation between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams was recorded at the Master’s Lodge, Magdalene College, Cambridge, on 17 July 2015. A previous conversation between them had been hosted by the Faraday Institute in the University of Cambridge in December 2013, and is referred to by them in the course of the present dialogue.

1
Science, stories and the self

A conversation between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams

Raymond

Tallis RT

Rowan, it’s a really great privilege to talk to you today. What I’d like to do is to explore our different positions, particularly focusing on the unresolved business, as it were, that we both have. Perhaps I could state where I think I’m coming from as opposed to where you’re coming from, in a very simplifying way. I imagine you’re coming from somewhere definite – from a definite position in relation to your beliefs. I have the fantasy that I’m coming from nowhere, as it were, that I’m not committed to any set of beliefs. I am an atheist, and therefore reject religious explanations of the kinds of creatures we are, of how we should live, where we’re going to and so on. But, unlike most atheists, I am equally opposed to a naturalistic account of what we are, particularly a scientistic naturalism that says we are essentially explicable as biological organisms. I find naturalism much more threatening, actually, than supernatural beliefs. So that’s why I imagine I’m coming from nowhere, but of course what it means is that I’m bringing to the party all sorts of unacknowledged prejudices and assumptions that I am sure, and I hope, you will expose and explore.

Rowan

Williams

RW	Well thank you. I’ve been looking forward to this very much indeed as a huge admirer of what you’ve written, and I guess where I’m coming from is certainly a commitment to the view that the universe exists because of some prior or independent agency which can, in certain circumstances, be called intelligent, which is God, and that that’s the context within which I make sense of what goes on in my life and the life of the universe. And I guess that the challenge for me is how you articulate that without slipping in by the back door what a great deal of traditional philosophy and theology tries to keep out, which is the idea that God is another thing in a list, another agent among agents, and can be drawn on as a sort of rabbit out of a hat to solve problems. And I guess that one of the things we may again find common ground with is that solving problems is not the most important thing or the only thing that humans do. It is an important thing, it is a significant thing, but there is something about – what shall I call it? – redrawing the boundaries of our map, exploring the implications, the depths, the resonances, of where we are, which doesn’t necessarily solve problems, it won’t always get you through exams, but it is one of the things we do as human beings.
RT	I couldn’t agree with you more. It seems to me that philosophy is often criticised because its clear-up rate of problems is so low that if it were a police force it would be in special measures. And of course philosophy isn’t about clearing up problems. It is about creating question-and-answer pairs. It’s about waking up, and when you wake up, you haven’t solved the problem, but you’ve become something rather different. And I think in many ways for you religion is a form of wakefulness, and for me the pursuit of philosophy and even scientific thought to some extent is a mode of wakefulness. One of the things that, I feel, you don’t think separates us is a set of very clearly defined beliefs which can be written down on a piece of paper, and amongst them the idea of God. The reason I’m an atheist and not an agnostic is that any account of the idea of God, to me, always seems to entrain contradictions; and if, as a thinker, I allow self-contradictory notions such as ‘the square circle’ into the list of things that I believe in or allow, then clearly I may as well give up on thought. But you have already anticipated one anxiety, which is, you set aside the notion of God as a ‘thing’ within the universe, as something offset from the universe, and you set aside the notion of God as an agent, a distinct agent. But that does seem to drain God of quite a lot of job description, and ‘presence description’ as it were, and I just wonder whether we can talk about that a bit more.
RW	Yes, sure. A couple of things. One is about contradiction. I think anybody who has got in their repertoire a concept like ‘a square circle’ can’t be serious, because there are things you can’t think, and that’s one of them. There are, in most of our repertoires, though, areas where there are tensions, where there are unresolved relationships – freedom and determinism, that sort of area – which look very much like contradictions on the surface, but when you push them you see, ‘oh, there’s some give there, and some give there, but I don’t quite see how it all comes together.’ If I thought that belief in God, or indeed belief in the divinity of Christ, was a ‘square circle’ issue I would, I think, properly need to be caught up on my consistency. But I don’t think they’re that kind of thing. They are much more issues about your being prodded to say, ‘well I think you got the definition of that end right, or that end right, but isn’t there a lot more work to be done than that?’ So, as for agency, I think the sort of thing you find in Augustine or Aquinas or, indeed, more modern writers on this, is not that agency is denied to God, but that whatever anyone says about God’s act it can’t just be one item in a list of actions, one point in a series, even if the first point in a series. And right at the heart of the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas, you have actually got some quite surprising clarity about that. To say that God causes things is not to say that God is the first item in a series of events in a causal chain, but that there is a causal chain because there is an active God. So that Aquinas is quite agnostic about whether the world has a beginning in time or not.
RT	That is extraordinarily interesting and I wish that some scientists would share that agnosticism. When science dates the beginning of the universe to 13.8 billion years ago, one feels that actually, first of all, it appears to be at odds with the Einsteinian notion that there is no global time and, secondly, it raises all sorts of questions about the notion of what was happening before the big bang and why you deny the notion of a ‘before’. Stephen Hawking has famously said that asking what happened before the big bang is like asking what’s north of the North Pole. Well, actually, that is not a valid analogy, simply because we’re talking about a certain direction which can actually go beyond the North Pole indefinitely.
RW	Yes, I agree. I think there is a huge amount of unexamined mythology in what cosmologists come up with, the narrative structure they use. Because we love stories, we want to know when it all started, in a galaxy long ago, and we say, yes, that was the beginning, if we were there to watch it that’s when it would have started, the curtain would go up. And you want to think, at every clause’s end, really, wait a minute, wait a minute, the mythological and anthropomorphic assumptions are flooding in all through that. Again, it’s an issue which is already being discussed in the early church, and St Augustine mentions the joke that was going around in the fifth century about this. The answer to the question, ‘what was God doing before the universe was created?’, was that he was creating the hell for people who asked silly questions!
RT	Yes. Richard Dawkins famously says that astrophysicists have now taken away the theologians’ trump card, that they have an answer to why there is something rather than nothing, why there is a world rather than nothing. And it seems to me they haven’t. It’s very easy to be dazzled by all the precision that surrounds cosmology, ten to the minus this, and ten to the minus that, but actually, in their starter pack, it seems to me they have something just as difficult as the idea of God as first cause.
RW	The idea of an absolute beginning.
RT	Absolutely. They have the idea of an absolute beginning. They also have the idea of a vacuum that has a built-in restlessness, they have the laws of nature given free – thank you very much indeed – you take those off the shelf. They have all sorts of things that are delivered. So they don’t actually begin with a genuine nothing.
RW	No, exactly. The table is littered with Get Out of Jail Free cards, I think. I don’t want to be critical of cosmologists – God (or something!) forbid – because it seems the elegance, the precision, the depth of all this is just extraordinary. It’s a great human achievement, and as with so many areas in the scientific enterprise it’s not that I want to make little of it, not remotely, but I do want to say, ‘remember what you are doing, what you are assuming.’ And re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• PART I A dialogue
• PART II Knowledge and language
• PART III Ethics and values
• PART IV Diversity and dialogue
• PART V Conclusion
• Index