This essay began life as a letter I wrote to a Christian friend. We had known each other for some time, but somehow I hadn't appreciated the depth of her very private faith. When I at last realized how literally she took the Bible, it came as something of a shock. I am not religious at all; even so, I was astonished that I had missed something as central as this in someone I thought I had come to know so well. We had even started to become romantically involved, and although we were extremely close in many ways, we hadn't fully connected in others. Now I knew why.

As our metaphysical differences became increasingly apparent, the question of respect started to arise, for both of us, which only heightened the difficulties. It seems to me that respect is an essential ingredient in any relationship, and yet I found myself claiming (sincerely!) to love someone whose worldview I considered ridiculous. Eventually I felt my whole position on truth, belief, and religion had to be re-examined. This letter was part of my effort to understand and explain that process.

Note: I have been deeply touched by the kind words and painful stories readers have sent to me in response to this article—from various faiths and none. Thank you all.

 

As you know, I have so much wanted to grasp what it is that motivates you, that informs you, that is your philosophical and spiritual bedrock—a position that feels very different from mine. I wish I could say that I now understand your convictions; sadly I can't. I would, however, like to say something about what I think and feel, and what my recent experience has been.

You no doubt remember that strange night we spent together some months ago. You were a little anxious I think, but you kindly talked to me about Jesus and God, and Adam and Eve, and some of the technicalities of your faith. And as you patiently explained these things to me, I was lying beside you, in the dark, open-mouthed with amazement—both at your encyclopaedic knowledge of matters biblical and at your extraordinary commitment to these ideas. But I was also getting ever more angry, and sad. I felt as if you were letting me in on a terrible secret, as if you were breaking bad news. It seemed as though you were secretly committed to someone else, someone you had known intimately for a long time, and most worryingly, someone imaginary. I think I was in a kind of shock. I remember I kept saying: "I hear you, but I just don't get it. What do I need to do in order to get it?" I so much wanted to understand. And after all, if someone as smart as you gets something, then there's surely something to get. But I wasn't getting anything. I began to wonder what was wrong with me. At last you suggested I reread the Gospels, and the next day you also gave me Sheldon Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy (ASM) [1] which I read on the plane home. What a moving and tragic tale.

When I said to you that I wanted the Christian story to be true, I meant it. What a tremendous prospect that would be. As the philosopher Mark Vuletic says:

[It would be] a wonderful thing if an all-good, all-powerful god existed. . . . Who would not want to kneel down and offer such a being one's eternal service and devotion?

I agree. What a tremendous sense of enlightenment and purpose that would provide. So many questions would be answered, so many problems solved. But having read Vanauken's book, and particularly the letters to him by CS Lewis, I realize now that I also do not want the story to be true, for reasons I shall give in a moment. As Lewis says, such contradictions are not really surprising: conflicting desires are commonplace, and we routinely believe all sorts of things that turn out not to be true. But centrally, as he says, wishing for things to be true is pointless; recognizing the truth (and presumably falsity) is what matters.

When confronted with the Christian story, my usual reaction has long been one of irritation more than anything else. The whole construct—and this applies to all the religions I know anything about—seems so ridiculous, so arbitrary, and (usually) so cruel. But I have to admit to some fear too—especially the fear of loss and change. Genesis and contemporary science cannot both be right, and if I am to accept your position, it seems I must somehow abandon one of the things I hold most dear—reason—when reason seems to be the only means I have for distinguishing truth from falsity. Frankly, the prospect is terrifying. There are other disincentives too: even if I did somehow grasp "the truth" of the Christian message, I would also have to assume a tremendous responsibility—a new moral burden—something I had underestimated. Also, I don't exactly relish the idea of an omnipresent judge and witness to my every thought and deed. There is another, darker fear too: what if your story is in fact nonsense and yet I still came to believe it? This is the fear of insanity.

Even if you were to read all the books ever written on, say, golf, you would not as a result know what it is like to play the game. Indeed, you would not even be able to hit a ball. One must do other things too, like find some clubs, go to a range, and practice for hours. Likewise, I doubt that any amount of reading could, by itself, instantiate a religious faith; one surely has to do something, or at least experience something, as well. So, despite my fears, there I was, sitting in a cramped Boeing 777, with tears in my eyes as I contemplated our wretched predicament and wondered what to do. I meditated intently, looking for any place in my heart or mind that resonated at all to the story of Jesus and your God. I have made this effort a few times in my life (whenever I have met an extraordinary person who has a strong religious faith), and I have now tried again, with the Gospels in front of me, as you suggested. In the last few weeks I have also read some of the better known Christian apologists, and I have even consulted a chaplain. In short, I've put quite a bit of effort into understanding your faith, intellectually and experientially, but I have to say that as a result I'm now more distant than ever from the whole matter. I'm sorry, I can go no further with it.

In A Severe Mercy (ASM), Van has the conceit to say that he chose to believe. Could he, I wonder, also "choose" to believe that the world is flat, or that a little green monster lives on the Moon, or that drinking petrol is good for you? I don't think so. We cannot choose what to believe any more than we can choose what is true, or choose what we desire. Our beliefs (and desires) are the result of a complicated mixture of experience, emotion, reason, intuition, and goodness knows what else, and a belief that is arbitrarily "chosen" is an absurd notion. It is wishing taken a step further—into the realm of delusion.

Davy, on the other hand, had an altogether different experience. She wrote what are perhaps the most poignant lines in the book for me:

All the world fell away last night,
Leaving you, only you, and fright.

Her words struck me deeply. It seems the nature of reality was suddenly revealed to her in a new light. We might call this a moment of insight, or even grace, but I suspect it was something rather more prosaic, if every bit as disturbing: a breakdown. The bottom had just dropped out of her world and she was plunged into an existential crisis. In my own case it isn't the world that has fallen away, it is the Word—in which I can put no faith—and I find myself facing not God but nature—and in my case one of its loveliest examples, you. And I feel just as lost as Davy.

I'm sure you remember that awful moment when I said I thought you were "some kind of Christian"—a rather naïve assumption, to say the least. Sorry. In mitigation, I can only say that most people I've ever met who have claimed any kind of religious faith are either "spiritual but not religious" or else have some nebulous notion of God as a "higher power" or "force for good" or suchlike, and I can scarcely think of a single person I've ever met who takes the Bible literally, if at all. Such vague claims to spirituality might be commonplace, even a bit neurotic perhaps, but I've always thought of this sort of thing as fairly harmless too. After all, who doesn't have some strange feelings and ideas from time to time? My mistake was to assume that you were somewhere near this position. How wrong I was. Your faith is clearly of a very different kind. Jesus is your "personal saviour" (whatever that means), and you read the Bible as the actual, literal, and inerrant word of God. This floors me. You must be on fire for Him. This must be an all-consuming thing—a conviction that is the very centre of your life; "the place," as Lewis says, "from which all distances are measured." I feel so idiotic for not realizing this sooner. Sorry again.

But a belief like this must present tremendous problems too—especially for someone with your strength of mind. Now I see why you either reject science out of hand or else avoid as much of it as possible (except, presumably, for those scientific realities we simply cannot deny, or without which life would be too unpleasant). You must be plagued by difficult questions. For instance, as a parent, how would you have advised Abraham as he trudged up the mountain with his son? How should we read Psalm 137:8-9? How did hundreds of millions of animals and plants fit into Noah's 450 foot Ark? And how did they get back to their destroyed habitats after the flood receded? (And where did all that flood-water recede to? Indeed where did it come from?) Floria's penetrating questions [2] to Augustine need answering too: what if there is no afterlife for us? And what if reality turns out to be radically different in some important way from what you, or I, suppose? The list of major problems like these goes on and on, and to my mind the sheer number of contradictions, absurdities, injustices, and simple schoolboy howlers contained in the Bible are so numerous, and egregious, as to render the whole text incredible. (Many websites raise these problems. E.g.: 1 - 2 - 3 and 4)

I'm afraid I now see religious fervour—by which I mean a commitment to the rectitude of some supernatural claim despite objections that would ordinarily render it suspect—as at best a bit problematic, and at worst quite psychotic. I used to just tut and think it all nonsense, but now I see it as something rather more dangerous—and not just because of 9/11. I think religious faith is a kind of conviction born of a desperate longing—a longing we all have—for the comfort of certainty. "What men really want" said Bertrand Russell, "is not knowledge but certainty." He was right. When we believe—when we have what is known in the field of metacognition as the "feeling of knowing" (see here and here)—we get exactly that sense of certainty. And with certainty we get the (mistaken) feeling that we can control our environment and keep bad things at bay. Certainty is a kind of security—which is surely a basic human need in anyone's book. Why else do we have universities, fortune-tellers, and forecasters of all kinds, if not to make our futures a little more certain and secure? Indeed, it seems to me that we dislike uncertainty so much that a wrong answer, forced to fit, is often preferable to no answer at all—a wretched state of mind the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom calls a "miserable security". [3] The physicist Richard Feynman went further, suggesting that our tendency to believe things that are not true is a "human disease" [4]—a disease that scientists are certainly not immune from. There is even evidence to suggest that we are genetically predisposed to believe nonsense. [5] What an irony that would be: Homo Delusio.

Presumably an omnipotent God wouldn't need us. But many of us seem to need Him, or something very like Him, and it's not difficult to see why. Our lives can feel meaningless and empty without the promise of some higher, cosmic purpose—Feynman's Inspiration—and it's not obvious where this might come from in a world without gods. Then there's the misery of existential loneliness: aside from a God or spirit, nobody is ever, ever going to get inside this skin with me—how am I supposed to deal with that by myself? And of course there's death—The End. As you reminded me, it was Big Daddy (in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) who points out that we are the only animal that dies—that we alone can see death coming. And we do think about death, and what it might mean, obsessively, and the idea scares us. The thought of a godless, eternal death—complete nothingness—is almost too appalling to contemplate, so it's no surprise that the idea of a heavenly afterlife is central to most religions.  Other deep problems need answering too, such as how did the world come to be, and how should we behave in it? And to all these questions, historically at least, there have been few satisfying answers without recourse to the divine. 

Looking at the scale of these problems, I sometimes feel I might go for some kind of religious explanation to the mystery of "Life And How To Live It", maybe, but Christianity (indeed all the religions I know anything about) seems so unlikely: Prophets, prayers, Messiahs, indisputable texts full of incredible (and often contradictory) stories, brutal moral systems, and all the rest. Why so complicated? Why all the riddles? And why so concerned with the minutiae of (iron-age) life? As Feynman said, it all seems so parochial. The more I look at religion the more I see a system—a man-made, self-serving, self-reinforcing system. And what a cruel system it can be! To take just one of countless examples in your faith, why is it that a kind and gentle person who does not accept your god is bound for eternal hell, while faithful rapists are assured a place in heaven? What is just or good (or respectable) about that?

But I must not get carried away and drift into the problems of theodicy or suffering. My aim here is to try and express my thoughts and feelings, not attack your beliefs. Irvin Yalom cautions against "stripping those who cannot bear the chill of reality" and he is right to do so. I have no desire to be the cause of anything which might result in painful consequences—especially for you—but neither can I leave so much unquestioned and unsaid.

I've done what I can. I have made a sincere effort to understand the veracity of your faith. I have opened myself, with humility, to whatever divine truth may strike me, and I'm sorry to say that none has—so I remain ignorant of your experience in this vital way, and that saddens me greatly.

But do you, I wonder, understand me? While your faith has been a constant thing in your life from the start, my secular existence has been characterized by doubt, uncertainty and struggle—to find whatever truth and meaning I can. Many of the big questions to which you seem to have ready-made answers, remain for me unanswered, and I must scratch about as best I can for provisional solutions, if there are any. This is hardly a satisfying philosophy, I know, but I have no other choice; I must live honestly, even if the cost is the horrible feeling of ignorance and doubt. To paraphrase Feynman (again), there's no point in deciding beforehand how things really are; the truth is what it is, and if things turn out to be different from what I tentatively expect or believe, then so be it. I will have made a mistake—but an honest one I can admit to and correct. I cannot in good conscience swap this simple-looking plan for one that promises so much more on a say-so, not even yours—and there is no one in the world whose views on these matters I would attend to more closely. And when it comes to faith, it has to be on a say-so; what else can there be? Lewis's analogy (in ASM) on this point—about not needing "proof" from one's friend as to whether he exists and is trustworthy—is specious: he already presumes what he is seeking to demonstrate: that God-as-revealed-through-his-text is real, friendly, and trustworthy.  

Truth cannot be determined by authority, democracy or even rhetoric: "The testimony of many" as Galileo said, "has little more value than that of few." In other words, the truth of a statement doesn't somehow grow in proportion to the number of people who believe it, or depend on the eloquence of an argument. No amount of believing, insisting, wishing, or even praying—no matter how ardent or melifluous—will make the sun go round the earth or the firmament fixed. In the same passage he continues:

If reasoning were like hauling I would agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing, not hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses.[6]

In establishing truth, then, testimony alone will not do—no matter how much of it there is or who utters it. Horace put this more succinctly: Nullius in verba—nothing just because someone says so; nothing by mere authority. If we are to believe, we should have good reason to believe, and generally that means evidence and logic. (For a wonderful meditation on this and some of the vagaries of our belief systems, see Richard Dawkins's charming open letter to his ten year old daughter: Good and Bad Reasons for Believing; see also William Clifford's marvellous 1877 Essay The Ethics of Belief).

The modern Western tradition is built on this axiom: that we should only believe a statement when we have good reason to suppose it is true (c.f. Robert Pirsig's three tests of truth[7]). By and large this plan has served us in the west very well. It's made us rich and given us every convenience. It has also resulted in a more secular world than could have been imagined in centuries past. But those who lament this actually rather limited cultural apostasy might want to pause and ask themselves if they would really rather live under an atavistic theocracy, where to think freely risks the charge of heresy? I doubt it. I certainly wouldn't. We should be committed to truth, not a particular claim to truth. As Mark Vuletic says, "I do not want to have false beliefs, no matter how pleasant those beliefs might be. Therefore, I have to look at the evidence. And it is the evidence, in opposition to my innermost desires, that tells me that there is no god."

Perhaps I lack the courage necessary to believe the things you believe, but I don't think so. I think Lewis is right on this point. Courage is sometimes needed to accept what we discover, as well as to suspend belief (or disbelief) while we "try-on" new ideas, but we must, surely, have some sense of the new thing first.

Do you have the courage to doubt, to question, to wonder whether we grossly overestimate our own importance? What if we really are no more than fragile little beings, living  in an unimaginably vast universe devoid of teleology, purpose or meaning, struggling to make sense of it all as best we can? What if our astonishing consciousness and ethics are no more remarkable than life itself? And what of the dreadful possibility that after we die the only thing left will be the echo of our existence in the minds of others? Perhaps, as Floria suggests, in the end all we have are each other and a little time—in which case let's make the most of it, yes? If you haven't already, I hope you'll give these ideas a try.

With love
 

Christopher Hitchens elegantly describes his problems with religion - here

Notes

All the CS Lewis quotes come from Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy; Irvin Yalom's from his book Love's Executioner; Richard Feynman's from his 1963 Danz lecture. Other citations are either referenced here or linked from the text.

[1] Sheldon Vanauken, 1980, A Severe Mercy, Harper Collins

[2] For eighteen years Floria was the concubine of Augustine, as well as the mother of his child. He dumped her for his beloved Abstinence, and kept their son, who died. Jostein Gaarder's wonderful book Vita Brevis (1996, This Same Flower in USA) is in the form of a letter from Floria to Augustine, in which she asks these questions, amongst others.

[3] Irving Yalom, 1989, Love's Executioner, Penguin

[4] Feynman claimed that the central purpose of religion is the provision of motivation and purpose. From his 1963 Danz Lecture on Religion and Science, variously reprinted, see, e.g., The Meaning of it All, or The pleasure of Finding Things Out

[5] Quite why it is that humans are so credulous when it comes to superstitious / religious / mystical claims is a fascinating question that researchers are now investigating. See here for an introduction (Guardian article). Behavioural neurologist Todd Murphy even claims to be able to induce religious experience - see here. See also Robert Trivers's paper, "The Elements of Scientific Theory of Self-Deception" Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 907:114-131 (2000)

[6] Dava Sobel, 1999, Galileo's Daughter, Penguin

[7] "As Einstein said, common sense-non-weirdness-is just a bundle of prejudices acquired before the age of 18. The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation." (emphasis added) Robert M. Pirsig, 1991, Lila: An Enquiry Into Morals, Bantam, p121

This predicament also provoked a short poem

If you are someone (or are supporting someone) who is emerging from a religious faith, take a look at Reveal.org for practical advice and help, as well as the Secular Web.

Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation expresses these ideas much more eloquently and powerfully than I do.

See also Merle Hertzler's moving and thoughtful account of his journey from Christian fundamentalism to a secular life - here

Philosophy of Religion