One of a series of lectures given at St Brides Liverpool in 2010 and 2011. The list is here.
Last month I described how modern society is unusual in the way it restricts the role of religious belief. There is a kind of default position that science explains how the universe works, without any reference to God, so believing in God is an optional extra.
Typically, the modern secular story goes that science explains the way the world is, by means of facts about physical things; so religious ideas like God, prayer and life after death, only apply in the world of religion and have nothing to say about the real physical world. Some people claim that science produces the facts, which we need to know, while religion produces beliefs and values, which we do not need to know but some people like to think about them.
This produces a taboo on talking about God, except when we are specifically talking about religion. A few years ago I was at the Liverpool Royal Hospital having my sinuses examined by consultant. He produced a long thin tube, which he pushed up my nose. He said ‘God has given us sinuses, which usually work well, but when they go wrong, God has also given us the skills to use technology to put it right’. I wasn’t expecting talk about God from a medical specialist at the hospital, and I confess I jumped to the conclusion that he must be a Muslim. He broke the taboo. You can ask the question of yourself:
In what circumstances am I comfortable mentioning God, and when would I feel that mentioning God would be socially unacceptable?
Facts and values
In practice this sharp division between facts about the world and religious beliefs jars with most people. Successive governments try to persuade more students to study science, but students persist in wanting to study the humanities. Far more people read novels than science books, and far more people watch the soap operas than documentaries on new technology. In public most of us go along with that secular picture of reality, but in our own lives most of us live as though it is not true. Why?
The scientific facts, the ‘how’ questions, are important for some people at some times; but the ‘why’ questions are important to all of us. Scientists believe the universe began with a Big Bang. Most of us do not need to know whether it is true or not; but most of us, at some stage in our lives, will be in a state of utter despair and will will ask questions like: ‘Why does it have to be like this?’
Premodern and non-western societies take the ‘why’ questions seriously, and offer answers which are integrated with the ‘how’ questions. The answers are normally expressed in stories. Like novels and soap operas, they help people to explore what happens in life, how to evaluate it, and how to respond. In response to some things it is appropriate to have a good cry, in response to others it is not. Some things are to be resisted, others accepted. We learn appropriate responses through stories.
My first example is bereavement. Suppose the person you love most of all dies. The doctor comes, you burst into tears, and you say ‘Why?’ It would be a crass doctor indeed who said ‘I can tell you why. The heart stopped beating and the lungs stopped breathing.’ That would not help at all.
Here are a couple of stories which may help a bit. The first is an Indonesian myth. In the beginning, God created the first man and woman, and hung his gifts on a cord for them to take. One day he hung a stone on it. The couple were surprised and indignant, and refused it. Some days later God let the cord down again, this time with a banana. They liked the banana. They took it straight away. Then they heard God’s voice: ‘Since you have chosen the banana, your life will be like the life of a banana. If you had chosen the stone, your life would have been like stone, unchangeable and immortal’. At the risk of spoiling the story by explaining it, it asks: would you rather have this life in all its fruitiness for a short time, or spend eternity lifeless and unchanging like a stone?
There is a Hittite myth about a goddess who was preparing for battle and asked a human man for help. He agreed, on condition that he could spend the night with her. She agreed. He ended up moving in with her. However she laid down one rule: he was never under any circumstances to look out of the window. You can guess what happened. One day temptation got the better of him, and he looked out of the window. He saw his wife and children. He begged for permission to return to them. Unfortunately the rest of the text is lost, but a likely ending can be reconstructed. He went back to them and thereby lost the chance of immortality. Again, as you listen to the story you cannot help asking yourself ‘Which would I have chosen? Would I rather live in a land where people live for ever and nobody is ever young, or would I rather live for a limited time, in a land with babies, children and families, and let them succeed me when I am too old to enjoy life the way I used to?’
All over the world there are traditional stories like these, reflecting on the big questions. Where do I come from? Where does my family, or village, come from? Why do people die? Are animals the same as us, or different? Why is childbirth so painful? Why do we find some things funny? Why do we get so much pleasure from sex? Why do people kill each other? Characteristically they combined what we would now call the scientific answers, the ‘how’, with the value answers, the ‘why’. If we treat them purely as science of course we today have more accurate answers; but they were more than this.
Purpose and intending minds
Modern secular society is usually quite poor at explaining and justifying the values we hold. Here are a couple of examples.
One is deciding what to want. Free market economic theory argues that different people want different things, and the things some people want conflict with the things other people want. Rather than having a big brother state imposing its answers on everyone, each individual should be free to spend their money however they like, and the free market will reflect people’s actual preferences. In this approach the theory is that economists accept our wants as a given starting point, without passing judgement on them. Of course other economists disagree, but free market theory treats what we want as an absolute given, the bedrock, the starting point for theories about what a good economic system would be like. Indeed, all of us do spend a lot of time knowing what we want and wishing we could get it, but we also spend some of our time wondering what we ought to want, trying to decide where to direct our desires. Our desires are not just unchanging facts about us. So how do we decide what we ought to want? This is one of the questions modern secular society is not good at.
Another is whether life has any point. Suppose somebody you know comes to you and says ‘I don’t think my life has any point. I’ve decided to commit suicide.’ What will you say? My guess is that you would not say ‘I don’t know whether your life has a point or not. I don’t know about these things. Ask a policeman.’ You will probably say ‘You mustn’t think of killing yourself. Of course your life has a point.’ But is that true? How do you know? Have you got reasons? It is just instinct to insist that all our lives have a point, a purpose.
So here come two more ancient stories. According to the ancient Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elis, the gods made the world because they were fed up of doing their own housework and cooking, and wanted servants to do it for them. So they created the world, and humans, and gave humans the job of maintaining temples and burning sacrifices. This is why the world is the way it is, and it explains the point of human life. If we fail to do it the gods can scrap the human race and try something else instead. What people might legitimately want or not want would be judged within that framework. Most of the people were peasant farmers, and it told them that whatever the circumstances they had to take their best animals to the temple and give them to the priests to be sacrificed. Even if it meant letting their own children starve because they had nothing else to give them, they had to keep taking their animals to the temple, or the gods would punish everyone.
Some of the people who heard that creation story in Babylon were exiles from Jerusalem. They thought their own story was better. They wrote it down and it survives as the first chapter of Genesis. One God, in complete control, created a world full of things to be good for us. God blessed us and told us to make good use of it. According to this story the point of life is that God wants us to enjoy it and flourish, by obeying God’s laws. This implies that if children are starving we are doing something wrong and it needs to be put right.
A different creation story again would be the modern atheist one, in which the universe developed through impersonal laws of nature. There are no gods, so there is nobody above us to give our lives any point. We just happen to be here, and it is up to us to create our own values.
Here are three different accounts of the point of life. Now let us go back to your friend who wants to commit suicide. If you are a Babylonian you could say ‘Your life does have a point. We need you to help with the temples and the sacrifices’. In the Jewish account you could say ‘Your life does have a point, you should be able to enjoy life and if you cannot, let us ask what has gone wrong and how we can put it right.’ In the atheist account the only honest answer is ‘Well no, your life does not have a point, but you could invent one for yourself if you wanted to.’ Philosophers today argue about whether this is a good enough answer. I do not think it is.
How do these stories about the point of life work? To work well, they need to do two things. Firstly they need to locate our lives within a bigger picture. To say that your life has value or purpose or a point is to locate it within something bigger than yourself. You contribute to something outside yourself, something which itself has greater value and purpose than your life on its own. Secondly, there needs to be an intending mind. There is no purpose without somebody doing the purposing, and there is no value without somebody doing the valuing. To say that your life has purpose over and above the purpose you give it, is to assume there is some other mind which gives that purpose to your life. Without that other intending mind, the only point your life can possibly have is whatever point you choose to give it.
We should not imagine that everybody believed every detail of those stories – after all good stories survive outside their original settings – but they witness to the normal expectation that explanations of the way things are normally include some references to gods. In these stories, there is a unified account of what we now call religion and what we now call science.
So to go back to the original question: ‘Why do most people have religious beliefs?’, the historical answer is that this is how most people understand what their lives are for. It is our understanding of who made us, and why, that gives us our sense that our lives have purpose, meaning and value, and thereby indicates how we ought to live and what we ought to want.
The development of dualism
How did we lose that integrated account of reality? I now turn to the question of how that separation arose between religious beliefs and beliefs about the world, and eventually made religious belief look like an optional extra.
In the early Middle Ages, from the sixth to the tenth centuries, educational standards were low. Monasteries preserved some of the knowledge built up by the ancients. The leading authorities on all learning were church leaders. They normally allowed new ideas, unless they contradicted what the ancients had taught – especially the Bible. If in doubt they thought the ancients were more likely to be right. This became the conservative position against which scholars reacted when educational standards began to rise from the eleventh century onwards.
One issue was a new interest in the natural world, largely due to rediscovering the works of the ancient Greek Aristotle. Aristotle had believed that God created the world but thereafter had nothing to do with it, so the world operates according to regular impersonal laws of nature. The early Christians incorporated the idea of regular laws of nature into their account of how God created the world, so that everything is the work of God but God has designed most things to operate regularly.
This became controversial. Genesis 1:7 says God put water above the sky. In the twelfth century William of Conches denied that there was any. This raised the question: is it permissible for researchers to disagree with a biblical text? William argued for a distinction between what nature does and what God does. Others accepted that it is all done by God, but God does some things regularly.
A power struggle developed within the universities. Theologians continued to work within the integrated view of reality, where beliefs about God and the Bible were an essential part of society’s understanding of the world, and if they had taken the new research more seriously things might have worked out very differently. The new researchers wanted freedom to develop their studies of the world without interference from theologians.
Another issue was the use of reason in theology. Medieval education put a heavy emphasis on logic. Theologians tried to apply logical analysis to Christian doctrines like the eucharist and the Trinity. On the other hand the monasteries encouraged monks to contemplate God directly, not to analyse. This is how Bernard of Clairvaux condemned Abelard:
He has defiled the Church; he has infected with his own blight the minds of simple people. He tries to explore with his reason what the devout mind grasps at once with a vigorous faith. Faith believes, it does not dispute. But this man, apparently holding God suspect, will not believe anything until he has first examined it with his reason.
What eventually undermined reason was not people like Bernard, but the limitations of logic. In the eleventh century Anselm thought he could logically prove that God exists, that God is a Trinity, and that God had to become a human. In the thirteenth century Aquinas agreed that reason could prove the existence of God, but not the Trinity or the Incarnation. From then on medieval scholars increasingly doubted the power of logic to establish Christian doctrines. So how did they know they were true? They concluded that it they must have been directly revealed to the Church by God. In fact those doctrines had been hammered out in centuries of debate between Christians in the early Church; but they treated them as direct divine revelation.
Medieval dualism
By the end of the Middle Ages the universities had resolved these two issues with a strict dualism. They abandoned the unified view of knowledge and instead distinguished between two ways of knowing things. Physical matter is observable and can be studied by reason. Spiritual things are not observable, so they cannot be studied by reason. Therefore the only way we can know about spiritual things is by direct revelation from God – namely the Bible and the Church’s teaching.
Here then is the beginning of the separation. From the scientific side, it meant that researchers should be allowed to get on with their research without theologians interfering. Not that it always worked, but the idea grew. It also restricted their field of work to observable things, because unobservables counted as spiritual.
On the spiritual side, it meant that all knowledge about spiritual matters is contained within divine revelation. In the long run this was disastrous.
Firstly it meant that in religious matters any new idea is by definition wrong. Everything we can possibly know is already known because it is in the Bible. This gave western Christianity a backward-looking character, which it has retained much of the time since then – though not always.
Secondly it meant that in religious matters we cannot learn anything from outside our tradition. Because everything is in the Bible there is no point in dialogue with other faiths. Only we have divine revelation so others are just plain wrong.
Thirdly it meant that knowledge on religious matters comes with certainty. The point is that divine revelation transcends all human reason. If revelation makes a statement that is impossible or irrational or contradictory, that just shows the limitations of human reason. Revelation is certain to be true.
Finally it gives immense power to church leaders. They become the gatekeepers of all spiritual knowledge.
The Reformation blew this system open. Protestants and Catholics disagreed about what divine revelation consists of and who the gatekeepers of revelation are; so by the end of the sixteenth century there was a wide range of beliefs about what God has revealed and what the certainties are. It was the age of religious wars. Protestants and Catholics alike accepted all four of these principles, and even today they are still popular among religious conservatives.
Wide and narrow reason
Eventually reason had to come back. The religious wars of the Reformation era provoked the Enlightenment, otherwise known as the Age of Reason. So what is reason? The Enlightenment inherited two accounts of it, a wider account and a narrow account.
According to the wider account the human mind has many different processes. This was the view held by Aquinas in the Middle Ages and later by the Cambridge Platonists and Joseph Butler. Today philosophers and psychologists continue to analyse how we come to know things. A typical list of the standard elements of knowledge would include the evidence of our senses, rational deduction, instinct, intuition and memory. These processes do not produce absolute certainty: we think we know things, but we may be wrong.
For a few centuries the narrow definition of reason proved more popular. The early Enlightenment philosophers wanted to show how reason could bring the religious wars to an end. They could see that people kept fighting because each side claimed absolute certainty for their own views. They therefore presented reason as a better way to establish certainty. To do this they limited reason to logic and the evidence of the senses.
René Descartes proposed to deduce all knowledge from a self-evident starting point. His starting point was the certainty ‘I think, therefore I am’. From this point he proceeeded to deduce, as also certain, the existence of God and the world external to his mind.
Descartes’ two realms
Descartes accentuated dualism. Medieval dualism was about two ways of knowing things, but Descartes turned it into two distinct realms of reality, a physical one and a spiritual one. The physical one is observable, and deterministic. It is nothing but atoms pushing each other according to laws of nature. The spiritual realm is where the human soul relates to God. This separation of the spiritual from the material sets God at a distance from the world and presents the human being as basically a soul which happens to have a body. Descartes’ system is called rationalism: reason is about analytical thinking, deducing.
The other main element in the narrow account of reason is information from the senses, empiricism. John Locke pictured the mind as in its own ‘box’, separated from the material world. The mind, he believed, has only three faculties: it is aware of its own inner states and operations, it receives information through the five senses, and it can make logical deductions. Nothing else. Those, he believed, are the only processes on which all knowledge is built.
The medieval nominalists had argued that because reason was limited to sense perceptions it had no authority in matters of faith. Locke was more ambitious: he set out to show that even his narrow reason, limited to the evidence of the senses and logical deduction, could still establish all truth, including the truth of the Christian faith.
Positivism
Of course it can’t. When that became clear there were two possible responses. One was to return to a wider account of reason, and abandon the search for certainty. This is the main response today. The other was to insist that narrow reason can provide a complete and certain account of reality, so therefore anything it cannot prove does not exist. This is positivism.
Positivism was at its most popular in the nineteenth century. At first it made ambitious claims and thought science would produce complete and certain knowledge of reality. Positivists today characteristically see themselves as defenders of science, and these are the people who argue that science produces facts, while other processes like religion can only produce beliefs and opinions. The most common refrain of positivists is that the existence of God has been disproved. A present day example is Richard Dawkins.
Eventually positivism undermined itself. If all knowledge is based on human experience, and if everything is observable, then we should dispense with God, but we should also dispense with all metaphysical ideas, and this undermines science. If I hold a pen in my hand and then move my fingers apart, the pen falls to the ground. We assume that the movement of the fingers causes the pen to drop, but we never see causes. We only ever infer them. Because we do not see them, the positivist principle indicates that they do not exist. By the end of the nineteenth century Ernst Mach was arguing that the physical objects we see are just bundles of sensory experiences to which we give names. If you look at something which you think is a wooden table, all you actually see is a brown shape. To infer that it is a table is to go beyond what we can know.
Positivism was popular for a time because it seemed to explain how science produces real knowledge with certainty. Positivists claimed both that science produces certainties, and that anything which science cannot prove does not exist at all. Science has in fact shown us the exact opposite: that reality is far more complex than the human mind can even conceive. There is no way we shall ever know everything, let alone with certainty.
Science works by asking questions, gathering data and developing hypotheses. Some hypotheses are more likely to be true than others, but in principle every hypothesis is open to review when new evidence calls it into question.
Summary
So to summarise. Most societies have an integrated understanding of reality, which gives information both about physical things and about values and purposes. By providing this integrated account of why reality is the way it is, they also indicate what our lives are for and which values are appropriate.
The story of how western Europe gave it up is a long one. Because medieval church leaders were too committed to their tradition they produced a sharp distinction between two ways of knowing things. This led to a sharp distinction between two spheres of reality, a spiritual one and a physical one, with the physical one completely empty of values or freedom. Later again people doubted whether the spiritual realm existed at all. This left a determined observable physical universe, nothing but atoms obeying laws of nature. For a while it looked as though this completely disenchanted world was what science would prove. However science now shows the exact opposite: a universe crammed with far more complexity than the human mind will ever understand.
Even if science had revealed this valueless determined world, life as we know it is full of values, significance, meaning, and purpose, and any account of the world which leaves all that out is not describing the world as we know it. Most of us, most of the time, need to spend more time thinking about the values of life than the physical facts.
Other societies describe reality in ways which combine the physical information with information about why we are here, and what there is to live for. They achieve this by describing who made us, and for what purpose. Their science may be behind ours, but they fill that gap which modern secular theory leaves empty. The way they fill it is by claiming that behind these bodies we find ourselves with, behind this universe we happen to be in, lies an intending mind, valuing us and giving significance to our lives.