Gunning for God (7 page)

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn’t even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence otherwise you just can’t trust them.
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Exactly! Evidence-based faith is not an unfamiliar idea — even to the New Atheists.

In all of these examples we should note that faith is not something that makes up for lack of evidence, so that strength of faith is inversely proportional to strength of evidence. Nor is faith that which “supports beliefs that lack the ordinary support of evidence or argument.”
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It is the other way round, as we all surely know very well. The more evidence I see for trusting a document or a person, the stronger will be my trust in it or her.

In light of all of this it is quite astonishing just how deep the Mark Twain definition of faith has been adopted by the New Atheists as the
only
definition of faith, so that they imagine that evidence somehow displaces faith rather than justifies it. A further classic example of this is given by Christopher Hitchens: “If one must have faith to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having truth or value is considerably diminished.” Exit science then! Exit also Christopher Hitchens, as I pointed out to him in our Alabama debate, “Is God Great?” After all, on the presumption that Christopher Hitchens has sufficient faith to believe in his own existence, his argument would tell me that the likelihood that he actually exists is considerably diminished. Such “logic” is not exactly impressive, is it? Worse still, what Hitchens says about faith refutes itself, since it is itself an expression of faith. He believes it, and he expects you to believe it; so if it is true the likelihood of its having truth is diminished! It contradicts itself. It is incoherent.

Indeed, Hitchens appears to have confused himself almost completely in this issue. Consider his wondrously foolish statement: “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.”
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A further root of this endemic confusion about faith is traceable to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. He introduced a false disjunction between faith and knowledge that has caused endless trouble ever since. Kant wrote: “I have… found it necessary to deny
knowledge,
in order to make room for
faith.
”
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Many have taken Kant to mean that if there were convincing evidence for the existence of God, then there would be no room left for faith.

This bizarre notion is very common, and yet it is plainly false. For instance, the late Warden of Green College Oxford, the eminent epidemiologist Sir Richard Doll, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that smoking causes lung cancer. We can therefore say that we
know
that smoking causes lung cancer. Does this knowledge leave no room for faith? Of course it leaves room for faith. Some people have faith in Doll’s work and stop smoking, thus dramatically decreasing the potential risk to their health. Other people do not have faith in the scientific results; even though they know it, and are reminded of it every time they purchase a packet of cigarettes. Their lack of faith is perverse, of course, and frequently fatal — yet they go on smoking. To say that knowledge somehow displaces faith reveals very muddled thinking. After all, knowledge of facts and people increases our faith in them and not the opposite.

IS FAITH IN GOD BLIND OR EVIDENCE-BASED?

As we have seen, blind faith exists, and can be dangerous. Therefore, our next question must be: Is the Christian faith
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like that?
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Is it Mark Twain faith? Yes, says Baggini, and, what is more, the Bible itself says that faith means believing something for which there is no evidence. In support, Baggini quotes the story of “doubting” Thomas’s encounter with Jesus in Jerusalem after the resurrection. In his Gospel, John tells how Thomas was not with the other disciples when they saw Jesus, and refused to accept their story unless he was given visual and tangible evidence: “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
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The account continues as follows:

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
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Baggini gives his interpretation: “Thus Christianity endorsed the principle that it is good to believe what you have no evidence to believe, a rather convenient maxim for a belief system for which there is no evidence.”
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This is a completely unwarranted, and indeed, rather foolish, deduction, as a moment’s thought will show. Thomas believed, says the text, because he
saw
. Does that mean that the millions of people (including myself) who have not seen Jesus with their own eyes, yet believe in him, do so without evidence? Of course not! Seeing is only one kind of evidence. There are many other kinds of evidence, and we shall consider it in detail later. For the moment, let us simply note that Baggini’s interpretation is on the level of suggesting that, because you have not
seen
gravity or atoms or X-rays, your belief in their existence cannot be evidence-based; or because you have not seen Napoleon, your belief that he fought the battle of Waterloo is blind. And Baggini is a philosopher!
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Before putting pen to paper he would have been well advised to read the statement in the Gospel of John immediately following the Thomas incident that explains just how John himself understood the concept of faith. “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
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John is stating here the purpose for which he wrote his book. It records a collection of signs — special things that Jesus did, that pointed towards a reality beyond themselves, and thus bore witness to his identity as God incarnate. For instance, Jesus multiplied loaves of bread to feed a large crowd and then used what he had done to point to himself as the “bread of life” at a deeper level. John records how people believed in Jesus because of the evidence he provided through the performance of such signs.
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And John regarded that evidence to be sufficient also for those, like ourselves, who did not directly observe the events in question. The belief (= faith) required by Christ is anything but blind, according to John. The blindness is on the part of the people who cannot see this.

Terry Eagleton, a distinguished British literary critic, is characteristically trenchant:

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.
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FAITH AND FREUD: IS FAITH A DELUSION?

Faith, seen through the distorting lens of the New Atheism, is a psychological aberration only to be found in deluded religious minds, or “faith-heads”, as Dawkins mockingly dubs them. In his considered opinion, faith is not only a delusion, but a morally reprehensible one: “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”
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It is also insane, in his view. Dawkins quotes Robert Pirsig, author of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
: “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion.”
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The idea that faith in God is a delusion did not, of course, have to wait for Richard Dawkins. Before sailing under guard for Rome to be heard by Caesar, the Christian apostle Paul made his final defence of the gospel in Caesarea, when he was summoned to appear before the Roman governor Porcius Festus and King Herod Agrippa. Festus famously interrupted Paul’s defence speech saying: “Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind.”
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If Paul was accused of delusion in those early days, then it is perhaps not surprising that we are seeing another wave of it today.

According to the OED, the word “delude” (Latin
de-ludere
— to play false, mock, deceive) originally meant simply “to deceive the mind or judgement to cause that which is false to be accepted as true”; but nowadays it almost invariably implies the suspicion of psychiatric illness. A delusion is “a fixed false belief”, “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder”.

It is to be noted that Dawkins classifies faith under the first part of this statement; and it is clear that, in this sense, some of what goes under the name of faith is clearly delusional — faith in the flying spaghetti monster; or even faith in leprechauns, if you happen to be Irish. Indeed, the New Atheists love to classify faith in God along with faith in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. But that is rather silly. Alister McGrath recalls:

As a child I believed (for a very short while) in Santa Claus. However I soon sussed the real situation out, although I must confess I kept my doubts about Santa’s existence to myself for some time because I also noticed that there was material advantage in so doing. I have never heard of an adult coming to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I have known many adult people come to believe in God. So clearly there is a great difference. But it is still worth asking the question: why is faith in the Tooth Fairy a delusion? The answer is obvious — the Tooth Fairy does not exist.
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This brings us to a key issue that is very easily overlooked. It is this. Faith in God certainly is a delusion, if God does not exist. But what if God does exist? Then atheism is the delusion. So the real question to ask is: does God exist?

This point is so important that I wish to put it another way, and simultaneously confront another objection. Many atheists (inspired by Sigmund Freud, who himself thought that faith in God is an illusion)
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claim that they have a very simple and convincing explanation of why people believe in God. It arises from incapacity to cope with the real world and its uncertainties. Michel Onfray tells us that “religion is imagined because people do not wish to face reality”.
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They would “rather have the faith to soothe than reason at the price of a perpetually infantile mentality”.
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For the New Atheists, then, God is a wish fulfilment, a fictional father figure projected on the sky of our imagination and created by our desire for comfort and security. On this view, heaven is an invention to cope with human fear of extinction at death, and religion is simply a psychological escape mechanism so that we don’t have to face life as it really is.

In his best-selling book
God: A Brief History of the Greatest One
,
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the German psychiatrist Manfred Lütz points out that this Freudian explanation for belief in God works very well —
provided only that God does not exist.
However, he continues, by the very same token,
if God does exist
, then exactly the same Freudian argument will show you that it is atheism that is the comforting delusion, the flight from facing reality, a projection of the desire not to have to meet God one day and give account for your life. For instance, Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who had reason to know, writes: “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death — the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”
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Thus, if God does exist, atheism can be seen as a psychological escape mechanism to avoid taking ultimate responsibility for one’s own life.

Lütz presses home the implication of his argument:
as to whether God exists or not, Freud can give you no help whatsoever.
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If atheists are going to use Freud, they must also give other grounds for rejecting the existence of God. Similarly, if Christians are going to use Freud, they must also give other grounds for believing in God. Freud alone does not help with the real question at stake: Does God exist or not?