Difficulty breathing

Once upon a time, it was not so difficult to believe. 

Believing in God was like breathing – a second sense of which people were hardly aware. Even with a man as rational as the great English philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century, lack of religious belief was an extraordinary and aberrant thing that wasn’t worth tolerating because it must surely lead to social chaos and even treasonable behaviour. Philosophers like the great medieval writers St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas offered their famous arguments for the existence of God not because they imagined that they would convince an non-believer but because they saw them as confirming what believers (that is, everybody) knew to be already true. 

Not only was the world self-evidently the handiwork of the Creator, but it was also the case that it was shot through with his divinity. Divinity oozed from physicality. Reality was connected in a great chain of being which participated in the highest being – namely, God. Human beings were a part of this great connected whole in which they could actively participate through prayers and other religious acts, mediated through the agency of the Church. The ‘divine’ and the ‘natural’ were not separate explanations for the workings of the world. 

Today we like to think of believing - as we like to think of many things – as primarily a choice. We think of our religious views as a preference – not a trivial one, it should be granted, but a preference nonetheless. What’s more, believing in God has become a highly contested choice, vehemently challenged by some of the most prominent intellectuals of our times. 

How has this come about? It would be too easy to say that the rise of the scientific world-view is the culprit. That is a common way of telling the story: as science and technology have enabled us to grasp the world more successfully and efficiently, the less mysterious the world has seemed. Take medicine, for example: once we could talk about bacteria and viruses and their effects, we could start addressing illnesses without supposing that a priest is going to have a great deal to contribute. It is true that science has provided alternative explanations of the workings of the world which at many points make appeal to a divine power apparently unnecessary. But that would be to miss the story of the how the scientific world-view come to prominence in the first place; and how it depended for its emergence on certain changes in the way faith and belief were thought of in Western Europe. The scientific world-view did not cause the change in the nature of believing, since it arose at the same time as the changes themselves took place. 

That change had to do with the extraordinary movement within the Western church: the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation, bound up as it was with the intellectual movement sometimes called ‘humanism’, introduced the notion of ‘faith’ not merely as ‘believing certain propositions to be true and others to be false’ but as a giving of the whole of one’s self in deep trust to the promises of God. The big thing that connected you to the divine world was now an inward and individual matter, whereas before this the external work of baptism was held to be the ground of your religious life. And this believing, this faith, was part of your life’s story: it was possible to tell a story of not believing and then believing, of coming to know what trust in the promises of God was as the Spirit of God did its work on you and you changed. Though the Reformers were adamant that faith itself was a work of God in the human person, it was still the case that the human person’s will, reason and affections were involved in the getting of faith. Even if one ought retrospectively to speak of the illumination of God’s Holy Spirit working in your heart to bring faith to flame, the experience of coming to faith felt certainly as if it involved one’s hearing, understanding and a moment of decision. At this point, faith became an act of the will – a reality decided upon. Mine to choose, mine to reject. 

At the same time, Protestantism concentrated the sphere of divine action in the Word of God. Instead of seeing God’s presence rippling through nature, Protestantism warned of the danger of confusing the created things with the Creator himself. There were many possibly idolatrous distractions from the decisive place in which God was at work – in Christ revealed in Scripture. And it would not do to forgot the sheer transcendent otherness of God. If anything, the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ revealed to humankind the radical alienation of humankind from the divine being. The significance of this separation of God from his creation was that the world’s natural processes became available for study on their own terms, without the confusion of a metaphysical explanation. This was the beginning of the scientific revolution, and a revolution in the way people in the West thought about faith.

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchosen choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one choses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

There is a kind of wistfulness expressed at this state of affairs, too. With the rise of an absolutist New Atheism, it would be easy to overlook the fact that a kind of longing for the ‘ability’ to believe is widespread. There is a wistful look over the back fence of religion. People frequently express admiration for aspects of the religious world view, and for the beneficial effects that religious belief brings to those who are so fortunate. Those who have moved on from a religious past will express feelings of grief and loss – even when the circumstances of their leaving are quite bitter.