why believe?

An atheist friend, challenging me - whilst we walked through the Chiltern Hills - as to why I believed in God, was unhappy when I offered him the (pictured) double rainbow in front of us. With his response I've a good deal of sympathy. One might say that, were we to take my answer as responding to the question as he intended it, my appeal to the rainbow - and by extension to anything in the natural world - would rightly be considered abject failure. And yet my response wasn't offered as an answer to his question in terms the question would accept. It was instead intended as a thoughtful refusal of those terms, one which I hoped might lead out onto a more meaningful discussion of the grammar of faith. His terms, I said, themselves show a failure to understand the grammar of belief when what that belief has as its object is God. Sad to say, this wasn't going to get us anyway: atheism after all is so very reasonable in its own terms, and yet so very unreasonable and dogmatic when it comes to the question of whether its terms are always apt to all forms of belief. 

I recently found myself reading a sermon from that vast sea of published 19th century Anglican addresses. (As it happens it was by Henry Lyte who penned the gorgeous 'Abide with me' hymn for us.) In it he told his congregation that

In every part of the universe with which we are acquainted, God has left abundant evidence of His presence and agency; and all that we behold, and all that we experience, present us with lessons of Divine wisdom. ... The heaven and the earth declare the glory of God. From the flower that we trample under foot, to the planet that rolls in majesty above our heads, all things speak His praise; all declare that they were made by Him; and that He who made them is infinite in wisdom, power, and goodness. The dispensations of Providence speak the same language. Effects demand a cause: and the existence, order, variety, and continued support of the universe, drive us to a Superintending Power and Intelligence, and forbid us to be without God in the world.

He goes on to add the moral law within (ie the conscience) and holy scripture as two other 'witnesses to' or 'remembrances of' God. In scripture, especially, God 'presents Himself directly to our attention; He vindicates His presence with us, and defies us to overlook Him.' 

So, how is Lyte intending such declarations? Are they supposed to compel the atheist? Well, of course not! He speaks of evidence but it's obvious from the context that really any existing thing whatsoever will for him here count as 'evidence'. (If anything at all is evidence for the truth of an hypothesis, then it's not clear that we really have to do either with evidence or with hypothesis.) What he's really doing is, I think, offering us a reminder of the grammar of the relationship between God and His creatures. (Wittgenstein: 'theology as grammar'.) 'All things declare that they were made by Him'. Imagine someone saying 'But are you sure they do?'! He is talking about what is religiously evident; he's not talking about what counts for rather than against an hypothesis. 

Now it's a common enough, and in its way true, observation that belief in God qua faith, pistis, is not a matter of maintaining the truth of an hypothesis but instead of commitment and trust. A natural rejoinder though is that we only tend to trust in or commit to that which we already believe to exist. But what kind of belief are we talking about? I can surely trust that the ground under my feet will be solid. Can I believe that the ground under my feet exists? Well, what would that, or its antithesis, look like? The truth is, as Wittgenstein articulated in On Certainty, that before we have rational certainties of a well-reasoned sort we have rational certainty of a sense-registering sort. My trust in the ground under my feet is not a well or poorly reasoned confidence in the existence of something which I can conjure first in thought and then wonder if it's incarnated in the world. No, I only get my  understanding of the word "ground" and "feet" by engaging with actual paradigms of these. My words are themselves run through by the realities in question.

And so too with my religious discourse. If you want to know what "God's majesty in creation" so much as means: let me show you a double rainbow. If you want to know what "God's law" looks like, let me tell you about the conscience - or even more fundamentally, about the work of love in the human heart - within. 

  

There are some differences between our trust in the ground under our feet, our faith in others, and our faith in God. The relevant question we may ask is: how easy is it for me to stay alive to the reality of each of these in our lives? Regarding the physical ground, this may be shaken after a powerful trauma - an earthquake perhaps. But in general this confidence is not easily shaken. How about our trust in others? Well we are unlikely, in some bland enough sense of 'others', to doubt they exist - there they go, standing in front of us in the checkout queue. But, as Weil and Murdoch have it, love is the difficult business of really believing that others qua others exist. We don't find it so easy to stay truly alive to our deep differences one from another - our different lives, experiences, tastes, convictions, reactive dispositions, skills and disabilities. We project ourselves onto them. And how much do we trust in them? Of course, sometimes we shouldn't. But when we should, how often do we, really? Or do we pull up the drawbridge? And finally, with God, isn't this even harder still? With other humans we can at least see that they are here, but not there. It may not make sense to doubt they exist, but it certainly makes sense to doubt that any are currently in the attic. But God is, as we say, pure spirit. 

Only when we dethrone our will can we grow in faith. Only when we invite love to take up residence in our heart can we see what only love can disclose. Only when our soul allows itself to hope for life eternal can we hear the sound of God's name echoing in the cosmos. I think these are not controversial ideas within the faith. They are, rather, its elements. So for one thing, what is even going on with these questions that would have us first grasp, in a merely inquiring mind, an idea of what God is and then ask for evidence that this idea is realised? For another thing: realised where? When what we're talking about is existence outside of time and space, do we even know what we're asking when we ask what evidence there is that God exists there.?