Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Keeping it real

Warning: it's all about religion!

Readers interested in the topic have probably already noted that there currently seems to be a backlash underway in England against the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens anti-religion books. Here's a Comment is Free article by Alex Stein in today's Guardian that takes Hitchens to task. Madeleine Bunting also joined in last week, and in The Times we had John Humphreys explain why, even though he had become an agnostic, the militant atheists really irritate him. Bryan Appleyard had a short, pithy post too.

All of those are worth reading.

The general gist of them is that Dawkins and his followers attack the most unsophisticated, fundamentalist versions of religion, but fail to engage in debates with those who have a more sophisticated understandings of religion. To the extent that he does engage, I think Dawkins claims that what sophisticated theologians propose is not something that has any real meaning anyway.

This does bring up an issue that is a tricky one for those of faith, namely, the contest between realist and non-realist views of religion.

I don't think this is often clearly discussed in the popular press. I believe I first read about the realist/non-realist divide in a book by philosopher/theologian John Hicks in the 1980's. The idea is that the trend which started with historical scepticism of the Bible in the 19th century has been for those sympathetic to religious belief to move from a "realist" understanding of the Gospels (or Bible generally) to a "non-realist" interpretation. That is, the literal truth of matters such as the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Christ, or even the existence of an afterlife, is believed by non-realists to be unimportant, and the mythological or metaphorical "truth" or utility of matters of faith is seen as the key.

People who hold thoroughly non-realist views can claim to still be people of faith, but it is achieved by re-defining what was previously thought to be undoubtedly real to something which is either not real, or a something in which the literal reality is now considered unimportant. John Hicks has an article on his website which explains this view well.

This is really the crux of the issue for faith in the Christian churches at this time in history, and I do find it a matter of some difficulty personally. Catholics like me, taught in the 1960's, have never had a particularly fundamentalist view of the Old Testament forced on them. So I don't have a problem with a non-realist reading of much of the Old Testament.

When it comes to the New Testament, though, the non-realist attitudes seems to me to have significantly more problems.

My main objection perhaps comes to where non-realism goes so far as to deny something as basic as a belief that there is a supernatural realm, or an afterlife of any variety. At its heart, the teaching of Jesus had the importance of how you live your life on Earth because there will be an accounting for it in an afterlife. (Whether that was an immediate after-death judgement, or one at the end of the world, is rather moot to this point.) But if you start denying that an afterlife has any reality at all, surely you are denying not just "stories" like the Virgin Birth or even the resurrection (which can be seen as, say, rumours that got out of hand,) but something which was clearly fundamentally what the figure at the heart of your religion believed to be a reality about the universe.

On the other hand, it is clear that the founding fathers of Christianity had a fundamentalist understanding of how sin came into the world (via the actions of the first man Adam) and the role that Christ had in fixing the situation.

If you do believe in evolution, one can still (like CS Lewis) believe that there came a point at which the first man did evolve into existence, and did actually undergo a temptation of the kind described in Genesis. But this is a matter difficult for modern people to believe. The concept of how sin or evil originated is thus a difficult one for the Church if you believe thoroughly in evolution, and this also affects one's understanding of Christ.

So, the issue as to where to draw the realist/non-realist line is a tricky one, to say the least.

Should my acknowledgement of the difficulty mean that I should not criticise the likes of Cuppitt and Spong, who try to spread the word that the only way for Christianity to survive is to become completely non-realist? No, I don't think so. I may have trouble with deciding how to resolve the issues, but I think I can still make the call if I think others have gone completely too far into the non-realist camp.

The other matter to always remember that above all of this is the issue of how lives are actually lived. As we all know, fundamentalist faith in ideology of any kind can lead to devastatingly evil acts. The atheist can argue that evolutionary biology is what is behind the moral impulse in humans, and that is why you don't need religion to inform moral reasoning. But what they can't show (at least to my satisfaction) is the reasons why humans should always act as if there is a true universality to the moral law.

In any event, a willingness to act as if there is a universal moral law is, at its heart, more important than the theory on which the moral actions are based.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jack Spong mentioned Hitchens and Dawkins in his recent talk in Brisbane. He used the tone of voice he usually reserves for Peter Jensen when he mentioned Hitchens. He said he was on a panel discussing God with Hitchens and after the show Hitchens complained that Spong was not the sort of Christian he was used to arguing with. I heard Hitchens debating God on an American radio show (I think it was Open Source) and he was so ill tempered and arrogant as to make listening unpleasant.

Spong quite like Dawkins though and I think they make many of the same arguments while coming to opposite conclusions. Spong said he assumed Dawkins thought he was deluded to believe in God.

I'm beginning to think it all depends where your locus of mystery resides. (The Locust of Mystery would be a good book title.)

If you can believe in an omnipotent theist God with the baggage that necessarily carries, fine. If that burden is too heavy, a non-theistic God makes sense. (Theodicy, etc) It depends where you can handle the necessary conflicts. It also makes far more sense in a post-modern age to go nontheistic. Modernity + religion tends to fundamentalism or secularism I fear. As they say, postmodernism gives permission for theology to begin again.


What do you think of the atonement - have you abandoned that as a concept? [say yes and cheer me up]

Geoff

Steve said...

The atonement: yet again, I suppose I am persuaded by CS Lewis that it is not essential to understand how it works to be a Christian, but it is somewhat the point of the historical religion to believe that Christ has a central saving role in the big spiritual drama. I haven't revisited the various suggested ways of understanding it for a while, but I am a distrustful of the modern dismissal of the whole idea of sacrifices to God and what they means, though.

Don't you have any concerns that non-realism just makes churches social clubs? And not particularly happy ones either, if you have big divisions within them as to what belief in its basic tenets means?

Anonymous said...

I'm hopeful that agreeing that the answers aren't sorted and that the Cross is central but does not have to be seen as a focus of substitutionary atonement could defuse unpleasantness. It certainly doesn't begin to cover Catholic tradition on the matter. One of the reasons I had reservations about the Cafe program I led at St Edwards was its dumbing down of salvation history to Alpha standards.

Churches as social clubs - a fair cop.

Since God has to be approached from many directions, all inadequately descriptive and merely indicative, the aspect of God that is seen in social networks is real enough. The aspect of God you see from sharing the lives of others is real enough. Eucharist, too, should be a commitment that you are committed to the social project of the reign of God here and now. That's a social club with a catholic agenda!

I am also happy to say that it is a privileged position to be within an established tradition and therefore having something substantial to kick against.

Cheers

Geoff