Sandra Hogan takes a second look at Atheism ...
Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, evangelising for the end of religion, have reached the pinnacle of marketing success: their books are on sale at the airport. (Air flights are traditionally a time when even atheists have been known to say a quiet prayer, but clearly modern travellers are made of sterner stuff.) They are getting some competition from defenders of religion. Last time I flew, for example, I bought a copy of Roy Williams’ God Actually: Why God probably exists, Why Jesus was probably divine and Why the ‘rational’ objections to religion are unconvincing, in case it was a bumpy flight. But the atheists seem to be dominating sales, a notable change from previous years when the only books about religion readily available were books with the word ‘happiness’ in the title, preferably ones by the Dalai Lama.
There is a tone of urgency in the atheist books. In the preface to The God Delusion, Dawkins says his highest hope is that religious readers who open the book will be atheists when they put it down. He sees religion as a persistent false belief held in the face of contradictory evidence and a danger to the world. Dawkins, Hitchens and other writers known collectively as the New Atheists began publishing in the wake of the September 11 bombings of 2001, when the dangers of fundamentalist religion became starkly evident to the Western world. Dawkins is also driven to protest by the growing power of right-wing Christian groups in the UK and the US seeking—with some success—to introduce creationism into the science curriculum in schools.
But Dawkins does not single out religious fundamentalists for attack. Rather, he sees every religion, however mainstream, as being fundamentalist. All religions, at heart, have the same basic vice he argues: they teach people, starting from little children, to believe that unquestioned faith is a virtue. ‘As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to hold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers,’ writes Dawkins. ‘The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith.’5
The new atheists fear a resurgence of religion. They hope to encourage people to stand strongly for atheism or risk falling into the hands of suicide bombers, right-to-lifers, gay-bashers, creationists and other faith Nazis.
Yet British philosophy professor, AC Grayling, in an essay called The Death Throes of Religion, says the Zeitgeist has not really moved on.
‘What we are witnessing is not the resurgence of religion but the death throes … Today’s “religious upsurge” is a reaction to the prevalence of its opposite. In fact, it is a reaction to defeat, in a war that it cannot win even if it succeeds in a few battles on the way down.’6 Grayling argues that the prominence of religion in the media makes it seem that religious devotees are everywhere, but less than 10 per cent of the British population attends church, mosque, synagogue or temple every week and this figure is declining. ‘Yes, over half the population claim vaguely to believe in Something, which includes feng shui and crystals, and they may be ‘C of E’ in the sense of ‘Christmas and Easter’, but they are functionally secularist and would be horrified if asked to live according to the letter of (say) Christian morality: giving all one’s possessions to the poor, taking no thought for the morrow, and so impracticably forth … This picture is repeated everywhere in the West except the US, and there too the religious base is eroding.’7
Grayling belongs to a school of thought reaching back to the intellectual movement of the 18th century known as the Enlightenment, which argued that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Religion was one of the principal targets of Voltaire, Rousseau and other Enlightenment figures. In the 19th century, the war against religion waged by Voltaire and Rousseau was continued by the giants of psychoanalysis, biology and politics: Freud, Darwin and Marx.
In a fascinating exploration of Freud’s atheism, A Godless Jew, Peter Gay says Freud liked to say that psychoanalysis had ‘dealt man’s narcissism the most consequential of insults. First Copernicus had attacked that narcissism by demoting man’s abode, the earth, from the centre of the universe; then Darwin had reduced proud man to the status of an animal. Now Freud demonstrated that reason is not master in its own house.’ 8 Freud saw no possibility for compromise between religion and science and he believed that the more knowledge we had, the more people would defect from religion. Like Grayling today, he believed it was inevitable that reason would conquer and religion would be defeated.
Dawkins’ science descends, via Darwin, from the same Enlightenment tradition as Grayling’s philosophy so, despite his apparently greater atheistic urgency, he still believes religion will disappear if parents and schools stop indoctrinating children with religion from an early age. In other words, like Grayling, he believes reason will inevitably defeat religion.
John Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, says that from a Darwinian standpoint the crucial role Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. ‘Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history and, if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this.’9 Gray said Dawkins’ belief in the value of education reminded him of ‘the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses’.10
Gray also points out that growing international secularism, which seemed to bear out Enlightenment beliefs in the defeat of religion by knowledge, was partly illusory. He says that the mass political movements of the 20th century, communism and Nazism, were ‘vehicles for myths inherited from religion’11 so that it was not surprising that religion was reviving now that those movements had collapsed.
This comment of Gray’s reminded me of an incident during a visit I had made with my family to Lviv, in the Ukraine. Our guide pointed out a beautiful church to us. He said that during Soviet rule, the church had been converted into a museum of religion. It included many religious exhibits arranged to show how they had withered away as part of the inevitable progress towards atheism, socialism and true Soviet enlightenment.
After the Soviets left, the museum became a church again.
* * *
Dawkins thanked his parents for taking the view that children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think. ‘If having been fairly and properly exposed to all the scientific evidence, they grow up and decide the Bible is literally true or that the movement of planets rules their lives, that is their privilege. The important point is that it is their privilege to decide what they think and not their parents to impose it by force majeure.’12
I am also the product of such an exemplary upbringing. My father, a kind and gentle man, was a scientist and a rationalist; he described himself as an agnostic but clearly had never struggled with any doubts about the possible existence of a personal god. My mother, whose children were her first concern in all things, was a firm atheist. By common consent, my parents sent my sister and me to the local C of E Sunday school when we were small, so we would understand the culture of the neighbourhood but, hopefully, not catch it.
And yet I did catch it, on and off anyway. I have grown up with a yearning for religion, or at least for spirituality. I have dabbled with Methodism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, the I-Ching, meditation and Tarot cards. I wish on the stars and pray in aeroplanes. These dabblings and yearnings alternate with periods of whole-hearted scepticism and scorn for exactly those things I long for; some of my friends know me as a materialist and an atheist and others as someone with an interest in spirituality.
The first time I read The God Delusion, I was excited by it and felt as though I had shed a skin that was too tight. For a few days, I was converted to Dawkins’ rationalism, believing I had found a way to be free of fear and prejudice.
In Somerset Maugham’s great classic, Of Human Bondage, Anglican schoolboy Philip becomes an atheist when he discovers that if he had been raised in South Germany, he would have been a Roman Catholic. After considering the evidence, he decided there was no particular reason why one should believe in God. Suddenly, ‘he could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.’13 After reading The God Delusion, I felt the same sense of intoxicating freedom as Philip.
Within a week, though, I was embarrassed by my own enthusiasm. I detected something ignoble in my response, so I re-read the book. And realised, uncomfortably, that part of my pleasure in the reading had been in the clever and often amusing way that Dawkins jeered at the faithful. I had thought Dawkins was like The Chaser, boldly making fun of corrupt institutions and absurd behaviour. And he is; but, while The Chaser focuses its satire on people with power over others, Dawkins also mocks ordinary people, most people, people like me, for our deepest beliefs and hopes. There is no tenderness towards fallible humanity in Dawkins’ writing and he argues against tolerance and support for diversity. He is arrogant and I was attracted to that arrogance. I was taking sides with my own scepticism to mock at my openness to the world of the unseen and mysterious.
Examining my feelings about The God Delusion, I decided not to take sides against myself, one way or the other. Whatever I come to believe, it must respect both sides of my nature, otherwise it will never stick.
Although Dawkins said it was fine for people to grow up thinking the Bible was literally true as long as the belief wasn’t imposed on them, he thinks it most likely people will reject religion and superstition if they are not indoctrinated with it early in life. So why did my tolerant, non-religious education not produce a secure atheist?
In Of Human Bondage, the narrator thought that Philip’s complete conversion to atheism was a matter of temperament. ‘The fact was that he had ceased to believe, not for this reason or the other, but because he had not the religious temperament. Faith had been forced on him from the outside … A new environment and a new example gave him the opportunity to find himself. He put off the faith of his childhood quite simply, like a cloak that he no longer needed.’14
This was true of my father too. He was the youngest son in a Melbourne family of the kind known in his childhood as a ‘mixed marriage’. His father was Catholic and his mother Protestant. Every second child of the marriage was christened a Protestant and every other child a Catholic. Dad was a Catholic and was sent to a Jesuit school. He went along with the faith for a while although, being a very good child, he had to make things up for confession, which bothered him. After a while, the whole question of religion seemed increasingly unlikely and he stopped believing in it without any difficulty or doubt. He was a humanist who believed in treating people with respect and dignity and he put his beliefs into practice all his life. He died at the age of 80 and, as far as I knew, he was content that his life had been well-lived, that it was over and that there would be nothing else afterwards.
My mother’s loss of faith was more painful, a harder, crueller loss. She was raised as an Orthodox Jew in Germany. Her Polish parents had gone to live in Germany to escape the pogroms; Germany in the 1920s was considered a place of liberalism, where Jews could live and work more freely than anywhere in Europe. It is hard now to believe how hopeful that period was for Jewish people, before the rise of Hitler, how free and flourishing their lives were, how well they generally got on with their Gentile neighbours.
By 1938, my 14-year-old mother had been dismissed from the German school she attended. She was forbidden to go swimming or to join clubs. There were days when this beautiful girl was not allowed out on the streets, in case her Jewishness would contaminate others. Once, from her window, she saw Hitler driving by in an armoured car with crowds of Dresden citizens, her neighbours, lining the streets and screaming ‘sieg heil’.
That year, after the horror of Kristallnacht, my mother escaped from Germany, leaving behind her family, her home, her language and everything she cherished. She was one of the children saved from genocide by the Kindertransport movement, which took children by train to foster homes in Britain. The Kindertransport movement was organised by both Jewish and Quaker groups in England, with support from government. In my periods of scepticism, I sometimes remember that my mother’s life was saved by those gentle and determined people of faith.
Established in Scotland, Mum wrote regularly to her mother until 3 September 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany. All mail to Germany then ceased. After that, Mum was alone in the world, only able to imagine what was happening to her family.
Six years later, when the war had ended with Hitler’s defeat, my mother hoped to be reunited with her family and restored to the life she had lost. But a distant cousin, who had survived the concentration camps, came to visit her in London and told her that all her family had been killed and it was better not to ask any more questions about it.
My mother had kept her faith through all her difficulties but it ended with that news. ‘If there is a God in heaven, how could he allow this to happen? You realise it’s just not possible,’ she said to me, years later.
So, my mother’s loss of faith was not a matter of temperament. It was part of the whole terrible loss of family, home, language, culture and identity that had been torn from her by a monstrous dictator. It was associated with the deep anger, shame and tormented grief that every Holocaust survivor is familiar with. In rejecting God, Mum was not merely coming to a rational conclusion, although that was part of it. She was also rejecting, with despair, everything that had previously been good and trustworthy and hopeful in her life.
In my childhood home, there were two realities: there was the rational, liberal scepticism that we spoke of and which governed our formal education. And there was the subterranean, unspoken reality of loss, longing, pain and anger at God. I believe that my conflict about religion reflects these two levels of reality and, in many ways, the unspoken things have more power. The scorn I sometimes feel towards religion is a reaction to my desire for some vaguely imagined world of goodness and hope.
I am very grateful for my liberal upbringing and education and the ability they give me to question and explore ideas and to live freely. But sometimes I wonder whether, if I had been brought up in a religious home, I might have been less conflicted, less scattered in my responses, more substantial, more whole.
This is only one story, and not a particularly typical one, but it underlines two faults in Dawkins’ reasoning. One of these is his theory about the Zeitgeist, mentioned earlier in this essay. Dawkins argues that religion is not necessary for morality because morality changes steadily in the direction of improvement without any connection to religion. Once slavery was acceptable in society, now it is not. Once women were not allowed to vote, now they are. ‘We are forced to realise that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he seems from our vantage-point today.’ 15 ‘Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or decide what is good.’16
My mother’s story reminds me that this is historical nonsense. Anti-Semitism has existed for thousands of years but in that time and place it had nearly disappeared, until it was revived by Hitler. Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, also noted this historical error in her 2006 response to The God Delusion. ‘It is precisely the swiftness with which the Zeitgeist can change that makes it profoundly unworthy of confidence,’ she writes.17 Robinson believes in religion, politics, philosophy, music and the idea that people have souls, and that they have obligations to their souls and take pleasure in them. She argues for these things in a passionate book of essays called The Death of Adam18 which reveals her distrust of the morality of the Zeitgeist in its current expression of consumerism, cynicism and Darwinian survival of the fittest.
The second error in Dawkins’ argument raised by my family story is his belief in the power of a rational education to eliminate religion. Reason, grand as it is, is only one aspect of our education. The influence of unspoken feelings, expressed in silence or in anger, in music or in gesture, is also a fundamental part of our education. What we say and teach can be contradicted powerfully by these feelings. So the kind of liberal education prescribed by Dawkins is not enough, in itself, to produce a sceptical outlook. To produce an entirely sceptical population, many of us would somehow have to cut ourselves off from our deepest feelings, desires and sense of what is true.
* * *
So far, I have argued that religion is part of humanity and not something that can be eradicated through a program of education and reason. The Zeitgeist moves on mysteriously, with changes in public attitudes to religion and morality but, throughout history, most people have continued to believe in some kind of religion because it speaks to part of them that is not answered by reason alone.
But Dawkins’ two main points are that religion is untrue and that it is universally destructive; I need to explore those issues, starting with truth.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins is attacking people’s faith in a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe. His targets are Yahweh, God, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus and all the others, though his focus is mostly on the Christian god. He argues that the world came about through gradual evolution and that, although the beginning is still unknown, a god figure is a most improbable theory for the origins of life. So religion for Dawkins includes the whole package: all the personal beliefs and also the institutions and dogmas for each faith.
My interest in religion is not in the institutions and dogmas. It seems obvious to me, as to Philip in On Human Bondage, that churches, temples, creeds and dogmas of different faiths contradict each other, most notably in the fact that they all claim a monopoly on the truth. Institutions live at second-hand upon traditions. The traditions are designed to bring people into direct connection with the divine, or at least to remind them of the existence of the divine. Religion, like science, is made by people and is therefore fallible, but it exists to provide a concrete, material reminder of an invisible, elusive world that some religions describe as spirit.
For example, here is an explanation by Melbourne Jewish scholar, Debbie Masel, of the annual Jewish celebration of Pesach (Passover) which is a ritual in the form of a family meal where the Biblical story of Exodus is recounted and relived:
When we read the ancient text, we are speaking neither history, nor homily. For the story to take hold, each of us must personally experience the spiritual heights of the Exodus …
Every time the story is handed down at a Passover table, the three millennia from then to now become one flowing river of narrative that binds together the souls of its tellers and carries on its currents the promise of the Prophet Isaiah, of a world ‘filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea’.19
In other words, the everyday act of eating is being transformed by the act of remembering into something with eternal value. The ritual is a vivid, bodily reminder of an experience people describe as a connection with God.
In searching for truth, then, it seems more instructive to explore the individual experience of divinity than to try to compare creeds and institutions that spring from those experiences and live off them.
This approach was confirmed for me by a conversation with a friend, Donna, who is a practising Catholic and a regular church attender. She says, ‘I know the Catholic church is corrupt and I don’t like it but that’s not relevant to my faith. There are parts of the creed that I won’t recite because I don’t agree with them. But church reminds me of the things I love and value, which go way beyond the body. If we are just body, what is love? Religion is a candle I need to keep alight. I couldn’t get up in the morning if that small fire went out.’
Even for people who don’t come from the monotheistic tradition of religion, personal experience is the key to their practice. Julie practices Zen Buddhism and a form of moving meditation called Qi Gong. She describes the process of meditation this way: ‘If we can learn to let go of the habitual chattering mind and live in the present moment, in our body, we can experience something beyond words. You can only know it by experience. I don’t theorise about it and I don’t like to talk about spirit because it’s not outside our body. It’s whatever we are this minute. The whole dualistic idea—either spirit or body—is very Western. In Asia, everything is one and always changing.’
So the real question for me is whether there is any truth in that individual experience of the divine or whether, as Dawkins argues, it is a delusion. He dismisses the argument from personal experience in five brisk pages. Here is the nub of it:
You say you have experienced God directly? Well some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn’t impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn’t vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into people’s heads. We humour them but we don’t take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous.’20
A hundred years before Dawkins, a doctor, psychologist and philosopher called William James addressed this same question and came up with a different answer. William was brother to the novelist Henry and, in his different field, was just as brilliant. In 1901, he delivered a series of guest lectures on religion at the University of Edinburgh. He compiled these famous Gifford Lectures into a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. I am not the first person to fall under their spell as they have been reprinted many times in the last century and translated into Danish, French, German, Italian and Swedish. Arthur Darby Nock, who did the 1960 introduction to Varieties said it was ‘the only book about the psychology of religion, in fact the only book about religion … which you could conceivably choose to take to a desert island with you.’21
James was fascinated by people’s religious experiences and describes them with an attitude of both tenderness and tolerance. He tips his hat to the Dawkinses of the world by outlining the rationalist or scientific approach, which has no place for vague impressions of something undefinable, and admiring its ‘splendid intellectual tendency’. But he points out:
Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits … The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition … If a person feels the presence of a living God, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.’22
This, of course, doesn’t prove that personal experience is objectively true, just that logic won’t convince us it is not. James agrees that it is dogmatically impossible to decide about the truth of spiritual experience (as opposed to people seeing pink elephants and thinking they are Napoleon, which can be decided objectively). But he doesn’t just leave us stranded in the dead end of: yes it’s true, no it’s not. James goes on to make a helpful comparison between different kinds of reality expressed in scientific and religious thought.
The pivot of religious life is the interest of the individual in his private destiny. Science, on the other hand, repudiates the personal point of view; scientific laws are indifferent to human anxieties and fates. The religious mind is impressed by ‘the “promise” of the dawn and of the rainbow, the “voice” of the thunder, the “gentleness” of the summer rain, the “sublimity” of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow; and … in the solitude of his room or the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in answer to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.’23 Science, of course, sees all that as an anachronism, a left-over from primitive thought.
James concedes the appeal of the impersonality of science but believes it to be shallow because ‘as soon as we deal with private or personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term’. 24 James’ point is that there are two types of reality: subjective and objective. Objective ideas give us ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess—for example, the information that the world is round—while subjective ideas are our actual experience. Our personal experience may be less significant than our objective knowledge but it is ‘a full fact’.
A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word “raisin”, with one real egg, instead of the “egg” might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The [impersonal scientific approach] seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare … By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given to us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny after all.25
James isn’t asking us to jettison scientific and objective reasoning. He simply points out that science can’t disprove the truth of religion (any more than religion can objectively prove its truth). Both are different aspects of reality and he asks us to value our personal reality as well as what we are told to be true.
I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor … whispering the word “bosh!”26
At this point, it becomes almost futile to examine each of the arguments Dawkins provides to disprove religion (or indeed, any of the theological arguments used to prove its existence). For example, the central chapter in The God Delusion is titled Why There Almost Certainly Is No God. In it, Dawkins argues that a creator God must be more complex than his creation, but this is impossible because if he existed he would be at the wrong end of evolutionary history. To be present in the beginning he must have been unevolved and therefore simple.
Marilynne Robinson counters this argument, with more exasperation than James, but using the same principles, by pointing out that evolution is the creature of time and that the scientific ‘big bang’ theory suggests that time and the universe came into being together in a giant cataclysm.
That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. … I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God hypothesis” has failed to impress theists.27
Likewise, when Dawkins points out factual and historical errors in the Bible and criticises ethical behaviour in the Bible, he misses the point for many religious people. I asked Debbie Masel if she believed the Bible was literally true.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. If I found out there definitely was an Exodus—or there definitely wasn’t—it would make no difference to me. I don’t read it for history.’
I asked Debbie how she interpreted the Bible.
‘Interpretation is an ongoing conversation. You read a passage from the Bible along with the commentary. The commentary is a very big body of literature and takes many years of study. If you read a passage and say, ‘It means x and there’s no other possible way of reading it’, you are excluding yourself from the Great Conversation . You read it in conjunction with the commentary and you compare it and draw conclusions but you do it within certain conventions. There is no one right way to read a text.’
Did she think Richard Dawkins did justice to the sophistication of this approach to reading the Bible?
‘No. Like the people he criticises, he takes Biblical commentary too literally. He is right to condemn the entry of creationism into science but he has no right to comment “scientifically” on Biblical interpretation.’
It all comes back to the same principle: that religion and science search for truth from two different aspects of consciousness and it’s hopeless to try to criticise one from the point of view of the other. The only way to decide about the truth or otherwise of religion is to test it from personal experience and the only way to find the truth of scientific endeavour is by objective experimentation and testing.
I have one final question of truth to pose to religion, however. It is a question William James lived too early to answer; it is the question my mother asked. If God exists, where was he during the Holocaust?
Reading Christian responses to this question, such as the one in Roy Williams’ God Actually, is an uncomfortable business. Although he is sincere in his desire to answer the question, I can imagine my mother’s grim face when he says that ‘suffering begets wisdom’ and ‘that’s how we learn’ and that God gave us free will so that we wouldn’t be automatons28. I decided I would feel more trust in a Jewish answer to this question. Once again, I turned to Jewish scholar, Debbie Masel. She sent me an article she had written called Darkness and Light.
Arguing from Deuteronomy (30:15; 19):
See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil; … I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore, choose life, that both you and your seed may live,
Debbie says that one theological response to suffering is that God deliberately creates darkness, or ‘hides his Face’ to allow scope for human action. Without this distancing, the human being cannot choose between good and evil. The ‘yetzer’, which could be defined as human passion, incorporates an intrinsic propensity for evil against which one must be vigilant, but it also provides the opportunity for goodness to prevail.
This is much the same argument about free will that Roy Williams gives, but one further quotation of Debbie’s seemed to me to answer my mother in a deeper, more fitting way.
In answer to the question, ‘Where was God at Auschwitz?’, Debbie quotes Yitz Greenberg: ‘God was there starving, beaten, humiliated, gassed and burned alive, sharing pain as only an infinite capacity for pain can share it.’
Theorising and argument seem to trivialise the pain of Holocaust survivors, even to patronise them. The statement that God was there, also suffering, is almost the only comment I can bear to hear on this topic.
* * *
In 1994, a remarkable thing happened to our family: we discovered that one of Mum’s three brothers had also survived the war, where he had been imprisoned in a Siberian gulag. Afterwards he had walked through Siberia, Kazakhstan and across Europe to reach Israel, enduring hunger and terrible hardships. When he had nearly reached his goal, he was imprisoned in Cyprus by the British. Against the odds, he finally made a home in Israel, married and had a son.
We found this out because his son had searched for Mum for two years and finally discovered her in Brisbane. A joyful reunion followed and our lives were changed forever by the restoration to my mother of one precious person from her destroyed childhood.
Eleven years later, my mother and sister and I met my Israeli cousin and his wife in Dresden to see if we could find the place where Mum had grown up. We knew there was no chance her apartment would have survived the wartime bombing but we had read that streets and buildings had been reconstructed precisely. At least, perhaps, we could find the street.
We caught a taxi to our hotel from the centre of Dresden, with its cobbled streets and old buildings, some in ruins still and some restored. It was a public holiday and people were picnicking beside the street, strolling by the river, enjoying sunshine and a holiday atmosphere.
At a tourist shop, we found a souvenir map of pre-war Dresden. Armed with this novelty map we set out on foot to find our way around the sites of my mother’s old neighbourhood. All the landmarks of her childhood were within walking distance of each other in the Altstadt, the old part of Dresden.
My mother led us confidently along Munzgasse, a crowded street of fancy little shops and restaurants which seemed old to me but must have been restored. ‘Here was my schule,’ she said, gesturing to one doorway. ‘And here was the synagogue. The service was all based around the singing of the cantor. He had a very fine voice … The kosher butcher was here and this is the place where we bought our groceries.’
We walked along the river. ‘I used to walk here with my cousins,’ said my mother. ‘See how beautiful it is: we used to say it was the Venice of the Elbe. And look, here is the Zwinger, the gardens of the palace. The King went to church here.’ We admired the carved stone, the gold-plated dome.
Not all the streets had been reconstructed in exactly the same way but, after a few false starts, we found the street where her apartment had once stood. None of the buildings were the same but somehow it was important to find the place on the street where she had lived, and we did. We took a photo.
Later, we found the graveyard where Mum’s grandfather and father had been buried before the war. It was in perfect condition. We heard afterwards that the Nazis had not destroyed the cemetery so they could check on any names in case of stolen identities.
‘They are intact,’ said my mother softly, standing beside the graves of her family members. ‘They have not been defiled.’ She was weak with relief, faint. I hadn’t realised how much it had been preying on her mind, this fear that she would find the graves had been desecrated; my atheist mother.
There were pebbles on the graves, the Jewish sign of tribute to the dead. Someone else had survived the war and visited this place. We put our own pebbles beside theirs.
During that journey, we also visited the village of Rozniatow, in the Ukraine; it was the place my mother had visited her grandparents for holidays when she was a child. All the Jewish homes and synagogues had been destroyed and there was no way to recognise the places she had known so well.
On the internet, we found a poem by Techezkel Neubauer written about Rozniatow after the war. My Town describes a beautiful hill, thick trees and a field; a marketplace with two ancient wells; three synagogies where the voice of the Torah was heard day and night; small houses with white rooves, sparkling in the sun.
Around the city, to the north and south
The turtles and bears roam around peacefully
And in the air there is the smell of flowers as well as destruction.
In Dresden and in Rozniatow, I found what I had lost; the thing I had been yearning for all my life. As we walked about, following my mother’s gestures, I recognised it, even though it wasn’t there any more. It’s there in that poem as well.
It was a world of safety, beauty and order, protected by God, governed by wise tradition. Pleasures were simple: walking by the river or across the field, eating fluden with chopped nuts and honey or lokshen kugel with sultanas. There were books and work and family, there was right and wrong and on Shabbat there was a day of rest.
I know that nowhere is really like that, or not for long.
I know there was always a smell of destruction as well as flowers.
I know I would probably have rebelled in an Orthodox home, that I wouldn’t have had the freedom I also crave. I know that, in a way, this thing I long for is a dream—although it was real for my mother.
But it’s always with me, this dreaming and longing; and it’s what I call religion.
* * *
Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, sees religion as child abuse, the root of all evil. He points to the atrocities carried out in the name of religion: executions for blasphemy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Baptist preachers who scream ‘God hates fags’, anti-abortionists who blow up abortion clinics and threaten to execute doctors, suicide bombers, and creationists. And we can all add horrors to that collection: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the collaboration of the Catholic church with the Nazis—it’s a long list.
But, astonishingly, Dawkins claims that atheism is pacifist: ‘… why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?’ he asks rhetorically29. He sees science as always ethical and good. He overlooks the fact that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were developed by scientists and so was Hitler’s racist eugenics. The vicious medical experimentation on prisoners in Auschwitz was conducted by the scientist, Dr Josef Mengele.
People have the capacity for evil, and neither religion nor science exempt us from that although, at their best, both attempt to. If we are going to compare the results of religion and science, we need to compare good religion with good science and bad religion with bad science.
Among the many kinds of religiousness explored by William James at the turn of the last century, was one he called ‘the religion of healthy-mindedness’. He spoke in favour of it as a practical and therapeutic approach to life. Healthy-mindedness was a form of positive thinking in which people connected with the Universe or the Great Spirit and thus exchanged disease for ease and suffering for health. It’s associated with groups like Christian Scientists, but it’s very similar to what we call New Age thinking now. The religion focused on the power of optimism and it sounds as though many of the techniques for healthy living have since been taken out of a religious framework and incorporated into Martin Seligman’s ‘new positive psychology’ outlined in books likeAuthentic Happiness. William James would have been in favour of this development as he observed many examples of it having direct results for people in healthier, happier lives.
A friend of mine, Joan, practises her own form of this mind cure, humourously calling it Joanism. She believes in a benevolent force that provides if we ‘put our wishes out to the Universe’. She also believes in reincarnation and that she receives guidance from her deceased grandmother. An intelligent, successful businesswoman, she knows her views can sound wacky to others but she points to the results: through a mixture of positive thinking and relaxation of control (to the Universe), she has overcome asthma and solved many serious difficulties in her life. ‘People ask me what if I’m wrong about what I believe,’ she told me. ‘I tell them I can’t see how it would matter. If, when I die, that really is the end of me, I won’t know and I won’t care. But, in the meantime, my beliefs are a great support to me. I don’t inflict them on anyone else.’
Healthy-mindedness tends to ignore evil, or at least not to focus on it. For instance, some New Age publications advise people not to read the morning newspapers as it’s likely to produce negative thoughts during the day. James says this approach is splendid as long as it works but it breaks down when people suffer from acute melancholy. For some people, suffering the despair of melancholy, a religion that incorporates pessimism can be more suitable. He sees Buddhism and Christianity as the most suitable for that purpose. For some of those people, sudden conversion can bring the happiness they lack.
I know a man who recovered from a long-term drug addiction, with all the related despair, when he took the 12-step program and became a Christian. I spoke recently to him and his wife and he said he had tried will-power to cure himself many times but that failed. ‘I had to ask for help. It was the only way,’ he said. His wife agreed. ‘You can practise anything, even tree worship, as long as it’s bigger than you. You have to make yourself humble and admit you can’t fix everything yourself.’
I agreed with them that will-power often isn’t much help with changing deep-seated habits but I wondered whether God was the only solution. And yet, talking to them, I remembered times I had opened myself up to ‘it’—something out there—and magical things seemed to happen. What is the ‘it’?
Near the end of Varieties, William James declared his own beliefs. He was a Christian ‘of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a critical philosopher’. His experience was that a connection with God did not alter the outward face of nature but the meaning of it. ‘It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love or upon the same person with love … It is as if all doors were opened and all paths freshly smoothed.’30
* * *
This exploration began when I questioned my own enthusiasm after a first reading of The God Delusion. I was curious to find, a few days after reading it, that I was embarrassed by my first reaction to it. I discovered conflicting attitudes to religion within myself; on the one hand I was attracted to religion and courted it, on the other I was glad to join Dawkins in mocking it and demanding its extermination.
I wanted to find a position around religion that didn’t require me to suppress any aspect of myself, that would allow me to be open and enquiring and that would be true to my own personal experience.
In a general way, I concluded from all my reading and talking that personal religion is around to stay—it may even outlast The Rolling Stones—and that it has a valid place in people’s lives, providing meaning at a deeper level than science can do. In a sense, it is like adding poetry to prose.
This has not been my road to Damascus. No bolt of lightning has struck me, causing me to change my life. In the end, I find the position I need to take is probably that one so despised by Richard Dawkins, the agnostic. But I can use that word in the positive way outlined by Mark Vernon in his engaging book, After Atheism.
Vernon uses the definition for agnosticism of 19th century scientist, TH Huxley: ‘The agnostic is not an atheist but is someone who tries everything and holds only to that which is good.’31 Vernon says agnosticism, in this sense, is not just a shrug of the shoulders but a passionate interest in and exploration of truth.
One story in his book illustrated this approach in a way that appeals to me. It was the story of how ancient Greeks, including the philosopher Socrates, would travel to Delphi to consult the oracle. The seeker of truth would ride several days through the desert and high into the hills. There he would purify himself in the Castalian spring and pay a fee. Then he bought a goat for sacrifice, over which was thrown a jug of water. If the goat shuddered, that was the sign that the oracle would respond to a question. Next he had to wait for his lot to be drawn. Finally he was ushered into the holy chamber of Pythia, who was sitting on a tripod wearing a bay leaf crown. He could then ask his question, taking the risk that she might not answer.
If the oracle did speak, she might say something quite ambiguous. For example, when King Croesus sought the oracle’s blessing on his proposed war against Persia, the oracle said, ‘A great empire will be destroyed.’ Croesus thought that meant the Persians and went ahead with his plan. In fact, it meant his own.
An atheist would see this whole procedure as a con job and a very easy way to part a king from his money. They wouldn’t waste their time considering the cryptic utterances of such obvious charlatans. A believer might take the words of the oracle literally, causing bemusement and no end of difficulty.
Vernon suggests that the real benefit might not be the advice itself but the commitment to the consultation process. ‘Agnosticism suggests a path in between a believer’s certainty and an unbeliever’s cynicism that simultaneously mirrors the “in-between’ reality” of the human condition.’32
Sometimes a list of pros and cons won’t solve a problem but a long horse-ride and some soothing rituals will bring new insights, as long as we are hopeful and open to seeing past our own first impressions. In the best of science and religion, uncertainty is the guiding principle.
In 1900, William James said that God had business with people. Perhaps so. For me, it is still unfinished business.
The End
