Abstract
What makes something believable? And do we choose our beliefs, or are they hard-wired inside us? Graham Ward sets out to answer these and related questions in Unbelievable. Starting with a ‘real’ ghost story – the controversial 1997 sighting of a ghost in Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where the author was then dean – Ward takes the reader on a journey through time and inside the mind to try and explain what makes us believe one thing and not another. The Peterhouse sighting is an apropos starting point, as the event brings the differing belief systems and predispositions toward belief of dons, students, serving staff and general public into focus. It gives rise to questions about perception and interpretation that drive Ward’s narrative through the worlds of prehistoric archaeology and anthropology, neuroscience and neurobiology, literature and philosophy. Although a theologian, Ward emphasizes that Unbelievable is not a book about theology, nor even to a great extent about religious faith (that comes in the final chapter). Rather, it is an exploration of ‘what lies beneath’ our beliefs, positing that belief arises out of a set of unconscious predispositions that come before reason, judgement, or interpretation, and we all have them.
In the book’s first section, ‘Belief in the Making’, Ward examines archaeological, anthropological and evolutionary evidence supporting the universal nature of belief as represented in the symbolic activities of our early hominid ancestors (cave paintings, ritual animal bones, burial of the dead). Important are notions of social and ritual order, self-awareness and transcendence, and the abilities to perceive intentionally and ‘see’ meaning in things. Possessing such qualities, our ancestors were in the broadest sense ‘believers’.
Following chapters explore questions of believability, moving into the realms of neuroscience, neurobiology and literature, examining theories of consciousness and the relationship between belief and imagination. Ward invokes an astonishing array of thinkers, central among them psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose work highlights the modern imbalance of left-brain ‘instrumental’ reasoning over right-brain native intuition, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who establishes a causal relationship between emotion and ‘rational’ thought and connects belief to the innate capacity for imagining. Lest one think this too abstruse, Ward cites Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (as well as Proust, Joyce and, later, Graham Greene) as an example of how literature can and does persuade us into ‘poetic faith’ – believing in, giving life to, and even experiencing the materially absent. Despite this and other, occasionally jarring, references to popular TV series and rap songs, Unbelievable will probably be hard going for lay persons not predisposed to conversations on cognitive science and evolutionary biology.
Ultimately, Ward is out to re-establish the intellectual validity of belief by showing that belief is relational, a response to something given, beyond oneself; that its evolutionary structures are universal, preceding consciousness; that the form it takes (or doesn’t take) is based on perception and interpretation; and that every belief involves imaginative projection, an anticipation of and investment in what could be or might be or might not be. It is, in religious terms, eminently hopeful. But as the author reminds us with reference to the rise of fundamentalisms, the objects of belief are and never have been relative. There are no unbelievers in Ward’s universe, just people perceiving, and therefore believing, differently.