Religion and atheism

Anthony Carroll and Richard Norman (eds), Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide (London: Routledge, 2017); 260 pp.: 9781138891913, £24.99/$39.95 (pbk); 9781138891890, £100.00/$160.00 (hbk)

Nineteen essays by humanists and religious (mostly Christian) believers, with an introductory conversation between Rowan Williams and Raymond Tallis, and a concluding summary by the editors. In England at the present time, just about half the surveyed population say that they have no religion. Not all of these would call themselves humanists, and there is as much dispute about what humanism is as about what Christianity is. Nevertheless, humanism has become a major factor in English society, with its own initiation and burial services, and even sometimes with its own ‘non-theistic’ services and hymns.

After the well-publicized battles between religion and the ‘New Atheists’, these essays are not battles, but dialogues – attempts to state positions without travesty, to understand why differences of this sort arise and to explore what, if anything, can bridge the divide between humanists and religious believers. The tone overall is irenic, though occasional sniping can be discerned, and the book as a whole provides a good exposition of the intellectual debates underlying such issues as secularization and the place of religion in public life.

In the opening conversation, Raymond Tallis makes it clear that, as a humanist, he is not a reductionist, reducing human lives to nothing but firings of neurons or bundles of quarks. We ‘transcend our bodies’, though we are inseparable from them. It is this transcendent aspect that the Christians in the book’s conversation focus on. Some of the humanists are certain that there are ‘objective moral duties’, and their existence is some sort of fact (Stephen Law). Theists respond that this points to a sort of ‘expansive naturalism’ (Ellis), where more than purely physical realities exist. Perhaps the term ‘God’ could be used to mark these expansive and often seemingly normative aspects of the world. Perhaps God is not just an extra supernatural agent distinct from the world, occasionally interfering in it and introduced in order to explain it.

So the debate is partly about what is meant by expansive naturalism, and whether it tells us something important about human experience and being. Anthony Carroll, as a Christian, speaks of ‘the transcending presence of God’, rather than just of a wholly transcendent God, and of God as present in depths of experience which transcend our ordinary experience.

In general, the humanists insist that theists really think of God as a supernatural agent, and sometimes slip into saying that this leads Christians to make superstitious claims about ‘spooky bits’ like the empty tomb. Theists, on the other hand, tend to deny that God is a causal object among others in the world. Still, theists do think that acceptance of a ‘transcendent dimension’ does make a metaphysical claim – as Ellis says, God ‘is actively present in all things without being reducible to them’ (p .77). It is unclear in the book just what this metaphysical dimension is and how far it would be wholly acceptable to traditional believers. But maybe we have come to a stage when unclarity is a necessary counteractive to overconfident repetitions of ancient formulae, and also to blunt rejections of anthropomorphic and literalist representations of God as if they were rejections of more sophisticated views that are in fact more characteristic of ancient theological traditions.

One result of the conversation is that various theoretical positions become less hard-edged and bluntly oppositional. There comes an admission (from some, at least) that there are elements of mystery in any attempt to assess the significance and meaning of human life and experience. Belief in God is not verifiable in any quasi-scientific way, and cannot provide the sort of certainty that experimental verification can. On the other hand, there is a serious search on both sides of the debate for discovering what human ‘fullness’ really is and how one can achieve it. This is not any sort of scientific search. It is more a search for an existential or experiential way of living in response to an understanding of what it is to be truly human.

This search can, from the atheist side, stress the ‘subjective’ and human element of personal construction and imagination. But even that embodies an ‘objective’ claim that it really is most truly human to be imaginative, sensitive and seriously concerned with questions about what a good life should be. It is not that one can live in any way one likes. Or, from the religious side, the search can stress the objective elements of value which exist and need to be discovered, not just invented – values that surface in the arts, in morality, in personal relations and in the scientific attempt to understand the world. Yet those values need to be personally or socially interpreted, and the concepts, symbols and rituals we use to interpret them have a certain subjectivity, because they inevitably carry the marks of their social and historical environments. Such interpretations embody metaphor to an extent that is not wholly clear or agreed, and it may seem that the attempt to make sense of human experience in all its variety and richness is bound to lead to diverse perspectives that partly reflect specific personalities and conceptual presuppositions.

In the end, the essays do not pretend that there are no differences between humanists and believers in God or some other ‘religious’ conceptualization of ultimate reality. But reading them should lead to a recognition that these differences are not founded on competing attempts to explain, in a dispassionate and theoretical way, observable phenomena in the physical world. They are founded on attempts to make sense of personal lives that find themselves thrown into an existence compounded of anxiety and hope, of moral demand and moral failure, of the search for a good and fulfilling human life in a world filled with hatred and greed.

It should also help one to realize that there is not just one simple division between humanists and religious believers. There is a whole spectrum of complex and interwoven perspectives, ranging from a claimed precision of definition and exclusive theoretical certainty that is characteristic of fundamentalism to the rather vague and imprecise notion that all are on the way to the same truth by different paths.

I have only been able to mention some of the contributors by name, but each contribution is worth reading, and there are fascinating discussions of, for instance, humanist ways of celebrating key events in human lives, the relations between science and religion, the perspectives of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the state of religious belief in the UK. The initial dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams is followed by: Nick Spencer (Research Director at Theos) on ‘Signifying nothing? How the religious and non-religious can speak the same language’; Julian Baggini (Editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine) on ‘The mythos of mythos’; Stephen Law (Heythrop College) on ‘Why do religious believers and non-believers see one another as irrational?’; Jonathan Rée (Middlesex University) on ‘Atheism and history’; Fiona Ellis (Heythrop College) on ‘Atheism and naturalism’; Fern Elsdon-Baker (Newman University) on ‘The compatibility of science and religion’; Anthony Carroll (Heythrop College) on ‘Beyond theism and atheism: the search for truth’; Richard Norman (University of Kent) on ‘Ethics and values: how much common ground?’; Robin Gill (University of Kent) on ‘Faith, ethics and values’; John Cottingham (Reading University) on ‘The spiritual and the sacred: prospects for convergence between religious and non-religious outlooks’; Anna Strhan (University of Kent) on ‘Matters of life and death’; Michael McGhee (University of Liverpool) on ‘Our proud and angry dust: secular and religious continuities’; Lois Lee (University College London) on ‘Polar opposites? Diversity and dialogue among the religious and non-religious’; Dilwar Hussain (Coventry University) on ‘Belonging without believing: religion, atheism and Islam today’; Ankur Barua (University of Cambridge) on ‘The Ocean of Being and the Web of Becomings: the pilgrim’s progress on Indic horizons’; Simon Glendinning (London School of Economics) on ‘Religiosity and secularity in Europe’; Andrew Copson (British Humanist Association) on ‘Engagement between religious and non-religious in a plural society’; Ruth Abbey (Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies) on ‘Siblings under the skin: Charles Taylor on religious believers and non-believers in A Secular Age’; and Angie Hobbs (University of Sheffield) on ‘Filling the space between: what we can learn from Plato’.

As the editors’ conclusion of the book says, the point of dialogue is to help to see what another person’s understanding of human being in the world amounts to. Both humanism and religion, at their best, are concerned with what makes for human flourishing, and can be brought to realize that various options are rationally possible, and that such basic beliefs are both complex and influenced by a number of varieties of human temperament and feeling. The strength of the collection is that it gives a good understanding of how many humanists and religious believers (those who are prepared to enter into dialogue) see the world. It should increase insight into why at this juncture in our cultural history the religion/atheism debate has become important. And it suggests a way to continue a meaningful conversation that is more than just an intellectual battle, but might provide new insights and perspectives on both ‘sides’ that can both expand and reinforce one’s own deepest commitments.