How Can I Believe?: A Little Book Of Guidance

by John Cottingham

Overview

Why do we exist? Is there a God? What’s the point of it all? These are some of the questions that all thinking people ask at some point in their lives.

John Cottingham explores the whys and wherefores that lead people to become believers.

Contents

1.The starting point
2.Why want to believe in the first place?
3.The human quest
4.Reaching for the unknown
5.The still small voice
6.Intimations of the sacred
7.Evil and waste
8. Belief and observance

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780281076925
Publisher:	SPCK Publishing
Publication date:	04/19/2018
Series:	Little Books of Guidance
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	48
File size:	298 KB

About the Author

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.
He has held visiting appointments in the United States (Fulbright Scholar) and New Zealand (Erskine Fellowship) and has served as Chairman of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, as President of the Mind Association, and as President of the Aristotelian Society. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy. From 2007-9 he was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion and is a life member of the Council of the Society.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The starting point

But my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all.

(Evelyn Waugh)

The challenge that the sceptical Charles Ryder puts to his friend Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited sums up an attitude that has become steadily more dominant in our contemporary culture. Over the last few generations we seem to have seen a steady shift from a world in which religious belief of some kind was the 'default' position for the majority, to one where it is an option only for a diminishing minority.

This applies, of course, to the developed Western world. There are many parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia where religion remains central to the lives of most people, and shows no signs of losing its hold. So the sceptical and detached attitude of Charles Ryder is by no means the norm in the world as a whole, though it has become fairly typical of our own Western culture.

Is the decline of religious faith in the West something to be regretted? It partly depends on which aspects of religion you're considering. A religion-dominated society can be an environment where intolerance and bigotry reign and fear and oppression flourish. Many Westerners pride themselves on their humane values, but one does not have to go back many generations to find a time when Christians in Europe were burning other Christians to death for their beliefs.

So there are aspects of religion that the modern Western world may be grateful to have left behind. But rather than go over that old territory, let us start our inquiry with a rather different and more directly personal question. Are we – are you, the reader – completely comfortable with living entirely without religious faith?

It's perhaps not easy to answer that question with complete honesty. But when the jaded Western tourist looks out from a hotel window in Amman or Marrakesh and hears the strange haunting wail of the call to prayer floating over the city in the clear morning light, he or she may feel a sneaking pang of admiration for a culture where each day still begins with the praise of God. The mess and the grime of another day will soon be unleashed, but here is a timeless moment of affirmation, a brief space set aside to acknowledge the utter dependency of humanity on a power it cannot fully understand but which it has felt a deep need, since time immemorial, to acknowledge.

A similar pang of nostalgia may grip the visitor to Jerusalem as the shops and offices fall silent on Friday evening and the sabbath lamps are lit. None of the difficulty or anguish of human life has disappeared, but here is a brief pause in which secular time gives way to sacred time, a time of renewal and reflection, following a custom passed on down the generations in faith and hope that human life has a deeper significance than the utilitarian imperatives of work and survival.

And even in disillusioned and disbelieving north-western Europe there are still cities where on Sunday morning the bells ring as they have done for hundreds of years calling the people to worship, and where the churches still receive those who have come to start another week by taking stock of their lives, offering up their anxieties and hopes, and singing out their hymns of prayer and praise, not expecting or demanding magical good luck or miraculous solutions to their problems, but as a simple act of duty and thanksgiving and affirmation.

A sentimentalized vision? Perhaps to some extent it is. But it may succeed in bringing home the idea that religious belief is not just a matter of giving assent to certain doctrines, or finding certain credal teachings intellectually plausible. Religion is integrally bound up with praxis – with patterns of action and behaviour and observance that are integrated into the daily and weekly routines of life in ways that confer structure and bestow significance.

Our lives, to be sure, are punctuated by many routines – routines of work and of leisure, of eating and sleeping, of family concerns and business transactions. But the structures and practices of religion are different in kind from any of these. Those who engage in them feel, perhaps not always but at least on some occasions, that they glimpse a deeper meaning and purpose to their lives. At its best, religious observance seems to afford a brief respite from the relentless grind of secular activity, a fragile window into a region that is hard to define or explain, but which something in us recognizes as having a special kind of significance – the region of the sacred.

You do not have to be a committed believer to recognize this elusive and precious dimension of our human existence. One of the fiercest contemporary critics of religious belief has recently conceded that there is such a thing as 'spiritual experience', and that it can be among the most 'important and transformative' occurrences in our lives. And another prominent self-styled 'materialist' and representative of the 'new atheism' is on record as acknowledging a 'numinous' and 'transcendent' aspect to our lives, which is 'beyond the material or not entirely consistent with it'.

It remains to be seen how we are to come to terms with this 'numinous' or 'sacred' or 'spiritual' dimension. But a more general point about the framework for our inquiry may perhaps already have emerged from these opening remarks. When people ask 'Should I believe?' or 'How can I believe?', it is often assumed that what is wanted is an intellectual inquiry into the truth of religious claims, or an analysis of the evidence or arguments that support religious belief. This calls to mind the detached, sceptical standpoint of Charles Ryder in our opening epigraph – 'How can you possibly believe all that?' But while there is nothing wrong with approaching religion via analysis and scrutiny of the relevant beliefs and doctrines, this is not the only way to tackle the subject – not even the only philosophically respectable way. There is another way: to start by thinking not about the doctrines but about the practices and observances that give religion its shape, and the heightened human experience (of the sacred, the spiritual, the numinous, or whatever term we use) that nourishes it. If we focus on these things, then perhaps the question 'How can I believe?' will end up answering itself.

CHAPTER 2

Why want to believe in the first place?

You want to cure yourself of unbelief and you ask for the remedy.

(Blaise Pascal)

Some people, perhaps with pain and effort, have thrown off what they now regard as the illusory religious beliefs of their childhood, and they may be angry or irritated if anyone suggests they should reconsider. Others, particularly among the younger generation of educated Westerners, may have had little if any direct childhood contact with religious belief and may possibly be curious about what it involves and whether they themselves could ever be drawn to become believers. Yet another group, perhaps because of crises or setbacks in their lives, may find themselves thinking wistfully about what it would be like if they could ever embrace the comforts and consolations of being a believer.

But what exactly are these supposed comforts and consolations? More broadly, what could motivate someone to want to become a believer in the first place? For unless there is some motivation, some initial wish or inchoate inclination to open up the question of religious belief as at least a conceivable option, then the question 'How can I believe?' could scarcely get off the ground.

When people speak of the 'consolations' of religion, they may well be thinking of belief in the afterlife. This is identified by many as the key component of being a religious believer; hence one quite often hears remarks like, 'I'm not religious – I think that when you die, that's the end.' Blaise Pascal, in the seventeenth century, who was one of the first to raise the question of how one might motivate oneself to become a believer, laid great stress on our hopes or fears regarding the eternal happiness or misery that awaited us in the next

Yet Pascal's emphasis is by no means the only possible one. A great deal of religious belief and practice is, and always has been, concerned with a deep sense that our lives need redemption, that we need to turn aside from our selfish and wasteful pursuits and seek a more fulfilled and abundant life here and now. The goal, in the words of the Gospel, is 'that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly'.

There are, no doubt, many aspects to this richer and more 'abundant' existence, but one of them is that religious belief typically appears to confer a sense of meaning to life. It would be absurd to say that an atheist's life cannot contain many worthwhile and meaningful activities. But for the religious believer, human life is typically seen as having an additional significance that is the key to its ultimate meaning – what might be called a cosmic significance.

The best way to see what this involves is to set it against the opposite view. If the modern scientific-materialist conception of the cosmos represents the final truth, then human life, together with love, consciousness and all that we value and treasure, is the result of inexorable physical laws operating blindly, without plan or purpose. It is of no more ultimate significance than an evanescent vapour that coalesces on a planetary rock for a while, as long as certain chemical configurations happen to arise, but is destined sooner or later to vanish, just as the rock itself will vanish, engulfed by the dying embers of the star around which it revolves.

Perhaps, by resolutely pursuing our own chosen activities and projects, we can salvage what meaning we can from this terrifyingly blank and indifferent cosmic backdrop. But however we construe it, our human existence will still be no more than a strange cosmic excrescence appearing and then disappearing without any more ultimate point or purpose than any of the other relentlessly unfolding events – shifting of tectonic plates, collisions of meteors, explosions of supernovas, spinning of galaxies – that mark the slow and inevitable running down of the universe towards the final stasis of total entropy.

Suppose, by contrast, that the core idea of traditional theism is true – the idea that at the heart of things is a living divine presence that is the source of all being and goodness. In that case, then, our human existence, even granted that it arose out of the long chain of forces and reactions described by science, will nevertheless be more than just an accidental byproduct of those inexorable physical processes. It will be ultimately grounded in something that gives it meaning and purpose. Our human nature, however often we go astray and turn towards darkness and despair, will nevertheless be fundamentally ordered towards the good – towards a purpose not of our own devising that is intrinsically good, and in which alone our true fulfilment is to be found.

It is this kind of vision, this sense of ultimate 'groundedness', that led the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to speak of a religious outlook as involving the feeling of being 'absolutely safe – I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say "I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens."' Wittgenstein certainly did not have in mind the naive or superstitious belief that God will protect us from the ordinary dangers of accident, aggression, weakness and failure that are inseparable from human life. What he may have meant was something closer to what has been called a sense of 'ontological rootedness' – a sense that, for all its difficulties and dangers, the world we inhabit is one in which we can feel ultimately at home.

Wittgenstein was not a religious believer, so there is a sense in which he was describing a promised land that he himself felt unable to enter. But it would be a major mistake to suppose that the initial entry point into the promised land has to be a purely doctrinal one – signing up to certain credal statements, for example. As already noted in our opening chapter, a vital part of entering the domain of religious belief has to do with praxis, with regular practical routines of religious observance. And it is this praxis that may be the key to nurturing the sense of rootedness without which life, however full of useful achievement, can seem ultimately flat and empty.

CHAPTER 3

The human quest

The soul is born to perceive the infinite good that is God and here alone can find rest.

(Bonaventure)

Human existence is difficult. Even for those in the developed world who enjoy unprecedented levels of comfort, life is hostage to the ever-present risks of accident, illness, depression, disappointment and failure. And even if we cheerily manage to forget all this, we can never entirely lose sight of the stark fact of our mortality. As the wry Woody Allen joke has it: 'You should live each day like it was your last – and one day you'll be right!' Or to quote the old psychoanalytic jest: 'Doctor, doctor, I have a nameless fear.' 'Don't worry – we'll soon put a name to it!'

The existentialist philosophers had various names for this – 'angst', 'sickness-unto-death', 'fear and trembling', 'nausea'. To be sure, there is plenty to be anxious about, and we all know what it is like to be racked by a specific worry – about one's job, perhaps, or an impending financial crisis, or the health of a loved one, so that the feeling one has when waking up in the morning is an all too familiar sickening lurch of fear: the ordeal continues, it still has to be faced, it has not gone away. But even when there is no particular preoccupation on the horizon, even when things seem 'normal' and comparatively comfortable, to be human is nevertheless to experience a certain residual restlessness – a characteristic sense of incompleteness.

The ancient Stoics spoke of happiness as involving a 'good flow of life'. Their ideal was that of the philosophical sage whose life is characterized by a calmness, a mastery of the unruly passions, and an ordered progression of rationally ordered choices. But as Shakespeare pointedly observes, 'there was never yet philosopher who could endure the toothache patiently'. However much we may want to pride ourselves on our intellectual detachment and rationality, we are not disembodied intellects, but vulnerable creatures of flesh and blood, and the resulting worries and insecurities to which we are prone affect us at much deeper levels than are accessed by the rational conscious mind.

Physical pain, or even chronic discomfort, can profoundly disrupt the 'good flow of life'. And mental anxieties can sap our energy and disturb our ability to think clearly and effectively pursue the tasks we have set ourselves. Perhaps one might imagine a scientific utopia in which the combined skills of the pharmacologist and the behavioural therapist could address the 'thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to', and alleviate all or most of our day-to-day ills. Yet one does not have to be an incurable pessimist to think that even in such a 'brave new world' our residual human restlessness would never completely go away.

To be a religious believer is clearly not to have a magical cure for the anxiety that is inextricably bound up with the human condition. When St Augustine spoke of the 'unquiet heart', he was referring not to our intermittent oppression by specific cares, but to a more enduring aspect of the kind of creatures we are. To be a human is to be dependent, finite, not self-sufficient – and indeed this is a feature of our existence that no one, believer or not, could coherently deny. Yet for the believer, it is at the root of the religious impulse. For in the very fact of recognizing this weakness, this finitude, we are dimly aware of the infinite – the perfection we fall immeasurably short of, but to which we somehow aspire or towards which we yearn.

This line of reasoning owes something to Plato, and was further developed by the thirteenth-century Franciscan thinker St Bonaventure, only to reappear five centuries later in the Meditations of René Descartes. Descartes is standardly considered to be the 'father of modern philosophy', the champion of cautious reasoning based on 'clear and distinct ideas'; but his reaching towards the infinite goes far beyond detached intellectual reflection. It involves a passionate encounter, characterized by awe and wonder, which dispels the darkness of doubt, and leads the meditator to 'gaze at, wonder at and adore the beauty of this immense light'.

We are back with the importance of praxis. Descartes' meditator is not just thinking something, he is doing something, doubting: seeking, wondering, gazing, adoring. Augustine remarked that the 'restless heart' that is our human birthright could find rest and repose only in God. And similarly for Descartes, the darkness and chaos that he plumbs when he resolves to doubt everything are dispelled only when he sees that in acknowledging his ignorance and weakness he is already implicitly acknowledging his creatureliness – the utter dependency of his finite being on the infinite light of truth and goodness that floods into his mind, 'in so far as the darkened intellect [of a finite creature] can bear it'.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "How Can I Believe?"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John Cottingham.
Excerpted by permission of Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
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Table of Contents

1 The starting point,
2 Why want to believe in the first place?,
3 The human quest,
4 Reaching for the unknown,
5 The still small voice,
6 Intimations of the sacred,
7 Evil and waste,
8 Belief and observance,
Notes,

Editorial Reviews

Strongly recommended. Ministers will find them a useful reference and may consider getting additional copies for pastoral encounters and spiritual counselling.

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