Beyond Belief: Life After Faith

Copyright © 2014 by Philip Stewart.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611.

Rev. date: 09/22/2014

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Contents

Preface

1.    One path to light

Disjunction

Evangelical oppression

Reason and doubt

2.    Religious basics

A plethora of deities

The case for God

The God of Nature

The leap of faith

Understanding evil

3.    Fundaments of Christian fundamentalism

Three gods

Divine man

Literal truth

Sin and salvation

The elusive afterlife

4.    The Almighty

Revelation

Acts of Providence

The Kingdom of God

The hidden god

5.    Religious experience

Reason and feeling

Deaf heaven

God’s will

Science of the spiritual

6.    Free at last

Saved from religion

Secular morality

Living within one’s means

Bibliography

End Notes

Preface

Many devout persons find it all but incomprehensible that anyone can – in good faith, as it were – do without faith, especially someone who was raised within any kind of fairly strict religious observance. The purpose of my book is to explain, at least in one person’s terms, how this is possible.

Even someone with ideas of his own begins somewhere, with some kind of storehouse of thought that is subsequently sorted through like a stuffed attic to see what can be discarded with no great loss. In my case, that entails having been raised in a mild-mannered and independent but decidedly evangelical church that, above any other single principle, saw to it that so far as possible the literal truth of the Bible was respected. In my case that belief ultimately did not prevail.

Some people, at some juncture in their lives, take a hard look at the things their religion tells them to believe and courageously resolve to make a break. Such was not exactly, however, the form which my experience took. Rather, I came gradually to a point where I more or less said to myself: well, maybe I really just don’t believe that stuff any more. By then it was more of an observation than a decision; it was less a matter of abandoning the faith than waking up to the fact that it had disappeared, quietly leaked away, as if there had been a small hole in my tank all along. Once I thought to raise the question at all, what remnant of faith might have survived until then had simply vanished with scarcely a trace. There is always, of course, some trace; but there was no struggle, just as there was no effort on my part to recover what was now gone. Nor, even now, is there anything I could, even if willing, decide to do that could possibly recall it; and if I could somehow wish it back, I would not choose to do so.

Such a situation might in many cases be formulated in the opposite way: faith is just too irrational to enlist or support credence. Just as it is impossible, as far as I am concerned, to will belief into existence, I would never be able to hold onto it. It just went away. A person who has lost faith ought not necessarily to be viewed as a renegade; there is nothing to be done when it simply has evaporated.

Yet I must confess, without at the time going so far as to formulate explicit doubts, that my spiritual conviction all along had never been deep. I knew this, but assumed the fault was in myself, whereas really it was in the system of religious belief. Did that position at one time constitute faith? It is hard for me now to find that question meaningful. When I was young I went through lots of motions, as I suppose anyone does, but I cannot remember anything inside me worth calling faith. God was never, as people say, there for me. Not that I wasn’t trying. I prayed a nominal amount and never, never really sensed any response on the other end of the line. Other people I knew frequently testified to spiritual experiences which were never mine. I knew how to talk their language, but there was no spirit filling me. I should have realized right then that God was just imaginary, but actually it took a long time for that to occur to me. Yet never did I feel, even in church, what is supposed to be the presence of God. Solemnity, yes, and I can still be awed by the evocative power of a great cathedral; but it is then the genius, the spirit if you will, of man I admire, and not something supposedly divine.

For most of my life I was on the lookout for any semblance of a sign that might point to God, or for that matter angels, demons or anything else supernatural; I have seen none. For the first third of that life, the inertia of family belief was enough to keep me going in the absence of tangible experience. But even meager faith needs something to feed on, without which atrophy finally sets in. I might have latched onto anything substantial, even on a subjective plane. But nothing came that could meet even those minimal criteria.

Sooner or later, a person in my situation has to give up imagining that, despite such a vacuum, a great but elusive essence exists out there that could justify at least some form of belief. It turns out to be much simpler and more comfortable to do without. We were taught that we were passing through a godless world that would try to bully us into abandoning our faith; at that time I never dreamed I would live long enough to feel that, on the contrary, the secular world is not safe from suffocation by evangelicals and other rabid believers. Yet that is exactly how I feel now, as I will explain in due course.

1

One path to light

The overwhelming memory that years of church-related activities left with me was that of a great weight of boredom. All told, I spent years of my life wishing the sermon were over, and the whole service as well, not so much in anticipation of other activities as from sheer claustrophobia and need to breathe air from outside. Clearly not everybody was similarly affected. Not only did some people seem to find solace and peace, perhaps protection, by retreating within the walls of the church, some undoubtedly were even energized by it. Others were just comforted by the fuzzy ambiance or fellowship, as it is known. In any event, a great many people were and are inured or impervious to boredom. Though it was not possible to conduct research on such a subject, I suspect more than a few – if they could not put their brain (or more simply, themselves) to sleep – were also incapable of paying much attention to the numbing, unvarying scenario being rehearsed in front of them.

Thus, to someone like me, the great exhilaration of higher education was the discovery that one could spend whole days in focused attention that was almost never boring – and not a word of it devoted to some imaginary being in the sky – and to feel in some inchoate but grateful way one’s mind beginning to unfold, stretch and seek the sun.

Light is an ancient metaphor for understanding or insight, and much used in the Bible, as in religious traditions in general, to symbolize specifically spiritual kinds of truth. But the light I want to invoke here is that of reason, which alone, by allowing us to see clearly and with our own eyes, can reliably illuminate our path. To the extent that any group’s spiritual truth means revealed truth, it inherently purports to supplant reason. Yet it is in the nature of the human spirit to reason. Reason is available to all and always has been, and is therefore independent of any form of revelation.

As Immanuel Kant famously put it, enlightenment is a process of maturation.¹ He meant this principally in a socio-historical sense, but so too it is often for individuals. For me it was at one and the same time a process of maturation and of education; it began, unsurprisingly enough, while I was in college, but still had a ways to go after that. If I myself became a scholar of the Enlightenment – the term used to refer to a broad movement of science and progressive thought, largely focused in Britain and France, in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – chance played a role, but it was not entirely accidental. Every scholar has some kind of personal relationship with his or her chosen specialty; mine is no doubt not exceptional but it is in some ways highly personal.

In a word, to pursue the historical analogy, I was raised, intellectually speaking, in the seventeenth century, which made it easy for me to re-live the eighteenth. I learned in church to think in a pre-modern way. Thus, despite our anti-Catholic culture, I had little trouble relating to the Catholic thought of seventeenth-century France, which held many of the same tenets I had learned, including such things as the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. Even in the absence of a Pope, a religious community is capable of imposing doctrinal constraints and policing their boundaries; we were allowed to think provided only we did not stray outside the rather strict limits of our own kind of orthodoxy. The sort of thought that could pass as mere inconsequential speculation was all right. You didn’t try to probe mysteries much, however, except in a devotional spirit, and above all you had to pass quickly over – or just deny – any contradictions you might happen across. When you believe that every word in the Bible is true, there are many dilemmas you must squirm out of as best you can. That sort of faith always consists in the final analysis, as Voltaire put it, in believing what reason does not believe.²

In such circumstances, to accept and assert one’s intelligence is already an act of independence, and as such is suspect. Philosophy as a whole was looked upon askance. You could be a skillful physician or lawyer or jeweler or business administrator without upsetting the boat through unsettling queries. It was hard for anyone around you to understand why you would provoke God by agitating futile questions when he had already revealed everything we were supposed to need to know. Was Jesus not purported to have said that his truth was simple? It seemed to follow that to preach the Gospel one need not be encumbered by any serious learning. That bias has hardly changed with today’s religious right. One can’t be half-saved. It was also hard to see how one could be an unbeliever failing a willful act that must make of you a militant atheist. Yet without daring to formulate misgivings as doubts, I must admit that my spiritual conviction was shallow indeed. This I knew, but wanted to think the fault was mine, whereas it lay in the system. Others constantly testified to daily experiences which I never shared. I was as subject to emotional manipulation as another person, and religions are very good at it. From the experience I retained an abiding mistrust of any combination of emotion and religion.

Something in me knew that I needed to go a long way away and bathe in a different ambiance. Before I left for college in the East, a prominent businessman from the church took me out to lunch to deliver this advice: Make up your mind that you are not going to let some smart men take from you something they don’t have. Such was, in unusually unambiguous form, the recommended survival strategy for such situations: in other words, make sure you do not listen to anything that doesn’t square with what you have been taught. Just filter it out. But it turned out to be not a question of cynical teachers trying to deprive me of something vital; no one in fact even tried. More to the point was what they gave me. The real problem was all the things I had been so sure about that made less and less sense, precisely because they had depended on blocking out inconvenient data. There were whole universes out there – and not just the cosmos – of which I had no idea.

As the seminal seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes wrote in the opening sentence of his Discourse on Method, Good sense is the most widely shared thing there is.³ Reason is just good sense, which is why it is, in the end, the natural enemy of revelation. What I was discovering was the light of reason, as inflected by many delightful artistic, literary, historical and political lenses. And so it was that my first contact with the Enlightenment in college gave me the feeling of being the contemporary of those who were experiencing a changed and changing universe. It was to me that Voltaire spoke, though I did not yet know of Voltaire’s extensive biblical criticism, which would have pleased or in any case aided me. I could learn from Montesquieu and Diderot what it was to reason, from Pierre Bayle to critique myths handed down to me. I emerged from the experience, as the eighteenth century had, much altered. All seemed marvelous to me in the vast cultural world I discovered, all the more so that I was able to spend a year in Paris as an undergraduate. I was certainly headed for literary study, and settled on the French eighteenth century through elective affinities, beginning with study of the novel and extending into intellectual history and art.

That variety of interests has stayed with me. I had an uncle, a physician, whose ever intense avocations constantly changed: it was raising champion collies, rare tulips, photography, art collecting, and so on. I am a little like that in my regular work, not for relaxation or as a pastime. A critical edition, for example, is a difficult and fascinating task, but I am happy to leave it for other pursuits once it is done. The value and difficulty of documentation, which can be numbing if it is not done intelligently, are often underestimated. These things both require and further hone critical thinking, which is a tough opponent for religious belief. I have enjoyed all these activities. I think of the opening of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew: I abandon my mind to all its libertinage. I leave it free to pursue the first thought, wise or foolish, that comes along […]. It is also very easy to understand Diderot’s cry: Land! land! when he finally put the Encyclopédie to bed after twenty years’ hard labor. Though I have never wandered too far from the eighteenth century, which is indeed, so to speak, my second home, I have enjoyed the luxury of roaming around within it, sometimes aimlessly, without ceasing to take it quite seriously.

Education ought to raise doubts, and, I would say, in the long run undermine faith, though that is not its purpose and may not be its actual result in most cases.⁴ It does not or should not set as its objective an assault on religion; but by ignoring religion, which is what it should do most of the time, it can have just as decisive an effect. The only battering ram that will break down the defenses of years of catechisms is reason. Once you become seriously committed to reason – to the light of observation, thought and pursuit of understanding – the range of attitudes you consider plausible and really justifiable is bound to shrink. As Rousseau once wrote, you do not doff your head as you do your bonnet, and you no more return to simplicity than to childhood. The effervescence of the mind, once begun, remains, and anyone who has thought will think the rest of her life.⁵

Two points are important here. First, by reason I do not mean abstract, purely deductive thought. One does not learn about the nature and origins of the world and ourselves through the power of thought alone. What I am talking about includes empirical reason, lucid thought applied as best we can to the data provided us by our senses and their extensions – instruments like telescopes, particle accelerators, computers and so forth. Second, reason and science are in no way, despite the silly rejoinders of some religious apologists, just another form of faith. To reason is to insist on empirical confirmation; to trust as an act of faith is precisely to do without such reinforcement. Reason is about the real and faith about the imperceptible. Nor do people of sound mind place blind faith even in reason: unconditional faith in anything is contrary to reason, which is always subject to critical examination and re-evaluation. People can reason badly, in which case they need to be corrected by better reasoning; but reason is not inherently deceitful, as religion often is.

Disjunction

The term atheism in American usage has a hard ring to it that immediately raises the hackles of true believers and even some of their fellow-travelers. Whenever news items mention that particular citizens are atheists, one can expect undertones of aggressive or other antisocial behavior. A sign of societal uneasiness with the simple fact of unbelief is that booksellers are ambivalent about even having on their shelves such titles as Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation or Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great. When I went looking for them at Barnes and Noble, I found a long shelf containing huge varieties of books on religion, none of which apparently purported to question religion; as if the company would be embarrassed for you even to come upon them, the first two of these titles were tucked away in the Current Events section (!) and the third in Philosophy.

There are doubtless, for that very reason, millions of people with no religious faith who tend to avoid the one label that, despite all, most clearly and simply describes their position. So they prefer to avoid the stigma and go quietly about their business. But the prefix of a-theism simply means without (as in atemporal, atypical, etc.): atheism is not a belief but a lack of belief; it does not necessarily assert that God does not exist, because it values evidence and does not find any for or against. What David Hume called the religious hypothesis⁶ cannot be either verified or falsified.⁷

Thus, because so many people seem to associate the term only with aggressive strains of atheism, most atheists who reveal anything of their position take cover in the more socially acceptable term agnostic,⁸ which unfortunately, at least in today’s context, makes things a lot less clear. An atheist has no god: that is the simple definition, and by that definition most self-styled agnostics are really atheists of a gentle and passive variety; for once you do not believe in God that is really the camp you belong to. Anyone who worships no god qualifies as an atheist, though many people who fit in that category have not worked it out that bluntly. If it doesn’t seem there are very many atheists around, that is because most people who lose their faith do not become argumentative, but instead just let it go and forget about it, and those who never had any faith anyway are simply uninterested in debating the issue.

I am using the term unbelief in this essay because it sounds less raw than atheism, but really they mean the same thing. There needs to be a word for withdrawal from belief, the way disaffection suggests gradual loss of love and ultimately estrangement. The dis- of disbelief, while not wrong, conveys refusal but not the process, which would be analogous to the dis- of disembark, disavow or discontinue, or the un- of unburden. And with the same sense of relief.

This simple statement by Sam Harris should reassure anyone who reads it thoughtfully:

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.⁹

In our society, observes George Smith, The atheist is pitted against morality itself, and the struggle between belief in a god and godlessness is viewed as a struggle between good and evil.¹⁰ Godless: what a loaded anathema often hurled at the inoffensive unbeliever. But in truth there are many things one can live without – and God seems to be one of them – without walking around under an ominous cloud of godlessness. As Harris further remarks wryly, The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors. It is hard to see why a stigma should attach to the humility of not pretending to know everything about the beginning, the present, and whatever shall be. Christopher Hitchens further clarifies this position: Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.¹¹

In 1927 Bertrand Russell wrote a little book called Why I am not a Christian, a title I might too have chosen; but he was Bertrand Russell, which immediately made his opinions interesting to some readers, whereas with my name on the cover the reader’s eye would scarcely pause before moving on. Though I cannot speak, as he could, with the sort of public authority that comes from notoriety, my subject is basically the same. It extends to why I am also not something other than a Christian; no more than Russell have I foresworn Christianity only to plunge into some other belief system that might be just as bad.

To be godless is to be free. Not free of every constraint, rudderless and abandoned to licentious excess, as is often imagined by the religiously enthralled: godless people like everyone else need sound values, compassion and human solidarity. But they are not beholden to the cult of an imaginary being,