Keeping it real

Warning: it's all about religion!

Readers interested in the topic have probably already noted that there currently seems to be a backlash underway in England against the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens anti-religion books. Here's a Comment is Free article by Alex Stein in today's Guardian that takes Hitchens to task. Madeleine Bunting also joined in last week, and in The Times we had John Humphreys explain why, even though he had become an agnostic, the militant atheists really irritate him. Bryan Appleyard had a short, pithy post too.

All of those are worth reading.

The general gist of them is that Dawkins and his followers attack the most unsophisticated, fundamentalist versions of religion, but fail to engage in debates with those who have a more sophisticated understandings of religion. To the extent that he does engage, I think Dawkins claims that what sophisticated theologians propose is not something that has any real meaning anyway.

This does bring up an issue that is a tricky one for those of faith, namely, the contest between realist and non-realist views of religion.

I don't think this is often clearly discussed in the popular press. I believe I first read about the realist/non-realist divide in a book by philosopher/theologian John Hicks in the 1980's. The idea is that the trend which started with historical scepticism of the Bible in the 19th century has been for those sympathetic to religious belief to move from a "realist" understanding of the Gospels (or Bible generally) to a "non-realist" interpretation. That is, the literal truth of matters such as the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Christ, or even the existence of an afterlife, is believed by non-realists to be unimportant, and the mythological or metaphorical "truth" or utility of matters of faith is seen as the key.

People who hold thoroughly non-realist views can claim to still be people of faith, but it is achieved by re-defining what was previously thought to be undoubtedly real to something which is either not real, or a something in which the literal reality is now considered unimportant. John Hicks has an article on his website which explains this view well.

This is really the crux of the issue for faith in the Christian churches at this time in history, and I do find it a matter of some difficulty personally. Catholics like me, taught in the 1960's, have never had a particularly fundamentalist view of the Old Testament forced on them. So I don't have a problem with a non-realist reading of much of the Old Testament.

When it comes to the New Testament, though, the non-realist attitudes seems to me to have significantly more problems.

My main objection perhaps comes to where non-realism goes so far as to deny something as basic as a belief that there is a supernatural realm, or an afterlife of any variety. At its heart, the teaching of Jesus had the importance of how you live your life on Earth because there will be an accounting for it in an afterlife. (Whether that was an immediate after-death judgement, or one at the end of the world, is rather moot to this point.) But if you start denying that an afterlife has any reality at all, surely you are denying not just "stories" like the Virgin Birth or even the resurrection (which can be seen as, say, rumours that got out of hand,) but something which was clearly fundamentally what the figure at the heart of your religion believed to be a reality about the universe.

On the other hand, it is clear that the founding fathers of Christianity had a fundamentalist understanding of how sin came into the world (via the actions of the first man Adam) and the role that Christ had in fixing the situation.

If you do believe in evolution, one can still (like CS Lewis) believe that there came a point at which the first man did evolve into existence, and did actually undergo a temptation of the kind described in Genesis. But this is a matter difficult for modern people to believe. The concept of how sin or evil originated is thus a difficult one for the Church if you believe thoroughly in evolution, and this also affects one's understanding of Christ.

So, the issue as to where to draw the realist/non-realist line is a tricky one, to say the least.

Should my acknowledgement of the difficulty mean that I should not criticise the likes of Cuppitt and Spong, who try to spread the word that the only way for Christianity to survive is to become completely non-realist? No, I don't think so. I may have trouble with deciding how to resolve the issues, but I think I can still make the call if I think others have gone completely too far into the non-realist camp.

The other matter to always remember that above all of this is the issue of how lives are actually lived. As we all know, fundamentalist faith in ideology of any kind can lead to devastatingly evil acts. The atheist can argue that evolutionary biology is what is behind the moral impulse in humans, and that is why you don't need religion to inform moral reasoning. But what they can't show (at least to my satisfaction) is the reasons why humans should always act as if there is a true universality to the moral law.

In any event, a willingness to act as if there is a universal moral law is, at its heart, more important than the theory on which the moral actions are based.