I have been an SOF member for over a dozen years. My first encounter with SOF was an episode of the BBC’s spiritual affairs programme Heart of the Matter (written and presented by Joan Bakewell) back in the mid-90s. I was not only fascinated by the idea of ‘Christian Atheists’ but warmed to how such a seemingly untenable position was explained. One interviewee, no longer a nun after 30 years in a religious order, argued that being religious no longer required belief in God but an appreciation that ‘life is sacred’. A working vicar argued that the most important thing was to be ‘creative with your faith’ (or lack of it). The essence of Christianity was accepting Christ’s model of morality – the supernatural aspect had become irrelevant, outdated and superstitious.
Having been brought up as a Roman Catholic these insights were so refreshing – I had been through a negative atheistic phase, reacting against some literal aspects of Catholic doctrine, especially things like transubstantiation, which seem more like a warped loyalty test than an example of spiritual revelation. I have a loyalty to SOF because it represents freedom of thought, and I confess to a slightly impish pleasure at the ‘heresy’ of the main idea.
However, having just read Don Cupitt’s Taking Leave of God I have to admit that I think the atheism which it argues for may now also be in retreat. While I take Cupitt’s point that religion and religious faiths cannot each be validated by their own story of the cosmos but by their exhortation to live according to a religious ideal, the complete divorce between the cosmic and social aspects of religion leaves an essential gap. Cupitt points out that a lot of religious doctrine and interpretation had been made in a ‘pre-scientific’ age and that it was missing the point to look for exact interpretation. You don’t believe in Jesus, you believe in what Jesus said. Authority comes from the power and sense of his words not from his divinity; the miracles are basically an anachronism.
But does this not miss the point of being religious? Life is not just sacred, it is miraculous – all good scientists will tell you that – and the awe and wonder we experience, the appreciation that there is transcendental knowledge, is the very basis of religion, not moral authority.
Cupitt describes a pre-scientific age but his own times are now looking like an age of scientific hubris. An age where the scientific method was the purest and surest path to truth, where all mystery would ultimately be conquered, be it the origins of the universe or of life. Mature philosophers of science understand that physics is unable to answer ultimate questions and that science is not ultimately based on mathematical truths revealed through evidence, but on unsolvable mystery: astrophysics and the life sciences will tell us more with progress but they will never tell us how and why everything originated. New things will come to light in our efforts to dispel mystery, but we will never dispel all of it; to believe that we can is to accept a false premise.
The essential strangeness and mysteriousness of life, the universe and existence is an affront to many scientists, but less so now than it was decades ago. New concepts such as dark matter and dark energy are now understood as placeholders before better explanations come along to reveal how we only perceive 4% of what actually exists. Likewise, we can track and describe the movement of DNA molecules but we cannot explain their origin or formation.
The hypothesis that organic chemistry simply emerged out of inorganic chemistry has been dismissed by both Francis Crick and Fred Hoyle. (Crick was co-discoverer of the DNA helix, a committed atheist for whom everything was merely matter and energy. Hoyle discovered that the organic compound, carbon, was made inside stars as were the other heavy elements.)
Both these giants of science preferred ‘panspermia’ to explain the start of life on Earth rather than the amino-acid soup theory, which both argued is impossible. The point here is not to do with their alternative explanations, but with the fact that these things are beyond explanation: we are rats in the underground system, we see the walls of the tunnel but are ignorant of the tube map.
So when we dismiss religious writing as mere poetry, we may be overlooking the chasm that this poetry is trying to bridge. Some argue that atheism is a metaphysical position: it requires accepting that the universe’s emergence is based on some higher scientific law or laws, but these laws must therefore predate the universe, hence a leap of faith is required – the laws are given divine properties. When Carl Sagan was asked whether or not he believed in God he replied, ‘It depends what you mean by God’. A God which is not a mind as we understand it, which we cannot relate to, just because it is partly a way of describing that which is beyond our comprehension, does not make it less real. And that is my issue with Cupitt – he argues God out of existence, rather than arguing for the impersonal God over the personal one.
Our thinking may have been affected by a false dichotomy between science and religion, best exemplified by creationism versus evolution. It surprises many to know that the founder of modern physics, James Clerk Maxwell, was a committed Christian of the theist sort. He described the limits of scientific knowledge thus: ‘Scientists are like bell ringers at Church, we know what ropes to pull to get the right notes, but we don’t know what’s happening in the belfry.’ Whether it’s quantum, the Big Bang or the origins of life, science is limited in what it can explain. The religious-minded try to bridge the gap, agnostics acknowledge its existence but modern atheists may not just be in denial that this essential gap in our knowledge exists, but that acceptance of this gap is at the very heart of what it is to be religious.
Robert Boucnik is a Maths teacher from Hastings. Last autumn his interview with Rupert Sheldrake on the subject of collective intelligence/consciousness was the centrepiece of Nexus magazine’s 200th edition (an audio version is on YouTube).