How Can I Believe? A Little Book of Guidance by John Cottingham. SPCK (London 2018). Pbk. 48 pages. £3.99.
John Cottingham has enjoyed a distinguished career reflecting on moral and epistemological philosophy, and is perhaps best known for his work on Descartes. In his latest book, he focuses on ways of being religious.
The work distils compelling arguments and ideas from its two predecessors, Why Believe? (Continuum, 2009) and How to Believe (Continuum, 2015). Those books aimed to show, first, that to adopt a religious approach to life is not to succumb to delusion. In all three books, Cottingham deals with each of the major objections to religions in turn, and offers a positive view of the religious attitude. His arguments are all the more compelling for being expressed in beautifully crafted, precise, at times almost poetic language; nearly every page has at least one quotable sentence. To Freud, for example, he offers the elegant response that 'feelings such as those of remorse and repentance … are not easily written off as merely an unwanted residue from our childhood' (21).
The underpinnings of Cottingham's approach include the observation that most people, including some atheists, have a sense of 'the sacred'. To reduce God to a 'supernatural' being or cause, however, 'is to add a kind of blank, a placeholder, which purports to inform but actually elucidates nothing' (30). As for science, while religious belief must not deny its truths, neither can science explain how (most) humans necessarily imbue the world with meaning and wish to move forward in their life. Cottingham argues convincingly that core moral values, like mathematical truths, have an absolute existence that commands a response from us but cannot be reduced to scientific statements about the material universe.
Cottingham's position seems similar to that of Roger Scruton's Gifford Lectures (The Face of God; Continuum, 2012): that it would be a plain misuse of language to assert, for example, that moral rules were mere conventions or the result of Darwinian selection for advantageous traits; or to deny that when I look at you, or at a portrait, I really do see a person, not an arrangement of molecules. Whatever underlying 'reality' may be supposed to exist, it is because we are language-using creatures that we cannot deny the real existence of principles and persons. 'The sacred' is a similar case. Whether or not there is 'really' a Creator, and whether it, she, or he is personally interested in ourselves, is for Cottingham beside the point. Belief is a response to the requirement, imposed by the very existence of 'a holy and inviolable power not of ourselves, to do what is right' (34).
The religious way of life is not a closing down but an opening up, a recognition that (in most people at least) there is an innate restlessness, a desire to live up to the moral truths they inwardly acknowledge to be unquestionable. Crucially, this forward motion must be based in religious practice (praxis). It should be an exploration, not a matter of intellectual assent; '[i]t would be a major mistake to suppose that the initial entry point into the promised land has to be a purely doctrinal one' (8). Thus most debates between atheists and believers are pointless; and there need be no 'struggle to believe'.
Cottingham does not discuss Christianity at length in this book, and his observations can be taken to apply equally to other major religions, which share the characteristic of being a 'search' (38). In Chapter 4 of How to Believe, however, he identifies what he sees as the distinctive contribution of Christianity, the sense 'that we need, not simply a Law or a Holy Book, but a person who shares our human weakness, yet who is an image … of the invisible God'.
The book, like its predecessors, is not designed to drive readers into belief (an aspiration the author would regard as futile). It does not (because it cannot) argue that theism is demonstrably true, or that atheists are not moral or admirable people; but that 'the cosmos we inhabit is one in which the theist … can feel ultimately at home' (25). A religious attitude makes sense for those already inclined towards it; they need not feel discouraged. Neither should they concentrate on doctrinal questions or the supernatural, but trust the world and the sacred, and practise their religion.
Graham Shipley is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leicester. His latest book is The Early Hellenistic Peloponnese (Cambridge University Press, 2018).