Atheists commonly claim to be “rationalist” – and so they tend to be. But, says Colin Tudge, they have misunderstood the nature and the limits of rationalism
A good friend of mine in an exchange of emails referred to himself self-deprecatingly as a “cranky old irreconcilable atheist”. For my part, I’m not a fully paid-up Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu but I’m not an atheist either, cranky or otherwise. I reckon a great many other people would say much the same including some who go to church or to the temple, or Mosque, and many who do not. In fact there are formal studies which show that this is the case.
But I don’t know what to call myself, or all the others who feel much the same. I’m just a non-atheist, which doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory term at all. There doesn’t seem to be a single word in English that’s the antonym of atheist. It ought to be “theist”, but theist has a special meaning which doesn’t cover the ground. Non-atheists generally claim to have “spiritual” leanings but so do many self-proclaimed atheists, including Richard Dawkins, and indeed my emailing chum. But atheists who claim some measure of “spirituality” tend to mean simply that they are moved by the music of Schubert or the Supremes, or by mountains and a fine sunset. That is, they equate spirituality with an emotional uplift that is evoked by something other than the promise of money or sex or a big feed. The heightened emotion is real enough, but, they claim, it can be explained perfectly well in endocrinological terms. All very rationalist. Many feel though, as discussed later, that there’s more to it than that.
As I understand atheism it’s akin to positivism, which the OED conveniently defines as “a philosophical system recognising only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism”. The philosophy of Logical Positivism, which arose in Vienna in the early 20th century, is an ultra-hard-nosed derivative of this. Logical Positivism, says Oxford Languages, “believes [only] in statements that are analytical and conclusive in nature”. Logical Positivism was a potent force in science and philosophy through much of the 20th century and although it seemed to die a death in the 1970s the residue is still with us, like the background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
I suggest that the broad but now much neglected discipline of metaphysics is key — the discipline that atheists specifically reject. Thus, the Oxford philosopher R G Collingwood (1889-1943) defined metaphysics as “the sum of all absolute presuppositions”; and an “absolute presupposition” as he saw it is an idea that we feel in our bones is true (my words not his), and that we take for granted, but which cannot be proven. A key example is the idea of cause and effect, which in science is crucial, but can never be proven beyond all possible doubt. As David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, we infer cause and effect from correlation; but we all know, don’t we, that correlation is not cause. (And the whole discussion re cause and effect is enriched by Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, which has launched a thousand learned treatises, not least from Arthur Koestler and David Bohm).
So it emerges that all science is rooted in an idea that belongs in the realm of metaphysics. So too of course is the entire discipline of moral philosophy. Indeed this is true of all very big ideas, including those of politics, economics, and law. All rest in the end on “absolute presuppositions”. And so too of course does all religion – although religious texts are always a mixture of metaphysical precepts, history, morality, and mythology, largely expressed in metaphorical or poetic language. The Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould felt that science and religion must be forever separate – two “non-overlapping magisteria”. In fact as many historians of science have argued, not least the Oxford and Lancaster philosopher of science John Hedley Brooke in Science and Religion (1991), the histories of the two “magisteria” are deeply intertwined, and have been since their multifarious and largely obscure origins many thousands of years ago. The dialogue between them has continued through most of the last few centuries and into the present. My only point here is that science and religion are both rooted in ideas that cannot be proven or indeed definitively disproved but in truth are “absolute presuppositions” – ideas of a metaphysical nature. It seems to me therefore that whoever dismisses metaphysics out of hand, as has tended to happen more and more in recent centuries, takes the rug from under the feet of all serious thinking (including serious thinking in science).
But to return to religion: I reckon the crucial characteristic of people who take religion seriously but don’t claim to “belong” to any of the formally circumscribed religions is not “belief in God (or ‘the gods’)” as is commonly supposed. After all, some bona fide religions dispense with the idea of God, as Buddhism does, at least in its mainstream form (although the Dalai Lama constantly refers to God). The crucial idea (I suggest) is the idea of transcendence: the idea stated very simplistically that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. Or, to be pedantic (since most of the universe is dark matter, which emphatically does not “meet the eye”) that there is more to the universe than science (or positivist thinking in general) can get to grips with. Indeed the idea of transcendence can only be grasped, insofar as it can be grasped at all, intuitively. Specifically the idea is that the physical, material world that we can see (in part), hear (up to a point), touch (here and there), and measure (however partially and imperfectly) is only the surface of things; that there is a great deal more going on beneath the surface; an agenda even; possibly even a purpose. Plato was among many philosophers – and, I imagine, all theologians — who felt this to be so. So, I suggest, do most of humanity, and always have. “God” might be seen as a form of shorthand for whatever the forces are at work behind the scenes which all but the immensely privileged can only glimpse, as St Paul put the matter, “through a glass darkly”.
Yet science too partakes of a version of this idea, not least in the cogitations of particle physicists of which Niels Bohr no less remarked that “anyone who thinks they understand particle physics doesn’t understand the problems”. Highly pertinent is the idea of “universal intelligence” – the idea that intelligence (which I am happy to take to be synonymous with “mind”) does not emanate from within our heads as we feel is the case. It is a quality of the universe of which we (and other cognisant creatures) partake to a greater or lesser degree, roughly as we partake of light. The idea of transcendence thus conceived gives insight into the nature of mysticism, which runs through all the recognised religions and is the essence of shamanism. The mystic is one who by-passes normal thought processes, including those that are construed to be “rational”, and tunes in directly to the universal intelligence. There is a huge and growing literature on this, not least from various branches of science, especially quantum physics, psychology, and anthropology. But I reckon that Coleridge encapsulated the whole idea most cogently in 1795 in The Eolian Harp:
“And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each, and God of all?”
“In the beginning was the Word”, said St John. But “the Word” is the King James translation of the Greek logos, which seems closer to the English “idea”. The logos in truth as St John surely meant it is the all-encompassing idea that lies behind the entire cosmos; the tune to which we all dance, which scientists, philosophers, theologians and poets seek to get to grips with. Yet in the end, whichever way we turn, we just have to acknowledge that the workings of the universe, and indeed the fact that it exists at all, is and always will be a mystery. We human beings can understand only what we are evolved to understand and the wonder is that we understand anything at all beyond what’s essential to stay alive. And what does it really mean to “understand”? In the end what we call understanding is just a story that we tell ourselves, and find satisfying. No doubt our stories capture elements of the truth (however “truth” is construed) but we can never aspire to the heights somewhat absurdly demanded in courts of law — “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. Omniscience is not in our gift. In the end, life and the universe are beyond our ken. Innately mysterious. To suppose otherwise is to fall into the trap of hubris, which the Old Greeks saw as the greatest sin and folly of all.
But many scientists in positivist vein hate the idea of mystery. They think of themselves as “rationalists” and take it to be the case that by rational musing they can unravel all mysteries. Yet this is crude in the extreme; not a rational thought at all. Scientists like to quote authorities in the form of references to refereed journals just as Catholics like to quote the pope. So let me for my part refer to one of the greatest of all scientific referees, Albert Einstein, who wrote in Living Philosophies in 1931:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.”
All in all, then, the idea of transcendence deserves to be taken very seriously. It qualifies on all counts: it is plausible (as in the idea of universal mind); if it is true it is of huge intellectual and practical significance; and there are no solid reasons to reject it out of hand, as the positivist-atheists seek to do. Plausible and potentially of enormously importance, and with no convincing refutation – what more do we want? To dismiss the idea of transcendence (and hence of all religion) out of hand as the dyed-in-the-wool atheists-cum-positivists claim to do seems to be nothing less than bigotry, perhaps even more pernicious than the bigotry that all too conspicuously bedevils religion.
Share this article:
Leave a Reply