The God Gene

I'm interested by the arguement that there exists a 'God Instinct', which tilts those with the necessary genetic make up to be more inclined to believe that God exists (or something along those lines).

My first thought was that this is slightly embarrassing for religion - making it ultimately a matter of biology not revelation. If you believe because you were always going to believe and not because you chose to take a leap of faith isn't that reductive, even embarrassing, for those who hold that God freely gave them religion? It has nothing, ultimately, to do with truth. Or even 'Truth', if you prefer.

Then I read this article by Nick Spencer, a director at Theos. He argues that the God gene could work in a totally different argument - that it is suggestively consistant with a divinely created universe. Evolutionary advantage could suggest that:

Not only does God tilt creation towards life, and life towards sentience, and sentience towards intelligence, and intelligence towards morality and wonder, but he tilts that package of intelligence, morality and wonder that we call human nature towards himself. Creation delivers us to God's doorstep and bids us only knock at his door.

Of course it doesn't prove anything - transferring from helpfulness or inevitability to truth or goodness jumps Hume's is-ought gap - but perhaps it's less of a problem than I thought.

Spencer concludes saying its bad news for the atheist who must defend his/her beliefs for their 'unnaturalness'. I'm not sure he's right, there seems something rather noble about being unnatural, and this is where I worry that the God gener might still be bad for religion.

If religion were weird or 'unnatural' it would give religious faith a valourous, against the odds sense of overcoming an 'animal' disposition. What greater obstacle to overcome than genetic disbelief? Bigger than martyrdom or persecution. And what is the effect on personal experience - for the fool that saith in his heart there is no God, but trusts in him anyway?

The most reasonable answer is probably that of Michael Argyle, as quoted by Spencer:

psychological research can tell us nothing about the truth, validity or usefulness of religious phenomena: these are questions which must be settled in other ways

He is, however, only repeating the conclusions made eloquently by William James in Lecture I of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The 'nervous' causes of any belief do not determine our judgement of it, which is based rather on other values (how pleasing it is, how well it fits with other beliefs, etc). As the mad genius is no less a genius for being mad so the mad believer is no less true or insightful for his madness.

Imam Butt

I don't truly believe I was born into a faith, although my parents did go to church - religion is something I feel free to question and explore how ever I wish to. Every so often I come across a part of the religious experience which chimes, where I feel I can empathise fully with the beliefs of the faithful.

Imam Butt found a chime between his western 'hippie' beliefs in the 1960s and Islamic scholarship, going to live out his adult life with the Pashtun tribes of the Hindu Kush, awed, he suggests, by the extraordinary topography of the area and the peaceful, thoughtful form of Islam practiced there.

Around him times changed, the Swat Valley became dangerous, violent and home to a new breed of extremist Islam. The Imam didn't change with it. A man able to explore his core beliefs through a programme of intense and demanding Koranic study did not change them in the process but found them reinforced in scripture. He took up the struggle against violence and extremism, preserving the way of life he had always believed in.

Picking and Choosing - the Episcopal Church, Part II

Theo Hobson replied to my post below and said this:

<<I wrote about a visit to a Quaker meeting in the summer for this site. I said they throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater of dogmatism.

Christianity is, at root, a cult of this mythic personality.>>

I replied with this:

<<A note - Quakers are not a Christian denomination, they are a group of believers who hold in common an approach to religion that cherishes different sources of truth and believes in the importance of personal revelation. They don't necessarily worship the 'mythic personality' of Christ, but they can do, if that is the truth revealed to them.

If you want to have Christ-worship in common with all your fellow believers then I suppose Quakers are not for you, but if you want a radically liberal approach to religion, which I think you do, and are willing to believe in Christ when those around you may not, then it might be what you are looking for.

This is just a thought, otherwise I'm pleased that the Episcopal Church can give you something of what you are looking for although I suspect more of it was to be found in England than you say.>>

I searched out Theo's piece on the Quakers (Thursday 18 March 2010 13.00 GMT) where he writes of his disappointment with the lack of Christian symbolism and structure at a Meeting he went to.

Picking and Choosing - the Episcopal Church, Part I

Theo Hobson's article in the Guardian newspaper (Friday 28 January 2011 12.44 GMT) describes his postive experiences in the Episcopal Church after his frustration with the Church of England (C of E).

Here's my response:

I too have been very impressed by the Episcopal Church's bold, brave and liberal stance on so many important issues, but you do the C of E a disservice. The point about an established church is that it includes a wide variety of voices - some liberal, many less so - and what could be more liberal than that?

There are few denominations which are spread as evenly across race, class, age and gender divides (not that the C of E doesn't have a long way to go on some of these). The Episcopal Church is a far more middle class institution than plenty of innercity C of E churches.

Joining in willingly with a bunch of people who have a load of different beliefs about many things but share a core trust in God is one of the most positive expressions of faith I can think of. Shopping around to find the church that agrees with everything you already think seems lazy and arrogant - challenge and diversity are essential in life as in faith.

Sure you don't get what you want in every way, but you do get to exercise skills of tolerance, argument and community. I'm not suggesting you should feel obliged to go to a mega evangelical homophobic stadium church if that is the antithesis of your belief, but then very, very few C of E churches are like that.

Holding onto liberal beliefs while actively engaging and changing the illiberal beliefs of others is a commission not a chore.

Lastly - one thought, why didn't you try the Quakers? Its not a ritualistic form of faith but there are meetings with clear purpose and format, its disestablished, and exceeds even the Episcopal Church in liberalism. An organised religion where members are called Friends and every book is treated as being as Holy as any other.

Picking and Choosing - Division and Unity

Where I live there are lots of churches, for every denomination, every neighbourhood, every style, every brand, every outlook, every set of opinions and every set of beliefs that I am familiar with. Between each of them there runs a line, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower, separating even churches within a denomination and beneath the same authority.

Here's one church: liberal, cerebral, reflective, catholic in tradition. Here's another: energetic, vibrant, evangelising, socially conservative.

And who goes? To the first: middle class families, older people, in their fifties and above, retired priests, a few ordinands. To the second: students, young people, young families.

My friend T, an atheist, loves the diversity. You can choose to participate in the religious outlook you believe in, to support the values you believe are true. Anything else is dictatorial, conservative and moralising, removing the free choice of the individual.

Here's what Screwtape thinks:

<<My dear Wormwood,

.... You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.... the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil....>>

If we choose the religious experience we like the best, as we choose our favourite brand of peanut butter from the shelf, wouldn't we be creating a market where:

<<religious institutions become marketing agencies and the religious traditions become consumer commodities>>

as, in fact, the economist Peter L. Berger describes contemporary society? The big, popular churches can hoover up worshippers from the small, local ones.

Could I remove myself from the market by choosing not the commodity which suits me the best but rather the one I am already living closest to? My local church is neither conservative evangelical nor liberal catholic. I would have a short walk on Sunday mornings. I don't imagine it teaches anything I would disagree with, or at least no more than any other place of worship. And, given that members of one outlook on Christianity don't tend to live together, it's probably a safe assumption that there would be a good mix of views and beliefs, and not a bad one of affluence and class.

But, says T, does this choice really exist? What if you lived next to a church you believed was fundamentally wrong? Now that we do pick and choose is it worth being a martyr to your local community when most of it heads off to the church they like the best on a Sunday morning? What about those churches where no one lives locally, such as in the centre of town, should they just fold?

We finished lunch and I told him I'd think about it.

Events; coincidences

A few weeks ago I met a woman who had become a doctor and then, after some 15 years, a nun. While in holy orders she met a monk and they fell in love. There was nothing for it but to leave the convent. So, after several years of waiting and thinking she left and they married. Out of the cloister he became, perhaps inevitably, a priest and she took up the full time position of priest's wife.

They grew old together. Eventually it was time for him to retire from parish life and they planned a new life in a pretty, old city. Shortly before they were about to move he died unexpectedly. There was nothing for it but to move there on her own. Suddenly it was hard to go to church, to see someone who was not her husband take the service. Each time it was a disappointment, never quite the way she remembered it, the way it had been when her husband took the service. So she changed denominations and became a Quaker, finding in it something of the convent, quiet, reflective and surrounded by other people. No priests to remind her of her husband. This was when I met her.

Capitalism, TV and God

At an Anglican discussion group this week and the question <<is distrust endemic in our society?>> came up. Surely, I thought, everyone will pitch in with examples of distrust - bankers, lawyers, politicians on the make - you don't have to look far for excellent folk examples. But there was silence.

I give it a minute and ask everyone what they think about capitalism - specifically does competition, relentless competition, breed distrust? It isn't the kind of statement that would always be guaranteed much traction in this kind of environment, but no one demurred. One woman in her thirties agrees, giving an example of students competing for results. A priest goes further - is it possible to stop competition becoming reflected in a relationship with God? What happens when consumerism, individualism and competition become defining characteristics of our relationship with other human beings - it doesn't seem credible that the faithful of any religion could shake off these shackles when having a relationship with God.

There's a new television programme on the BBC by the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker called 'How TV Ruined Your Life' (I don't think the irony is lost on him) which argues that the media has used fear to increase ratings. An obvious one I guess. But he pulls out research which argues that the more a particular image is repeated on TV the more ingrained it becomes in the brain; the more real it seems. Inevitably, therefore, other studies show that those who watch more TV believe they are in greater danger from crime and other threats than those who watch less. And, equally inevitably, this bares little to no relationship to reality as represented by falling crime statistics.

Competition and fear are natural bedfellows, and, of course, they undermine trust and then justify distrust by leading us to behave in untrustworthy ways. And TV, one of the most irresistible conduits for information about our world that there is, uses every tool in the disaster movie handbook to amplify competition in any way it knows how.

Not silent but thinking

To a Friends Meeting House and a service in silence. An hour spent sitting still, in the quiet, surrounded by other people is a challenge. You won't find me plugged into my iPod at all hours, I don't even listen to music much, but silence is a novelty, especially purposeful silence.

I am on a bench by the door, three rows back from the centre and all I can hear is breathing, pages turning, legs crossing, feet shuffling. My face itches like madness. For the first twenty minutes I focus well, discerning the Spirit, or trying to. It is taking, I realise later, all my powers of concentration. I focus, I refocus, I search my body and my head, the sounds near to me, the sounds far away from me, looking for something I don't understand. I close my eyes but that makes the itching worse. I try to sit with my feet on the floor, my hands in my lap, but I can't. My legs need to be crossed, my head supported. I give up.

Around me men and women, mostly in their 40s and 50s have their eyes closed beatifically. I can't copy them. I try and I can't. There is no deepening. My focus oscillates back and forth metronomically between discernment and distraction. Do I feel the Spirit? Do I feel nearer the Spirit? How do I even know?

After 20 minutes my psyche is exhausted and I think <<maybe that's the point>>

Time to not-try, to just exist in the room. I open my eyes and watch the other people. Someone speaks, tells a story, and I listen carefully. One woman hasn't shifted a muscle since I walked in. I feel envious. My head is sometimes filled with white noise, sometimes blank. I sit together with everyone else and enjoy the dawdling, the pleasant large windows, the young guy in a cap who smiles consistently. Are they all discerning the Spirit together? Are <<we>>?

The time passes very quickly and within moments the hour is up and two men in long beards shake hands, there is a sense, I think, of collective release. We smile and nod at each other. There is tea afterwards and one woman suggests to me that this is close to a monastic experience. Communion that isn't filled with action or purpose or function but just - communion. I agree and have a coffee.