God as the voice in our heads. (Part 3)

God as the voice in our heads

Part 3: My final defence of religion

While we are still on “preliminary matters” before – finally! – getting onto the subject matter of this article, I would like to mention what I consider to be my final defence of religion. Throughout my life, during times of doubt, it has been possible that I would abandon faith. This would never have been in terms of “falling out of love” with God – he has never lost his appeal for me. Rather it would be the possibility that I would decide, “Oh no! I’ve got it all terribly wrong!”. I might have made an intellectual decision that I am mistaken believing in God. Simple honesty and integrity would require me to “see through” the mistakes that I made in my youth and admit that the case for God’s existence is too weak to uphold any longer.

Through my introduction to the wonderful world of philosophy, I believe that I have found a truly impregnable position. It involves “moving to the anti-realist side of the board”. As a teacher of philosophy of religion, I would keep returning my students to “the 8 key words” that in themselves provide a key framework for understanding the philosophy of religion. They are as follows:-

Realist                                                                                Anti-realist

Correspondence (theory of truth)                     Coherence (theory of truth)

Cognitive                                                                          Non-cognitive

Verifiable                                                                          Non-verifiable

The 4 terms on the left work together, supporting each other, as do the 4 terms on the right, and each pair of terms are opposites. Popular demand might force me to go into the 8 terms in detail, but my particular point here is the question of whether “moving to the right hand” anti-realist side is the final, impregnable defence for God or “the last nail in his coffin”? Briefly, a realist statement is one which is intended to be actually true in reality. So, if I say, “God loves me” in a realist sense, I mean that there really is a God – as an actual, independent being -and he truly does love me. If I say it in an anti-realist way, I am saying that in my personal subjective belief system I have made a commitment to believing in God. Ultimately, it doesn’t actually matter whether there is “really” a God or not, because God “really does” exist for me because the idea of the person of God who exists and who loves me is an idea that has supreme significance for me. Thus, in my consciousness, God is a real being. Whereas for the realist it is of vital importance that they believe that the God in their consciousness corresponds to an actual God who exists outside of their consciousness, for the anti-realist this is not important because the key point is that this “figure of God” is important to me. Thus, no doubts about whether God exists outside of the person can ever assail the anti-realist, because this point simply isn’t important to them. The anti-realist inhabits an enclosed world where, provided the different bits of their belief system fit together successfully (that is, they cohere in the coherence theory of truth), then it is a “true” belief system, simply because it is believed to be true.

So, is this the final impregnable defence of religion in that your beliefs can never be undermined? Or is it the final nail in God’s coffin because you have only achieved this intellectual safety by abandoning belief in God, as he has always previously been understood, as an independent agent? Adopting an anti-realist belief system is, in fact, an excellent example of adopting beliefs within a framework of understanding, but, while all beliefs exist within a particular framework of understanding, those beliefs that depend on an anti-realist understanding of them, make no appeal to corresponding to any external reality. Thus, it is very important for my task in writing my blog that I do not retreat into anti-realism. My whole point is to NOT simply make religious claims – such as, “God loves you”, and call on people to accept this as an act of faith – this is calling on people to simply have a conversion experience from the secular to the religious worldview. Instead, I call on secularists to work within their own worldview, but to make connections between what they already clearly see is real, with what I am now claiming is real within the religious sphere – but secularists can see that these religious elements already exist within the world as they know it to be.

My aim to give people the freedom to accept and embrace their religious experience. Perhaps, previously, secularists felt unable to acknowledge the full range of their experiences or to accept their importance because – within their secular framework of understanding – this would mean abandoning their entire way of thinking. We must accept that this is as precious to secularists as their own framework is to religious people. Just as it is an awesome thing for a secularist to convert to become a religious person, and painful for a religious person to give up their faith, so we must accept that it is painful for a secularist to give up their secular framework of understanding the world. Thus, conversion, one way or the other, requires an enormous weight of substantive content to persuade a person to “switch sides”. I am hopeful that if I introduce religious ideas that make sense within the secularist’s framework, then it becomes easier for them to accept and so grow towards God. A conversion is still required! At some point, a person will find that they have adopted so many aspects of the religious worldview that it’s not entirely clear which side they do now stand on – until, perhaps, they come to the self-realisation that they have moved into God’s kingdom. It’s possible that they didn’t even realise when they crossed the border, but now something has happened and they realise that they have made a commitment to follow the Lord. Let there be no doubt, this still entails an act of faith. It is not possible to prove God’s reality, so faith is always going to be required. However, whereas perhaps before, the secularist understood faith in negative terms as an abandonment of reason and a retreat from reality, now, as a person of faith, they see that God is the ultimate reality and a life of faith is the most fulfilling way of life there is.