This tedious fixation on belief

| Michael McGhee | Comment is free | The Guardian

What is it to believe in God? It may seem odd, but it's not a matter of believing there is a God


Personally, after the religious struggles of my Roman Catholic youth I don't much want to hear about what people "believe" – and want to hear even less about their "convictions". In this dangerous and unjust world we need to know what people will do or refuse to do, how aware they are, as Joseph Conrad put it, "of the mysterious power of the human glance that can awaken the feelings of remorse and pity". I am not a believer. I incline towards a secular humanism that leaves space for "spirituality" – conceived as the disciplined search for self-knowledge – and recognises that we can sometimes and beyond the exercise of our will transcend the narrow perspective of ego-centric self-enclosure.

But my wariness of "belief" is matched by an equal wariness of the new atheists' rejection of belief. It is not just that their popular polemic shows a juvenile comprehension of religion as altogether "a bad thing", nor that they are silent about self-knowledge and transcendence. They are fixated on a confused notion of belief, assimilating "belief in God" to something like "belief in fairies", not seeing that these are different notions of belief.

The point about those who believe in fairies is, well, that they believe that there are fairies. But what is it to believe in God? It may seem strange, but it is not a matter of believing that there is a God. To be a believer is to occupy a role in a drama, but there are other dramas, and other roles – being a seeker, or a renunciant, or a disciple or a pupil. Believing in God, then, is a culturally specific form of spirituality. It envisages a relationship based on a "covenant" of trust and fidelity. When Jesus says "you believe in God, believe also in me" he is not inviting his followers to believe that someone or other exists. This distinctively Abrahamic spirituality frames how the members of a "faith community" together confront mortality, the contingencies of life and their own treacherous and mutual duality, a human duality acted out in the behaviour of individuals and institutions and at once inspiring and infecting all the religious traditions.

But surely you have to establish that there is a God to have such a relationship with! This impatient criticism superimposes a model of empirical inquiry on to religious discourse, and takes it for granted that talk of "belief in the existence of God" means something akin to empirical existential belief. Let's just say it. The point is not that there isn't a God after all but that there is no such belief as the belief that there is a God. It sounds paradoxical to claim that believers do not believe that there is a God, but this is only because it seems to imply that they believe that there isn't. We should take "belief that there is (or isn't) a God" out of the equation.

But what is the alternative? To be a believer is to participate in a way of life informed by a conception, not of God, since God is traditionally beyond conception, but of the world and humanity. To become a believer is to come to see the world itself as dependent, contingent, created. This vision of things strikes people with the force of a revelation (so that it is natural to think in terms of "conversion" precisely to a way of life not otherwise contemplated): it presents itself as how things are, and the resident temptation is to assume that those of us who do not share this vision fail to see how things are.

It is how believers act, though, that counts. We secularists should forget the tedious fixation on belief, forget about being "atheist", and concentrate on a conversation about the spiritual strategies for overcoming the common human resistance to living well.