Believe Differently

Despite Richard Dawkins’ claim otherwise, the truly rational person is agnostic; reason alone cannot lead a person to faith and neither can it do the opposite. I am continually frustrated by how often I meet individuals who claim an atheistic position based on what they understand to be rationalistic principles. Philosophically it is simply not possible to prove or disprove God’s existence, and those that argue one way or the other are simply rehearsing old material. Especially since Immanuel Kant, all such debate has been found wanting; we simply cannot know if God exists; both belief and unbelief require us to exercise faith.

I came across a quote, the other day, by Bryan Magee – a philosopher, author and broadcaster – which sums up rather well how I feel in this regard. His words are especially striking when you realize that he does not “believe” in God! With respect to his own belief he writes:

I have never shared Kant’s belief in God, and I do not I do not see what such a belief would explain, since the existence of God would then in itself require explanation. There is nothing I would love more dearly than to believe that I have an immortal soul, and it is possible I have, but I can never been able to persuade myself as far even as a fifty – fifty conviction that it is so.1

But with regard to those who claim there is no God he writes.

I have little intellectual patience with people who think they know there is no God, and no life than this one and no reality outside the empirical world. Some such atheistic humanism has been one of the characteristic outlooks of Western man since the Enlightenment, and is particularly common among able and intelligent individuals. It is the prevailing outlook, I suppose, in most of the circles in which I have moved for most of my life. It lacks all sense of the mystery that surrounds and presses so hard on our lives: more often than not it denies its existence, and in doing so is factually wrong. It lacks any real understanding that human limitations are drastic, in that our physical apparatus must inevitably mould and set narrow bounds to all that can ever be experience for us – and therefore that our worldview is almost certainly paltry, in that most of what there is almost certainly lies outside it. It is complacent, in that it takes as known what it is impossible we should ever know. It is narrow and unimaginative, in that it disregards the most urgent questions of all. I think that I, like Kant, would go as far as to say that it is positively mistaken in believing that there is no reality outside the empirical realm when we know there must be, even if we can have no proper understanding of it. Altogether, it is a hopelessly inadequate worldview from several different standpoints simultaneously; and yet it is one that tends to identify itself with rationality as such, and congratulate itself with sophistication. Throughout my life I have found most of its adherents unable to understand that truly rational considerations lead to quite different conclusions. Such people tend on the contrary to take it for granted that anyone who adopts a different view from theirs does so from a standpoint of inadequate, or inadequately rational, reflection or intelligence – perhaps blinkered by convention, or religion, or superstition, or irrationalist beliefs of some modern kind; or just plain muddle-headedness, if not thoughtlessness. Their attitude is what Schopenhauer called “shallow-pated rationalism”.2

1. Bryan Magee, The Confessions of a Philosopher. A Journey though Western Philosophy (London: Phoenix, 1998) 205 [↩]
2. Magee, The Confessions, 200 [↩]