Many thanks for the invitation to join the service partly marking Lois’ new role on Saturday. I tend to assume that the Anglican Church extends a blanket invitation to people like me (whom it perhaps views as lost sheep). I think that this is generous of it, though it is not, in general, an offer I am likely to accept. (You’ll recall I did attend the service at Carlisle to witness that specific very important event in Lois’ life.)
Perhaps, as we will bump into each other over the next few years, it might help if I explain, now, my attitude to religious faith so as to manage any expectations that might otherwise seem to attach to the partner of a licensed lay minister who also works in a paid role for the Church (and lives in a rectory!).
I think of the difference between having, and not having, religious faith as a basic cultural-anthropological datum (hence the picture above). One either sees the world a certain way, and naturally expresses that seeing in certain practices, or one does not. And if one does not, there is no point in faking it (outside religious totalitarian states where there might be external but merely prudential reasons to do that). There would, likewise if more trivially, be no aesthetic or musical point in faking a liking for Wagner if one does not see the world of music in a ‘Wagnerian’ way.
There have been historical attempts at what might be called ‘cognitive prosthetics’ ie non-question-begging attempts to motivate, rationally, a move from a lack of faith to faith starting from premises available to anyone. Natural Theology and Pascal’s Wager are instances. But the former is an argument, at best, for a cosmic engineer (perhaps of the sort that von Däniken postulated in the heady 1970s) and the latter a way to appease a cosmic transactional Donald Trump figure. Neither yields a God worth their name. (I do think that the world - via the Enlightenment - owes a debt of gratitude to Natural Theology. Newton was more a Natural Theologist than a proto-physicist but his labours for the former helped shape the latter.)
So that leaves the basic datum untouched.
I think from conversations with those who naturally have a religious outlook that it is quite hard (for them) to conceptualise what its lack might involve. One either tends to subtract too little or too much.
Subtracting too little yields a picture of those without religious faith as themselves experiencing a religious lack. Now there is a lack I obviously do experience. I can see how much meaning, value and reassurance that a religious outlook gives Lois. Frankly, I’m envious. But I’m envious of it as a psychological factor not a cognitive one. From my perspective, religion is a false consolation. So it is not that I experience what I take to be a lack of genuine consolation. That would be senseless (for me, that is, given the basic datum). Still, given my anthropological starting point, I can see some mundane psychological disadvantage in lacking that faith. But not having that faith, I cannot see this as an error or blindness to something real. Perceptions of truth and error follow from the basic datum. They do not underpin it.
(This is akin to one of the paradoxes of liberalism. Liberals tend to admit that our views are historically constituted but do not see this as a reason to hold them any the less strongly. Given our historical constitution, these are our values!)
Subtracting too much seems to yield a picture of shallow scientism. I’ve often found that religiously minded people assume that I must trim my ontology to basic natural science. It is as though one either believes in the full richness of a theological world or, austerely, just what post C17 science yields of its limited subject domains. The latter is an assumption that reductionism is coequal with realism. It is, of course, false.
Like many philosophers, I am an Aristotelian realist. I hold that the world contains values and meanings as part of extra-human reality, to which we can, with the right education, be sensitive. Our moral judgements are made true or false in virtue of those values and meanings in much the way that our empirical judgements are made true or false by the facts. (The assumption that one needs a theology to underpin such realism - strangely, seldom made for empirical judgements - is undermined by Plato’s Euphyphro dilemma: is what is good good because it is loved by the gods or is it loved by the gods because it is good? To avoid divine arbitrariness, the latter horn is the one to go for. It still leaves a role for God as moral connoisseur: the logical limit of good moral judgement. That’s no part of Aristotle’s picture, which predates all this, but it could be made part of it for those on the first side of the basic datum who wish to accommodate this dilemma.)
I’ve never experienced any cognitive dissonance in having a 40 year long, close relationship with someone who experiences the world very differently in this respect. It is a key part of Lois’ nature and, for her, shapes her moral and meaning-laden outlook. However, other ways of arriving at many of the same non-religious but moral and meaning-laden views are available. But it does mean that we render unto Caesar what is his (to invert that metaphor). I would not insincerely fake a personal involvement in the faith Lois is lucky enough to possess. Equally, she does not ascribe to me a kind of inconsistent sense (ie qua cognitive blindness) of my own ‘lack’, though of course, starting from her position on the basic datum, she does also think I’m just plain wrong / missing something real. (Not thinking that would be inconsistent for her.) But that is all perfectly fine.
I hope this helps.
Tim
