Mark Vernon argues that we must always know more than we can express, but this is no excuse for expressing things we cannot know
What fundamentally grounds religious belief? It's one of the biggest questions concerning faith, too big in fact, because it's really two questions, not one. The first is what as a matter of fact grounds people's religious convictions, the second is what would justifiably ground them. People believe many falsehoods for bad reasons and fail to believe truths in spite of having good reasons to do so.
Writing in response to this series, Mark Vernon has helpfully shed light on the importance of this distinction by demonstrating what happens when you fail to account for it properly.
The kernel of the argument is the familiar claim that atheists tend to have too narrow a conception of rational justification. The only admissible evidence they allow for the existence of a divine being or realm comes from empirical facts which are open to everyday observation or scientific investigation. This, it is claimed, is arbitrarily restrictive, because there are good reasons to allow personal experience, intuition, feeling or some other scientifically verboten data to ground faith.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that experiences are indeed what generally ground faith.
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all. Rather, they gain faith some other way and the arguments are post facto defences or rationalisations, attempts to reply to the rationalist atheist on her own terms, when the reality is the rules of engagement have never been accepted as fair. So I much prefer it when people come out and say honestly that their reasons for belief are not the kinds of reasons atheists accept as admissible, and for them to then make the case for why atheists are wrong about this.
Vernon, who is himself an agnostic, has made just such a case on behalf of the religious, and I'm afraid I find it all too representative of their general failings. His argument is based on some uncontroversial truths, such as the fact that cognition is "embodied" and does not take place in some kind of Cartesian ego which is distinct from our physicality. Far from being inconvenient encumbrances, "our bodies play a vital role in how we engage with the world" and "are crucial for making the world a meaningful place too". We know all this, not from fluffy spirituality, but from "contemporary research", "cognitive science", "evidence coming out of neuroscience" and "research into human development". All of this is true (apart from the claim that "When a child turns away from the bottle or breast, it is not only having trouble feeding but trouble trusting too", which is in desperate need of a qualifying "sometimes" to avoid being completely batty).
Having established that bodies are required for us to make sense of the world, Vernon then turns on "the modern sceptic" and "the modern atheist" saying that they value "knowledge that can claim objectivity, a validity independent of the body" more than they do "subjective knowledge, which is gained by introspection, turning inwards ... The upshot is that the modern sceptic is suspicious of subjective convictions."
Spurning subjective, inner experience, these materialistic rationalists are unable to accept that activities such as prayer and going to church might be "processes by which the individual becomes porous to the divine", while meditation "opens up to a new experience of life" where "illumination is gained".
I'm afraid it's all too common for defenders of faith to start off by piling up a whole load of interesting scientific findings, only to follow up with a plethora of non sequiturs.
The question rightly asked, however, is how reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth? And there seems to be no escaping the simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality. Despite the comfort Vernon draws from recent research, there is no escaping the fact that the vast bulk of it points in exactly the opposite direction, undermining any confidence we might feel that our intuitive judgments are effective truth-trackers.
The reason for this is that "reliable" has very different meanings depending on whether you're interested in survival or truth. Fear responses, for instance, serve us well precisely because they are over-sensitive to false positives. The price of thinking the animal in front of you is dangerous when it's not is quite low; the price of thinking it's safe when it's not could be terminal. Vernon says that atheists "fixate on the many ways in which individuals can be self-deluded, and forget that they can also be wonderfully discerning" but it seems to me he is guilty of fixating on the very specific ways in which they can be wonderfully discerning, forgetting that it is precisely when it comes to establishing objective truth that they are most deluding.
Given that, his conclusion just doesn't follow. The reasons we have for doubting that prayer and meditation provide any kind of access to divine reality are not that we have an unjustified prejudice against subjective experience. It is that we use our reason to examine the reliability of various kinds of subjective experience and distinguish between the ways in which they lead us aright and the ways in which they lead us astray. A persistent pain is a pretty good indicator of the presence of bodily damage; the feeling that you have been touched by the Holy Spirit is only a good indicator that you have had a generic religious experience, shared by many the world over, and you have interpreted it according to the narratives and belief systems familiar to you.
Vernon's argument has the same general form as most protests against the atheist's reduction of admissible evidence to objective, scientific facts. They start by pointing out the many ways in which reason is not a purely abstract, judgment and emotion-free process but then leap from this to giving non-rational elements more credence than a sober look at their reliability would allow. The modern sceptic is indeed suspicious of subjective convictions, which is not to say they dismiss them completely. The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
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