Here is a link from the Facebook page of the Cardiff Humanist Group. It is by Julian Bennett:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=33780953675&topic=14097


It is probably a bit obsessive on my part to go on about the issue of Belief, but I am struggling to get something right, to not misrepresent what we call religious belief, which is not the same as being blandly uncritical. Anyway, here is my response below, which Julian has seen:

The main thing for me is to get a clear sense of what is really involved in theism and to avoid misrepresentations of it. This is not of course the same as ‘defending’ it, as I’m sure you will agree. On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get a clear sense of what an accurate representation might be, I find the work difficult.

I was disappointed that so many people took me to be saying that someone could believe in God without believing that there is a God when in fact I was questioning whether ‘belief’ is the right category, whether that there is a God is the proper object of a belief.

Now questioning whether ‘belief’ is the right epistemological category is not to rule out theological realism, so isn’t by itself reductionist and certainly doesn’t imply that the alternative is ‘commitment to a way of talking’. This latter is pretty sub-Wittgensteinian in my view, even worse than ‘commitment to a way of thinking’: commitment is a matter of making a decision and I don’t believe a person chooses how they (should) think.

Anyway, the crucial part of what you wrote, as far as I am concerned, is the gloss you put on my alternative suggestion, that believers (come to) conceive or see the world as contingent etc., Your gloss on ‘conceive’ is in brackets: ‘aka believe that’.

First, though, notice that I just referred to ‘believers’. I use that term to refer to those in the Abrahamic tradition, where to be a believer is to trust in God or Jesus or the Prophet or whatever.

I think that the way we have come to reflect upon what we call ‘religious belief’ sits uneasily between this form of discourse (which naturally tends towards talk of commitment and choice because it is about trust and fidelity) and that of empirical inquiry. Critics and defenders of ‘religion’ alike generally seem to me to bring that language of trust and fidelity to bear upon this disputable notion of belief that there is a God and at this point most critics and some defenders of religion also assimilate this to the language of hypothesis formation. The defenders say it is all about committing yourself; the critics say, how can you talk like that when we need evidence. (Some defenders probably say, well we talk about commitment because there is no evidence; others say, well there is evidence, and so it goes on, interminably). And of course there is no evidence, but to think that there should be is an intellectual error. And no one gets away with anything. My point is that we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of belief here at all. ‘Archaeologists now believe that Stonehenge was a centre of healing’. This is a hypothesis that needs to be tested, they need to find evidence to see whether what they believe is actually true or to be rejected: and so they start digging. We can understand this readily enough. That isn’t the whole story about belief but it is a good part of it, and the obvious point is that this archaeological enterprise depends upon an epistemological context of inquiry with a whole series of presuppositions already written in. The religious viewpoint doesn’t lack all this, as though it ought to have all this background. I’d say it is a different game, but you might say, I knew he was a Wittgensteinian! This is why it is more appropriate to think of it in terms of conceiving the world, or, even better, as deriving from a leap of religious imagination. Now this is not to deny that this conception has ‘cognitive content’ or that it can be expressed in terms of particular propositions, but a proposition is not the same as a belief, even though some propositions can be believed. I wanted to say that it is a matter of conceiving the world as contingent, etc., rather than forming a hypothesis about the world or about some higher existence. It is an act of imagination that comes from contemplating the world as a whole. Now forming a hypothesis is also of course an act of imagination, but it is a matter of a conjecture of how things might be in the world, which we can then find out. The leap of religious imagination is seeing the world itself as the handiwork of God, or as God’s gift, or whatever.

As to realism: as far as the believer is concerned it seems to me that the phenomenology is, as it were, one of ‘disclosure’. The image of the spirit of God moving over the waters presents itself in the form of a revelation of how things really are. There is no ‘evidence’ for this, nor is it therefore ‘arbitrary’—as it would be if there ought to be evidence. The crucial thing, though, is that it conceives the world as a whole in the first place. But to talk of disclosure or revelation does not amount to any form of endorsement of the content of the vision. All the believer can say here, it seems to me, is that this is my faith, and it comes from a transformative moment. A realist is someone who takes it that statements about God are true or false, and this quite independently of our powers of verification. But there is no such thing as verification in this context. All the believer has is the vision and if we talk of commitment at all then it would be a matter of committing oneself to keeping the vision alive, say.

Those of us who do not share this vision can at least see that it is just that—a vision that presents itself as a disclosure. The interest for us then is what it seems to secure for believers: we want to know their conception of justice, etc. And, as you say, they have the intractable problem of evil to deal with.