Scepticism and suspicion

There have been two movements in modern atheism. It began with the argument that there was no evidence for the existence of God. This may be regarded as evidential atheism, and is based a scepticism in which all concepts were doubted. This is illustrated by an anecdote put about by Bertrand Russell. He held that if God had asked him why he did not believe in his existence, Russell would have replied "Not enough evidence God!"

It was thought that healthy scepticism would rid us from the ancient superstitions and dogmas and lead to a new age of rationality.

The second wave of atheism presumed the nonexistence of God. This presumption led inevitably to a suspicious examination not of belief but of the believer. If God did not exist then belief was an illusion. Freud worked this out in his theory of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious and declared that religion was a universal neurosis. Marx examined the function of belief in politics and came to the conclusion that it was the opiate of the people that ensured that they accepted their situation in life.

Thus the two movements of modern atheism were based firstly on scepticism and secondly on suspicion.

I came across the following definitions of scepticism and suspicion in Merold Westphal's Suspicion and Faith.

"Scepticism is directed toward the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is directed toward the evasiveness of consciousness. Scepticism seeks to overcome the opacity of facts, while suspicion seeks to uncover the duplicity of persons. Scepticism addresses itself directly to the propositions believed and asks whether there is sufficient evidence to make belief rational. Suspicion addresses itself to the persons who believe and only indirectly to the propositions believed."

The first movement of modern atheism was championed by the likes of Hume and Kant.

The second phase of opposition to Christian belief is based on the suspicion that believers are not what they seem, that their belief is self-serving and has little to do with truth. The major proponents of this view are Freud, Marx, Feuerbach and Nietzsche. They all see religion as irony that masks a latent function.

Believers deal with the anxieties of life by projecting a loving supernatural father who will look after them on earth and welcome them into heaven after death. Belief was thus transparent. Belief is formed not on truth but on what was needful. For example, Mary is elevated to be almost a member of the Trinity because female believers required a woman with whom to sympathise.

Feuerbach's criticism of Christianity was that it encouraged the best properties of humanity and projected them as properties of a supernatural being. Thus humanity was impoverished by the enrichment of God. Marx used this idea in the political arena and stated that the poor had rich gods and belief served to keep them impoverished. This criticism reveals believers to be childlike and unable to accept the realities of human existence. Nietzsche regarded Christianity as producing a slave race that refused to grasp its own power.

The close relationship between the aristocracy and the church in both France and Russia, for example, looks more like crowd control than an adherence to religious truth. We could certainly say the same about medieval Christianity with its friezes of the last judgment showing those on the left of Jesus being dragged off to hideous punishment and those on the right enjoying the life of heaven.

It is tempting to agree with the postmodern fashion of analysing everything in terms of power relations. Political power was based on religious power.

The two poles of atheism, the contention that there is no evidence for the existence of a supernatural being and the irrationality, immaturity and superstition of believers is common fodder for modern atheists. I have dealt with the first pole of atheism in this column here and here and here but have not dealt with the second, that belief is really a sham that hides other motives. That it is in fact utilitarian and is formed by the psychic needs of the believer or used to manipulate the lives of the common man.

My experience as a hospital chaplain showed me how far we will go to comfort ourselves when things do not look so good. Many patients would say to me that "someone upstairs is looking after me." It is tempting to answer that if he were really looking after you then why are you here in the first place? Believers often portray a lack of critical insight that allows them to continue in irrationality. They do this because belief for them has a crucial function, that of insulating themselves from a world that seems to be ruled by chaos. This use of belief is bound to bring it into disrepute for obvious reasons.

Feuerbach is correct when he says that religion is essentially self consciousness, we create God in our own image and the consciousness that results is false consciousness. We remain enclosed within our own projections of what we wish the world to be.

Westphal explains that in the absence of critical thought we will adopt those views that favour our situation. A 2012 poll in Britain showed that half of the people surveyed believed in life after death while only a third believed in God. A survey this year showed that a quarter of agnostics think that life is not the end, while a third of believers rejected the idea. If this trend continues there will be more secularists who believe in an afterlife than religious. This goes to show that you do not have to be religious in order to favour a view that deals with the horror of non-existence in death.

It is unfortunately true that believers will have faith that God will protect them despite the overwhelming evidence that belief does not protect us from evil and the many biblical passages that decry this sort of piety. What we are dealing with here is folk religion that is uninformed by either biblical texts or critical theology. We are dealing with the God of bargains.

There are many biblical texts that operate from a hermeneutics of suspicion, the Old Testament prophets were the first masters of suspicion. They knew when bargains were being struck, when "solemn assemblies" displaced the practice of justice. Likewise, there are episodes in the New Testament, many of them involving the disciples of Jesus, that indicate his suspicion of their motives. These are episodes that reveal that the disciples are duplicitous, that they act and speak out of motives of self-interest. For example, they squabble about who will sit at the right hand of Jesus in the new regime, Peter, the rock on which the church will be built, denies Jesus three times and at the crucifixion they all abandon him.

It is thus acknowledged that a utilitarian understanding of Christianity is one of its greatest dangers. Those closest to Jesus were motivated by self-interest even in the face of the sayings of Jesus that indicated that they must die to themselves in order to live. It is exactly here that "religion" is the greatest barrier to communion with God. Indeed, God is often absent when He is most loudly proclaimed. "Manifest piety is latent impiety."

Faith can grow in the face of both scepticism and suspicion and in fact requires both in order to be properly faith. Indeed Westphal recommends reading Freud, Marx and Nietzsche as a Lenten discipline because we need to hear their criticism and examine our own faith.

Having said that, it is important to understand the limitations of the criticisms levelled against us. While I would rather be sceptical than gullible, a consistently sceptical point of view will limit what we can know about the human condition. As I explained in my article on Scientism, limiting what one can know to scientifically verifiable facts cripples the human soul, isolates us from the neighbour and closes us to beauty. Even Descartes was willing to concede that consciousness is an irreplaceable means of knowing the world.

Likewise a consistently suspicious view of other's motives will mean that we will not trust them. Learning begins with trust. While rationalists would assert that we must know in order to believe, Augustine held the inverse; that we must believe in order to know. Our lives are hedged around with trust, that our teachers will not lie to us, that merchants will not cheat us, that most people act out of good intentions. Without this society would not work. Indeed, the current fashion for accountability reflects a loss of trust that threatens to overburden us.

It is one thing to concede too much ground to modernity to the extent that we have nothing left to say. It is quite another thing to listen to the criticisms of modernity, some of which are sound and need to be dealt with. The church cannot, for its own health, seal itself off from justifiable criticism both from the sceptics and the suspicious.