Fairies at the bottom of the garden

There are a few options for responding to this metaphysical jumble. One is to lump it all together in order to dismiss the lot, as the writer Kurt Andersen does in his Atlantic article on “post-truth” thinking in the age of Trump. He excoriates his fellow Americans for their “promiscuous devotion to the untrue”, and proclaims himself one of an embattled minority he loftily calls “the solidly reality-based”: 

“Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. … More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God … 15 percent believe that the ‘media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals,’ and another 15 percent think that’s possible.”

Equating religious dogma with conspiracy theories with any old supernatural belief may be satisfying – but it does mean being forced to conclude that most of your fellow citizens, and most humans who’ve ever lived, have been loonies. (Some may not consider that a downside.) 

Second option: we can focus on where to draw the line between supernatural beliefs that are “reasonable” and those that aren’t – where warranted faith ends and the lunatic fringe begins. I would argue that we have a moral obligation to do this for our own beliefs; but in approaching other people’s, it may be less constructive. 

Finally, we can opt to bend our attention back on itself – on the phenomenon of faith in the first place. It’s striking that humans are so prone to Milbank’s “desire for the supernatural”. We can be thrilled by the wonders of the cosmos and the little joys of our daily lives, yet still we yearn for something more. We can suppress it in ourselves and belittle it in others, but it tends to take its revenge, one way or another. 

I believe that Jesus rose from the dead for what I sincerely believe to be historical, evidence-based reasons. But not only for those reasons. C. S Lewis, looking back on his conversion from atheism to Christianity, wrote that he once considered the Christian story simply a version of the old myth of the “corn king”, a god who dies and rises again as a symbol of the agricultural cycle. And yet: 

“Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. … ‘All that stuff … about the Dying God. … It almost looks as if it had really happened once.’ … If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not – as I would still have put it – ‘safe,’ where could I turn? Was there then no escape?”

Lewis came to believe that something could be both myth and fact, at the same time. And he was as shocked as anyone to find in orthodox Christianity the satisfaction of his desire for the transcendent.

I still don’t believe in fairies. But this Easter I’m retiring my cynicism, and accepting that the near-universal longing for something “beyond” might itself have something to tell us about reality.