The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View

"Tim Crane is best known for his writing on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. In this book, he’s using his philosophical skills in an area that he’s not written on before. It partly came out of a talk he gave a few years ago in which he was unsympathetic to New Atheism. In the book he’s arguing against what people like Richard Dawkins in particular—but also Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens— have written about religion. He’s saying that they have mischaracterized religion and set up a kind of straw man. In Crane’s view, the target of most New Atheism is religion as cosmology plus morality—saying stuff about the nature of the universe and where it all came from and telling you what you should do. The morality is supposed to derive from the cosmology: there is an all-powerful God, who did various things at various points depending on the religion, and that led to certain sorts of often very prescriptive rules about how you should live. Tim says that although those elements are present within many religions, the New Atheists’ description misses the core of what religion is usually about. For him, the religious impulse is a combination of a sense of community—a joining up with other people in religious practice, performing certain rituals, treating certain places and ideas as sacred, in a tradition with a long history—combined with a notion of the transcendent, a sense that there are things beyond what’s visible or discoverable through science. Added to that is the possibility that we can’t understand exactly what’s going on: religion recognises the limits of the human mind in relation to the mind of God. So, if you’re looking for absolute proof that certain things have happened, or will happen, many religious people don’t believe those proofs are out there in a straightforward way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As a result, the dialogue that’s gone on between hardline New Atheists and those who practise religion has often been at cross-purposes. They’re not really discussing the same thing. So what Tim’s trying to do, as an atheist himself—he doesn’t believe that God exists, or that this is the best explanation of how things are—is to give a sympathetic understanding of what the New Atheists have missed about religion. He’s very interesting on toleration, and what that might entail. He gives the example of another philosopher, Simon Blackburn, agonising about whether he should cover his head at a Jewish ceremony or not. Tim clearly thinks, as a matter of politeness, that he should. There’s an interesting question about whether, by not doing it you are undermining the possibility of demonstrating sympathy towards other people, regardless of their religion. It’s a respect for other people’s autonomy. It’s difficult, because there is a prescriptive element when you are in the presence of people who are highly religious. Tim is grappling with that. What I like about the book is that he’s not dogmatic. He’s thinking things through and allows the possibility of you disagreeing. I do disagree with him about lots of things in the book. I think, for instance, that he’s overplayed the practical and performative elements of religion: there are certainly a large number of religious people who go hammer and tongs on the cosmological story and really believe there is scientific proof for it and that moral conclusions about, for example, abortion and suicide, can be derived from this. I am also more swayed than Tim is by the argument that religions are directly or indirectly responsible for much suffering in the world. But the book is stimulating, it’s a nice, short, easy read and it’s something new. This is the kind of philosophy that makes you think again. Whether or not you agree with him, he’s saying, ‘Here’s another way of looking at this.’ And it’s informed by sociology and anthropology in a way that David Hume’s writing was. It’s a good book about a topic that affects us all, religious, agnostic and atheist alike. Sometimes the autobiographical elements that fuel a book can intrude too much, but I think he’s got a nice balance. He’s using what he knows from having been a religious believer around believers to stimulate him to think more deeply about what the nature of religion is and what matters about it to the people who practise it. It depends what you want the outcome to be. There are lots of debates set up in completely antagonistic ways where the people on the stage are completely polarised and there are two clear factions in the audience. No argument, nothing that could possibly come up in those debates is going to change anybody’s opinion. This book is an attempt to help such people understand each other differently. While I am sympathetic to many of the arguments of New Atheism, I do think some of its spokespeople can be incredibly rude. They stand up and speak as if the people they’re saying it to will suddenly see the light and renounce their religion. I suspect that’s comparatively rare, that very few people convert to atheism suddenly after hearing an argument from a New Atheist. This book is more subtle than that, and I think it allows for a different kind of debate."