The archbishop of Canterbury recently admitted that he sometimes has doubts about God. Thank God! We could only wish that more religious leaders had some doubts and expressed them honestly. The archbishop's confession caused a bit of a stir among some of the ignorant and uninformed. Some atheists hailed it as the beginning of the end. A person of faith who doubts is a contradiction? Even though the news was a bit of damp squib, the issue did point out, yet one more time, the appalling ignorance in our culture about the very nature of faith. Faith isn't necessarily believing fifty impossible things before breakfast. It is not believing in something in spite of the evidence. Faith has to do with risk and trust in the face of deep uncertainties and amazing mysteries. It comes in many forms -- admittedly, some irrational and unreasonable -- a sort faith in faith; but others, are humble and tentative, inviting and deepening questions.
If you're a faithful unbeliever and approach the claims of religion as if they were scientific facts, you will naturally point to and even rejoice in their whacky falsehoods. In this view, science and religion cannot be reconciled. So claims David Barash (an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington). He's right, but only if religion is thought of as a bunch of "facts" to be swallowed. He writes, "But just a smidgen of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelous, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death -- and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things." (see the New York Times, Sunday, September 28, 2014). It's an amoral process. So far so good (or bad). But in the light of this how should we vote? Where does our social and political vision come from? Or should we seek to be more efficient predators, parasites, and murderers? Religion could be helpful here but it needs to give up its claim to "scientific" knowledge and share its deep wisdom in myth, story and metaphor, as to how we are to live together. Religion has a lot to give but it also has a lot to give up -- not least its greedy claim to explain things.
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