Bad reasons to believe.

Bad and wrong beliefs

Let's say a belief is bad if people who hold that belief are likely to do more bad things. This is quite different to the belief being wrong, or factually incorrect, but the two can often be confused. For example, one of the contentions of the new atheist movement is that religious beliefs are bad, and in sloppy argumentation this can often be mixed up with the idea that religious belief is also wrong. The same argument is also made the other way.

Presented with such a poor argument, it is simple to turn it aside by pointing out the sloppiness. For example, in this post the blogger Thrasymachus painstakingly points out that this flaw is present in any attempt to refute a belief by pointing to all the nasty people who have held that belief. 

This is rhetorically very satisfying: suppose someone shows that one of your beliefs is bad, and argues on that basis that it is wrong. Their argument doesn't work, and it is easy to point this out and move on. But wait a minute - they showed that one of your beliefs is bad! So you are more likely to do bad things. You probably would prefer to do good things, right? So this isn't an issue you can just ignore, after all.

This is just the principle of intellectual charity - if you are challenged by an argument that has a small flaw, and you can see a way to get rid of the flaw and keep the challenge, then it isn't enough to just point out the flaw and move on. You have to be ready to face the argument in its strongest form.

An illustrative argument
The post by Thrasymachus set me thinking along these lines, and I realised that I have usually fallen into the trap given above - I have habitually dismissed arguments that nontheism is wrong which tried to jump to that conclusion on the basis of a claim that it is bad, and have not considered deeply whether they show that it is bad, or what the implications would be if they did. So I set about constructing the strongest argument I could along these lines, such that the argument is a challenge to my own worldview. I'll want to give a bit of explanation in a minute, but first of all here is the argument:

There is decent evidence that religious folk are likely to donate more to charity. Charities can use resources effectively enough that a moderately well-off person can do more good by charitable giving than in almost any other way. Thus well-off religious folk should strive to preserve their beliefs by engaging in apologetics.

This argument is directed towards a particular sort of action (namely apologetics - please follow the link to see the sense in which I am using this word), rather than a belief (theism). This is because we can choose our actions, but we can't directly choose our beliefs.

It is directed to the theist, rather than the nontheist (though of course a similar argument could be made that nontheists should strive to become theists by taking advantage, if possible, of cognitive biases). The reason is that the argument is stronger in the form given, because the investment needed by the theist to fortify their belief is less than that needed by the nontheist to change theirs, and they have a greater chance of success.

Nevertheless, I wanted the argument to be a challenge to my worldview - and it is. I don't, after all, think apologetics is a good thing. I would encourage theists to avoid it. This is also the reason I phrased the argument in terms of something we can all agree is good (charitable giving) rather than something only theists would recognise as good (such as the preservation of their souls).

Lording it over Pascal
The argument is similar, in a sense, to Pascal's wager, which can also be seen as arguing that nontheism  is bad (or at least imprudent). Nevertheless, many of the standard arguments deployed against the wager will not work against the argument I have given above. Since this also nicely illustrates some of the good features of the argument itself, I'll give two examples.

1. Doxastic involuntarism: the idea that our beliefs are not subject to willed change. So even if we accept that theism is more prudent, there isn't much we can do about it. This doesn't work in this case because the argument is directed to an action rather than a belief. To be fair, Pascal was also aware of this issue, and dealt with it as follows:

   Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.

2. Examination of the range of options: Pascal has the nontheist say `I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God,' whereas there is no reason to expect that this is the full (or even a representative) range of options. What if the Buddhists were right all along? Or what if God is very keen on intellectual integrity and will reward nontheists who stick to their guns but punish those who convert because of the wager? Terry Pratchett imagines a scenario like this in the novel Small Gods: `Upon his death, the philosopher in question found himself surrounded by a group of angry gods with clubs. The last thing he heard was "We're going to show you how we deal with Mister Clever Dick around here"...' This isn't an issue for the argument above, because the theist already has a particular belief, which is therefore favoured by the ease with which it can be preserved.

What's wrong with the argument?

I tried to give the argument in as strong a form as I could, and I was relieved to find that it still fails. This is for two linked reasons. The first is that it suggests a particularly inefficient means to the end of charitable giving. To illustrate this, consider the following argument:

People who support Manchester United are statistically more likely to wear red shirts. So if you wish to wear a red shirt more often, you should become a Manchester United supporter.

There's a much simpler way: just buy yourself lots of red shirts. You don't need an excuse to wear them. Similarly, if you recognise that charitable giving is a good idea, then you can go ahead and do it. It may be, of course, that you aren't very motivated to give to charity and that the idea is that theism will help provide motivation. But again, there are far easier ways to achieve this end. Ask a trusted friend to regularly nag you about how much you are giving to charity. Make a pledge at a website like this. 

The only way an argument like the one above could evade this difficulty would be if it promised a systematic package of goodness that couldn't be achieved more efficiently some other way. As Thrasymachus points out in his comments, there is good reason to doubt that theism provides any such systematic increase in goodness (he addresses Christianity in particular):

We’d have to weigh up all plausibly operative associations: I gather there is a strong association between Christian belief and negative attitudes towards homosexuals, which would seem to ‘count against’ Christian belief being a good thing; there are also the old standbys about religion and war/violence etc. which would need to be considered.

Assessing the plausibility of these various concerns and their ‘weights’ strikes me as a lot of work. Moreover, it is likely these will be coloured by your beliefs about whether Theism is true or not: I don’t fancy my chances of persuading a Christian that Christianity is prudentially bad even if it was by the preponderance of evidence. So these concerns seem generally a bit of a detour instead of just considering the truth of the beliefs in question: rightly or wrongly, are minds are much more interested in that.

The second paragraph of this quote touches on the other big problem with the argument: intellectual integrity is a greater priority, even for the specified end, than the motivation that might be preserved by intellectual self-manipulation.

If you are keen to maximise the effectiveness of your charitable giving, then your choice of charity will depend on your religious beliefs. For example, if Christianity is right, the most good you can do will be converting people to Christianity - they then get the benefit of an eternity in Heaven. So you would want to give a decent chunk of your cash to charities which have that high on the agenda. If Christianity turns out to be wrong, that money is wasted. So getting that belief right is very important, and you should follow the usual best cognitive practice and strive to make your beliefs conform to the truth.

A note on cynicism
Some of what I have said above is cynical in tone - cost/benefit analysis of manipulating your beliefs. This is because the argument I was evaluating is pretty cynical. That doesn't mean that arguments like this shouldn't be taken seriously, but it is reassuring that we come to the wholesome conclusion that trying to cynically manipulate yourself is silly and misguided. Indeed, although I have admitted to indulging in a little belief-suppression here, I am extremely wary of this practice except in certain clearly-demarcated special cases.

You LIARS!! How could you!??!

Well I won't deny I'm a bit angry right now at all of you grue-denialists who as well as demeaning and teasing me have been lying to me for so long. But I'm trying to stay calm and keep this all under control and not do anything silly and if the guy I saw in the park and with whom I had a cordial, if lively, discussion of the colour of the grass is reading this I want to say straight out that I'd be happy to buy you a new bike if you just email me. There's someone else - you know who you are - who will have to think hard about making an apology for their immoderate language before we discuss who will pay for those windows. Never mind, though, I've been allowed access to a computer in here and I should be released again really really soon, I'm told, so all's well that ends well, eh? It's not like there's any hope of bringing you all to justice for what you've done.

 At first, I thought it was a joke, when everyone kept on insisting that grass was green. Or maybe that you were all just having trouble admitting you were wrong. But that would be dumb. After all, I have working eyes and I could see for myself that the grass had stayed exactly the same colour as before: grue! Now I've had some time to think, I've worked out what was going on. You have all been misusing the word `green' for years - using it, in fact, to mean `grue'. So what you meant when you said that grass would CHANGE from grue to bleen was that it would STAY EXACTLY AS IT WAS. I guess you can see why I was confused. Well, no, that's right, you can't! I haven't met ANYONE who is prepared to take responsibility for this collective abuse of words. EVERYONE is blaming ME!! Not ONE person EVER took the time to consider whether maybe you were all using the word `green' totally wrongly. Nobody said `well hang on, perhaps what you mean by grue is what we mean by green'. Then we could have spent our time productively trying to find a way to test that. Instead, you all just dismissed me, as if I was some sort of nutter.

The time has come!

That's right, folks! I have chosen to take this opportunity to put my philosophical beliefs to the TEST!. I have obtained for myself a grue item (a mug) and, as the time reaches 12:00, I fully expect it to remain completely grue, without a spot of bleen on it. I'm pretty excited, to be honest, at the thought that some of you might be carrying out similar tests, though the hurtful remarks made by those I personally invited to join me in my grue vigil have left me doubting that there's anyone out there with the intellectual maturity to take this seriously. In response to one of those remarks, I want to clarify that the colour phenomenon I expect is genuine, and not to be induced by mind-altering drugs of any kind. By my watch, the time is now coming up to midday, and, ... YES! THe mug is still grue!! it is still grue!!! I KNEW it! I have to show the world!

The grue cometh!

Norman Malcolm introduced the colours `grue' and `bleen' as part of a cunning extension of the problem of induction. Since almost everyone who has encountered these concepts WRONGLY thinks that their main significance is this philosophical role, I'll start out by explaining what Malcolm used them for. Then I'll explain the REAL reason why they are important.

The problem of induction is something like this: when we see something happen a lot, we tend to think that we will go on seeing it happen. For example, if if all the healthy grass we've ever seen was green, we expect that when we see healthy grass in the future it will also be green. But how can we justify this sort of expectation? How can we justify the expectation that, when we see something happen a lot, it will tend to go on in the same sort of way? There's an obvious answer: it works. That is, this sort of expectation often turns out right. That is, it very often happens that when we expect to see the same sort of thing we've seen before, we do indeed see that sort of thing. We expect grass to continue to be green, and it does. We expect the sun to keep on rising every morning, and it does just that. So, since it has happened a lot in the past, we expect that this sort of expectation will keep on being fulfilled in the future. The trouble is, we're relying on the same principle we want to justify here in order to produce that justification, which seems a bit circular. It is such a fundamental principle, in fact, that it is hard to see how we could avoid relying on it. This is the problem of induction, a favourite source of recreational confusion.

Malcolm's argument makes the problem even worse: he argues that, even if we could find some way to justify the principle `Things will go on in the same way they have in the past', that wouldn't let us justify favouring any particular expectation about the future colour of grass (green, according to most of you FOOLS) over any other. Why not? First of all, we need to introduce a couple of new words. Let's take the word `grue' to mean `green before midday on the 20th of January 2012, and blue afterwards', and the word `bleen' to mean the opposite: `blue before midday on the 20th of January 2012, and green afterwards'. Now, how might we argue that grass will still be green on the 20th of January 2012? We could note that grass has always been green in the past, and apply the principle above. But the same argument shows that grass will be blue on that date: We could equally note, after all, that grass has always been grue in the past, and apply the principle above to deduce that grass will continue to be grue on the 20th of January. But (by definition) that means it will be blue.

Notice that there's a symmetry to the argument here. To illustrate this symmetry, it is traditional to introduce, as a figure of hurtful scorn and ridicule, the `grue believer', who is contrasted with the oh-so-smart `green believer', who, like all the rest of you, just KNOWS somehow that grass will continue to be green. Well, not so fast! The point is that any argument the green believer could level to try to convince the grue believer could equally be employed by the grue believer to convince the green believer. All the grue believer has to do is to replace the word `grue' by the word `green' wherever it appears in the argument, and make other similar changes. For example, the argument might look like this:

ANDREW: You can't seriously believe that grue stuff, though, right? That makes you an IDIOT, because you DISAGREE with the rest of us.
ANDVID: Despite your groundless attacks, I do continue to uphold my beliefs. Perhaps, rather than just insulting me, you would care to provide something more constructive. Like, hmm, I don't know, ... an ARGUMENT!
ANDREW: Oh come on, it's just obvious isn't it? The completely ARBITRARY appearance of the date `20th of January 2012' in the definition of `grue' makes it a STUPID concept for reasoning about the world with.
ANDVID: On the contrary, it is you who is using a STUPID and ARBITRARY concept, namely `green'. If I've understood correctly, what you mean by that is `grue before midday on the 20th of January 2012, and bleen afterwards', which is a ridiculously convoluted definition.
ANDREW: Ye Gods! You're right! My argument can easily be turned against me … nevertheless, I refuse to accept your conclusion, however good your arguments, because I just KNOW I'm right. Don't try to convince me: I'm not listening. LALALALALALALALALALA

Andrew makes an important, and common, mistake in this argument. He speaks about the date I mentioned above as arbitrary, meaning that it could just as well be replaced by any other date. Well maybe that's true for philosophers, who just want to play DUM WORD GAMES, but for those of us who understand the TRUTH it is a different matter. Because the 20th of January 2012 is the day when we will be VINDICATERED!!! That's right, you won't all feel so smart when you look around at the grass and it STAYS GRUE!!!!! I can just picture all your piggy little faces covered with surprise and SHAME as you see that DESPITE YOUR BULLYING AND LAUGHTER IT WAS YOU WHO WERE WRONG, YOU WHO WERE THE STUPID FOOLS WHO COULN'T THINK YOR WAY OUT OF A PAPRE BAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES ON THAT DAY YOU WILL SEE YOU WILL ALL SEE AND NOBODY WILL LAUGH AT ME AGAIN AND YOU WILL ALL CRALL TO ME WITH YOUR SNIVELLING APOLOGIES AND I'LL JUST LAUGH AT ALL OF YOU JUST WAIT

God and the common people

I once more had an opportunity to give an address at the unitarian church recently. Here's what I said:

I'd like to try something slightly odd this morning - though in many ways it will feel quite familiar. I'd like us to play a kind of game. It's a new game, but one you will be able to pick up very quickly. What we're going to do is pretend that I've heard a message straight from God, and that you're here to hear that message. I know, it's a crazy idea that God would speak to someone like me. You can fill in the details how you like: maybe I had a vision of an angel, or meditated in some arcane way, or the apostle Paul appeared in my cornflakes: whatever. Mad, I know, but please go along with it. Here we go...

One of the most explosive claims we can make about God is that he became one of us - a mixed up, flawed, stressed human being who had to muddle through like the rest of us. As John's Gospel puts it, the Word became meat. One of the common people.

To help us see just how incredible that is, let's look at the song of that name: `Common people', by Pulp. I guess a few of you will remember it. It starts by recounting how the singer (Jarvis Cocker) was in a bar and getting to know a young lady from a wealthy background. She explained that she hoped to experience a more `common' life, saying (I won't sing it, you'll be glad to hear) I want to live like common people. I want to do whatever common people do. I want to sleep with common people (well, it is a pop song). I want to sleep with common people like you.

The singer goes along with this a bit, taking her to a supermarket and asking her to pretend she has no money. However, it soon becomes clear that she'll never really be able to live like common people: But still you'll never get it right, `cos when you're laid in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your Dad he could stop it all. Her background gives her a security net which keeps her from facing the despair of the poor.

But doesn't the same apply to Jesus? After all, on the standard reading, if he called his Dad he could stop it all. Well, if we are to take the claim that he was one of us with full seriousness then that can't be right. If God was one of us in Jesus, he couldn't rely on the supernatural action of another part of himself any more than we can. The discomforts of life as a peasant in an occupied country (most of which we should be grateful we'll never even be able to imagine) were not relieved for Jesus or his peers by the possibility of escape.

Jesus himself, for most of his life, would have disagreed with what I just said. He thought that he had a heavenly Father who would, ultimately, look after him. The fact that he found himself utterly forsaken at his death is all the more tragic because it shattered that previous mistaken belief. As a human, Jesus shared the common human failing of being wrong about the answers to questions of ultimate importance.

It's a good job I have the authority of God behind me at this point, because what I've just said flies in the face of the core beliefs of a lot of people. But let's think about what it implies. God's presence in Jesus didn't entail that Jesus would be right in what he claimed about God (quite the opposite, in fact). Similarly, the presence of God in ourselves or in others isn't based on any such standard of correctness.

That brings me to the next point I wanted to address, which is a little more positive than the rather bleak picture I've painted so far. God didn't die out with the death of Jesus, since God wasn't just present in Jesus. Jesus didn't just talk about himself as the Son of God - he talked about all of us as sons or daughters of God. That has some serious implications for how we live, as Jesus made clear in the sermon on the mount: `But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.'

That can seem like a huge responsibility. Most days, when someone is rude to us or just plain annoying we don't feel like showing them love. Even if we can see ways we could love them - even just a smile or a kind word - we don't do it because we don't think that that's who we are. We don't see it as possible for us, for the identities we see ourselves as already hardened into. But if God can be in us then that isn't the only identity available. We can see ourselves as children of God, who can love our enemies, can turn the other cheek, and can go the extra mile. This, I think, is the sort of thing John was getting at when he said No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. [This quote was from the reading, 1 John 3:1-10]

This other identity doesn't trap us or harden around us, because it isn't strictly ours - it is hid with Christ in God. It is empowered by a power from beyond ourselves - God's Holy Spirit. Paul put it this way, in Romans 8:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

It's not just that God's Spirit can animate us individually in this way, but even more that we can be animated as a community. As a community, we can see that we are the family of God, the Kingdom of God. We needn't be trapped by the ways we have been in the past, and remembering the presence of God amongst us can help us avoid being blinkered to the good we can do just because we haven't done it before. The story today was a really simplified example of that - the people didn't realise that they could be a group who shared all their food freely so that all were satisfied until they found that that was what they were doing. [The story was Tolstoy's version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, as found in chapter 5 of the Gospel in Brief.]

All this doesn't mean that we can look down on other folk, though - on those we see as outside our communities. We can't exclude them from the family of God, and in fact they too have available an identity as children of God. Sometimes we accidentally suppose that we can ignore some people, that their problems don't have the urgency of God's call, because of their squalour. As if God had never come to the squalid, been squalid Himself. It is because in the Christmas story we see God in a squalling baby that we are confident that whatever we do for the least of His children we do for Him.

It is so easy to think we can classify and dismiss a person on the basis of one thing they've done. Anyone who has committed a serious crime is liable to ever after be seen by others not just as a person but as a `person-who-commits-such-crimes': as a swindler, a thief, a murderer. For us the nearest case to hand is the rioters who caused so much havoc in our major cities a few weeks ago. It's easy to take that as their full identity: they are `rioters'. But we need to remember that they each have a fuller identity as people like us with complex and diverse motivations, loves and resentments. Nor should we content ourselves with politely analysing what may have led them to act as they did. We need to remember their hidden identity as children of God, and accord them the dignity that goes with it. If they should be punished - and I'm certain that they should - then it is because of that dignity, not simply as a whipping to keep the rabble in line.

We can't hem God's Spirit in to our own community, then, or to those like it. We have to treat other communities with the reverence appropriate to those in whom God is acting. This is true of all kinds of communities, though the only ones that themselves explicitly make this sort of claim on us, in these sorts of terms, are religious communities.

Unfortunately, it is with just those religious communities that a major stumbling block arises, something which often distracts us from God in them. It is that they get so much wrong about God. They say that He hates gay sex, or that He's put Himself in such a bind that He'll be forced to torture people in Hell, or whatever your pet peeve is. They say it so confidently. And they claim to be saying it all in the name of God. Just like I am doing now.

This is why it is so important that we look with clear eyes at the person who we see as the paradigm of God in the common people: at Jesus. We need to see that he wasn't a post-passionate liberal like us but another human being making all kinds of crazy claims about God, in the name of God. And so what? That doesn't stop us seeing God in him, and it shouldn't stop us recognising God in other religious communities either.

The same applies to us. We don't need to be sure that we're saying all the right things about God (or at least avoiding saying any wrong things) before we turn to the task of living Him out in the world. Just as God's Spirit can animate other communities whatever their nutty dogmas, we don't have to step aside to de-nuttify all our dogmas before being swept up by God's Spirit ourselves.

Okay, that's the end of the game. I guess you'll have managed to pick it up as you went along, though maybe, like me when I found out about golf, you're wondering what the point was.

Well, I wanted to talk about the availability of an identity directed to good in God for us and for others, individually and collectively, and I wanted to do that without positing a mysterious powerful mechanism which makes everything turn out well for us. The only way I can talk about that at the moment is by talking about God. Maybe some of you would want to say other more wonderful things by saying something very different about God, and that certainly doesn't interfere with what I was trying to do. As I said, we don't have to get all our words straight before we start showing God's love.

God is in us. Live Him.

Ignorant `hic's: an address at the memorial church

This week, I gave the address at the unitarian church in Cambridge. Here's what I said:

Ignorant `hic's

I quite like indian food, so I enjoy going out for a curry from time to time. But I have a slightly embarrassing problem when I eat hot food; it always makes me hiccup. Of course, everyone has advice on how to cure the hiccups: their own special method. My personal favourite recommendation, which is absolutely guaranteed to work, is `Hold your breath for 20 minutes'.

The problem with hiccup cures is that they often rely on the user not being used to them, so after a while you can't use them any more. Sometimes our religious practices can end up like that, too; we get so used to them that they lose their value. We go through the motions, singing hymns but not worshipping. That's a huge problem, which I won't attempt to address today. One thing I'll do instead is suggest my own spiritual `hiccup cure'; it's a trick, or hack, to help you see the sacredness of ordinary things. Hopefully it will be new to some of you, so that you'll be able to use it. I'll also give a diagnosis of what I think is a key feature of the spiritual hiccups, and why it is such a bad thing.

I came across this `hiccup cure' by accident just under a year ago. The way it happened is a simple enough story; there is almost nothing to it. But it remains strong in my memory. There was a film night, here at the church. We watched a Japanese animated film called `Spirited Away'. It is a magical film; I recommend it. But it is not the story of the film that I want to talk about; it is the credits. There is nothing very unusual about them. The names of those involved in the making of the film are shown in turn against a neutral background; in this case the background was a patch of ground; dirt with some stones on it and a couple of scrubby plants. However, since this was an animated film the dirt, stones and plants had been drawn rather than photographed.

Whoever had drawn this picture had lovingly filled in a lot of detail: the shading on each rock, and the gentle changes in the colouring of the ground. I was fascinated by this process of creation. Why had this stone been placed just here, rather than a little to the left? How did the artist come to settle on this colour for one patch of dirt, and on that for another? Maybe it just felt right. I know that inscrutable feeling of rightness a little, but it is shy and mysterious. And perhaps the artist's mind and hand were guided by something else entirely. Perhaps some detail hides a mistake, so expertly that I cannot tell. Perhaps the whole thing was sketched inattentively, during a conversation or in a meeting. To be honest, it wasn't specific questions like these which fascinated me, but something they can only serve to hint at: a sense of a subtle story of which I could only see an accidental trace, the foam on the tip of the wave.

I don't want to dwell too long on the details of this experience, but rather to point out something a little odd about it. The picture was a picture of stones and dirt, which are not unusual things. I encounter them beneath my feet every day as I walk about. But even when my eye does, occasionally, rest on them, they do not strike me in the same way as that picture. It's just a bit of ground, after all. It's not as if somebody took the time to choose where to place each pebble.

But if I do look at it like that, as if it had been carefully arranged, then I suddenly do notice all sorts of fascinating oddities, and my mind no longer slips away onto other concerns. That's the trick, the `hiccup cure'. To encounter their sacredness, try looking at the ordinary things you come across as if they had been created by a person; an artisan. The aim of this practice is to help us stop, sometimes, and pay attention to the world.

There's an episode of the TV detective show Columbo in which Columbo's investigation takes him to an art gallery, where there's a lot of modern art hanging up; canvasses with just a single diagonal line and so on. Columbo goes to look at one; a white plastic square which is set into the wall, with some vertical slits in it, through which you can see that there is a hole in the wall behind it. `How much is this piece, ma'am?' he asks the gallery owner. `Which one?' she replies, `Oh, ... that's the ventilation system'.

When Columbo thought of this system as art, he was curious about it, but when he was told it was functional he lost his curiosity. This wasn't because there was less to be curious about. Most of us have little idea of how ventilation systems work, how to install them, what can go wrong with them and so on. But these are the kinds of question we normally just avoid thinking about. We're all immensely ignorant about the world around us, but we don't usually notice this. We think about the things that we reckon we do know about and subconsciously edit out those features of the world that we don't understand.

The practice of encountering things as if they had been created can help us to recognise and acknowledge this vast ignorance. When I was talking about this with my brother, he pointed out something which drives home just how much we naturally ignore. Imagine if you were to go out onto Christ's pieces, pick a chunk of grass, and examine it as if were created. In the words of the poet Lew Welch, you might

Step out onto the planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside are three hundred things nobody understands, and, maybe, nobody's ever really seen. How many can you find?

Well, maybe you would find a couple of hundred. But now imagine if we were all to do this, with the same patch of grass. I reckon our collections of mysteries would barely overlap, and this would still be true even if there were a hundred of us. So each of us, straining to see a hundred mysteries, would miss ten thousand. That's how ignorant we are; how ignorant even of our own ignorance. Of course, being reminded of this ignorance is always helpful when we need a dose of humility.

What we encounter when we allow ourselves to see the world this way aren't simply riddles to be solved, but mysteries, even sacred mysteries. That is, in seeing the everyday mysteries of the world, we see the sacredness of ordinary things and the boundary between sacred and mundane blurs away. As Gordon Atkinson speculates in the second reading we had earlier, maybe we should `build a shrine to everything', at least if it weren't for the fact that `the mortar is worth as much as the saint'.

One reason it is great to be reminded of how much our minds filter out is that so much of it is fascinating and wonderful. We find it amusing when small children are as fascinated with the wrapping paper as with the gift inside, but secretly I think we all mourn the loss of the childish fascination which would reveal to us once more how magical wrapping paper is. To put it in more biblical language, our minds are often so focused on the treasures we have on earth that we completely forget about our treasures in heaven. Conversely, perhaps if we paid attention to what treasure we do have in heaven we might cling a little less fiercely to what we've managed to scratch together on earth. You cannot serve both God and mammon.

Of course, in drawing attention to this mystical way of seeing the world, I don't want to give the impression that it is always the most appropriate way to engage with things; that we should be continually exhausting our stores of `hiccup cures' to pull ourselves ever deeper into this vision. Sometimes, we do need to filter out our ignorance. When you're driving, you don't want to be fascinated by the unexplored territory on your right; you want to keep your eyes on the road. In an art gallery, you do want to spend a fair amount of your attention on the official artwork. I just want to suggest, or remind you, that sometimes dropping our filters can be of immense value.

So, where is it most important not to glide over our ignorance? I think one of the most important areas is in dealing with other people. I know myself better than most of you know me, and I know that I have all kinds of quirks, some rather endearing and others much less so, and that occasionally my reasons for acting run untraceably deep. I also know that this isn't some special fact about myself - we're all like that, we just find it harder to see it in one another. We have the annoying habit of overlooking our deep ignorance of one another and working with pictures of each other based on first impressions or even flimsier things like sex or appearance. I include myself in this; I know I make this mistake all the time. It's part of who we all are that we do this, and it is a tragedy, something we should be actively fighting. We should remember how we all shape ourselves day by day, crafting ourselves in small ways into the people we later become, and we should respect the artistry of that.

A second key area is in our encounters with God. Let me take a deeply stereotypical example. I went on holiday with my family to northern Scotland a few years ago - right up away from the bright lights of civilisation. The first night we went outside and I saw the stars, properly saw them, for the first time. I guess most of you know how that whips your mind away from under you. We don't have a good way to talk about what is encountered there except with religious language.

Thinking in terms of creation can recall to our minds the grandeur of it all, as in the first reading today where thinking about `who created all [the stars]?' leads to thoughts about `bringing out the starry host one by one' and `calling them all by name'. There's an important caveat at this point. For this thought experiment to remind us of the vast mysteries we like to leave in the wilderness, we don't have to actually believe that there is, somewhere, a being who actually knows the name of each star. Approaching them through the lens of creation is enough. And after all, don't they all deserve names? `You know, out of respect.' Just like every mote of dust that dances in every sunbeam, and in every starbeam on every distant planet.

We can't take it in; we must refer such knowledge to the mind of God. But there's a huge danger here. The danger is of using this language to cover over, rather than explore, our ignorance: of dismissively saying `God knows'. We can take God's name in vain to pretend that we understand more than we do. So often the word is used as a stopper, an unquestioned answer, rather than as an acknowledgement of the depth beyond our questioning. We think if we have a neat enough signpost to the sacred grove we don't have to go visit. But it doesn't have to be like that. We can find ways to remind each other why the signs were put up, with small `hiccup cures' and with broader frameworks of religious language and ritual. I pray that we will constantly find new ways to refashion the word of God from heavy chains back into a`two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit'.

Once upon a time...

As I've mentioned here, I had a very sudden loss of faith in the summer before I began my PhD. One of the most frustrating things about this loss of faith at the time was that I was completely unable to give a good reason for it. I certainly hadn't discovered any logical inconsistency within Christianity, nor had I suffered at the hands of my fellow Christians. I wasn't going through a lull in my prayer life (though I did, as part of a wider crisis, a few months before), and I was still studying the Bible regularly.

Since then, I've put together a `just so' story, which I think gives some explanation of how it happened. However, you should bear in mind that this story was put together over a year after the fact, and it may well be off the mark.

Before I get into the story proper, I'm afraid I need to digress to explain some technical details to do with apologetics. The word `apologetics' refers to the practices employed by Christians in defence of their faith, especially reasoning and argumentation. The kind of apologetics that matters for this story is called presuppositionalism. It is based on the idea that, whilst we justify some of the things we believe in terms of others, we all have some ultimate presuppositions on which our worldviews are based and which do not rest on anything else for their justification. A key part of the presuppositionalist strategy, at least as I encountered it, is to conclude from this oversimplified picture that it is OK to take, for instance, the existence of God and the truth of the Bible as such basic presuppositions. In other words, on this view there is no need to argue for these beliefs - they can be taken for granted. There's much more to presuppositionalism than that, but what I've said is enough to let me press on with the story.

When I was at university, a charismatic member of my church was a presuppositionalist, and I encountered this style of apologetics in conversation with him. It made a lot of sense to me (at least, the parts I explained in the last paragraph did) - after all, if God is foundational for ontology it makes sense for belief in God to be foundational for epistemology. So I became presuppositionalist.

This meant that, when I encountered a refutation of an argument for the existence of God, I didn't have to worry. After all, my faith wasn't based on such flimsy things as arguments. So I could examine the refutation and, if it made sense, accept it. Here are a few typical examples:

• Argument: the unity and perfection of the Bible indicate that it must have had a divine source.
  Refutation: examination of the text shows that the various authors had very different, sometimes conflicting and often questionable projects.
• Argument: God answers prayer.
  Refutation: repeated scientific testing has produced no evidence that prayer has any measurable illness-reducing effect.
• Argument: the fine tuning of the universe is highly improbable unless there is a God.
  Refutation: the notion of probability does not apply to things like universes in the same way as to things like coins.
• Argument: God is necessary to explain morality.
  Refutation: it is plausible that there may be evolutionary explanations (though not justifications) of morality.
  

I could extend this list ad nauseam.

And lo! It came to pass that my faith was completely unsupported. I did not know of any compelling argument for the existence of God, or any of the other supernatural claims of Christianity. Of course, I didn't mind that, because I didn't have any compelling arguments against, either. And I was happy to presuppose the truth of Christianity.

How did this affect my beliefs? Well, it began to disconnect my religious beliefs from my day-to-day expectations about the world. Since I was not aware of any phenomena in normal life which science was unable, in principle, to explain (so that God would be needed), I made no allowance for such phenomena. Thus, for example, if someone was ill and I prayed for them this did not increase my expectation that they would recover. This did not devalue prayer in my eyes.

What this meant was that my internal model of the world was not what I thought it was. For the purposes of normal living I was making use of a perfectly workable worldview which did not rely on the presupposition of the existence of God at all. Although this presupposition was present, and I believed it to be fundamental, all that was being supported by it was the ornate cathedral of religious doctrine which I had been slowly building over the years.

One day, there was a switch in perspective - suddenly the religious doctrine no longer counted for me as belief. It was all still conceptually present; I am still able to recall and understand much of it today. But the concepts involved no longer served as beliefs for me. The cut was relatively clean, and what was left behind was the nontheistic worldview which had already been serving me (as a substructure of my beliefs) for some time.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.