Belief and Doubt

 

A telling Wittgenstein quote, in my view:

Doubt comes after belief. (On Certainty, paragraph 160).

Let me try to apply this to belief in God. It is fairly evident, after all, that we cannot doubt the existence of God without at least admitting the possibility of the existence of God, and the proposition that God exists is one which, surely, entails that we have some ideas about the properties of God.

To take a different example: I believe that there is a silver birch tree in my back garden. Now, having made that claim, you might doubt it, but there are known procedures for establishing the veracity or otherwise of my claim. In short, we go and examine the trees in my garden and, possibly armed with a textbook of tree species, identify which, if any, are silver birches.

I might, of course, doubt the accuracy of my own claim. I am not an arboreal expert. However, the tree in question looks to me like similar trees which I have been told are silver birches, and hence, by comparison with those trees and their appearance, I believe that there is a silver birch in my garden.

Given my admissions about my knowledge of trees it is perfectly possible that I am wrong and you might now doubt the correctness of my statement. However, the doubt is likely to be related to my ability to recognize a certain species of tree. You are probably not doubting that there is a tree in my garden, or that I have a garden at all. You might now have started to wonder about my garden, but that is because I have raised the possibility in your mind that I might not.

Once these further doubts start to be raised, however, we find it hard to stop. You might doubt whether there is a silver birch in my garden, whether there is a tree at all, whether indeed I have a garden. But you can go further: do silver birches exist? Do trees exist? Does earth supply the nutrients which trees need to survive (if they exist) and so on, back to the basic question of whether the universe exists or is an illusion.

If we push too far down this line, of course, we land up in a rather mad world (which fortunately does not exist) where everything is doubted. This, of course, is where Descartes found himself with his system of hyperbolic doubt. He had to find one thing which he could not doubt; in his case it was the famous cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. Whether, in fact, he could claim that as something he could not doubt is a bit of an open question which I shall duck.

The point is that, if we are not careful or sensible, we can land up doubting everything and anything. The fact that we do not, that you will quite likely believe that there is a silver birch in my back garden is because we simply cannot afford to travel the road of doubting everything that people say to us, particularly if they are everyday sorts of things, about gardens and trees. As I noted, it was only after I questioned my ability to identify trees that you started to doubt my statement about the silver birch.

God, of course, is not an everyday thing. A broad school of philosophy and theology does not understand the concept of God as referring to an object in the universe. Some people may well do so, and they might be described as pantheists, but most people do not think like that, I suspect. Nevertheless, there is still a residual belief in the ‘three-decker universe’ of heaven above us, then earth, and then hell below. This is a bit of a hangover from medieval world-views (although a lot of medieval philosophers were not quite that naive) and remains as a matter of convenient language – referring to God as ‘Him up there’ may well be a convenient short-hand rather than a direction.

There is a problem here, of course. If heaven being ‘up there’ is a model for how the universe works, there is a danger of making our model absolute, that is, of starting to believe that heaven really is up there and that if we fly high enough we shall find it and, presumably, see God. This is not the case, of course, scientifically and, in fact, theologically it does not work either. Models can be dangerous things if they become embedded in our language and their origins are forgotten.

Still, as Wittgenstein observes, we get told many things as children which we believe. As we grow up, perhaps our belief in some of them become a bit shaky. Other evidence comes to light to cast doubt on these beliefs. But the fact is that we have to have these beliefs before we can cast doubt upon them.

Perhaps the problem with God, as it is with science, is that our childhood beliefs are never properly updated. My own childhood view of God was like the kings in a pack of cards – a bit scary and bearded. But then I came from a non-religious background. On the other hand, people do change their views. Children brought up to be ‘religious’ can become atheists, and vice versa. Too often, as I have mentioned before, we take the models of God that we are given, run them to extremes, and then cry ‘false!’. That these models do not work for us is hardly a surprise.

However, we do doubt. There are plenty of things in the world which we can count against the existence of a loving, caring God. The most obvious and most telling one is the existence of evil, both natural and human. Natural evil is the sort of thing we see as earthquakes and disease; human evil is of course related to what we do to other humans and animals (and in fact, the environment). But evil deserves another post (or many).