From the bulletin of the Parish of St Joseph Leicester

Dear Father John,
I hope you are well. I am writing to you because I think it is the right thing to do and I would like to explain why you haven’t seen me in church for some time.

All my adult life I have struggled with my faith and I came to St Joseph’s and fell in love with my religion all over again. It got to the point where my faith and love for Christ had never been stronger. But then I started to have doubts.

I’ve always been a keen reader and my choice of books became searching for answers to the meaning of life. Why are we here? What is reality? Is there a god?

It has been a long and tough journey this past year, but I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer believe in a god and have now accepted atheism, science and reason. One man, in particular, Richard Dawkins, has influenced me. You will not see me at church any more. I must move on and embrace science and reason so I can gain a real understanding of life.

AB

My reply

Dear AB,

I have read your moving letter to Fr John. I am replying not on his behalf (I cannot claim to do that) but, as someone like you, who wants to get to the big questions. You say that you have been, and I imagine are still on, a long and tough journey. I do not believe in the god* that Richard Dawkins does not believe in either. My problem with him is that he has, in my opinion, a very simplistic grasp of what god is. He strikes me as rather like a child who believes in Father Christmas until s/he is of a certain age then feels utterly cheated by his/her parents when the real source of the gifts is made plain. As if the source of the gifts really matters. To repeat myself, I do not believe in Richard Dawkins' god either.

To claim to be an atheist requires, in my opinion, an act of faith. To say THERE IS NO GOD is of the same truth-status as saying THERE IS A GOD. It is an assertion of a belief. To say I THINK THERE IS NO GOD or I THINK THERE IS A GOD are both much more reasonable statements. Agnosticism seems to me to be a much more reasonable position than atheism.

Science is a method of verifying hypotheses. It is not something in which I believe, rather it is a method I use in my work. Reason is one of the qualities or capacities that makes us special in the animal kingdom I believe. That is why we are called homo sapiens where the second word points to our need, as a species, for knowledge. Here I declare my current assent, for the time being until a better explanation is demonstrated, in Darwin's theory of evolution which is not oppositional to Catholic teaching contrary to what some under-educated Catholics believe. When people point to the bible, for example the accounts of the beginnings of human kind in the book of Genesis we are reading not a book of science but of myth; beautifully written poetry - but myth not science.

As a Catholic Christian, I believe in the great importance of science and reason. I also think poetry and myth are important but in a different way than science and reason.If you want to read a critique of Richard Dawkin's views on religion I would draw to your attention Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books in 2006. This can be freely accessed on line at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
Eagleton was brought up a Catholic, but I do not now know how he would identify himself now and this does not bother me at all. Some said he was a Marxist. I do not know or care. What I think important are his arguments as are Dawkin's similarly important and demand our attention. His critique of Dawkins is nothing if not thoughtful, evidence-based and, to my mind, convincing. My fear about god-talk is that the words used can often reveal more about the speaker than about the god spoken about who, in my view, cannot be captured in human words. Rather like the love we feel for our partners, children and close friends can never really be put into words. That is why the best I can do is talk about god being love and love being of god. Inadequate and probably heretical to some but it helps me and, I hope, offers you something to think about. Faith + Reason = Catholic Christianity.

When I was a student at the University of York in the mid 60s I was much helped by a Dominican friar Herbert McCabe OP. He was also a friend of Terry Eagleton. We were all trying to struggle with the insights of Karl Marx and see how far they illuminated the political struggle with which were engaged. Herbert often used to say that god was not the answer but the question. Over the decades since then I have often thought that conceptualising god in this way as the question rather than the answer is a much more grown up or adult way of living one's life. It demands courage, maturity and is greatly helped by talking and even arguing with other people. Often clarifying the question is more important than getting answers. Sometimes sitting in silence, especially with others, can help greatly as we ponder these really important areas. Other times, being exposed to great art - music, painting, sculpture, literature and the rest - can bring big surprises.

Thank you for your letter to Fr John as it has helped me put into words what I think and believe, inadequately so, but as with most important things in life it is difficult to capture what one thinks and feels.

Yours sincerely,

Bernard Ratigan