Hi George, there was one thing I should have said further. I am not seeking to replace or explain away faith in any way. I think faith is a fundamental need of humans. The question is though, what is it?

In my opinion it is a willingness to hold to, express and act on a belief when one is unable to provide evidence of the validity of that belief which will satisfy others. However, there is another side, which is often ignored, which is that faith must be tested and tested and tested again. If I cannot find evidence for myself that will satisfy me, then I have nothing but a superstition, or worse, a delusion.In some ways, it's a scientific endeavour!

The history of Man has been littered with the corpses of believers, literally and figuratively. Sometimes they have been vindicated, showing their personal tests were good. Faith is something of a two-edged sword. It needs to be balanced with understanding and the right context or the consequences can be disastrous.

Seeking to explain the workings of the brain/body system does not diminish the wonder of the mind. Seeking to pretend that it is impossible to do so, does.

Seeking to understand what religious doctrine has been based on does not diminish the numinous experience of the religious faithful. Seeking to pretend it can't be understood reduces it to the level of delusion.

I find a useful tool in seeking insight into all sorts of things is metaphor and analogy. As the Bard said, "there's nothing new under the Sun"; the details change, but the form remains the same.

Craig Minns,

Thanks for the mini-essay that made me think about my Christian approach to the idea of God and the multifaceted function of religion more than the usual atheist arguments frequented e.g. by Richard Dawkins and his followers.

Nevertheless, let me comment on some of your claims.

>> religion, like mathematics, is a human construct and like mathematics it is an approach to organising a systemic understanding of the world.<<

I agree that they are both human constructs if you mean they are not objects or phenomena assumed independent of the mind. Mathematics can be used to model parts of physical reality and one of the functions of religion is to “model” human experience and for the believer also to “model” the transcendent, spiriritual, divine, or what you might call aspects of reality that are outside the reach of science. An atheist is a person who does not believe in the latter, hence for him/her there is nothing to model.

I am not going to give a definition of mathematics, but as for religion, my favourite is Clifford Geertz’s anthropological definition:

“(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books 1973/2000 p. 90).

This does not show much similarity with mathematics.

On the other hand, Ian Barbour’s “Myths, Models and Paradigms: The Nature of Scientific and Religious Language” (SCM Press 1974), where he finds similarities between models in science (where mathematics plays a crucial role), and models in religion (at both metaphysical and human experience levels), had very much influenced the way I think about these matters.

>> God is an idea to explain those phenomena which cannot be otherwise easily explained <<

This sounds like the discredited idea of God of the gaps, which is not what I, and most educated Christians, believe in.
(ctd)

(ctd)

The same about your explanation of faith which I think is more than just belief in a God whose independent (of mind) existence could be established through a generally convincing evidence.

To explain is only one of the functions of the idea of God, namely on the psychological level, and it says nothing about God’s “existence” or not outside our mind (compare existence of phlogiston and gravitation, both ideas aimed at explaining certain phenomena).

Stephen Barr in “Modern Physics and Ancient faith” wrote:

"Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point."

Cannot this objection to the all-explanatory claims of Darwinism be applied also to System Theory?

>> Seeking to explain the workings of the brain/body system does not diminish the wonder of the mind. Seeking to pretend that it is impossible to do so, does.<<

This depends on what you call explanation. If you believe that the workings of the brain/body system can be explained to the same satisfaction of everybody as Kepler and Newton explained the movements of planets, then I lack that belief.

Of course, I am aware that one features of my belief in God is a belief in this irreducibility of mind to its physical carrier (brian) or manifestations, but I fail to see how this diminishes the wonder of the mind.

What I believe is that there are going to be more and more satisfactory explanations of the workings of the brain/mind relationship and consciousness, like there are going to be more and more satisfactory cosmological explanations. This is different from “knowing the truth” about these things from within sciences (natural or human), the truth that the more and more satisfactory explanations only converge to. Like the sequence {1/n} cannot reach zero it converges to from within the interval (0, 1]. You can reach it if you close your interval. I shall leave it at that.

George thank you too, for helping me test my own understanding.

I think Geertz's description of religion as given in your piece fits mathematics perfectly! I also like Barbour's ideas, which I hadn't encountered before.

There is no denying that the spiritual and transcendent exists. I would be dishonest in the extreme to try, because I have certainly had experiences which cannot be characterised any other way. However, it is does not necessarily follow that this implies divinity must exist, per se, but saying that does not imply that it must not.

It is all a question of context and the base of knowledge which one brings to the task of understanding. Barr does not understand the idea of self-organising systems, so he ridicules it; Dawkins does not, or chooses to act as though he does not understand the human need for certainty and so he ridicules religious doctrine which seeks to provide it and so it goes on.

In my view it is possible to consider these things as part of a transcendent system that does not rely on an external divine driver. It may be that there is a God as envisaged by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, but it is not necessary to believe in His existence to have a faith that is to all intents and purposes the same. All that is needed is a set of precepts which lead to a similar conclusion in regard to behaviour. Behaviour creates cognition; this is at the heart of religious practise.

Convergence to a limit is a powerful tool, as you say. Where one chooses to stop the process is not necessarily all that important, but being willing to start is vital.

I have difficulty with the idea that faith is a human construct. I know that is how things are explained in modernity but I would rather that faith is a response to a reality outside of ourselves. That reality cannot be investigated by reason alone. Rather reason is used to understand our experience of a reality other than ourselves. God is not our construct, God is a reality that breaks in upon us from outside, God is apocalyptic, revealed. This is no revelation from outside of humanity as if God is "out there" there is a humanity to God as there is a humanity to Christ. If faith were only a human construct it would be worthless, it would obviously be a put up job, produced for our own comfort. Who would take that to be the author of our lives, the argument is somewhat circular. Telling us that faith is a human construct is how modernity deals with it, it deals with it by doing away with it.

Even in the world come of age, or in a disenchanted world, or in the absence of the supernatural, God breaks in upon us and does so via the witness of the church to an objective historical and present reality.

Hi Peter, from where I sit the idea that there is something transcendent that is extrinsic to ourselves is not controversial. The only real difference between what you have said in your last and my own view is that I do not see the need to characterise that transcendent "presence" as being an unknowably different God, but am happy to think of it as an emergent property of a complex system that is ultimately knowable as a wondrous thing of itself.

As I said to George, the only real issue is contextual: you have a religio-cultural one and I have a psycho-scientific one. The subject is the same, but the explanatory narrative is different.

Such is life.