My Year with God is well-intentioned, but ultimately highlights the complacency at the heart of modern secular thinking, writes Niall Gooch
In the early years of this century, one of the most striking cultural trends was emergence of a hard-edged and belligerent unbelief that came to be called the New Atheism. Professor Richard Dawkins was among the best-known members of this tendency, which also included the late Christopher Hitchens.
They could be well summed-up by Winston Churchill’s definition of a bore: “a man who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”. However, not all writers and intellectuals outside the faith should be identified with this tendency. There have been contributions to the debate that manage to strike a more constructive tone. The volume on atheism in Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introduction series, by the philosopher Julian Baggini, is unsatisfactory in certain respects, but generally thoughtful and non-confrontational.
The latest entry in this latter category is Svend Brinkmann’s My Year With God. Brinkmann is an affable, eirenic Danish academic, a self-ascribed agnostic, and his book is an honest attempt to get to grips with what it might mean to believe in religion. It is very loosely structured around a diary format, with each month dedicated to reflection on a particular aspect of faith. The lack of a polemical edge is refreshing.
However, My Year With God is still frustrating, despite Brinkmann’s goodwill. The core difficulty is that he cannot really escape his own perspective as a conscientious Scandinavian liberal of the early twenty-first century. He never really grapples with the idea that he might be wrong about any major moral issue – sexual ethics, say, or abortion – which limits any insight he might gain into the Christian view of the human person and the human condition.
If you want to write insightfully about a way of life, you have to be able to genuinely inhabit that worldview, to understand what it is like to see the world as an adherent does. You need authentic conceptual empathy. That is one of the problems with non-believers writing about faith (and, it must be said, believers writing about atheism). Brinkmann does not help himself in this regard by his failure to engage with any actual believers who are willing and able to give him a robust defence of their convictions, and his failure to regularly attend church or take part in any religious activities. This is such a strange decision for someone writing a book about the divine. Imagine someone who knew nothing about cricket setting out to understand the appeal of cricket, but never talking to any serious, knowledgeable cricket fans, or attending a game. It is just impossible to get any serious sense of Christianity – or any religion – without immersing yourself in its rituals and traditions.
Additionally, Brinkmann fights rather shy of the absolutely fundamental question in the religion and atheism debate, i.e. is it true? He is trapped, unconsciously, by his own conception that the value of religion lies in its being a system of metaphors and symbols by which to explain human experience. This means that when he thinks he is developing a more sophisticated understanding of faith, what he is really doing is refining and improving the intelligibility of the metaphors and symbols that he considers religion to be.
He provides only the most scant treatment of other crucial questions. The chapter on the Bible is mostly taken up with a lengthy psychologising excursus on the story of the Fall, which is interesting but ultimately rather trivial beside the deeper matter of whether the Bible constitutes a revelation from God. He treats its historical unreliability as a given rather than something to be explored by scholarship and argument.
I don’t want to be too damning of My Year With God. It is not an aggressive book so it does not deserve an aggressive response. But it is a missed opportunity, inadvertently highlighting the complacency at the heart of modern secular thinking. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Brinkmann’s glib repetition of the maxim that we do not need God to be good. This may be true but the question is not “can atheists be good people?”. The question is, “in a material universe with no intrinsic purpose or meaning, how do you ground morality?” Brinkmann gestures at this with some talk of the importance of the individual and of human flourishing, but can’t really explain why individuals are important, or give an objective account of what flourishing might involve, or not involve.
A few steps deeper might have brought him to a life-changing realisation, that it is the divine imprint which gives all individuals their worth. Unfortunately, he can’t quite make the leap.
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