Topics Religion

Question Is it wrong to practice a belief which one does not believe or finds to be irrational? For instance, are cultural Christians like Richard Dawkins intellectually irresponsible for adhering to practices connected with the belief which they find unconvincing? This is a very bugging question for me since I am a Christian who is becoming more and more disillusioned with my religious beliefs, so a philosophical answer would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

Accepted:
March 31, 2010

Comments

I suppose we should not involve ourselves in practices based on beliefs we think are false or could not be true. On the other hand, if we are not sure, and feel that the practices might help us decide, we might well want to continue with them. Even praying to a God who might or might not be there has a point since the process of prayer itself is often helpful in clarifying our ideas on the topic.

Many of us vote in elections where we are unenthusiastic about the alternatives on offer or unconvinced of the efficacy of our vote, but we still vote since we value the process itself, even though on particular occasions it may be ill-directed.

Another question worth considering here is whether the "practice" of Chistianity, as you understand it, is really as connected to the beliefs with which you are becoming disillusioned as you suggest. I'll speak at some length about this. What I have to say may not seem very philosophical, and in some ways it won't be. But there are profound questions here about the relationship between faith and belief, and what I will have to say is related to my own views about that relationship.

It seems to be quite commonly believed that one cannot "really" be a Christian unless one accepts certain doctrines of faith, for example (and since it is Good Friday), that Jesus rose bodily from the dead on the third day after he was executed by the Romans (the doctrine of the resurrection). That, in doing so, he made himself the supreme sacrifice, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world", as the Agnus Dei has it (the doctrine of sacrificial atonement). That Jesus is the only way to God (John 14:6). And perhaps the most widely cited essential belief: That Jesus was divine, the "Son of God", conceived by the Virgin Mary, etc, etc.

It is not for me as a philosopher to say whether acceptance of any of those doctrines is in fact essential to Christianity. But I will point out some relevant facts.

Historically, all of these doctrines came to wide acceptance only well after the death of Jesus. (There is excellent historical work being done on these sorts of questions nowadays, by the likes of Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, Paula Friedriksen, Elaine Pagels, and many, many others.) To a significant extent, most of the "central Christian doctrines" appear to have been the result of a conscious attempt to merge elements of the Jewish tradition, which was of course Jesus's own, with the classical Greek tradition, an attempt that begins, to some extent, with Paul but becomes all the more important after the Roman usurpation of Christianity in the fourth century, and then again with the re-discovery of the classical tradition in the late middle ages. An excellent example is the doctrine of transubstantiation, which makes little sense outside an Aristotelian metaphysics that distinguishes between a thing's "essence" and its "accidents": It is supposed to be the essence of the bread and wine that change, becoming those of body and blood, even while their accidents remain the same. This doctrine, though central to the Roman Catholic understanding of communion, and often regarded, even by Protestants, as somehow crucial, was explicitly rejected by Martin Luther and is no part of the "official" understanding of communion in (most?) Protestant denominations.

It is worth pointing out, too, that some Protestant denominations, including those of the Pilgrim settlers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, explicitly reject the very notion of doctrine. In the Congregational tradition, membership in the church depends not upon the acceptance of certain doctrines but rather upon one's willingness to enter into "covenant" with the other members of the church. Not, of course, that the early settlers always managed to live up to that ideal, but it nonetheless was the ideal they espoused, and Congregational churches today continue to espouse it. One might say similar things about the Religious Society of Friends, i.e., the Quakers.

That should make it apparent, I hope, that there is vigorous disagreement nowadays about the extent to which there actually are any "central doctrines of Christian faith". One might even begin to wonder whether "faith" and "belief" have very much to do with one another (as foreshadowed above). And there is a long tradition of conceiving of faith not in terms of belief but in terms of what people call "spiritual practices". There is a fantastic recent book, An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor, that explores these issues from a Christian point of view. The writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh often explore similar things from a Buddhist perspective.