Heathen's Progress 17: The modern believer is not suspicious enough

I'm afraid it's all too common for defenders of faith to start off by piling up a whole load of interesting scientific findings, only to follow up with a plethora of non sequiturs. The question rightly asked is how reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth? And there seems to be no escaping the simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality. Despite the comfort Mark Vernon draws from recent research, there is no escaping the fact that the vast bulk of it points in exactly the opposite direction, undermining any confidence we might feel that our intuitive judgments are effective truth-trackers.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Heathen's Progress 16: Struggling with the question of belief? Homer Simpson's got the answer

Homer's Wager concludes that you have no good reason to believe in God, even if it is more likely than not that he exists, let alone if you are among those of us who think the probability is closer to 6.7% than 67%. And what this shows is that the issue of God's existence or non-existence is not an important one after all.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Heathen's Progress 15: You don't have to be religious to pray … but it helps

Prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens. One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social reinforcement. But the main one is that the religious context transforms them from something optional and arbitrary into something necessary and grounded. Because the rituals are a duty to our absolute sovereign, there is strong reason to keep them up. You pray every day because you sense you really ought to, and it will be noticed if you don't. In contrast, the belief that daily meditation is beneficial motivates in much the same way as the thought that eating more vegetables or exercising is. Inclination comes and goes and needs to be constantly renewed.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Heathen's Progress 14: Can it be rational for the religious to be non-rational?

In practice there is no neat distinction between the logical and the psychological. Those who attempt to use pure reason cannot expect to succeed, while those who willingly allow psychological factors to affect their reasoning may be being more self-aware about their rational capacities than those who do not.

The Guardian Comment is Free Belief series continues.

Heathen's Progress 13: Has the God debate been moved on?

Some in the blogosphere have suggested that in this series I have moved closer to the new atheists. I'm not sure this is true. For a variety of reasons (including unfortunate headlines others gave to some of my pieces) the extent to which I have disagreed with the new atheists has probably been overstated because it is the disagreements that I have found more interesting to write about. I agree with them that literal belief is not a straw man, strongly expressed belief is not aggressive dogmatism, we should be as free to criticise religion as people have been to criticise atheism, and that science does pose difficult questions for many religious people. But I still maintain that much of the rhetoric has not been helpful and that in order to make progress we have to look more at the best that religion has to offer, not the worst, and find common ground with more liberal believers in order to counter the more pernicious forms of belief.

Half-time report in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Heathen's Progress 12: The parable of the allotments

Last week I challenged the idea that religiosity is more about practice than belief with evidence that most religious people appear to have a large number of traditional beliefs which they take to be important. However, I suggested that there might be a response to this, and I've found a possible one in book 42 of the apocryphal Gospel According to Monty.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

Heathen's Progress 11: The myth of mythos

A few weeks ago, I argued that the debate about the true nature of religion is hampered both by a confusion between what we think it ought to be and what it actually is, and by a lack of knowledge about what religious people, rather than the elite commentariat, really think. To get a better sense of these facts on the ground, I've conducted a survey, and I think the results make for interesting reading.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

Heathen's Progress 10: Respect for you and your crazy beliefs

I keep channels of communication open out of disrespect to my own intelligence. When you look out into the world and see that it's insane, you have to accept the likelihood that you probably have your little pockets of insanity too.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

Heathen's Progress 9: The empty common ground

"I'm sorry Julian, you seem to be working hard to establish a middle ground that nobody wants to occupy." I'm finding it hard to disagree with this comment by DiscoveredJoys on last week's post about what reasonable religious belief could look like today. But since the main purpose of posting my articles of 21st-century faith was to find out just how many could support them, the project is not worthless if we find out the answer is hardly anyone at all.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

Heathen's Progress 8: Articles of 21st-century faith

I want to see just how many people really do embrace the kind of religious faith that explicitly rejects the kinds of things atheist critics think silly. To do this I've formulated four "articles of 21st-century faith": beliefs that I think would make religion entirely intellectually respectable, even to the hardest-nosed atheists. They are neither so vague that anyone could put their name to them, nor so specific that people who are broadly sympathetic should feel unable to do so. They are brief and minimalist, stating clearly and concisely only as much as needs to be stated to establish the legitimacy of superstition-free belief.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

Heathen's Progress 7: True religion

Although we might not be clear enough about what we ourselves believe, we are frequently all too clear about what others believe. People may accept there are lots of views out there, but they are very confident they know what the genuine version of any given belief looks like, which is usually how the speaker wants it to look.

Latest in the Guardian's Comment is Free Belief series.

Heathen's Progress 6: "You just don't understand"

"Too often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively. Believers constantly attribute all sorts of qualities to their gods and have a list of doctrines as long as your arm. It is only when the questions get tough that, suddenly, their God disappears in a puff of mystery. Ineffability becomes a kind of invisibility cloak, only worn when there is a need to get out of a bit of philosophical bother."

Latest in the Guardian's Comment is Free belief series

Heathen's Progress 5: The lust for uncertainty

It's high time we realised that adopting a moderate position in the God debate is not the same as adopting a non-judgmental one in which uncertainty becomes the new object of veneration.

Latest in the Guardian's Comment is Free belief series

Heathen's Progress 4: The autonomy of science

Last week, I argued that although science and religion clearly can be compatible, they often make for far less comfortable bedfellows than most believers sanguinely maintain. There is, however, another side to the story of science's relation to belief: the idea held by many atheists that science is not only on their side, but is their best buddy. The uncomfortable truth for believers and atheists alike is that science is a loner who never shies from revealing embarrassing truths about anyone who tries to claim ownership of it.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Heathen's Progress 3: Religion's truce with science can't hold

The fact that science is compatible with religion turns out to be a comforting red herring. The less comfortable wet fish slapped around the face is that how easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we're talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab. If it is of a kind that doesn't attempt to explain the hows of the universe, then it has to be very careful not to make any claims that end up doing just that.

Latest in Comment is Free Belief series (posted 14 October)

Heathen's Progress 2: How not to be a dogmatic fundamentalist

We need to get beyond a false set of assumptions that divide people up into the dogmatic and the reasonable, the nasty and the nice. There is no automatic virtue in softly advocating accommodating beliefs, nor any vice in strongly advocating clear, divisive opinions.

Second in Guardian Comment is Free series

Heathen's Progress 1: Stalemate

A plague on all their houses: all parties in the God debate are guilty of becoming entrenched in unsustainable positions. For there to be movement, all are going to have to recognise their failings and shift somewhat. The battlelines need to be redrawn so that futile skirmishes can be avoided and the real fights can be fought. This is the first in a series of articles which together will attempt to do just this. Over the coming months, I'll be fleshing out the charges I have made and suggesting what the right responses to them should be.

Start of a new series at Comment is Free Belief (30 September)