The case for giving God a go
Faith or delusion? This is your invitation to explore the intriguing possibility that faith may be involuntary, an instinct rather than a conceit.
Danish author Svend Brinkmann has wrestled with the concepts of faith and Christianity since boyhood.
“At times,” he writes in My Year with God: Faith for Doubters, “I have really wanted to believe, but not found it in me. At others, I have looked askance at the faithful: what is it that makes them capable of believing such incredible things? Is it faith or delusion?”
His curiosity is, in itself, a thing of beauty. His book, written in an intimate diary format, does what it says on the box. Without sarcasm, sentiment, or trauma-fuelled desperation, Brinkmann, whose background is secular, invites readers to explore his scepticism and the intriguing possibility that faith may be involuntary, an instinct rather than a conceit.
“This year,” he decides, “I am going to give God a chance.”
On the basis of the awarding Society’s atheist foundations, Brinkmann experienced ambivalence on being named Danish Humanist of the Year, sensing “that there are legitimate discussions to be had about our relationship to life, nature and each other that cannot be accommodated purely within a human horizon.”
Citing German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s belief that 21st century alienation is a by-product of a fundamentally masturbatory mindset – namely, the perception of everything outside the self as a resource “whose sole value is derived from the extent to which we can transform them into something that benefits us” – Brinkmann believes that the solution is conscious living.
This idea of resonance, in which “things are not just dead objects with no meaning and history, when animals and the rest of nature are not just production units, and other people are not just human resources used to maximise profit”, is antithetical to the stance of French existentialists such as philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Nobel laureate Albert Camus, who understood the world as both deaf and mute.
There is a touch of transcendentalism about Brinkmann, who, while purporting to have no faith, nonetheless subscribes to a certain religiosity. Is meaning even possible without a God, even a God whose presence exists only in His absence? he asks. The idea of the holy and the sacrosanct may well have been lost, but “a power that transcends the ordinary world of the human senses” and the establishment, through symbols, of “a general order of existence” exists.
The way in which we honour the dead is, he believes, in itself evidence of our covertly religious nature. Irrespective of materialism, “we still care about the wishes of the dead. We read the last will and testament of the deceased with interest and try to abide by it … Nobody would dream of saying, ‘Who cares what he wanted. He’s dead now. Why bother?’”
Brinkmann argues that intersubjectivity or interpersonal contact is not exclusive to the living and the living, and that Christianity answers questions that even the Greeks flubbed.
The twin drivers of Greek philosophy – honour and greatness – are antithetical to Christianity’s “radical” teaching that people all have value, not because, as Brinkmann writes, “they perform great, heroic deeds, but simply because they are human beings”.
This is illustrated by the depiction of the dominant force on Earth – that is, Jesus – being, in reality, “the weakest, most pitiable thing imaginable: a person in great torment in his hour of execution, who surrounded himself with the dregs of society because he insisted that their lives have value, too.”
In this respect, Western culture, in which value is quantified “through tests, rankings, points and contributions to GDP”, is closer to the Greek ideal.
Despite these recognitions and his own acceptance of a power beyond his own understanding, Brinkmann simply cannot bring himself to believe in an afterlife. He appreciates that belief in an afterlife provides solace to the “lonely”, but human existence is, he insists, limited to human existence. To this end, he quotes an acquaintance in her 90s: “From earth you have come, to earth you shall return, and by words you shall rise again.”
In short, human life ends with biological death, but our words, like those of Jesus, live on.
The problem with Brinkmann’s perspective is his anthropocentricity.
When he writes that eternal life would be a nightmare (“a state in which nothing could have meaning, nothing could motivate us, nothing could spark our interest … there would never be any reason to do one thing rather than another because everything could be done and undone an infinite number of times, and nothing would be lost”), he is assuming that the only meaning is human meaning, that the only motivation is human motivation, and that linear time exists.
He assumes, in short, that existence can only exist as he understands it.
If there is a God, it is unlikely that He or She or It could be defined by a luminously white middle class Danish academic, however lucid and intellectually spacious. My Year with God: Faith for Doubters is nonetheless a necessary meditation for, as Brinkmann points out, “I may not currently be facing any of life’s great dramas, but they come to all mere mortals at some point, so perhaps it would be good to think about faith before they strike.”
Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, can now be ordered
Year with God: Faith for Doubters
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