I’m feeling a bit embattled today.
Everywhere I look I hear and read people to whom a materialist world view is
self-evidently the only plausible one. Their arguments are compelling and I
feel out-gunned. Of course, the person who wins an argument isn’t necessarily
(or even normally?) right: they could just be a better arguer. But it still has
a wearying effect.
(It’s probably worth mentioning at this
point that one of my weaknesses (strengths?) is that of being easily convinced
by anyone who is confident in their own position. Thus I will spend time in the
company of a believing friend of mine whose intellectual horsepower appears to
exceed my own and feel my reposts crumbling to dust, then meet an atheist
friend and find exactly the same thing happening. I end up thinking how similar
the two people are, and how different from me. And yes, I am one of those
people who (briefly) believed it when I was told that the word ‘gullible’ had
been removed from the dictionary…)
Mind you, it’s not surprising that I’m
feeling a bit vulnerable at the moment. I’ve been overworking for months (last
week 46 hours for a 35 hour contract) and it’s now a bank holiday Monday and
I’m alone, so there is plenty of scope for an unhealthy reactionary ennui (i.e.
I’ve kind of flopped). Also, a much anticipated trip to Egypt, due to begin in
about 2 weeks time, looks like being cancelled due to a new advisory from the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Both my parents are rather unwell. I have a
tiresome chesty cough. And I am dissatisfied with my last post, which ran out
steam before the end.
I’m tempted to grasp hold and cling to my
faith as a person in the sea would grasp a log (or a frightened child a
teddy-bear) but I try not to. Apart from anything else it’s undignified. I try
to let the waves carry me, to accept the apparent bleakness and let it lead me
into wisdom.
But, to all you atheists and materialists
out there, I ask you to remember one thing. Yes, for believers faith is a
comfort (sometimes: other times it’s a colossal inconvenience). We live
believing things for which there is no scientific evidence. But be careful.
There is no scientific evidence for free will, nor for our sense of time as
progressing from past to future. Yet you live as though there were and your heart
believes that there is. In fact if you tried to act as though there weren’t I
suspect you’d end up as a psychopath.
On a broader level, we generally believe
that what we do matters, in the infinitesimally short and tiny flickers we call
our lives. But in the grand scheme of things, cosmologically speaking, it’s
hard to see why. Yet to believe that what you do doesn’t matter is generally a
clear indication that your mentally unwell.
In other words, I contend that no-one
really thinks as rationally as they purport to.
But back to me.
Comparing grumpinesses with the rector at
church yesterday (he was the one who had arranged the trip to Egypt) he pointed out
that Egypt has an odd place in Judao-Christian thought. It is the place God’s
people try to escape from, it is a place of exile, like Babylon, far from home,
a place of suffering, exclusion, and barrenness. Yet the Israelites time in
Egypt was a very necessary part of their experience. Their journey from Egypt
to the Promised Land was, arguably, what came to define them. I’m an exile, far
from home. At the moment I feel far from home. But maybe I should welcome
this…
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