The Uncertain Believer

There are a lot of books aiming to reconcile all or part of science with all or part of religion. Thus, when I picked up Edward Correia’s new book, The Uncertain Believer, my first thought was, ‘What new insights does this book offer that have not been treaded and re-treaded before?’ From the outset, however, it seemed to me that this book would be a bit different from any others that I have read in the ‘accommodationist’ arena of thought. The title gives two clues to Edward’s approach. First is the word ‘uncertain’ and second is the word ‘God’. The book seeks to reconcile God, not religion, and science. Edward rejects all religion in its traditional forms and embraces the uncertainty that is inherent in a scientific world view. Given the latter, then, what room is there for God?

Before I go into that allow me to first explain who Edward Correia is as you are not likely to have heard of him even if you try and keep current in science and religion debates. He is an attorney with a private practice based out of Washington DC and served as Special Counsel to President Clinton for Civil Rights and was appointed to the National Council on Disability. He also teaches law at American University. None of this seems particularly pertinent to the topic addressed by the book, but Edward claims to have pondered these questions – as indeed many of us do – for most of his life. That he has spent a great deal of time thinking through his position shows in his clear and lucid prose and his ability (perhaps like any good lawyer) to lead you through an argument.

One of the highlights of this book is the way that Edward goes about completely dismantling traditional notions of God as a supernatural creator of the universe (among other things) as untenable and unsatisfying intellectually. He then makes a case for embracing science in all of its many implications. Finally, he leads us through three intellectual steps that follow from there:

1. First, we must acknowledge that human beings decide what God is. That has been the case ever since humans evolved sufficiently to consider the existence of God.
2. Second, we must give up the idea that God is a “being” that controls the universe and understand that this image was created by our pre-scientific ancestors struggling to make sense of things they did not understand.
3. Third, God cannot love us because God is an “it,” not a “he.” Thus, we have to give up the notion that a personal God loves us and protects us as bearing no relation to the world we actually observe.

Having dismantled religion and the traditional God what then are we left with? Well, not much. Edward’s solution to reconciling God and science is essentially to reduce the concept of God to an abstract moral principle. Drawing on Hegel’s notion of a “collective consciousness” (or widely shared feeling), he argues that “God is the shared ideal of genuine, unqualified love for others [being the highest law]” and that the spirit of love is not a being but a shared attitude or perspective (115-116). To love God, then, means to participate in this spirit of love (117).

The most obvious objection to this re-conceptualization of the idea of God to an abstract moral principle is that it does violence to the word God itself and seems to render its use unnecessary – like an extra layer of garments. Indeed, underneath the veiled God-talk it seems that what he is really doing is just suggesting that we (should) devote our lives to loving others – which is reminiscent of secular humanism. Edward has three responses to this objection – none of which I found to be especially appealing.

First, noting correctly that this is a question of semantics, Edward suggests that since we set the rules of language then we can define God however we like. This is true only to a certain extent. Since language is a social tool meant to convey meaning to others beyond ourselves I cannot easily get away with, for example, defining a dog as a cat. One can certainly argue that we should be defining a dog as a cat, but such a person likely faces an uphill battle. I think that Edward realizes this.

Aside from the semantic issues, however, there is still the issue of the desirability of this new definition. He argues that the word God has been used so differently that a narrow definition of God (such as a supernatural creator being) would exclude many of the ways that it has been used historically. While it is true that dominant definitions or understandings of the concept of God ebb and flow throughout history, this observation suggests why the term is more confusing than helpful and, therefore, a better argument I think for dropping it altogether. Language that creates confusion is usually not preferable to language that creates clarity. God is a confused and muddled concept. If in conversation one has to continually explain and expound on what one means by God, then the term has indeed ceased being useful.

Finally, Edward argues that keeping the word God allows us to better conceptualize this inspiration or spirit of compassion for which it refers. I have my doubts. Keeping the word around seems more like an effort at saving face or avoiding atheism rather than facilitating any understanding. It certainly makes for an extremely nominal form of theism. Indeed, many theists would see no difference between this and atheism. On the other side, most atheists that I know already value a spirit of compassion towards other humans and will not likely rush out to identify this idea with God and start calling themselves theists.

So while Edward is certainly successful in what he set out to do – and in identifying a worthy and unobjectionable way to find meaning in life – the book and the exercise in general leaves me feeling kind of empty in that I don’t really sense what is achieved by hanging on to God in this manner. An argument for greater human compassion would seem to stand quite well on its own without masking it behind any God-talk. Then again, I did get the sense from the book that Edward is not comfortable with calling himself an atheist and doesn’t see that as a valid option – even though his ideas are virtually indistinguishable from atheism. With that said, his arguments could be effective at weaning other “uncertain believers” off of traditional theism and onto something that is clearly much more palatable. However, as I have said before, I like to call a spade a spade. There is no shame in atheism. Let’s call it what it is.

You can find out more about the book at its website or view this interview with the author.

Before I leave you I would like to point out  a few smaller disagreements and errors that I found in the book:

On page 3 Edward writes that “When Copernicus demonstrated that the earth revolved around the sun, the church condemned his findings as heretical…” Copernicus did not “demonstrate” that the earth revolved around the sun. Rather, what he did was propose a plausible astronomical framework that explained observational evidence in a mathematically appealing way. But then again, the old Ptolemaic framework could do that as well. The (Catholic) church did not quite condemn his findings as heretical – rather, the Catholic church objected to any statements to the effect that this was a real physical description of the solar system – for both religious and philosophical reasons. The book was not condemned but “corrected” – i.e., censured.

On page 24 Edward writes that Galileo “showed that the orbits of the planets are not perfect circles…” This was Johannes Kepler, not Galileo.

On page 29 Edward claims that Pope John Paul II issued his famous statement recognizing evolution as a valid scientific theory in 1981 when, in fact, that was in 1996.