Do I believe in God?

In the past few days, I have been revisiting some thoughts I thought I had already thought about before.

Every once in a while I am asked the question, "do you believe in God?"  And I always have a hard time answering it.  It seems like such a simple yes/no question, but neither answer seems to do justice to what I really believe.

While re-reading more properly Robert Paul Wolff's small book Moneybags Must Be So Lucky (which I highly recommend), I came across a side-point example, being used to explain his main point.

Wolff writes:

Imagine, for example, that I have been raised in the Catholic faith, and have arrived at my present atheistical condition through a lengthy and painful process of questioning and selfcriticism.  The symbols, the myths, the liturgy, the language of Catholicism retain for me, as for many lapsed Catholics, a residual power that I cannot wholly subdue, and whose direct and indirect effects in part define who and how I am. If I am asked, “Do you believe in God?” how can I answer in such a way as to communicate this complex state of affairs, with the weights and resonances of the several portions of my religious condition given their proper magnitude? 

Simply to answer, “No, I do not” would be, strictly speaking, to lie. It would be to lie by omission, but to lie nonetheless. Such an answer in no way distinguishes me from one who has had no religious upbringing and who has never believed. To say, “I once did, but I no longer do” comes closer, but still misrepresents the true situation by treating the remnants of Catholicism as no longer present in me, as having been externalised and destroyed.

We might think that a true, though tedious, answer to the question would be a thorough unpacking of the situation in flat, declarative prose, more or less as I have been doing in these past few paragraphs. But that really will not do. To speak that way is to invent a voice that is neither the voice of the victorious portion of myself, nor the voice of the subdued portion, but is the voice of an external observer, a scientific reporter, a neutral party not implicated either in the original Catholic faith nor in its rejection. It is the voice of the cultural anthropologist describing native customs, of the social theorist denying complicity in the popular culture of his own society by his very manner of reporting it. Insofar as I purport to be voicing my religious condition in that voice, I am lying. In all likelihood, I would be deceiving myself at least as much as my audience. What is more, the declarative unpacking of the complexities of my loss of faith would entirely miss the sensuous immediacy of feeling that is an essential part of my present rejection of, and residual clinging to, Catholicism. 

Consider now what might be accomplished by means of the adoption of an ironic voice. Asked whether I believe in God, I might reply – employing, ever so faintly exaggeratedly, the singsong tone of the Apostle’s Creed – “I believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth and in Jesus Christ…” These few words, uttered thus, would capture, for an audience capable of understanding what I was saying, the entire state of affairs: that I once was an unreflective communicant of the Roman Catholic faith, that I no longer am, that I view my former beliefs with amusement, rather than with superstitious fear, but that those beliefs, and the associated rituals, still have some power for me, so that what I now am and believe can only be understood as a development out of that earlier, credulous state. To a naive audience, it would of course appear that I was simply answering the question in the affirmative. 

Since this point is, in fact, the pivot on which my entire argument turns, I shall belabour it a bit at the risk of growing tiresome. The literary complexity of an ironic reply to the question, “Do you believe in God?” is required by the complexity of the speaking subject who gives the reply. If the self were substantively simple, so that either it believed or did not, asserted or did not, and so on, then simple declarative discourse would suffice. Even if this simple self had emerged from a complex process of development, in the course of which first one belief, then another, first one passion, then another, had held sway, even then, so long as the product of the developmental process were simple, unambiguous discourse would suffice to express its present state. The complexity of the historical development of the self would require no special complexity of expression, so long as that complexity were fully represented in the unified nature of the present ego. But if the speaking self is complex, many-layered, capable of reflection, self-deception, ambivalence, of unconscious thought processes, of projections, introjections, displacements, transferences, and all manner of ambiguities – in short, if the history of the self is directly present as part of its current nature – then only a language containing within itself the literary resources corresponding to these complexities will suffice to speak the truth. [my emphasis]

In the example we have been discussing, the immediately experienced tension between the antireligious conviction to which I have won my way by an inner struggle and the old, defeated but not banished faith that still asserts its claim upon my allegiance is a part of what I actually believe. It is false to suggest that I believe the proposition “There is no God” neutrally, unambivalently, purely assertorically, but also that, as an added and separable fact of my consciousness, I am experiencing certain inner feelings that can be characterised, phenomenologically, as feelings of tension or conflict. The tension is a tension in the belief, in such a manner that my belief differs in its nature from that of a complacent atheist who has never known God. It would be strictly false to say that we two believe the same proposition, and it would be manifestly obvious that we might fail to communicate with one another if each of us were to say to the other, in turn, “I do not believe in God “

This rings true for me.  I was raised in a Christian faith, and have arrived at my present atheistical condition through a (now distant, and occasionally painful) lengthy process of questioning and self-criticism.  And not only is my current state a development out of that earlier state, but I am also sure that a lot of those early beliefs and attitudes remain.

However, I wasn't raised in the Catholic tradition, meaning that all those fancy ceremonies and traditions are alien to me.  The version of Christianity that I was raised in was ceremonially simple, and the Apostle's Creed is not a part of me.

Moreover, I don't now view my former beliefs with amusement, so that singsong irony doesn't sit comfortably with me.

And there is family to consider, too.

So, Wolff's example ironic response would not work for me.

And I am struggling to think up any alternative.

The best I can think up is to say that I was born into Christ's house, and when I left home Christ came with me.

Not perfect, but I think I sort of get the right ironic tone of voice with that.