The Comforting Myth of the Heroic Unbeliever

I

A common rhetorical move made by contemporary proponents of atheism is to remind their audiences of the size and scope of the universe. Richard Dawkins, for example, in Unweaving the Rainbow, points out that, if we could write the history of a year on a single sheet of paper, so that a book the size of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations would take us back to Queen Elizabeth I, we would need a bookshelf of history volumes stretching for hundreds of miles in order to write the history of the universe. The point is to impress upon readers the vastness of the universe, and the minuteness of human existence within it. Essentially the same strategy is employed by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which memorably points out that space, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.” In the sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a machine called the Total Perspective Vortex is the ultimate torture instrument, designed to render its victims completely useless by showing them their actual significance within the cosmos. Victims are given “one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, ‘You are here’.”

We could understand the point of the Total Perspective Vortex as being to instil a heightened version of the same feeling Pascal experienced when he confessed that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread”. We should also notice, however, another aspect of this idea implicit in Adams’s story, namely, that facing the reality of the universe is not easy, and that it takes courage to live with an open eye on the overwhelming truth about life, the universe and everything.

This sense of the nobility of confronting the cold, hard reality of the universe is also important for Dawkins. As he memorably put it in his article “God’s Utility Function”, there is ultimately in the universe “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference”. Yet this is not necessarily a recipe for gloom. Unweaving the Rainbow is an attempt to show how a thoroughly materialistic view of the world can nevertheless provide resources for “personal hope”, through the sense of wonder that the universe evokes: 

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it? 

The metaphor of open eyes is common in this discourse. It suggests an undiluted commitment to truth, whatever it may turn out to be; and it speaks of new possibilities opened by this courageous stance. By contrast, to continue to hold on to religious or mystical ideas is simply a failure to grow up, “a hankering after, indeed a pining for, the lost securities and comforts of childhood”. Those who believe are simply timid, too attached to the protective myths of their infancy. Why, asks Dawkins, would we settle for this, when “we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever”.

This picture of a courageous act of facing the truth and divesting oneself of comforting fantasies is found in other contemporary anti-theist writers. “Atheism cannot provide comfort,” writes Ian Robinson in The Australian Book of Atheism; but “if you are genuinely following a spiritual path, you will seek the truth no matter how it makes you feel”. Similarly, in a 2006 article in the Guardian, “The Milk of Humanist Kindness”, A.C. Grayling speaks of humanism’s “intellectual courage”, and its requirement only of “open eyes, sympathy, and reason”. And in language indebted to Dawkins, Greg M. Epstein, the “Humanist Chaplain” of Harvard University, writes in his book Good Without God: 

Humanists accept that the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming; we build our worldview around it because we want to look reality square in the face, unblinking, unflinching, unafraid of the truth … The billions of stars and trillions of big and small rocks that surround us in this universe do not care about us, and do not love us. They do not hear our prayers. The only guidance for which we have ever seen evidence is human guidance. The only purposes we’ve ever been able to understand are the purposes we have created and chosen. A blind watchmaker created us. But it is now time for us to open our eyes and take responsibility for our future.  

Courage and responsibility in the face of the truth—these are apparently the hallmarks of a robust atheistic materialism.

It is important to remember, however, that this constellation of ideas is not new. Almost identical formulations were developed during the great clash between science and religion of the Victorian era; and the historical comparison can illuminate the way these ideas function in our own day. 

II 

The historian James Turner, in Without God, Without Creed, and the philosopher Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, have reflected deeply on the emergence of widespread unbelief in the nineteenth century. This took place in the context of dramatic scientific and technological advances, which had called into question aspects of traditional Christian faith. Yet both Taylor and Turner argue that it was never science on its own that dislodged belief. (Turner points out that many of the most prominent advocates of agnosticism in fact had “an astonishingly loose conception of science”.) Rather, the breach in traditional belief was opened by, as Taylor puts it, “a new militant moral outlook”, or as Turner has it, “a new, secular moral ideal”.

This new moral vision was characterised first and foremost by an ideal of uncompromised pursuit of truth. Motivated by an admiration for science, this ideal was held to entail a rejection of whatever one could not know empirically. There was an ethics of belief: one ought not believe what one has insufficient evidence for. Thus, throwing aside all that depended on tradition and authority, unbelievers were, as Robert Ingersoll depicted it, “intellectual discoverers” setting out for “new isles and continents in the infinite realms of thought”. As Turner puts it, “Whatever their tone, all unbelievers agreed on the ‘duty’, resting ‘directly upon us as individuals’, to seek ‘earnestly, fearlessly, and carefully’ for the truth.”

This note of “fearlessness” alerts us to another central characteristic of the new moral vision: a sense of the heroism of embracing the truth, however, cold and dark it turned out to be. In a famous lament, W.K. Clifford spoke of the costs of giving up belief: “We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven, to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead.” Both Turner and Taylor call attention to the significance of this idea of courage; the “manliness” of disbelief was a common notion. Charles Norton wrote with disdain of the “consolations of religion”, describing abandoning faith as “a step from childishness toward maturity”. Similarly, for Samuel Putnam, religion was a “cry of the child against the night”. Turner sums up: “By rejecting the easy consolations of religion, by facing the truth no matter how grim, agnostics in their own eyes had climbed a moral Everest inaccessible to believers.” They “could—and commonly did—feel themselves as actors in the heroic mode”.

A third crucial aspect of this new moral vision was the importance of benevolence, the possibility of contributing, in whatever small way, to human betterment. This commitment lay close to the heart of Victorian agnosticism. As one unbeliever argued, “the only ultimate object which can be successfully maintained for human effort is the improvement of the human race upon this planet”. Indeed, for many agnostics, such a commitment was more than simply a feature of their new worldview; it was their deepest value. Some, such as William James, deeply depended on such a commitment, for without it, life could seem very empty: 

if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the purposes of God, or to give up theoretically the idea of final causes, and of God anyhow as vain and leading to nothing for us, we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in stead of a final cause; and through a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so active, and so sustained by a clean conscience as not to need to fret much. 

Benevolence made the disenchanted universe liveable; because as Turner reflects, “whether they would otherwise have found the courage to stare into emptiness is an open question”.

Taylor and Turner focus mainly on North America; but the same ideas were present in Australia. In the Victorian Review in 1879, Marcus Clarke, author of For the Term of His Natural Life, published an article entitled “Civilisation without Delusion”, in which he argued that there was a “moral grandeur” in “the strong-souled man who lives uprightly because he feels that selfishness and sin injure the welfare of his fellow man”. In the same year in Sydney, and with similar passion, the Spiritualist lecturer Charles Bright contrasted Christian “Dogma”, “which denies to the natural, free, brave heart everything excepting damnation”, with “the teachings of rational philosophy and modern science”: 

Rationalism views every proceeding with a philosophical eye, and tries all glittering pretensions with the test-stone of natural, not priestly, morality, goodness and virtue. It turns with disgust from the fulsome formulas of fashionable flattery—termed religious worship—to the intrinsically noble and spiritual qualities developed in the souls of men whose lives are one long sacrifice for their fellow-men—whose every breath is an aspiration for human advancement. 

Demonstrable truth, the courage to face it, and a spirit of love towards humanity; this was the moral vision that lay at the heart of Victorian unbelief, in North America and in Australia.

Many felt this vision to be very powerful. Samuel Putnam spoke of how he “breathed the joy of recovered liberty and virtue” when he gave up his faith, insisting that “the moment that one loses confidence in God, or immortality in the universe”, one becomes “more self-reliant, more courageous, and the more solicitous to aid where only human aid is possible”. Similarly, the Australian lecturer John Tyerman boasted in 1880 that “Freethought”: 

has proved a blessing and comfort to thousands of men individually … It has emancipated them from many galling fetters, eradicated from their minds a number of pernicious superstitions, dispelled a host of groundless and depressing apprehensions, inspired them with several stronger incentives to a good life than they ever felt before, and furnished them with more rational and ennobling conceptions of man, of nature, and of God and a future state, if they really exist, than Christianity has ever supplied. 

It was this capacity for moral inspiration that made Victorian unbelief powerful.

A number of features of this vision, however, require closer attention. For one thing, we should note that there was a certain paradox in the sense of the heroism of unbelief. On the one hand, this notion only made sense because of what was held to be lost by the unbeliever—an “enchanted” universe and a “Great Companion”. On the other hand, this loss was precisely what constituted part of the attraction. Reflecting on Clifford’s lament, quoted above, Turner comments, “Doubtless Clifford … genuinely suffered. But the suspicion will not down that he took a certain pride in displaying his wounds: bloody proof that agnostics did not simper and, by inference, that believers did.” There was, as Taylor puts it, a “deep, spiritual satisfaction of knowing that one has confronted the truth of things, however bleak and unconsoling”. Furthermore, though no doubt true that unbelievers gave up much that was comforting, it also seems true that this freed them from burdensome beliefs as well, “depressing apprehensions”, as Tyerman put it. Thus, Samuel Putnam experienced his rejection of God as “a vast relief”, and in a revealing comment, proclaimed that “the very moment man recognises the evil of his lot, that very moment the grandeur of his being arises. For he can love; he can endure; he can perish without terror.” Facing the truth of the disenchanted universe was, indeed, hard; but it was not without certain benefits.

Furthermore, it is interesting that an element of the transcendent frequently crept into attitudes to humanity. Humanity became an object of devotion in ways that must call into question any absolute disavowal of non-scientific truth. Some kind of belief in “the sanctity of human nature”, or “the greater whole”, or “the onward march of the race” almost always accompanied Victorian forms of unbelief. This note of transcendence was the basis of unbelievers speaking of their new position as a “grand philosophy” or, frequently, as a kind of “religion”. Marcus Clarke concluded his Victorian Review article in this way: 

Mankind, freed from the terrors of future torments, and comprehending that by no amount of prayers can they secure eternal happiness for their souls, will bestow upon humanity the fervour which they have hitherto wasted in sighs and hymns. The creed which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted will fade away. The interests now felt in churchmen’s disputations will be transferred to discoveries of science. The progress of the world will be the sole care of its inhabitants; and the elevation of the race, the only religion of mankind. And this consummation of civilisation is nearer at hand than many think. 

Or as Professor J.E. Oliver of Cornell put it: 

We have or may have a religion of unselfish devotion to others and to our own highest ideals; a religion of character, of abiding enthusiasm for humanity, and of complete intellectual honesty. Into our little human lives it will bring something of the grandeur of these infinite surroundings, a high purpose amid which and for which we live. 

As this quotation highlights, the effect of recognising these points of transcendence was to lift one’s eyes above the humdrum of day-to-day life. In the face of the infinity of the universe and the nobility of man and his destiny, the petty, parochial concerns of “our little human lives” disappear. Turner remarks that this was a central feature of Victorian attitudes to art: “Immersed in art, one lost sight of the minuteness of individual limits in the lasting grandeur of the race.” This sense of seeing one’s life in the light of the bigger picture was intimately linked to the moral vision outlined above. Taylor comments: 

What the Victorians called the “manliness” which enables us to face the truth also has another side. We not only transcend our craven desire for comfort and assurance; we also rise beyond our narrow perspective and can take in the whole. We become so filled with awe of it that we can step outside our own limited concerns. 

A final point to note returns us to the question of the relationship of these ideas to science. To several of its early exponents, the spiritual aspect of this new way of looking at the world was obvious. Samuel Putnam, for instance, insisted that agnosticism “is not merely an intellectual conviction, it is a moral power”. As time went on, however, a distinct tendency to obscure this fact crept in, and the assumption gained ground that unbelief was simply the necessary consequence of progress in science and technology, that religion simply must wither away in the face of scientific rationality. It should be pointed out that this is almost certainly not, in fact, what happened in the Victorian era. For one thing, the devotion to altruism that played such a significant role in this period was not a scientific deduction. Rather science and the new morality were mutually supportive, and according to Turner, “the vogue of science may have owed more to these new moral values than the new morality did to science”. Yet whatever the case, we should notice that such a belief is not surprising. As we have seen, this moral outlook has a deep investment in the idea that it represents the pursuit of truth, and in the corresponding assumption that the natural sciences are the only sure means to this truth. With such a commitment, it is no surprise that the view developed that, eventually, religion would pass away because truth (on which science has a monopoly) would win out.

There is, then, more to “heroic unbelief” than meets the eye. The claim to courage is more complex than it appears. What is really given up and what is really gained? Strong evaluative language also raises questions about the avowed commitment to very narrow criteria for “truth”. And the tendency for the “greater whole” to draw one’s eyes away from the everyday raises questions about the kind of benevolence that is generated. Might this stance also sometimes be a retreat from the complexities and moral demands of “our little human lives”? 

III 

We can be helped to pursue these thoughts further by Marilynne Robinson’s subtle and powerful 2004 novel Gilead. Gilead takes the form of a long, rambling letter written in 1956 by the elderly—in fact, dying—Congregationalist minister John Ames to his six-year-old son, for the purpose of filling the boy in a little about his father, given that Ames will not be around for most of his son’s life. As such, Gilead is essentially a detailed study of a single character.

Ames, born in 1880, has lived almost his entire life in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. Having taken over his father’s pulpit, he has been a preacher and pastor in that town for decades. Ames’s ancestors were religious folk, his father’s father an eccentric preacher associated with the famous Kansas abolitionist John Brown. In many ways, Ames is the opposite of the ideal discussed above. He lives in a small world, preoccupied with parochial concerns, and he has held onto a basically traditional faith in the face of modernity. Yet Ames is nevertheless a deeply compelling, even beautiful, character, and this warrants reflection.

The action of the novel, such as it is, revolves around the arrival in town of Jack Boughton, the son of Ames’s old and trusted colleague and friend, Rev. Robert Boughton. Jack is very much a returning prodigal, and his presence prompts numerous reflections from Ames. Jack represents a disruption at best and a danger at worst. Ames is dying, and understandably preoccupied with that; and there is more than a hint that Jack is moving in on his family. Yet Ames responds with a deliberate generosity and self-awareness anchored in a belief in providence. Despite Jack’s provocations, Ames persists in being gracious. He makes an effort to overcome the prejudices Jack has created by many years of disappointment, and reaches out to him at real cost to himself. This interaction is the fruit of a life of cultivating virtue. We are “artists of our behaviour”’ as Ames sees it. As he spends a morning praying for wisdom “to do well by” Jack Boughton, and as he persists in difficult conversation to the point of tears, John Ames is very much an artist.

An important element of the background to this action is Ames’s relation to his father. At the beginning of the novel a complexity in this relationship is signalled by the mention of a letter that Ames ultimately burned. By the end of the book, we discover that this letter concerned Ames’s father’s abandonment of faith. Ames’s older brother Edward had gone to study in Germany and had there lost his beliefs. Ames’s father had come to agree with Edward, eventually moving away from Gilead and all its narrow interests. Ames’s recollection of part of this process is significant: 

Then, when he [Ames’s father] began reading those books I brought home, it was almost as if he wanted to be persuaded by them, and as if any criticism I made of them was nothing more than recalcitrance. He used phrases like “forward-looking”. You’d have thought a bad argument could be put beyond question by its supposed novelty, for heaven’s sake. And a lot of the newness of this new thinking was as old as Lucretius, which he knew as well as I did. In that letter he sent me which I burned he spoke of “the courage required to embrace the truth”. I never forgot those words because of the way they irritated me. He just assumed that his side of the question was “the truth” and only cowardice could be preventing me from admitting as much. All that time, though, I think he was just finding his way to Edward, and I can’t really blame him for it. He did try to take me along with him. 

Ames knows that his father’s move away from faith was far more complicated than simply a courageous decision for the truth. Because of his emotional commitments, Ames’s father could never be an objective assessor of good and bad arguments—as is no doubt true for Ames, as well. But what frustrates Ames is the self-deception involved, and the self-gratifying, but falsifying, description of his father’s act as entirely a matter of courage and truth.

In contrast to this confident attitude towards “the truth”, Ames is a man with many unanswered questions. “I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times,” he says. His is a world filled with spirit, with “miracle”; it is a world in which the deepest questions are opaque to human reason. Yet this is by no means a retreat from serious intellectual engagement. Ames is familiar with the ideas that turned his brother around. He has read Feuerbach. To his great amusement, his life’s work of writing sermons amounts to a literary output to rival any of the greats—he estimates 67,500 pages—“almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true.”

Nor is Ames inattentive to the world because of some preoccupation with invisible, spiritual realities. The details of the world hold for him an endless fascination: the appearance of raindrops in sunlight, the orbit of the moon, a row of oaks dropping acorns in the dark, the sound of trees at night. “This is an interesting planet,” he tells his son, “it deserves all the attention you can give it.”

Importantly, this attentiveness to the world extends to the human. He is absorbed by the beauty in two men laughing together at a garage, a couple walking at night, the death of a parishioner. Indeed, Ames’s interactions with Jack Boughton are simply the fruit of a lifetime of attention to the detail and meaning of normal life. He writes of conversation as a great privilege: 

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want”, and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned. 

For Ames, life, the very fact of existence, is a miracle that understanding cannot dull. “I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.” It is not that Ames actually does not know the names of the things he looks upon—he is not the child he imagines. But the world still has this feel to it, simply because it is, and its smallest details echo with the grandeur of the infinite.

Ultimately, Ames and his father simply represent alternative ways of being in the world. When Ames’s father visited him some time after leaving, he tried to convince him to leave Gilead: 

He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, “Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.” And that irritated me. He said, “Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it.” He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, “I have become aware that we here lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them.” 

Ames is certainly living by notions that are old and local. Yet by this point in the novel, it is no longer straightforward to share Ames’s father’s disdain for such notions, for the reader has seen their consequences for a way of life. At the end of his days, Ames is a man full of fire and love and delight; and it is very compelling.

Ames’s father’s outlook on life is alive and well today. In his article in the Guardian, A.C. Grayling describes humanism in this way: 

Its desire to learn from the past, its exhortation to courage in the present, and its espousal of hope for the future, are about real things, real people, real human need and possibility, and the fate of the fragile world we share. It is about human life; it requires no belief in an after life. It is about this world; it requires no belief in another world. It requires no commands from divinities, no promises of reward or threats of punishment, no myths and rituals, either to make sense of things or to serve as a prompt to the ethical life. It requires only open eyes, sympathy, and reason. 

Courage, truth and benevolence—this is certainly a powerful combination. Yet Gilead reminds us that things are not as straightforward as this. For claims to courage can be self-flattering, hiding as much as they reveal; and truth can be reduced to the empirical only with difficulty and distortion, and by suppressing significant, if mysterious questions; and real love for people is altogether harder than it seems to be. In an essay titled “The Essence of Religion”, Bertrand Russell spoke of the “infinite part” of the human soul, which rises impartially above the prison of the “here and now” in “truth in thought, justice in action, and universal love in feeling”. Yet it is one thing to love “all indifferently”; it is quite another to love this particular man or woman who appears before me with the jarring demands of a concrete other.

Over against the courage to see beyond the day-to-day and open one’s eyes to the unhallowed universe, John Ames reminds us of the quiet, patient courage of belief, which issues in a steady, active love for others and refuses to flee from the complexities and heartbreak of the mysterious and parochial. And although this stance seems foolish to many today, to call it “childish” reveals a lack of awareness that says more about the speaker than the object. 

Andrew Errington has a BA (Hons) in Government from the University of Sydney, an MA in Ancient History from Macquarie University, and is currently a student at Moore Theological College, Sydney. He has taught at Robert Menzies College and tutored in the departments of Biblical Studies and Government.