Interview with Alain De Botton

Brian Rosner: Thanks Alain for your willingness to answer some questions about your new book, Religion for Atheists: A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion.  As a Christian, it’s a nice change to be seen as having something positive to contribute as opposed to being accused of “poisoning everything” (to allude to another atheist author’s book title)!

You write that “the most boring question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it’s true.”  Clearly, it is a valuable exercise to set it to one side and consider the existential value of religion.  To kick-off, and at the risk of being “boring,” have you engaged with some of the Christian responses to the so-called new atheists, such as John Lennox or Alistair McGrath, or your fellow philosopher, David Bentley Hart?  What settled you in your position as a non-believer?

Alain De Botton: I declared this issue boring simply because it is so hard to make any progress on it. Most of us come to our position with our mind well made up for us, by forces that are out of our control. The religious would say, because of the Grace of God. Atheists might say, by our nurture, by our psychological upbringing. I cannot be sure why I am a non-believer exactly. Surely much does have to do with the way I was raised in a family of non-believers, and a rational outlook very much at the fore. So the key question for me isn’t whether one should believe or not, but where one goes to – as an atheist – once the non-existence of God is clear. At this point many atheists simply dismiss all talk of religion, whereas I am attempting to engage with the subject selectively.

You argue that there is much to learn from religion, taking the examples of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism, even though “the supernatural claims of religion are entirely false.”  It is fascinating that the apostle Paul in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15:19) argues the reverse.  There he says that if the central supernatural claim of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Christ, is false, then “we are of all people most to be pitied,” rather than envied.  What are the limits to your admiration of religion?  Do you think some of the benefits depend on religion being true?

It depends on what you mean by ‘true’. If by true you mean, revealed by God or provable by science, then most of religions is patently ‘false’. But I’m not interested in such criteria of truth. For me, religion is as true as a novel like Ana Karenina. We don’t go around asking if Ana is ‘true’ because we accept both that she is made up and that her fictional status is connected to very important psychological notions which are true at a humanistic level. It’s in this sort of way that I believe religions to be true. They carry with them psychological insights which seem very right to me, even though this rightness has nothing to do with revelation or science.

Take the doctrine of Original Sin. The idea that we are broken and incomplete isn’t something you could run a laboratory test on, it’s a piece of artistic/philosophical speculation – and is very appealing as such. My admiration for religion rests on many different moments when psychologically important principles seem to be touched.

The kinds of religious practices that you recommend borrowing from religion sound like they are things that would generally enhance the well being of anyone, regardless of belief or non-belief.  Might not the theme of your book simply have been ‘how to live well’?  Why all the religious history and background to what could have been a straightforward self-help book about the value of habituation, reflection, embodiment, community, etc?

Aren’t you perhaps tacitly admitting that there is something more powerful about these practices when done as ‘religious practices?

You’re right that many of the practices I praise can be found in some form or other outside religion, but it’s within a religion that they assume their clearest and more coherent form. It would be absurd not to borrow them from their real source.

In my book, I argue that believing in God is, for me as for many others, simply not possible. At the same time, I want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that open up – we don’t need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the centre stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to lose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the minuscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger (note the tentative can) that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour is more easily overlooked – in other words, that evil becomes less incongruous.

Now, it is important to stress that it is quite possible to believe in nothing and remember all these vital lessons (just as one can be a deep believer and a monster). I simply want to draw attention to some of the gaps, some of what may be missing, when we dismiss God too brusquely.

I wonder whether remembering such “vital lessons” and putting them into practice over the long haul is actually possible.  It seems to me that the core beliefs of Christian faith produce those benefits.  Living out such lessons, without God, might be like trying to keep a bicycle upright without peddling. It reminds me of positive psychology’s recommendation that each of us count our blessings and nurture an attitude of thankfulness, which is thought to be a practical way of avoiding the dangers of individualism, losing perspective and so on.  But “giving thanks” is a transitive verb requiring a direct object.  To whom am I supposed to be grateful? In other words, can the fruit from religion actually survive when it has been cut off from the tree?

I can quite see why to answer ‘yes’ here would offend a believer. It’s the natural suggestion of the believer that the tree is a whole and that no part can exist independently of any other. So one can’t say that one likes the music of Bach but reject the story of the resurrection, or admire Chartres Cathedral but ignore the doctrines that lie at its foundations. And yet, as an atheist, simply from empirical evidence, it seems that actually one can. I am very moved by aspects of Christianity even though ‘the tree’ as a whole is not part of my life. This may seem strange and even eerie to a believer, but I have to report that it is true for me.

You write very honestly and emotively about universal human longings and needs. Might not these longings be suggestive of humans being hard-wired to seek the transcendent, the spiritual God, because these things reflect something of reality? 

We may be hardwired to seek transcendence, to seek comfort, to seek unity, to seek closeness, to seek peace… BUT that doesn’t mean that all the things we long for are true. All of us long to be immortal, and yet I don’t see evidence that we are. In my eyes, religions commit the error of turning an ought into an is. So the longing of the religious is very clear to me, I feel it too. It is the relief of the religious that is foreign.

Appeal to our “hardwiring” reminds me of a line of Christian apologetics going back to Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century and his classic book, Pensées.  While not discounting rational arguments for the existence of God, Pascal adds that “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing: we know in countless ways.”  Pascal finds in the human heart a gap that only God can fill. Speaking personally, my heart seeks transcendence, is impressed by antiquity, searches for wisdom, yearns for justice, needs hope, loves beauty, senses my darkness, is appalled by evil, is repulsed by death and aches for the reassurance of a satisfying story to make sense of my existence.   In my experience believing in God and the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ coheres impressively with the palpable longings of the human heart.

It’s interesting that you use the term “hardwiring.”  Can an atheist talk about humans being hardwired to seek transcendence, and so on?  It is hard to imagine how the adaptations of natural selection have led to these outcomes.   I may be taking your reference to “hardwiring” too literally, but it does imply something for which evolution alone seems an inadequate explanation.  Can a materialistic worldview really account for such longings?

I am not a neuroscientist or an evolutionary biologists, so do take my remarks simply in the weakest lay sense. Nevertheless, I do feel there’s something fundamental in us that seeks transcendence BUT that this can be explained in rational, scientific terms, without an appeal to the divine. You are really asking, in different words, why I don’t believe, a question that is as hard for me to answer as it might be for a believer to say why they believe. The heart has its reasons, as Pascal said so beautifully…

This is an abbreviated version of an interview published on the Centre for Public Christianity website.