Belief, reason, babel fish and misplaced faith
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What: Christian
Where: Head of think tank called Theos
Transcript of the Radio 4 broadcasts
Chapters and podcast script
- Theos the unserious – 00:39
- Believing the implausible wingdings – 06:12
- God’s disappearance in a puff of logic – 09:39
- The need for doubt in science and faith – 10:04
- Faith, reason and Christian gibberish – 13:20
- What are faith, reason, knowledge, belief and reason? – 16:29
- Reason and faith according to Christian traditions – 20:38
- The lies about reason to keep up appearances – 25:19
- Apologetics: bad ideas, bad faith, big names – 29:50
- Occam’s reason absolutists (the agnostic atheists) 36:19
- The enthusiastic doubt hunt is missing! – 39:58 – 44:42
- Too outlandish even for Dan Brown – 44:44 – 46:03
- Bible society balderdash – 46:03 – 52:07
00:00:39 That to come. For now, we’ll be picking up where we left off; on the topics of doubt and faith as prompted by a TftD broadcast on 24 April 2025 from Chine McDonald.
McDonald was introduced as a Christian commentator. She was formerly the head of fundraising and engagement at Christian Aid. Today she leads a thing called Theos which, describes itself as a Christian Think Tank. Well, almost. With an interesting approach to specificity it actually describes itself as a Christian, religion and society think tank. This Theos tank of thought must truly be vast if they’re able to spread it so widely. Or perhaps they already have, accounting for the observations to come.
According to its website, Theos believes that religion is a significant force in public life and that it should have an active role, therefore, in public debate.
There is, I think, a lot wrong there. First, there’s the implication that any entity deserves a role in public debate, and that there is some automatic invitation to join resulting from force in public life.
Anyone with something relevant and valuable to contribute can take an active role in public debate, there’s no need to apply for a permit.
I’ve contributed to all party parliamentary meetings, I’ve voiced my opinions in local government policy discussions. If I can do it, I can’t see what extrinsically might stop religions doing the same?
That religion ‘should’ have a role in public debate sounds to me like shrill protestation. This isn’t an engagement achieved by protesting, it’s achieved by doing.
Unless, of course, this is all just very telling of something else? It makes me wonder if, each time the Christians behind Theos attempted to partake in public debate, they were left feeling unheard? The lesson from that is clear, and that lesson is not, ‘we must go set up a think tank’.
There are hallmarks here of petulance. Like Christianity felt slighted that its contributions were ignored. Instead of examining what might be wrong with its contributions it just ordered a bigger loudhailer.
By stressing a position of religion being a significant force in public life, it seems to me that Theos is either acting in bad faith, or it has been at the Kool Aid. Neither is a good look for a religious organisation. For anyone under the age of 40, please google Kool Aid (with a ‘K’) 1978 Jonestown.
I don’t think anyone can reasonably conclude that religion is a significant force, though, in British public life. I get a strong impression that the presenters of TftD struggle with the notion that they represent extremes of British churchiness, or that the public life of churches should not be conflated with the public life of a country.
Theos, despite the way in which it defines itself, is principally focused on Christianity. I find the notion of Christianity being a significant force in public life to be laughable.
My view of Christianity in the UK, which I appreciate may not be universally shared, is that, for the most part, it is a fossil. A clue to the tyrannical monster it once was but best now kept in museums and most definitely away from evangelical revivalists and any improbable geneticists with a liking for amber. Like the monarchy, religion in the UK persists only because it has adopted a moderate and palatable form after having been enfeebled and sanitised by such things as education, the enlightenment, evolution and democracy.
What we do have is cultural Christianity, as popularised by Richard Dawkins. The church provides much-loved window dressing for marking life events and public holidays. It supplies for those who wish to indulge, timeless opportunity for hymn singing, bell ringing, jumble sales, the noble provision of civic support and the drinking of tea.
Mainstream Christianity has long since abandoned the rabid threats of brimstone and perpetual torment in a hell that can’t be avoided just by being a good person. It’s only the radical fringes that today cling to things like six-day creationism, special born-again passes to heaven and the stoning of homosexuals.
Back to Theos. Whether or not Christianity should or should not be considered a force in public life, Theos strikes me as an entirely unserious organisation or one that is so far removed from reality that it maintains an unawareness of its own irrelevance. Will be interesting to revisit this assessment as we learn about Chine McDonald’s views as put via this episode of TftD.
Believing the implausible wingdings
00:06:12 McDonald uses the death of a pope as a platform from which to explore doubt in the context of faith. Here’s her opening:
MCDONALD: I’ll remember Pope Francis as the pope who wasn’t afraid of doubt. “Crises of faith are not failures against faith”, he said, “a faith without doubts cannot advance”. This week, the church hears again the story of the disciple Thomas and his encounter with the risen Jesus. This very human moment – in which an angry Thomas says he needs some firm and hard evidence to believe in the resurrection – has even attached the word doubt to his name. But I think we’re all doubting Thomases, really.
I should bloody hope so. Accepting anything solely on the word of another has always been folly. In a time when the technology of social media has democratised propaganda, maintaining a suitable degree of doubt is more valuable a life skill than ever.
It’s a life skill, the underdevelopment of which can appear to correlate with belief in the implausible.
In 2001 I was working at a firm in Blackfriars. One of my peers was a charming and utterly decent person called Charlotte. She was, by her own billing, an evangelical born-again Christian. She was a great colleague. Had good ideas. Worked hard. Knew how to manage clients and how to manage staff. She was, though, almost entirely without guile. On 21 September, the Friday of the week after the 9/11 attacks, Charlotte shared an email she’d received. The message asked the recipient to type into Microsoft Word the flight number of the aircraft that crashed into the ground before it could be flown into buildings in Washington DC. This predated Facebook by three years, email was how back then, viral was done.
Helpfully, this email provided the flight number, QN33. It then invited the recipient to convert the text into the font Wingdings (not really a font, just one of several collections of icons that shipped with Microsoft Office).
To Charlotte’s horror and amazement, the resulting Wingding icons were of an aircraft, two towers and a skull and crossbones.
Unable to contain her astonishment she hastened me round to see her screen. The ruse was obvious. I asked if she’d checked the flight numbers of the 9/11 hijacked planes.
She had not.
The astonishment, horror and amazement were snuffed out by the simplest of searches on google.
She so wanted it to be true. She so wanted this mystical Microsoft made-up meme to have hinted at something beyond explanation, beyond natural.
How odd.
This craving for proof (like Catholics and their miracles) has always to me been bewildering. Religion, I thought, demanded faith. It demanded belief without evidence. If you have evidence, you lose the need for faith. What point then is religion without faith?
God’s disappearance in a puff of logic
00:09:39 A suitable time, I think to revisit Douglas Adams and the Babel Fish.
THE GUIDE: The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
Which is brilliant.
And it’s largely consistent with the comments about doubt the Chine recounted from Pope Francis. If faith is essential for religion, doubt is essential for faith. If there were no doubt, there would be no need for faith.
The need for doubt in science and faith
00:11:03 Prominent humanist scientists are often quick to praise the attempts of early thinkers to develop hypotheses to explain the world in which they found themselves. In the absence of better explanations, gods that cause wind, fire and bad harvests is a good start.
This only begins to present a problem when new observations are made, which result in both doubt and better explanations. This sounds like an ideal. But when the new explanations are deliberately ignored, we get an intractable problem. Galileo famously was not just ignored but silenced by the church, dying while under house arrest to prevent him from teaching knowledge of the sun being at the centre of the known universe. Any search for understanding gets derailed when the importance of doubt is diminished. However good your hypothesis, it should only ever be considered a useful model until a better one is found. To cling on to ideas that are past their think by date is pretty human. Obsolete ideas embedded in egos and reputations of powerful people can be hard to shake off. Embed them in a religion, though, and doubts get dogmatically eliminated. Typically because ideas arising out of doubt present a threat to the established holy order is considered greater than the threat of continued ignorance. Shaking off becomes the effort of millennia.
Doubt, is clearly essential for enlightenment and the progression of knowledge, it should also good for religion. If you’ve already committed to belief in things for which there is no evidence, doubt becomes a way to exercise faith. If you don’t feel doubt then your belief is absolute requiring from you no faith. If faith is to be considered a cornerstone of religious belief then doubt is it essential precursor. Pope Francis and Chine McDonald, to me, seemed only to be exploring this critical relationship between religion, faith, belief and doubt.
Yet this approach among Christians on the respective roles of faith, reason, evidence, knowledge and belief is apparently quite rare. I was happy to take Douglas Adam’s treatment as definitive commentary on the matter. Alas, that happiness is shattered.
Faith, reason and Christian gibberish
00:13:42 It turns out that the role of faith and reason is one of the of murkiest and shabbily debated subjects in Christian theology. It’s a real cluster. There’s deception, dishonesty and sleight of hand. There are charm offensives, belligerent hard-liners, magical thinkers, impossible inventions and a stunning lack of humility almost everywhere. Before getting into it, worth visiting some of what the bible says about faith.
One very famous instance which Christians are taught is in the book of Hebrews, chapter 11, “… faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
The first of those phrases seems fair enough. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. At least, fair enough, until you begin to wonder what is meant by the word ‘substance’.
The quote I used is from the King James version of the bible. Several other versions replace ‘substance’ with words like ‘assurance’, ‘reality’ and ‘certainty’.
Faith is the certainty of things hoped for? Unless meant as a joke or a caution, this is a meaningless sentence. Moreover, it’s a clear distortion of the apparent intended meaning. The earliest rendering we have today of the book of Hebrews is in Greek. The word used for substance in the Greek is ‘hypostasis’ which has a range of meanings dependent upon context. See how troublesome it is to pin your belief system on ancient scribblings? Hypostasis is most broadly understood, in this philosophical context, to mean the underlying reality (or substance) of something. This kinda works. Faith is the underlying reality of things hoped for. Although, that’s almost exactly like saying, “unreal is the underlying reality of things dreamed up”. Which is less poetic but far better at revealing the nature of the statement.
The second phrase is a real humdinger, [faith is] the evidence of things not seen. Gibberish. Unless, or course, it’s being deployed as a warning, in the vein of, “death is the wages of things ungodly”. So in this case, faith being the evidence of things unseen warns against drawing any conclusion from things unseen because faith is evidence of nothing. In which case, Christians have long been up the wrong tree barking.
And in this simple biblical verse we have the whole scope of a deep religious muddle.
What are faith, reason, knowledge, belief and reason?
Given all the murky deceit, best start with some clear definition of terms. Specifically, the terms Reason, Faith, Belief, Knowledge and Evidence as I’m using now. These are plain words with plain meanings. However, because of the philosophy that has developed around knowledge, logic and the theology of belief, we are given some very precise definitions that are useful to navigate this topic:
- Knowledge: What is held to be true in light of evidence
- Belief: What is held to be true without evidence
- Faith: A motive to believe without need for evidence
- Evidence: Valid justification for the truth of knowledge
- Reason: Use of logic to reach belief, valid justification or knowledge
This is no attempt to fix the meaning, redefine or deny other meanings of these words; but purely an academic exercise allowing precise common use of terms here. Oh, and there will always be some dipstick who thinks they are smart in attempting to subvert the intent by imposing a personal definition of ‘valid’ or ‘truth’. Life’s too short. If you encounter one of these, toast their confidence and move on.
If you believe that knowledge of gods is only possible through faith or through the revelations of a god as a consequence of your faith then you can skip much of this. For you faith and reason are in conflict on matters of god. They are incompatible. No discussion to be had. We can move on. I hope you enjoyed the bit about the hitchhikers. You will be the subject of much discussion later so feel free to stick around. Who knows, you might like it.
Back to the definitions. It helps to put these terms to work.
English supermarkets claim to sell to sell sugar packaged with 1kg to a bag. Do I believe the claim? Do I know the claim to be true. Do I ‘know’ that the bags of sugar in English supermarkets labelled 1 kg actually contain 1 kg of sugar?
I’ve purchased these bags, measured out sugar and baked with it. My observations of the amount of sugar in them is consistent with the amount claimed on the packet. I’m aware that a government network of trading standards officers is charged with checking that what is claimed on the label matches what’s inside. I, hence, have valid justification of the truth (evidence) that a typical bag of sugar in a British supermarket will contain the 1 kg as indicated by the label. This information is therefore, for all practical purposes, knowledge, not simply belief. I used reason to process the claim, my observations and existing knowledge to reach this valid justification of truth (evidence).
I’ve read multiple academic studies and several books on the subject of the processed food industry. It is claimed in several of these papers and books that ultra-processed food (UPF) is contributing to overweight and obesity, and that the effect appears to be divorced from the amount of salt, sugar and fats in the food, and is perhaps related to the ingredients used that are not naturally part of human diet. Much is not understood but one suggestion has it that the UPF somehow knocks out our normal homeostasis for energy. That is, we carry on eating the food when for thousands of years the normal feedback loops (like feeling full) kicked in to stop us eating before we ate more than was good for us. I believe this homeostasis model is likely correct and that this mechanism may be mediated by the gut microbiome.
We have observations. We have suggestions that might plausibly explain those observations that are not currently within the realm of knowledge.
I, however, choose to believe that ultra-processed food is causative for overweight and obesity. I cannot, though, reason my way to knowledge that every food under the academic definition of UPF has this effect on weight. I cannot even reason my way to belief of either the ingredient or the homeostasis hypotheses. I merely suspect they are right. Time and research will tell.
Reason and faith according to Christian traditions
So what are the various realms of understanding among Christians on the relative positions and merits of faith and reason? All fall broadly into one of two camps. Tension or harmony. Tension when they are considered to be incompatible ideas, especially with respect to the search for knowledge of god. Or they are in harmony, reason and faith in some way are thought to complement one another in a search for knowledge of the divine. Along this spectrum of tension and harmony we find the multiple theological offerings from various bits of various Christian traditions.
In practice, there are really three principal groups of modern Christians:
- Straightforward faith absolutists :
It is only through faith that you can know god - Disguised faith absolutists:
Reason has its place but it is only through faith that you can know god - Reason absolutists:
We have proof of god through reason. We don’t need faith in the way you’ve defined it here.
I should point out that these are my categories. Unsurprisingly, those Christians in the group I’ve labelled ‘Disguised faith absolutists’ don’t see themselves in quite this light. More commonly they are referred to according to what subgroup they’re in on the tension-harmony continuum as: synthesists, harmonists or presuppositionalists. Some of these make great play of reason being able to work in harmony with faith. Some even suggest that the two essentially complement one another. This is all PR, though, as different splinters of the church contort themselves in attempts to head off criticism and combat their own irrelevance and mask their innate intolerance. Ultimately, the disguised faith absolutists all end up with the same subordination of reason to faith via one MacGuffin or another.
In fairness, one of the disguisers is much more honest about this ‘disguise’ than the others.
The traditional labels for the various groups are:
Fideism:
Faith is all. Reason is subordinate to and the servant of faith. Reason often regarded with suspicion.
(for me: Straightforward faith absolutism)
Thomist synthesists :
From Thomas Aquinas, and other Catholic thinkers. Faith and reason can coexist as friends. Faith, though, perfects reason. Faith is not irrational it is supra-rational. Revelation of god via faith is the only way to have knowledge of constructs such as the trinity and incarnation. Thus there is invention of a whole new category of supra-rational knowledge, only accessible via faith. Creates a hierarchy of truths.
(for me: Disguised faith absolutism)
Presuppositionalism:
From Calvin and other protestant thinkers. Reason is of man and, hence, is blinded by sin. No neutrality: Christianity is the sole valid foundation for morality, reason and meaning. The bible is pre-supposed to be infallible. Only then is reason considered of value.
(for me: Still disguised faith absolutism)
Trans-rationalism:
From Byzantine eastern orthodoxy. Faith transcends but does not contradict reason. Reason cannot fully comprehend god. Assertion that god is beyond categorisation. It’s supra-rationalism but with added mysticism and a pre-suppositional-like rejection of the categorisation of knowledge.
(for me: Plain-old disguised faith absolutism)
Evidentialism:
It is possible to know god through reason alone. No need for faith or belief. This gives us modern apologetics: we have evidence (valid justifications of truth) for the existence of god achieved only by reason.
(for me: Reason absolutism)
Lies about reason to keep up appearances
00:25:21 Back to my three categories. The absolutists are on the fringes. Faith absolutists are dismissed by the Catholic church as ‘superstitious’ which never stops being funny. Reason absolutists are similarly fringe. They are obliged to maintain that they have incontrovertible, objective evidence for the existence of god while the rest of the world, quite rightly regards them as simpletons. We’ll expand on the contradictions and bad faith of the apologists shortly.
Mainstreamers are almost all in a different uncomfortable compromise: that of disguised absolutism. It’s a fudge that allows them to seem slightly less backward and irrelevant.
As recently as 1998 a thing called a papal encyclical was published by John Paul II as official teaching of the Roman Catholic church on the matter of faith and reason.
It was called Fides et ratio and it advanced a harmonious approach for all of Catholicism. Reason and faith could not only coexist but they complemented one another. The broad summary was that faith without reason leads to superstition and that reason without faith leads to nihilism.
Oh yes, when you’re on the inside of Catholicism it’s other things that look like superstition.
In truth, though, this was disingenuous claptrap. A strategic move to head of criticism and to prevent the church from direct and unwinnable confrontation with an age of reason in a fast-developing world that was failing to see any relevance of the church in the advancement of humanity. Worse, dogma of the Catholic Church was increasingly seen as a drag on progress. For example, the church has long since refused to tolerate sex that wasn’t between married heterosexual couples and then never for anything but baby production. Sounds almost quaint until you realise that this teaching is not only homophobic but that it killed 100s of 1000s by undermining the use of condoms as one of the most effective ways to prevent people from dying of Aids across Africa.
For all its talk of harmony, the encyclical had buried deeply within it the concept of ultimate truth. A concept where only faith had relevance and reason fell away, no matter how helpful it had been to that point. This is special pleading. The church pronounces faith to be of exclusive merit when seeking knowledge of god. It creates a new, special category of knowledge and, hence, places god conveniently beyond reason.
The harmony vanishes. These guys are faith absolutists.
It’s like the colour vellowbreath. It’s half violet and half yellow with a tinge of echobreath. It’s common throughout nature but only visible if you genuinely believe in vellowbreath. Once, unfettered by enquiry, reason and science, and only then, it becomes visible to those select few who truly believe. In other words, codswallop.
Having invented gods, it becomes necessary to invent ways of putting gods beyond reason. Allow to the two to collide and reason will skewer dogma with ruthless inevitability and vellowbreath.
The other large component among the mainstream disguised faith absolutists are the pre-suppositionalists. From a protestant tradition they simply hold that the bible is pre-supposed to be true. After that, they’re fine with you using reason to your heart’s content. This is the same as saying the bible is true because it tells us it is true. It also seeks, just as with the Catholic ‘ultimate truth’ to put the existence of god beyond what can be debated. One is circular and apparently evidence that pre-suppositionalists don’t really care if you have criticisms of their logic. The other is special pleading to put arbitrary rein on enquiry. Same rubbish, different Christians. Both illustrate the truth of faith absolutism, that it has no place for reason which can only be a threat. Yet they maintain their acceptable public faces by stressing that reason and faith are compatible, that the church is tolerant and inclusive. They know this to be false and seek to deceive us in their own interests regardless. Charming.
Apologetics: bad ideas, bad faith, big names
So we have the faith absolutists. And the faith absolutists who pretend they are not. There is a final group relatively common among modern Christians.
These are the reason absolutists who claim they can prove the existence of god. They have a passion for giving bad ideas very important sounding names. For example, they call their approach apologetics. It will go downhill from here on that front. It is for these I hold the most contempt. They go along with faith but they devote themselves to concocting, repackaging and disseminating ‘evidence’ that denies any need for faith. These are the crowd who would desperately attempt a babelfish breeding programme, and then watch god disappear in a cloud of logic not quite realising what they’ve done. Much to the entertainment of all of us.
I remember being told as a teenager by one of my teachers that one should never enter into a shouting match with an idiot in the street. No advantage will come from it and no onlooker will be able to discern which of the two of you is the idiot.
On the same grounds, be wary of engaging any of these Christians in debate. They all meddle with ground rules to advance their views. They have nothing to lose and all to gain. Hence, no issue with a shouting match and, for them, 50:50 are good odds for not being mistaken as the idiot.
It is from this apologetic harbour for absurdity that we get such things as intelligent design (which is an important-sounding name for creationism), fine tuning (which is an important-sounding name for failure to understand observer bias) and there is a genuinely batty argument about the inevitability of there being a god simply because other things exist. I’m not kidding. Those with a finger on the pulse of apologetics claim that if a thing exists then it must have had a beginning. And that if a thing had a beginning, there must be a god. That on its own merits is a monument to the colossally daft. If, though, you ask them about the beginning of the god, they claim you’re being unfair and that gods, unlike all other things don’t have beginnings. This idea was presumably considered so (shall we say, bold?) that a run-of -the-mill important sounding name wasn’t going to cut it. The one they came up with was the Kalem Cosmological Argument. You couldn’t make this up.
My children are very familiar with the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It would appear that, to an apologist, that the acceptance of extraordinary claims is dependent only on the suitable invention of an extraordinary name.
Oddly, this group of reason absolutists are utterly wedded to faith. They’ve shifted targets – likely without awareness. They now hold that intelligent design, fine tuning and the Kalem cosmological argument are true despite no valid argument in support of those truths. By necessity of their own argument, they now have to believe that manifestly false things are true to secure their need to reason the existence of god. Colossally daft, justice to, this collection of absolutists, does not do.
Google apologetics and you find a fixed litany of scripture is repeatedly regurgitated in support. No surprise, we find here more wilful deceit and more abandonment of sense.
Typically, an apologist will claim that the bible commands them to defend their religion with reason. It’s worth touching on this as it reveals dishonesty from the outset.
For example, the word reason appears in the King James translation of Iasiah 1:18. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the lord.”
You will find this text cited over and over by apologists who claim this verse to be a commandment from god for humankind to employ reason, in the sense of using intellect and logic, to defend their belief in and knowledge of god.
I’m guessing they figure no-one will actually check the sources. When you do, you begin to find problems.
The Hebrew word that is translated to ‘Reason’ in the original Isiah has the root ‘yakhah’ which can mean many things according to context: to determine, to argue, to rebuke, to mediate and to reconcile. The meaning to argue could reasonably be translated as to reason.
The scene, though, in Isiah 1 is a courtroom; Judah is charged with ‘scarlet sins’ by none other than god. Talk about judge, jury and executioner!
God’s not suggesting they reason or debate the matter at hand, that would be nonsense in this context. He’s inviting reconciliation and resolution before offering forgiveness.
A more recent popular English translation of the bible, the new international version, contains the verse as:
“Come now, let us settle the matter,”
says the Lord.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.”
At one stroke of curiosity, a large and clumsy deceit is removed from the arsenal of those who would mislead you with evangelical propaganda.
These godly folk default to dishonesty with alarming speed when they believe deceit will strengthen their case. They are as a waiter in Pretty Woman might put it, slippery little suckers.
Apologetics, though, is far more cynical than I’ve made it seem. In the 80s, they put together intelligent design to counter the impact that evolution was having on the teaching of biology in American high schools. Whenever you hear them discuss it, you’ll note they never identify the designer but it’s obviously the Christian god. Why this distance? Because the whole project was an attempt to have schools teach creationism. It was a cause that was ultimately lost in the courts which were not about to entertain such blatant deceit, or such affront to the first amendment to the American constitution.
Occam’s reason absolutists
00:36:13 There is one other group of reason absolutists. The atheists. Without any evidence for god or for any reason to invent a god, they don’t. This might be one of the most powerful illustrations of Occam’s Razor. We’ll have to cover this and other logical Razors another day.
By way of contrast, faith, evidence and belief for an atheist are much more straightforward.
Most atheists are also agnostic. This is a simple acknowledgement that no-one can be certain that there is no god. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, which is famously attributed to the scientist Carl Sagan. And, by the same token, I’m also agnostic about the existence of fairies, dragons and magic. While it seems enormously unlikely that there are winged sprites in my garden or fire-breathing flying lizards in Welsh steam engines, I cannot prove that they do not exist.
If you weren’t aware of the interplay between dragons and Welsh steam engines, please check out Ivor the Engine for a beautiful take on the mythology.
Atheists, when confronted with a staggering lack of evidence for gods, simply put them in the same category as magic beans and wish-granting genies.
That choice, though, demonstrates a belief. Given that it is highly implausible to me that some elephant-sized reptiles can spit flames while being masters of aerobatics, I choose to believe that they are nothing more than figments of the human imagination.
This imagination is very good at figments. From the record of human history to which we today have access, there is evidence of over 3,000 gods having been claimed at one time or another to have existed. Clearly, humans have something of a talent for inventing and believing in them.
Most Muslims, Jews and Christians today have reached the conclusion that 2,999 of these gods can be lumped in with dragons, Zeus and Gremlins. As Neil deGrass Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais have so eloquently put it on many occasions; Christians, Jews and Muslims have already done most of the work of atheists. In each case they choose not to believe in almost all the gods. Atheists simply choose to believe in one fewer god in each case.
Put more directly, I believe there are no gods. This is clearly a belief as I have no way of knowing that gods do not exist. Given all the opportunities that there have been for gods to demonstrate that they do exist, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the lack of evidence for gods is best explained by a lack of gods.
Similarly, I believe in the germ theory of disease. I believe that planet Earth is a globe. I believe in the theory of gravity. I also believe in the theory of evolution.
Do I know these things? Not really. I know that water is a liquid. I know water becomes a solid when sufficiently cold. My everyday experience presents me with empirical evidence that causes knowledge in these cases to displace belief. An astronaut on the ISS would be able to do the same for the non-flat nature of the Earth. Although, in fairness, there are many ways to achieve this knowledge without having to enter low-Earth orbit.
For evolution, germ theory and gravity, we all have to examine the observations made and how well these fit with the suggested explanations, and to consider the rigor to which these suggestions have already been subject.
We each then have a choice to believe, or not. On which note, back to McDonald…
The enthusiastic doubt hunt is missing
00:39:58
MCDONALD: I’ve been a Christian my whole life, devoted much of my career to writing and thinking and speaking about God. But there are moments when I’m not sure God exists. Yes I feel a sense of devotion to God, observe rituals, praise and worship God; feel a sense of wonder and beauty and transcendence, just like other believers. But it’s funny how we’re called that, believers. When belief is just one element in the experience of faith. Sometimes we might wonder: is anybody really there?
Funny? Is she joking?
What in Odin’s name do you imagine she meant by belief being just one element of faith? Sure, using the word faith interchangeably for ‘religion’ is fine. That’s not the problem. But there are lots of things, including those she listed that stand alongside belief in the practice of the religion: devotion, praise, worship, ritual, communion. To suggest that belief is in some way not the defining part, would be ridiculous. None of the remaining elements has any meaning if the belief is absent.
So, no. Not funny at all. Perfectly sensible.
This is a group of people who make a very public point of claiming knowledge of something for which they have no evidence. A group of people making a public display of belief. What would she have us call them? The worshipers, the praisers, the devoted, the pew warmers, the spirit stalkers, the fan club? She can moan all she wants but much like nicknames, this isn’t a choice she gets to make. Whining about what nickname others give you does not generally reveal good character.
McDonald should remain grateful we don’t call them something else like, reason deniers, magical thinkers, the enlightenment dodgers, the blinded or the entrenched.
She’s also being dishonest. Belief isn’t just an element of faith, it’s the defining element, particularly when part of a discussion of doubt. It seems that Chine McDonald is every bit as unserious as the think tank she leads.
While she casually invokes doubt and mocks the idea that Christians are called believers, she also implies that some general component of Christianity is afraid of doubt.
She’s clearly right. The pretenders. The disguised faith absolutists. Those Catholics and the pre-suppositionalists are clearly afraid that doubt leads to reason and that reason will then skewer faith.
This makes what Francis had to say refreshing. He preached a lack of fear. He was also being considerably more honest than JPII. Francis was careful not to contradict Fides et Ratio but he applied a logically coherent approach that is consistent with faith as the fuel for religion, of which doubt provides an endless supply and, hence, should be treasured not feared.
That being the case, Christians should be seeking doubt wherever they can find it, secure in the knowledge that the greater the doubt, the stronger the faith and more robust the religion will become. If they were really behind this notion, archbishops in debates with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins would have noted only and calmly that faith is the evidence of things unseen. There would be no need to engage detractors on subjects such as dinosaurs, misogyny or how it’s not possible to contain two pairs of eight million species of animal on a boat. Especially at a time when a good 95% of these species are unknown to boat builders. These points would only serve as valuable additions to the cannon of doubt from which faith draws its power.
This, though, is not how the church behaves. Not before Francis, and not now. In 2009 Hitchens was joined by Stephen Fry in a debate with two apparent luminaries of the catholic church, Anne Widdicombe MP and Archbishop John Onaiyekan. The debate was staged by Intelligence Squared (a reputable institution that employs live debate to encourage dispassionate critical thinking and to promote the importance of meaningful public discourse). The motion was that the Catholic church is a force for good. Stephen and Christopher did a masterful job of dismantling the augments in support of the motion.
By engaging in the event, the church demonstrated how invested it was in being perceived as a force for good. It was not happy to see the doubt invoked by Fry and Hitchens.
Too outlandish even for Dan Brown
00:44:44 Unless it was a strategic masterstroke. The Vatican knew that Widdicombe and Onaiyekan would founder. They knew that Fry and Hitchens would not only triumph but that they would eviscerate the arguments of the Catholic church. Cardinals would then watch with glee at the six million youtube views of the debate and reports of it around the globe. All this, safe in the knowledge that doubt would be provoked, faith would be reinforced and the church emboldened.
Hanlon’s Razor states that one should not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. Similarly, one should not attribute to conspiracy what can adequately by incompetence also be explained.
It seems very unlikely to me that the Catholic church really is on a global mission to provoke doubt.
I suspect, though, that Dan Brown could get a book or two out of the idea. In one of them it would be revealed that the global sexual abuse scandal of the Catholic church was all part of a centuries old, cold and sinister plan to hijack doubt as the nuclear option to achieve Roman domination of all churches.
Bible society balderdash
00:46:03 McDonald, though, wasn’t happy just to provide us with faintly ridiculous comments that inescapably exposed the impossible tightrope on which her church aims to walk with regard to faith and reason. She went on to give us a live example of just how eager she is to believe the implausible. I suspect this journey also began with an email.
On 7 April 2025, an organisation called the Bible Society published a report called ‘A quiet revival’ that contained results of a YouGov survey into British churchgoing habits. The Bible Society is a nonprofit that works to distribute and encourage reading of the Christian Bible.
Here’s McDonald:
MCDONALD: Over the past week there’s been much discussion of new data from the Bible Society and its YouGov poll, which shows an increase in churchgoing, particularly among younger people. Some have debated whether those arriving at church doors really believe, or are just looking for belonging. I’m not sure the distinction between the two is that clear.
McDonald notes debate about the motives of the apparent new churchgoers but accepts without flinch a conclusion from the survey that flies in the face of sense and all other evidence. We can all be grateful that when odd-sounding survey data are covered by the UK media, there is a strong likelihood that these data will fall to the scrutiny of More of Less, an excellent BBC radio show that exists only to police the unbiased use of numbers in the news. They reported:
MOL: The survey apparently showed that churchgoing had dramatically increased between 2018, a previous survey, and 2024. From 8% of people going each week, then, to 12% now. Or as one Christian publication put it, Church attendance soars 50% as faith surges among British youth. That would be quite the turnaround, as both Christian belief and church going have been in long term decline for decades. But while resurrections are firmly on brand for Christians, not everyone is convinced.
The first move to level the field was to note that this survey didn’t measure who went to church. It measured who said that they went to church.
MOL: it’s well established that people don’t actually go to church as much as they say they go to church. Research from the U.S. using cell phone data suggests that while 30% of people say they go to church every month, only 20% actually do.
Then there were issues with just how big a return to church was actually being claimed:
MOL: take this summary from the Bible Society’s website. In 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24 year olds said that they attended church at least monthly. Today, this has risen to 16%, with young men increasing from 4% to 21%, and young women from 3 to 12%. So, in a few short years, the proportion of young women attending church has quadrupled, and young men has quintupled. I mean that is huge.
Yes. It is. So what to do?
MOL: Well, look, when you get a survey result like this that goes against what you’d expect, you’d ideally want some more evidence.
As you might expect, More or less sought expert guidance. In this case from David Vos, an emeritus professor in Social Science from the University College London, who noted that the Bible Society survey results are completely contradicted by other surveys.
MOL: He says the Gold standard surveys, such as the British social attitudes and survey, show that churchgoing has actually fallen by nearly a quarter between 2018 and post pandemic, and very importantly, the main Christian denominations conduct and publish their own attendance counts every year, and those show that, while churchgoing has rebounded from the lows of the COVID lockdown, it remains substantially lower than it was in 2019, before the pandemic.
Yep, you heard that right.
MOL: Wait, so the churches themselves aren’t reporting increases in attendance? Not above pre pandemic levels. No. For example, the Bible Society survey finds attendance among Catholics has doubled, but the Catholic Church itself says attendance is down since 2018.
As more or less noted:
MOL: Well, this sounds like a pretty open and shut case. I don’t think I’m being devil’s advocate to say that I’m starting to doubt the figures in the Bible Society report. There’s enough evidence to suggest that it might just be a rogue survey result. They do happen. Maybe it’s better to wait for more evidence.
They went on to note that a case could be made that the problem was not with this survey but with one from several years earlier that was used for comparison. It’s possible the new data will provide interesting insights to the way in which church attendance is beginning to approach pre-pandemic levels. But ‘more or less’ noted…
MOL: We need to see the 2024 data for the social attitude survey to check that theory, though. I think it would be odd to call that a revival, though. And it does feel a bit like we’re looking for arguments to fit the evidence. And there’s nothing absolutely concrete that backs up this idea of a big increase in actual church attendance compared to before the pandemic.
Did that stop Chine and many other church-aligned sources and spokespeople from leading with headlines that just claimed a new survey showed an increase in church going? No, it did not.
McDonald: a flag-bearer for Christian dishonesty
00:52:08 Most of us have worked out that when something looks too good to be true, there’s a very good reason for that.
The faithful, however, appear to be wired differently. They can’t wait to believe things that are too good to be true.
On those grounds alone, it’s easy to see why they struggle to make any meaningful contribution to public debate.
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