A VERY SHORT ESSAY ON RELIGION

Extract

My impression is that the fire-breathing atheists about whom we hear so much – the celebrated quartet of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett – think of religious commitments in terms of mistaken or at least hopelessly improbable and therefore irrational ontology. Believers think that something exists, but the overwhelmingly probable truth is that it does not. I may be wrong that this is what they think, but whether they do so or not, I am sure others do. Yet this interpretation of the issue is itself mistaken, and indeed doubly so. It is mistaken, or perhaps it would be better to say unimaginative or off-key to think of religious frames of mind primarily in terms of belief. And it is similarly misdirected to think that the belief component primarily concerns the existence of anything. I read both these insights into Hume's celebrated works on the philosophy of religion, but their lesson seems never to have been properly absorbed. Even Wittgenstein, I think, although he came close and certainly flirted with more adequate views, failed to take their measure properly, although I will be unable to substantiate that opinion here.