When I was 15 or so, I dispensed with God. I was into astrophysics and quantum theory and I could find no place for Him in my mathematical universe. I had a little bible in my room called Bertrand Russell's Best and, if challenged on religion, always had one of the great humanist's rebukes to hand. Russell seemed to voice my own thoughts, only more lucidly than I could myself.
"Religion," he wrote in one passage, is based "mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing-fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations."
Tremendous stuff, I thought, especially the reference to science. Over time my antipathy to religion became so pronounced that when I went to university, I refused on principle even to enter the chapel of my college. I could not accept that there were aesthetic grounds for taking a look at its interior. Religion was something that I just wanted to banish.
Thirty years on, my attitude is remarkably changed. I still have the battered little book of Russell quotes, but his aphorisms now strike me as rather juvenile. I cannot quite say that I have found God, but my dislike of religion has disappeared. In fact, I have come to regard some religions-liberal Christianity for instance-as largely a force for good, and I have taken to attending an Anglican church regularly.
I don't really believe that this change needs an explanation. The truth is that none of us stay the same people over time. We shouldn't think of ourselves as entities with a given essence but rather as beings that are always developing in response to new (and unpredictable) experiences. I'm still responsible for the things I did at 15, and I share many of the character traits of my younger self. But I don't feel much closer to my teenage self than I do to the youngsters that I see in shopping malls. And I confidently expect to be another, different person in 20 or so years' time.
If I had to explain what has changed, I would say that I have learned to interpret religious language in a more subtle way. As a teenager interested in science I had as naive an empiricist understanding of the world as Russell. Like him, I assumed that God had to be seen as an entity something like us, only omnipotent and omniscient and residing in a different heavenly realm. Since the possibility of such a super-person struck me as absurd, I abandoned religion.
I still think that a God of this kind is all but impossible. It is a ridiculous conceit on our part to imagine that God is anything like us. We are part biological and part social constructions, and it makes no sense to think of God as a product of similar forces, but on an unimaginably larger scale. Yet unlike my more dogmatic younger self, I no longer regard a clear understanding of the word "God" as a precondition for being religious. On the contrary, I think that one has to become religious if one is to have any hope of eventually understanding what the term might mean.
In my tentative searches I have been impressed by the intellectual openness of theologians who, in their bid to understand religion, are into everything from particle physics to hermeneutics and deconstruction. I now know what I did not know at 15; you can be a devout Anglican and not believe that God is some kind of super-person residing in a different dimension. John Robinson, while still Bishop of Woolwich, made a succinct case against this kind of deity 40 years ago in his book Honest to God. You can even be a Christian and believe that God is a purely human construction: this, for instance, is the stance that Don Cupitt adopts in The Sea of Faith.
Once I realised that there are no canonical readings of scripture (or of any text for that matter) and that I could understand complex terms and passages in my own way, religion became less of an intellectual strain. I still find certain interpretations unbelievable but I no longer regard them as mandatory. I am, for instance, impressed by the argument that many of the supernatural elements in the gospels represent a pre-modern way of emphasising Jesus's importance as a teacher. Others will disagree, but what they cannot do is prove that their interpretation of an ancient text is the only possible interpretation.
Having accepted that meanings are always contestable, I have found myself more able to focus on what religious people do, and less on what they say. Are they "better" people than the irreligious? Of course not. Are they better people than they would be were they not religious? Probably, and this is what counts for me.
We live perforce in a society that is dominated by the instrumental values of the market. This may have boosted economic efficiency (although I sometimes doubt it) but it has also encouraged a selfish individualism. I now see religions as a partial antidote: beneath the foggy rhetoric you can still discern an old-fashioned understanding not just of how human beings should relate to God, but of how they should relate to each other. It is as recipes for living well that they now have most value. n
