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Habitude
Granddaughter
I have discovered a granddaughter,1 ‘N’, aged eighteen who is a Christian, but who tells me I must not put her in a ‘religious person’ box. After a little bit of tricky manoeuvring by email, I hope she’s got the message that she shouldn’t put me in an ‘atheist person’ box, and that I am not trying to shake her faith, which she expressed as follows:
[F]ive years ago I was convicted of the reality of a personal God – I see evidence for such a being in the work he has done in my life and other believers I know, in the fact that the world and we as humans exist, in religious experience and in our moral awareness (being well aware that there are arguments against each of these as proofs of God – anyway, I do not believe there can ever be enough proof either way). However, I do not believe in God because of proof, logic, or because of my upbringing – I believe because I have ‘met’ him in a way that I could never express in our limited language.
I sent N a copy of a pamphlet I wrote many years ago, when I became a Quaker Universalist as part of exploring the ‘spirituality thing’ – since abandoned in any of its accepted forms. I told her this essay could be a ‘language bridge’ between us. She is studying philosophy at A-level, but I don’t think she’s picked up yet that her grandmother is a philosopher in her own right – not all the time, I have other identities, but this web site is about my philosophical
concept 2 called ‘habitude’. From that perspective I can reinterpret N’s faith as follows:
The intensity – and even the illogicality – of N’s experience of meeting her God suggests to me that she has encountered something much more powerful than a ‘God in person’. She has tuned into the collective experience of all the people alive now who believe the same as she does, and the colossal number of people who have believed it in the past. The habit of believing in the Christian God has been building up over two millennia, and was laid on a foundation of habits of belief going way back into human history and pre-history. It is part of what human beings are, particularly collectively. It is what you feel when you walk into an old church; the worshippers are still there, haunting (in a non-threatening sense) the very stones and spaces.
The illogicality of N’s knowledge is a reflection of another habit of thought running counter to it. There are those who ‘believe in’ orthodox science, the kind of science which dates back to the Age of Reason, when thinkers like Newton and Descartes were seeking to understand the Mind of God. The idea that the regularities and mechanisms in the physical world being expressible in mathematical terms, proves that there is a Designer God with a mind like ours, is called the ‘Argument from Design’.3 The subsequent argument that the universe is only a material and mechanical entity, with life itself being explicable in mechanistic terms, with no room for notions of God or soul, is, in my view, more illogical than the concept of a Designer God. The mathematical models which scientistic atheists give credence to exist in people’s minds and in their texts and diagrams, not elsewhere in the universe, although those models have been used to despoil the living Earth, replacing its rich and chaotic life with machines and monocultures. Scientism is another habit of human thought, going back only a few centuries, but that is long enough for its adherents alive today to feel their conviction reinforced with a powerful sense of rightness. They ‘know’ their truth, with something like the same conviction as N’s knowledge of her personal God.4
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