Honest Doubt Part 19 - On Presence and Absence

This talk considered how God can be experienced both as present and absent at the same time, exploring the idea through three post-war poets - Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and RS Thomas.

Having listened to the programme I wasn't convinced that the poets had looked particularly hard for their absent God. I was reminded of Dawkin's point about a scientist not being content to sit in the presence of a mystery but wants to get to work on it, analyse it, break it down, study it, measure it, question it and so on, so that even if there is still a mystery left at the end of it, it is at least much better understood.

I got the feeling that the three poets, having been touched by the absence of God, rather enjoyed it, like a romantic Victorian catching TB, and didn't much care to look for the cure.

The interesting thing here is not the presence of doubt, but the acceptance of living with doubt and absence - why where these three people content to stay in that state? Another analogy - suppose you try to encourage a child to take up reading, and they reply that they tried a book once and didn't like it, we don't look in detail at that book to try to understand what was wrong with it, we ask why didn't they want to keep trying different books until they found one they liked?

We need to look at the history of doubt the way we look at a history of the future. A history of the future means how was the future imagined at different points in history, a history of doubt would similarly look at what doubt has meant at different times. Today a scientist doubts, but that doesn't mean they are torn by existential angst, it means they looking enquiringly and sceptically at an explanation to see if they can improve on it.

So "doubt" seems perfectly healthy if it is part of our natural process of change and development, but it seems unusual to stay permanently doubting one particular thing without doing anything about it - there would seem to be something damaged about that type of doubt.

Betjeman wrote a poem "The Conversion of St. Paul", in response to a radio broadcast by humanist Margaret Knight, but Knight's representation of Christianity wasn't engaging with modern theologians such as Bultmann or Tillich but with some pre-modern version of Christianity which of course was (and still is) very common. Similarly Betjeman's response was within this pre-modern schema.

This points to the problem of communication. A sociology of communication would probably show that top-down organisations - by their nature - pick up change from the bottom very badly. A Tim Keller talk about church plants addressed the point "why do we need to plant new churches when the existing ones are nearly empty?" by pointing out that the existing churches are resistant to change and that is why they are nearly empty.

He talks about how the USA in the nineteenth century had a large number of immigrants from Germany, but very quickly they adapted to speak English with one exception - in church. For many years the German churches in the USA continued to speak German even while most of the congregation had learnt English - illustrating a very important point about how churches are slow to change.

How are ideas communicated? Typically through organisations. Ideas of evolution were promoted and communicated through scientific communities, in which scientists were listened to when they spoke and wrote  because they were representing the ideas of the community. "Rogue" scientists who existed outside of the community would have had much less of an audience.

Similarly it is the responsibility of religious organisations to communicate religious ideas, but all too often - at least in the West - they haven't. Modern responses to Christianity are not communicated by the church so it is no surprise that people either don't know about them or don't listen to them when they are represented as the views of individuals and not a community.

There have always been individuals who have given genuine religious responses to the questions raised by science, the enlightenment and secularism/humanism but the church in general has not been helpful in spreading the communication of those ideas, but instead has been stuck in a loop of disengagement and head-in-the-sand-ism. It really is no surprise then if many within the church responded to its stance with a reciprocally similar disengagement and left.