I’ve just returned from a discussion held by the UWA Christian Union on ‘Dawkins v God’. It was enjoyable, and I thought the speaker’s characterisation of Dawkins was pretty fair. The usual old canards came out though. Dawkins is a fundamentalist. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, so atheism kills people. Science and religion don’t necessarily conflict (but then why the hell do they always reach opposite conclusions?). And as a bonus, Dawkins was wrong because the speaker didn’t like his vision of morality. Pretty thin stuff.

There was one special area where the speaker had some real trouble: Is god empirical or not? During the presentation, the speaker made two contradictory claims:

• God can’t be examined empirically because… well… he doesn’t want to be, for some reason. Sort of like UFOs, he only comes out when no one’s around.
• Despite the inability to examine god empirically, the empirical evidence for god’s existence is very strong.

So which is it? In fact, this argument lets the believer have it both ways; you can grab onto evidence that looks promising, but you’re covered when there’s none.

The empirical evidence for god is not strong. Prayer studies come up consistently empty, evolution is a better explanation than creation, and anecdotes about finding keys just aren’t empirical data. The speaker was leaning pretty heavily on the ‘historicity of the New Testament’, but even if the writers did write it just as it appears (which is what Mark Twain would have called a ‘stretcher’), it just means they wrote it, and not that it’s true.

My question, which never really got answered, was this: If you can’t use empiricism or science to study god, what are you going to use? How are you going to make sure that your evidence for god isn’t just whatever you want to see?

Book Of Iconic Nun’s Letters Shows She Was Tormented By Her Doubts In Her Faith

In a new book that compiles letters she wrote to friends, superiors and confessors, her doubts are obvious.

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.

“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”

Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.

“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.

“What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

I really feel for Mother Teresa when I read these writings. I no longer expect certainty, but I come from a religion where they constantly tell each other how certain they are that the doctrines are true. And this kind of certainty is difficult to maintain in the absence of good evidence. The wolves of doubt are always at the believer’s door, and it seems to me that they tend to measure their faith by how well they circumnavigate doubt, or (in more sophisticated thinkers) how well they’re able to modulate and accept the doubts they entertain.

This is something that religious believers (with a brain) will be grappling with for the whole of their lives. The sad thing about this conflict is how unnecessary it is. All it takes to resolve it is to drop one faulty premise — gods’ existence. Once that’s done, everything makes sense and understanding becomes possible. The Dostoyevskian problem of evil evaporates. The need to reconcile spiritual ideas with conflicting physical evidence vanishes. The struggle to keep up unbelievable ideas in the absence of solid evidence disappears. The exhausting need to sustain faith is over, and it becomes possible — at last! — to think rationally.

Of course, MT was heavily invested in her religion, and it would have been very difficult for her to drop it all. But she (and anyone else) could have done so. And then what? Well, she wouldn’t have been a candidate for sainthood, that’s for sure. But the acts of service she did (pace Hitchens) could still have been performed by an atheist humanist ex-nun. Or by you or I.

I expect this article to be of interest to some believers. Perhaps many will say, “Well, if someone like Mother Teresa had doubts about God’s existence, maybe it’s nothing to worry about when I have doubts myself.” But perhaps they should be asking this: Why do we knock ourselves out trying to keep believing in this pre-conceived notion of god’s existence when the evidence doesn’t support it, and when other good explanations are so easy to come by?

UPDATE: Was I right? Now the Pope has weighed in.

“All believers know about the silence of God,” he said in unprepared remarks. “Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God,” he said.

He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God in order to understand the situation of people who do not believe.

I suppose he’d take that reading instead of the reading I gave it: People who claim to believe in god are secretly faking.

I’m sorry, that’s rude. But no ruder than the many Christians who have told me “Everyone secretly believes, even if they don’t think they do.” I’d say the reverse is more accurate: no one really believes, even if they think they do.

Mother Teresa was a believer, so just about any evidence would have done. But it says something that with all her desire to believe, she couldn’t find enough of the kind of evidence that even she would find satisfactory. It’s to her credit that she recognised the silence, and to her shame that she wanted the letters destroyed.

The silence of god? How long does it take to realise that there’s nobody on the other end of that phone?