The debate about it has been going on for a very long time, and it's even had more than a few outings on this blog, so I wouldn't expect to come across a new angle on it at this stage, but I think I maybe have. The debate about religion, that is. Where I think I came across a new angle (for me anyway) is in some remarks by Howard Jacobson:
"I can't say I believe in God but every time I hear someone saying they don't believe in God, it sounds so tinny." He looks to one side, concentrating, hand to his mouth. "Whatever one makes of Dawkins as a scientist, as a thinker I have no regard for him whatsoever. He couldn't write a novel out of that kind of certainty. That will not make a novel. That will not make a painting. In not knowing, all the interesting things happen."
It's the profession of unbelief as sounding tinny - a certainty that seems narrow against a world which is, otherwise, more interesting. This sent me back to a column by Tim Crane in the New York Times that I'd read a few days earlier. It struck me as saying something similar. Writing as an atheist, Tim seeks to understand religious claims and the spirit in which they are accepted by those who do accept them. The claims purport to say something about the real world but they aren't judged in the light of empirical evidence and counter-evidence in the same way as a scientific hypothesis would be, for the believer is more open to things not being explicable:
Religious belief tolerates a high degree of mystery and ignorance in its understanding of the world. When the devout pray, and their prayers are not answered, they do not take this as evidence which has to be weighed alongside all the other evidence that prayer is effective. They feel no obligation whatsoever to weigh the evidence. If God does not answer their prayers, well, there must be some explanation of this, even though we may never know it. Why do people suffer if an omnipotent God loves them? Many complex answers have been offered, but in the end they come down to this: it's a mystery.
He goes on to say that religion tries to make sense of the world not, like science, 'by showing how things conform to its hypotheses', but rather 'by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things'.
Both Howard and Tim, then, neither of them speaking as a believer, sees religion as making the world, so to say, fuller for its adherents - with more of interest, of meaning, of things, even, beyond our grasp. This reminds me of the occasion I asked a religious friend about the basis of his belief and he cut the conversation short by saying simply that his life would be poorer without it.
All I can say is that this account of religion doesn't work for me - I mean, to shift me - and for two reasons. The first is that the world seems like an intensely interesting place already, without any extra population of meanings and mysteries. Just look, read. There's no end of it, never mind a fullness. The second is that I don't feel free to add a further layer of things to those for which some evidence can be supplied, and if I did, I wouldn't know where to stop. Why just those mysteries?