Angles of thought …

… Bryan Appleyard — ‘The Opposite of Faith is not Doubt, it is Certainty’.

… Roger Scruton and the kindly atheists.


(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


I certainly agree that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but I'm not sure if our certainties aren't in most cases also underpinned by faith. At any rate, from what he is quoted as saying, Holloway doesn't seem to be lacking in certainties. He seems certain, for instance, that the church should change in in accordance with sophisticated opinion. (I say this as someone who thinks the church's attitude to sexuality is often wrong-headed, but who can't go all the way to accommodating the wishes of gays in every particular.)  As Mark notes, "We must keep religion's poetry, [Holloway] concludes, because it consoles and humanises. We must purge religion of its prose, the dogmatic formulations that do so much damage."
But why? Because Holloway says so? Rightly understood, the dogmatic formulations can be seen as a kind of poetry as well, and as Mark goes on to say: "… there would not be one without the other. Prose ignites poetry. Poetry inspires prose. So Holloway too seems to be condemned to a parasitic life, drawing on the faith of believers to sustain his doubtful belief."
And while faith is not certainty, it is faith in something. It is not directionless. To acknowledge that we live in a great mystery that we will never come close to fully grasping is not to say there is nothing behind the mystery. The problem with agnosticism is that in the long run it seems to be a willful refusal to make the leap of faith it so often extols and embrace the mystery and the uncertainty that mystery entails.