Review

Atheism

Belief

Culture

27 April 2023

7 min read

David Baddiel's wrestle with the God desire

David Baddiel’s short book is important, writes Krish Kandiah, as it represents an internal wrestling match that many can relate to.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A painting depicts two wrestlers on the ring mat, watched by eager fans.

Wrestlers by Abraham Bogdanove.

Abraham Bogdanove, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I have been a David Baddiel admirer ever since he penned the anthem Three Lions with his friend Frank Skinner. The song has provided a hymn of hope to every England fan since 1996. “Football’s coming home”, I sing to my friends, family and TV screen every time England plays. Fans declare it out over the pitch, as though the louder they sing, the more likely it is their prophecy will come true.

As the author of a song that has sought to inspire faith in the England team it is perhaps ironic that David Baddiel’s new book “The God Desire” is all about why he cannot bring himself to have faith in God.

I really enjoyed reading the book and the subsequent back and forth I had on Twitter with Baddiel. He comes across like the kind of guy it would be great to sit in a pub with and talk about life, faith and football until closing time. I hope I get the chance.
The book, for me, offers three significant strengths and one major topic of contention.

A new tone for the new atheists

Baddiel offers what might be called a ‘New New Atheist’ approach. He differentiates himself from the now old New Atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchings by challenging their machismo:

“Some atheists divine [sic] – correctly – that what religion provides for human beings is comfort, and then, in a way that can feel a bit adolescent, they feel impelled to say, essentially, ‘Comfort? That’s for babies.’ “

Baddiel refuses to ridicule the consolation of faith and indeed seems instead to long for it. He is kinder, warmer, more polite than old New Atheists, taking a far less dismissive tone. Perhaps part of this comes from his deep and sincere friendship with Frank Skinner who is a devout Catholic Christian. Their friendship is reflected in Baddiel’s robust yet gracious approach to controversial topics. It is an approach that can act as a model for a lot of our discussions in increasingly polarised times.

Baddiel’s critique of New Atheism also has an epistemological angle. He observes that in an age of social media our relationship to the concept of truth has changed. He reflects that in previous eras truths were handed down from authority figures but now there is a democratisation of truth - through social media everyone can share their own truth.

This is one of Baddiel’s most interesting observations:

“In a moral universe dictated by social media, punching up and punching down are the new markers of good and evil, and if religion is no longer considered a vastly powerful and high-status force, but rather a series of fragile and individual identity-based beliefs that only the unkind would mock, then atheists become pariahs.”

I think Baddiel might be on to something important here. For some atheists, religion is still a huge and influential behemoth that needs to be taken down. We can see that in the aggressive antireligious tweeting of Professor Alice Roberts or the theologically ill-informed op eds of Matthew Parris. They “punch up” against the authority of religion. Others “punch down”: from their morally superior position they are prepared to issue something akin to imperialistic judgmentalism against anyone who dares to identify as religious.

But punching up or punching down says nothing about the truth or otherwise of the position. Instead, it speaks to relative social position. Like Baddiel I believe both in the right to freedom of expression, and in the concept of objective truth.

An honest recognition of the desire for God

This new tone permits Baddiel to admit that he recognises in himself the existential longing for the things that faith can provide. He writes:

“My argument, on the other hand, is, in a general sense, psychological. It requires an admission, which frankly most atheists, I’ve noticed, aren’t prepared to make. Which is: I love God.”

Baddiel’s coming out with this brave admission reminds me of these words of Canadian artist and novelist Douglas Coupland as he draws to a close his book “Life After God”:

“My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

Some might read too much into Baddiel’s confession. A whole book explaining why he doesn’t believe in God may seem then pointless, as though he “doth protest too much.” But for me Baddiel’s short book still feels important – it represents an internal wrestling match that many people can relate to – wanting to believe in God on one hand but struggling to find the evidence on the other.

A helpful evaluation of the benefits of faith

Baddiel explores three reasons why he would love to believe in God: story, parenthood and immortality.

Firstly, he recognises a longing for meaning in life. He believes that belief in God can provide the possibility of life having an external story, offering not only direction and significance but a source for moral evaluation:

“God also offers story. Humans have a need to organise, to structure, the chaos of existence. They need to feel that life has narrative. Narrative requires satisfactory checks and balances, such as good being rewarded, and evil being punished. God provides all this. He storifies life… With story comes another God benefit: meaning. A sense, on an individual level, that your own narrative has significance: that it matters, in some way. This can only be the case if Someone or Something is taking account of it.”

Second, Baddiel notes that God provides an answer to the longing for there to be a benevolent force guiding us through the universe. Baddiel frames that in the need for a parent-figure:

“God is this: an archetype, a super-projection, of a parent who can be both blissful and terrifying.”

This could be seen as a recycling of the Freudian critique of belief in God as an immaturity, a babyishness as Baddiel might call it. But instead, it reads as longing.

Thirdly, and for Baddiel most significantly, God offers immortality. Baddiel puts it clearly:

“At heart, though, God is all about death. The other issues are spin-offs.”

Belief in God can help us confront the biggest fear that human beings face: the prospect of our own death.

A point of contention

As a Christian, there is much to agree with in the above points. However, my main point of contention is very neatly identified by Baddiel himself:

“The God Desire should not have to lead to the God Delusion.”

Baddiel seems to argue that the very fact that he wants God to exist must mean that he can’t possibly exist, that he must simply be a projection of his own desire. This is the exact opposite conclusion to that reached by CS Lewis following a not dissimilar journey to Baddiel’s:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water… If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world…”

Baddiel concedes this line of reasoning but reflects that desire in those cases are met by tangible, visible things - food and water in this case. He summarises that “desire + invisibility = God.” God, for Baddiel, seems to be so utterly transcendent, that he cannot be evidenced, discovered, known. If he cannot be evidenced, then he cannot exist.

But what if God, truly and utterly transcendent, has chosen to make himself known? And what if that revelation is right under our noses in the person of Jesus Christ? This is the central and astonishing thesis of Christianity, grounded in the evidence of Jesus’ birth, his miracles, his teaching, and, ultimately, his resurrection from the dead. This evidence cannot be discovered merely by psychological reflection, as Baddiel has discovered. There are further historical, theological, spiritual, moral and scientific theories that need engaging with.

I hope that Baddiel writes a sequel. In it he would explain why his desire + invisibility equation does not stop him standing up for universal human rights, for example. He would investigate the historical evidence for Jesus and the concrete experiences of millions in their connection with God. He would look further at the explanatory power that the Christian faith gives to life and see why compassion and justice matter. He would admit that his sense of the divine, was evidence of God’s existence. He would discover that his love for God had been met by God’s love of him.

I am hoping one day there’s a warm fire, a cold beer and long night available to amicably talk these things through. In the meantime, I commend his book to you and encourage you, with Baddiel, to continue wrestling with the big questions of life.

Column

Books

Comment

Faith

15 August 2024

4 min read

Faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing

Sarah Perry’s comments suggest a reawakening of concern for its observation.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A woman being interviewed gestures with a hand in front of her

Sarah Perry.

Waterstones.

If there’s one thing anyone who has ever written a novel can’t stand, it’s having to congratulate a successful novelist. So, it’s through gritted teeth that I warmly welcome the words of Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent) that religious faith is ceasing to be a subject of embarrassment in published fiction.

It’s about time. Perry told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that, for her latest book Enlightenment, she was asked to put in more theology: “I assumed that everybody knew what the doctrine of predestination meant.” Bless.

The cause of my pathetic envy as I applaud her is that I had my first (and, to date, only) novel published in 2017, to almost universal disinterest. I like to tell people that it was well received – all three people who actually read it said they enjoyed it and only one of them was a family member. It actually did a bit better than that, but you get my drift.

It was an unashamedly religious psychological thriller, titled A Dark Nativity. Brace position, here comes a one-sentence synopsis: The narrator, Reverend Natalie Cross, is a frustrated former aid worker who undertakes a mission to Israel, is kidnapped and held hostage, murders her way to freedom, discovers she was the victim of an Anglo-American plot, wreaks her terrible revenge and (spoiler alert!) gives birth to a son of uncertain paternity.

See what I did there? As well as the latter-day Nativity resonance, thematically I was interested in what redemption looks like in Israel and Palestine. I know, I know – but even I thought it would be distasteful to try to cash in on what’s happened there since.

Enough of the plug for a seven-year-old novel. My point is that its religious themes actively militated against it at the time. Novels addressing Christian faith (or any other kind) occupied a particular publishing niche – a harsher word might be ghetto. To try to break out of it was pointless. The great Christian novelist Penelope Wilcock told me (very kindly) that my book was too religious for the secular market and too secular for religious readers.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation.

The restricted area to which religion was confined had its stylistic rules. There was the cathedral close romp, which authors such as Catherine Fox had made their own. The vicarly whodunnit (lately updated by Reverend Richard Coles). Magic realism with its daemons and Philip Pullmans. And anything, in the wake of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, involving ancient plots that might make a movie, with hooded figures walking in slo-mo through cloisters.

Vicars had to be evil or silly. I may be both those things at times, but I’d like to think there is other stuff going on here for cultural exploration. My narrator, Nat Cross, was driven, often funny and more than a little mad. So like a lot of Anglican clergy.

If she’s right – and I very much hope she is – it’s why what Perry has to say is so hopeful. Because it begins to suggest that religious faith is slowly beginning to be accepted back into polite society. Whisper it softly, it might even become a cultural norm. If Richard Dawkins can describe himself as a “cultural Christian” and the historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, can claim that Christianity is the entire foundation of western civilisation, then there is everything to play for. And, indeed, write for.

It’s not as if cathedral frolics and the revelation of Jesus’s wife in Leonardo’s Last Supper was anything other than a fictional diversion of post-modernism. Religion and specifically Christianity had been a staple of the novel in English.

I hesitate to mention their names in the same column as the authors above (including me, most obviously), but Graham Greene’s exposition of Catholic guilt in The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s of the impossibility of moral reformation in Brideshead Revisited are probably the best religious novels of the twentieth century.

Further back towards the birth of the English novel, the Reverend Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is perhaps the most tragic portrait of a clergyman who is neither evil nor silly. He stand as a warning from history to today’s Church of England.

And it’s to that, the established Church, that Perry’s remarks ultimately turn our attention. We’re told that there has been a five per cent spike in church attendance recently, but that of itself isn’t sufficient to suggest a renaissance in our religious culture. Our arts and culture will only ever really reflect what we care about.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation. If so, that’s good news for the religious, as well as for religious authors. And I might just get a sequel out of it.