By Nelson Jones
The New Statesman
A study by Theos shows the apparently limited appeal of scientific materialism. But is it evidence that hardline atheism of the Richard Dawkins variety has little popular appeal?
Modern
Britain is "spiritual" but not religious. That's the headline finding
of an opinion poll, and accompanying report, released this week by the
Christian think-tank Theos. The ComRes poll - which confirms a trend identified
in several previous surveys - found that well over half those questioned (59%)
said that they believed in some kind of spiritual being or essence. There were
substantial, though minority, levels of belief in specific concepts such as
spirts, angels and "a universal life force", whatever that is. One
for the Jedis, perhaps.
Even
a third of people who described themselves as non-religious were prepared to
own up to having some such ideas, while a mere 13% - and only a quarter of the
non-religious - agreed with the statement that "humans are purely material
beings with no spiritual element". And more than three-quarters of the
survey agreed that "there are things that we cannot simply explain through
science or any other means".
Theos
seems to be impressed by the apparently limited appeal of scientific
materialism, seeing in it evidence that hardline atheism of the Richard Dawkins
variety has little popular appeal, despite the high media profile it has
garnered in recent years. Its director, Elizabeth Oldfield, writes that it is
"notable is that those same voices have not managed to convince us that
humans are purely material beings, with no spiritual element". The
implication is that there's a huge untapped reservoir of spiritual longing and
that it would be wrong to attribute the decline in religiosity in this country,
stretching back decades, to a spread in actual unbelief.
Yet
it's hard to see much comfort in these figures for the future of religion. To
return to the headline figure, the 77% who believed that some things couldn't
be explained "through science or any other means." Any other means,
presumably, includes religion itself. And even many scientists doubt that
science is close to explaining some natural phenomena. Consciousness, for
example, is often called the "hard problem" because even in the age
of MRI scanners it remains profoundly elusive. A sense that life has mysteries,
that there are things - love, for example - that will always remain beyond a
reductive scientific explanation, doesn't necessarily make someone religious.
The poll found quite low levels of belief in more specifically religious
concepts: a mere 13% believed in Hell (Heaven was twice as popular, implying a
national spirituality skewed towards the feelgood), while a quarter believed in
angels and around a third in life after death.
Take
the findings about the power of prayer. An equally small proportion (17%)
believed that prayer could "bring about change for the person or situation
you are praying for" as believed that prayer had no effect whatsoever. By
far the most popular view was that prayer "makes you feel more at
peace". Such an idea of prayer as a kind of therapy is of course at least
as compatible with atheism as it is with religious conviction.
No comments:
Post a Comment