The Importance of Doubt
John Cornwell's article in the Guardian has helped clarify what it is that feels wrong to me about Richard Dawkins' style of atheism. I'll have to get his book.
At the core of it, he raises the notion that faith, far from being a kind of certainty without evidence, is rather a "doubt of doubt". It is a sort of apophatic thing to say that I think is very Anglican, certainly, and very likely to be frustrating to atheists and fundamentalist Christians alike. The things that he describes as characterizing the faith journey are exactly the sort of things that annoy the philosophers because it's fuzzy; you can't argue against it. Ted Peters, my systematic theology professor, pointed out that atheists start right at attacking "God exists" as a scientific statement, but that Christians almost never consider the existence of God to be a scientific question.
Increasingly, I'm coming to think that the big problem with the last few hundred years is that religions developed in a pre-modern world. None of the religions have really dealt adequately with modernism. They have either (a) become a modernist, scientifically-materialist philosophical atheism, or (b) become a curious modernist rejection of modernism as a fundamentalism, or (c) muddled along until post-modernism started to give them openings with the return of subjectivity.
Most people, I think, are basically decent. Those that I know who are religious are in general slightly more likely to appear to me kind, thoughtful, and reflective. This is quite possibly, though, because I am in fact religious myself, and I feel that they speak a comforting sort of language. It might also be perhaps because I am far more concerned with ethical behavior than with linguistic or philosophical correctness. What I categorically do not see is a tendency towards extremism among either the religious or the non-religious people in my life. I simply don't have enough certainty around to support it.
But lack of certainty certainly isn't reason enough to stop believing.