Belle Tindall-Riley: Spiritual but Not Religious (The Ache, Pt. 1)

Lee C. Camp (0:00)

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Now, on to the show. I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

Belle Tindall-Riley (0:28)

We're in a disenchanted age.

Where we've decided that all that we can see is all that there must be. And actually we've realized we desperately don't want to be the most powerful beings that we can imagine. We actually desperately don't want this.

Lee C. Camp (0:45)

That's Belle Tindall-Riley, author of The Sacred Ache. A century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber said, The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all by the disenchantment of the world.

Disenchantment. The original German word here could be transliterated as demagicking. The demagicking of the world. The Enlightenment, Modernity, the Scientific Revolution, all seemingly took away our magic. If we can measure, master, control, dissect and quantify, it seems our gods are all explained away.

Weber was not the first. The celebrated poet Wordsworth a hundred years earlier lamented Modernity too. The world is too much with us, he said. Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. And then listen to his ache. Great God, he said, I'd rather be a pagan, suckled in a creed, outworn.

To many, this seems the only remaining option in our day. To live, on the one hand, in a materialist, quantifiable, eminent world, nothing transcendent or magical, or on the other hand, as Wordsworth says, adopt some worn-out creed patently false, but one which at least lets you live in the myth of some magic. Weber had another phrase from an earlier essay, which is also stuck around, the Iron Cage.

Alistair McGrath (2:26)

Weber made the point that the Enlightenment simply captures you within a cage saying you are not allowed to think otherwise, and of course the world is rather more complex than the Enlightenment vision and rationality allows. And that's one of the key challenges all of us have to face. How on earth do we deal with a really complex, beautiful world when pure reason can't really do justice to it?

Lee C. Camp (2:54)

Alistair McGrath taught at Oxford University for more than 30 years. And he says that about a decade ago, the questions which students brought into his office began to change.

Alistair McGrath (3:05)

People are trying to break free from this rationalist cage because they realize there has to be more than this because everything inside them is saying this isn't good enough. You know, it's obvious there's more to life than this. Tell us what it is.

Belle Tindall-Riley (3:19)

Or as Belle Tindall-Riley put it, You just don't have to look very far to see, like, when we're all that we've got, we're not enough, I think. We still ache.

Lee C. Camp (3:32)

So, we went to Britain to explore that ache. Because Britain might be seen as at least one of the places where the war between science and religion was declared. In Oxford, in fact, 1860, in a widely publicized public debate, a prominent bishop asks the famous atheist and defender of evolutionary theory Thomas Huxley which side of his family the ape was on. And the war was supposedly off and running.

So, we went to a manor house outside Oxford, then took a long train north to Edinburgh, followed by a long drive west to the beautiful Isle of Skye.

And along the way, we interviewed three people who have lived on both sides of that supposed war. A biblical scholar from rural Wales, who grew up when the book The God Delusion was topping the charts. And she then lied to her classmates about going to church. Or a theologian who came to Oxford as a Marxist atheist. And finally, the psychiatrist on Skye, who has spent 35 years asking what the two halves of the brain are for. All three agree that Weber's iron cage is real. They do not necessarily agree on what lies outside the bars, or whether what is rushing in to solve the ache is good news.

Belle Tindall-Riley (4:53)

I would caution people to be weary of things that always give them what they want.

Alistair McGrath (4:59)

It's not about arbitrarily re-enchanting nature.

Ian McGilchrist (5:03)

I think there is a great deal in common between fundamentalist atheism and fundamentalist religion.

Lee C. Camp (5:10)

Max Weber said we're locked in, but psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist is not so sure.

Ian McGilchrist (5:17)