Such examples give rise and substance to perhaps the book’s central thesis, which is an attempt to distinguish between ordinary ignorance (we do not know what the weather will be like tomorrow) from willful ignorance (we choose not to know what our teenage daughter is doing in her bedroom), and both from what Carse calls “higher ignorance,” in which, the deeper we travel into a subject, the more we see how much we can never know about it. We accept, as he puts it, both the necessity of trying to comprehend the truth and the impossibility of ever doing so. This is not a new distinction–Abraham Joshua Heschel made it years ago, and it is at the heart of such centuries-old mystical texts as The Cloud of Unknowing–but Carse dilates on the idea with panache. After taking us through many of history’s variant readings on Jesus, for example, he points out that “About the man Jesus, much is believed {itals}, almost nothing is known {itals}.” More than that, it is intrinsic to the meaning of Jesus that he can and should never be known. Those who claim to know “the `real’ Jesus” are in fact, in the very act, denying the mystery and unknowability of a figure who has meaning and force only if he can never be fully grasped. The true believer, who feels that Jesus has divinity as well as humanity inside him, often, in that very acceptance, fails to acknowledge that she, being only human, can never truly understand him.
This deliberately tilted and loaded way of proceeding will likely give the professional philosopher or scholar plenty to disagree with. Some of Carse’s sentences grow less sound the more you look at them–“No one is evil by choice, willingly and consciously, but only by the desire to eliminate it elsewhere” (what of the serial killer?)–and at times one feels that the neatness of his phrasing has led him to take one sharp turn too many: “Without time, experience is impossible; without experience, life is impossible.” Italicized emphases can be found on every page of The Religious Case Against Belief, and while they effectively convey a tone of voice, they also sometimes seem to push a reader to a conclusion that she’s not yet in a position to accept. It goes without saying, to take a central example from page 2, that “Being a believer does not in itself make one religious.” But it is not self-evident that “Being religious does not require that one be a believer”–since one may be believing, as Carse does, just in the principle of free enquiry, a life based not on certainty but mystery.
Carse provides a glowing, even inspiring vision of what he calls “awakened ignorance” and “permanent unknowing.” Those in this position–whom he sometimes confusingly calls knowers–”eagerly accept the emendation and enlargement of their knowledge from any source.” Knowers, he says, “have no need to win over resistant believers. Their only need is to enter into dialogue with others committed to the labor of extending the field of knowledge.” Knowers, in his formulation, are committed to finding the truth–or many truths–while believers are convinced they have already found it, once and for all. Knowers see how much they do not and will never know; believers believe that they’re already in possession of all that they need. Belief, as Carse points out, invoking Plotinus and medieval mysticism, goes against the fundamental fact that you can’t describe a divine truth fully if you’re part of it–and yet if you’re apart from it, you can’t entirely describe it either.
Some of this raises more questions than it answers. Carse reminds us, for example, that the presence of mystery in the world is no argument for the existence of God; but one could equally say that the doubt that he cherishes cannot be so readily translated into “wonder.” When he lays out a distinction between the civitas {itals} (which he sees as a doctrinaire, and therefore defensive, community of believers) and a communitas {itals} (a collection of enlightened seekers), he is in some ways simply creating terms to support the preferences he’s already decided upon. As he notes, disarmingly, on his final page, his entire book is an ideological argument against ideology.
More than that, in the areas that I know best within his discussion, I’m not sure I buy many of his assertions. I don’t think the Buddha “lay down under the Bodhi tree” (he sat down under a peepul tree, more likely); and I don’t think he found enlightenment, as Carse says, because he’d given up the search for it (rather, he suggested, as many religious figures do, that simply undertaking the search is the first step towards enlightenment and it is up to us to summon the will power and hard work to embark upon the challenge). At one point Carse tells us that the Buddha’s “crowning insight was that suffering comes from striving”; in fact–given that he spoke about striving in his final words to his disciples as a desideratum–he was always encouraging striving (as opposed to craving) as the only way we could liberate ourselves in our minds from suffering.
It might, indeed, have been interesting to take in such figures as the current Dalai Lama in the argument, as he advances a religious position precisely by saying that nothing he says is inherently correct and that even the words of the Buddha should be thrown out if they are shown to be wrong by research and empirical testing. As a “non-theistic” religion (as the Dalai Lama puts it), Buddhism, in principle at least, has no time for faith and, when it deals with philosophical questions, stresses reason, logic and what is as universal as the laws discovered by Newton or Pythagoras’s theorem. The Buddha himself, after all, would not have been a Buddhist, and did what he could (ultimately in vain) to try to prevent his listeners from creating a religion or belief system around him.