An Atheist’s Meaning of Belief
“Religion, as I am using the word, is a systematic and practical attempt by human beings to find meaning in the world and their place in it, in terms of their relationship to something transcendent” (Crane, 6).
So writes Tim Crane in The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View. The title is a dead giveaway for what is found in the pages; it’s a brief treatise on religion — why people believe and why religion needs to be taken seriously. Crane graciously and eloquently interacts with and critiques New Atheism and their inadequate view of religion while offering several olive branches to believers. Though, as the title suggests, Crane himself is an atheist, so those olive branches are just that, signs of respect to the growing world of religion.
This growth is “staggering … According to the Pew Research Center, there are 2.2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, and 1 billion Hindus world wide. Adherents of these three vast religions make up 4.8 billion of the world’s 7.16 billion people. And then there are all the ‘smaller’ religions: Judaism, Buddhism, Shinto, Jainism, Sikhism, and many others. Around 1.1 billion people identify as secular, atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious. Approximately 6 billion people, then, identify as belonging to one religion or another — over 80 percent of the world’s population” (Crane, 2). These numbers drive Crane throughout his book as he attempts to answer the question, “What is religion, and why does it move people?”
He does this in essentially two movements, focusing on the religious impulse and identification. The impulse revolves around the idea of a believer’s trust in the unseen, in an order that lies beyond the earthly experience — and in this order, “good” can be found. “I do not think it is a confusion to see a meaningful life in terms of aligning oneself with the unseen order,” Crane writes, “nor do I think it need involve some kind of deep self-deception. Rather, I think it is clearly an intelligible human reaction to the mystery of the world, one that has dominated much of what has ever counted as human society” (Crane, 46). He later writes that this impulse is much more than a scientific hypothesis, and instead serves as the source that provides a believer’s life with meaning.
The second movement of Crane’s discourse is identification. Here he discusses rituals, practices, “the sacred,” and what it means for a believer to belong to a religious group: “Identification with a group is what connects the two features of religious practice: its repetitiousness and its social character” (Crane, 88). Crane wades into intriguing territory as he argues this religious identification as something “similar to belonging to a nation or having an ethnicity” (Crane, 91) — this is reminiscent of Mark Lilla’s discussion of citizenship in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Making it as clear as he can, religious identification becomes part of an individual’s identity. As Crane says, what constitutes as your identity should be considered the same as where you belong. Eventually, he ends his discussion on identification by connecting it back to his original definition of religion, noting how rituals and practices point “toward the transcendent. There can be nothing like this in an atheist’s world picture” (Crane, 117).
That last statement is critical for Crane. He obviously anticipates religious believers taking his definition of religion and turning it back on him, the atheist, saying something like, “But atheism is a systematic and practical attempt by human beings to find meaning in the world and their place in it, too!” That argument misses the final part of his definition, that of the transcendent. No atheist believes in the transcendent, Crane claims. “The transcendent is something that is beyond this world,” he writes. “Beyond the ordinary, the everyday, the world of experience, and the world of science too” (Crane, 9).
The Meaning of Belief is a fantastic read, something believers and non-believers alike can enjoy thanks to Crane. He somehow appeals to a wide-range of people, never alienating one group for the sake of making his point. The culmination of the book showcases that perfectly:
Atheists are not going to eliminate religion, either through legislation or through rational argument. The problems the world is facing are practical political problems, problems whose solutions need cooperation, coordination, and compromise. Any view about how atheists and theists should live together and interact must ultimately confront the fact that neither religion nor secularism is going to disappear. (Crane, 193)
Crane sets the table for a respectful dialogue between believers and non-believers, and provides a powerful book for Christian leaders and thinkers as they continue learning what it means to live in secular contexts. Crane doesn’t interact closely with any one religion, so don’t expect this to be a blueprint of how an atheist views Christianity specifically; this would be an interesting follow-up for Crane, though, as there are areas in his descriptions of the impulse and identification that overlook the message of the gospel (which is fair because he’s not focused primarily on Christianity).
Ultimately, The Meaning of Belief is important because, as Crane points out, it is the beginning of a much larger conversation, about how we all might better cooperate, coordinate, and compromise.
*It’s worth noting that the topic of Crane’s book might appear to tackle the growing issue of evangelicalism and politics, but it doesn’t. This is something he acknowledges, admitting the political issue is too large for this one book. Hopefully Crane will find the means to tackle this soon, though, because “the political question of how secular states should make room for religious believers” (Crane, 164) is something of the utmost importance.
