Belief in Belief

Op-Ed

Christopher Hitchens

Belief in Belief

A question that interests me very much (and always has) is this: I know that I do not believe in either any god or any religion, and I can give my reasons in a manner that the other side can at least understand, but can the same be said for those who claim that they do believe?A shorter way of putting this is to ask whether our antagonists in this ancient argument truly mean what they appear to say.

The recent disclosure that Mother Teresa had for almost half a century been unable to feel the presence of Christ in the Eucharist or the ear of God listening to her prayers, is of great importance here. (See the recent book of her despairing letters, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.)

Not even her most fervent admirers regarded this woman in any sense as an intellectual, and she evidently struggled to combat her doubts in a highly traditional way—namely, by making ever-more extravagant and even masochistic professions of “faith.”

This would be superb confirmation of Daniel Dennett’s hypothesis about "belief in belief"— the strange idea that, though faith itself may be ludicrous and incoherent, the mere assertion of it may possess some virtues of its own. Resto do

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