Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. Today we have a chance to talk to one of the most distinguished scholars exploring the relationship between religion and the society in which it functions and lives, and also exploring how it is that people hold beliefs, and how they support each other—or not—in holding beliefs.

Professor Peter Berger is professor emeritus of religion, sociology, and theology at Boston University and director of their institute on culture, religion, and world affairs. He has written a whole stream of books through the years, several, I was just saying, that influenced me a great deal thirty years ago, looking very much at how religion creates a sense of living under a sacred canopy where mutually enforcing faiths support one another in living out a faith.

Some of you may have read his influential book The Social Construction of Reality several decades ago. He’s been writing a lot since then on a number of subjects, including pluralism, the family, capitalism, and even a recent book on laughter we hope we’ll talk about before we’re finished today. Dr. Berger’s latest book, co-authored with Anton Zijderveld, has the intriguing title, In Praise of Doubt. He’s going to help us understand this morning, I hope, what’s so great about doubt, and why doubt is an important part of faith and an important part of democratic societies. Dr. Berger, thank you very much for being with us today.

Dr. Peter Berger: Thank you.

Lloyd: In Praise of Doubt is a paean of praise for what some people would regard as one of the banes of existence. What is so great about doubt?

Berger: I came across a quote from Oliver Cromwell, which unfortunately the book had been written by the time I came across it, but otherwise we could have put it at the beginning of the book. Cromwell was irritated for some reason with Parliament. It’s a famous statement; you probably know it.

He addressed Parliament and said, “My brethren, I beseech you by the bowels of Christ, bethink that you may be mistaken.” Bowels of Christ in seventeenth-century English just meant the essence of somebody… bethink that you be mistaken. And I think that’s a very, very healthy thing, certainly in politics. This was a political context. But I think it’s also important for religion and for society in general. In terms of religion, I’m a Lutheran.

One of the basic phrases of Lutheranism is “we are saved by faith alone,” sola fide. And faith, I think by definition, means that we don’t know. It’s not certain. We have faith, but we don’t know. And I think, already in that sense, theologically, I think [there’s a] balance between doubt and faith, which I think is important for religious life. In society, and that takes us back to Cromwell, to be skeptical, to not be easily swayed by this or that enthusiasm, is very healthy politically and morally. So the book came out of, should I talk about that, how I came to write that…

Lloyd: Sure, sure.

Berger: The research center which I’m affiliated with at Boston University, we had a project, which was my idea, called “Between Relativism and Fundamentalism.” And we had a group of American and European scholars of religion who talked about this from different points of view. I think one can say, what can be described as, for much longer than we have time for here, why these two things—relativism and fundamentalism—are very characteristic of our cultural situation.

Lloyd: These are two predominant modes of thinking and living these days, of...

Berger: Yes.

Lloyd: … a complete relativism about any certainties or any values; and a fundamentalist rigidity and certainty about things.

Berger: And both are bad things.

Lloyd: Both are bad.

Berger: Both are bad. They’re bad religiously because the relativism, which unfortunately permeates much of the religious scene, makes all truth claims impossible. Everything is the same. The only virtue left is tolerance of anything.

Lloyd: I have my truth, you have your truth.

Berger: Yeah. I believe in cannibalism; you don’t. We amicably agree to disagree. That’s a terrible situation.

Lloyd: That’s right. And there’s no appeal to anything else.

Berger: No, except tolerance.

Lloyd: Except tolerance.

Berger: I can say I’m tolerant but not of everything.

Lloyd: And I’m to tolerate your cannibalism.

Berger: Yeah. Which I would think would be a bad idea, but theologically I should be stopped from being a cannibal, not amicably discussed, my ideas.

Lloyd: Right.

Berger: And fundamentalism is bad because it makes impossible the application of reason. To religion, morality or anything else you have fanatical positions which are in conflict with each other. At best they don’t kill each other. But even if they don’t kill each other, they’re enemy camps.

So I think this is bad theologically, it is very bad morally, it is also bad socially, because relativism, taken to a certain degree, makes impossible the moral consensus which any society needs to survive. And fundamentalism, at worst, creates civil war and, at best, creates some sort of balkanization of society into little sectarian enclaves. So both religiously, morally, and politically, I think, we think, two of us in this book, that one has to find a middle position.

Lloyd: Is there something about our times you think that has encouraged a polarizing of thinking into these camps of fundamentalism and relativism, and, if so, why now?

Berger: OK, I can answer that question in tedious detail, which I will spare you.

Lloyd: Skip the tedious part [laughter].

Berger: Both are responses to modernization.

Lloyd: To modernization? Yes.

Berger: And what modernization does, for a long time, historians [and] social scientists believe that modernity leads to secularization, the decline of religion. I thought that in my early days…

Lloyd: That’s right. You were wrong in your youth.

Berger: I was very wrong in my youth, about many things. This is one of them.

Lloyd: And could you just say what secularization means?

Berger: Decline of religion.

Lloyd: The notion was, as modernity moved forward, intellectual exploration, public discourse, that religions would fade away.

Berger: Yes, that was the idea, which was not crazy. There were some reasons for that…

Lloyd: It was fading.

Berger: But it was wrong. And it is true of parts of Europe, it is true of certain intellectual circles, like the Harvard faculty club [laughter].

But most of the world is not secular at all. It is furiously religious, including the United States. So that’s not what modernity does.

What modernity does is pluralize. People of all sorts come together, rub elbows with each other. The inevitable result of this, which again one can describe in tedious detail, is relativization.

To put it in different words: it is no longer possible, for social and psychological reasons, to take one’s own world view for granted. Things have to be reflected upon. One has to make certain decisions about what I believe in, even who I am.

That is very different from secularization, because many of the decisions one makes can be religious decisions. But nothing is to be taken for granted anymore. Relativism and fundamentalism are two responses to that situation. Relativism embraces it: it is wonderful; we no longer have to worry about truth. Fundamentalism responds to it by saying, we have the truth; all of this doesn’t really concern us.

Lloyd: One image you offer in your book for the challenge we face is the experience of driving up 16th Street here in Washington, DC. Why don’t you tell us what was so striking about that for you, and if you could speak up a little bit, too, that would be good.

Berger: [It’s] not far from here, you could go out and do it. Take a car, drive north, or take a taxi, drive north on 16th Street, about three blocks from the White House.

What you encounter is an orgy of religious pluralism. I think I’m right, there’s not a single block without some kind of religious building in it, almost to the Maryland line, not quite. Well, that is a situation, this is paradigmatic of what happens.

These people talk to each other. So you have a Serbian Orthodox church and, I don’t know, right next to it, let’s say an Episcopalian church. They have to talk to each other because there are parking problems, all kinds of things. When people talk to each other—with different value systems and worldviews—they begin to influence each other.

The least that can happen is, being a Serbian Orthodox or an Episcopalian is no longer to be taken for granted. It has to be thought about, decided upon.

Lloyd: And once you begin to see that religion is really a smorgasbord of choices, when you perhaps were born into a Catholic community, or grew up in a Methodist church that pervaded your life, or you were born a Muslim, you assume that that was the way the world is ordered. If you begin to discover that people view the world strikingly differently and then that, in a way, shatters a sense of confidence that your view was the only view, and it can lead then either to relativism or to fundamentalism.

Berger: Well, it leads minimally, to slightly paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, that the idea arises in my mind, I bethink that I may be mistaken, and that starts a process of thinking.

Now, many people will think this is awful. Fundamentalists think this is awful. I don’t. I think it’s a good thing. And, in terms of religion, it puts us in a very interesting way into the situation of the early church.

When the apostle Paul went to Athens to preach the Gospel, he came, that’s what the book of Acts tells us, into… very similar to 16th Street, an orgy of pluralism.

Being a Christian could not be taken for granted by definition; it was totally new. I don’t think it is a superior situation if being a Christian or having another other value or worldview, if it is as much taken for granted as, I’m a man or a woman, I have brown hair or blond hair, I have hay fever or not hay fever, I don’t think that’s a good thing. If I have to have an act of decision, a rigid sense of faith, I think that is not a bad thing at all.

Lloyd: So we’re living, for example, in a time that is widely being described as the end of Christendom, the end of the notion that certainly the religious life of the West was dominated by one particular set of faith convictions, one narrative being told about what the meaning of life is, and that Christendom vision both sustained the growth of what we now call the Catholic church—and it also sustained the growth of the Protestant church after the Reformation—has only really been breaking down, we might say, since the late Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, the unraveling of this consensus. And it might even be a Judeo-Christian consensus of what the norms were.

Many people bemoan that as the loss of a comprehensive story to be told in our society, but you’re saying that that actually is a more… what?…honest and creative situation for people of faith to be in.

Berger: Yeah. I think it’s a good thing. And I don’t regret the fact that we suddenly find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the apostle Paul. He did some admirable things with the situation.

Lloyd: He did. But do we have enough Pauls around to get us through this one?

Berger: We may not have many Pauls around, but I think we have lots of people who manage the situation quite creatively, ordinary people, not philosophers or theologians.

Lloyd: And so how do we manage this creatively?

Berger: Well, we arrive at certain convictions about which we’re reasonably confident. We have faith in them, but we are not absolutists about it.

We admit that other people have other ways of life, other worldviews. Now there are certain moral things we are not going to be tolerant about, like you are not going to be tolerant about my cannibalism…

Lloyd: No.

Berger: … but about lots of things there is a greater tolerance. Again, we have nice data about this, and I think that’s a good thing.

Lloyd: Are we able to live with an array of convictions going on around us, an array of faith views, a Muslim view, a Hindu view, a Protestant view, a Pentecostal view, a Catholic view, and still feel confident about making truth claims about our tradition but also making them in ways that aren’t offensive to other traditions?

Berger: Well, look, the United States is an example of large numbers of people managing this trick rather well. And I think one thing one has to recognize, and it’s difficult for people who are really rooted in a tradition, that this process of interaction changes one’s worldview to some extent.

Fundamentalists want to resist this at all costs. I don’t think we should resist it, and I think the healthy, religiously and morally healthy, attitude is one of open-mindedness. I have certain convictions, but I’m willing to give things here and there. If this conversation with the Hindu, the Muslim, or whatever other, or the atheist, for that matter, makes me modify my own views to some extent, that’s fine.

Lloyd: How does someone living in that sort of pluralistic context, with a lot of competing views floating around them, how does someone sustain a faith conviction when there are so many others around? It would seem that the relativizing and even secularizing tendencies would be very strong if I’m surrounded by people who believe dozens of other things and scientists who are saying it’s all foolishness.

How is it that people find ways to sustain a living, vivid sense that their vision is not only life-giving, but truthful to them in some significant meaning of that word?

Berger: Well, we are sitting in the answer to your question—a community of those who think like me. If I’m all by myself, I’m the only Hindu in a Lutheran Finnish village, it’s going to be difficult to hold on to my Hinduism.

But if I can find some other Hindus, maybe in Helsinki, there may be some Hindus in Helsinki, I don’t know [laughter], and we have a little Hindu temple—I visited one in central Texas the other day. Very interesting, the middle of central Texas, big Hindu temple. Well, that can sustain me in my idiosyncratic or deviant worldview.

We are social beings, in religion and everything else. So I think the need for a religious community is very strong in that kind of situation.

Lloyd: I’m reaching and I cannot summon the phrase from one of those books from thirty years ago. But you had language for the necessity of a community that gives credibility to the faith by existing, and that community... In other words, if we believe, at some important level, that something is true, that truthfulness is sustained by living with a community that also affirms the credibility of it amidst a marketplace of competing worldviews all around you.

Berger: Yeah, I know the phrase you have in mind.

Lloyd: What is it?

Berger: When I die, it will be written on my heart. It’s my main conceptual child. I call it a “plausibility structure.”

Lloyd: Plausibility structures.

Berger: Plausibility structure is the social context in which certain beliefs or values are plausible.

Lloyd: And one of the things that faith communities provide is a plausibility structure.

Berger: Absolutely, yes.

Lloyd: And that doesn’t mean you step inside it so you don’t have to think. But it even allows a way for you to think through what you believe in the context of others who share that faith perspective.

Berger: Well, not all religious traditions allow that. And there are some, Christian and non-Christian, which are fundamentalist in the sense of fanaticism of some sort. You may not question, you may not reflect.

Lloyd: If you had asked somebody, for example, or if I would ask somebody, as I do on Easter morning, to imagine the thought that someone has been raised from the dead, and that actually changes the game in human life, one of the things I want to say is, you’re not going to believe that if you just walked off the street with another set of values and convictions about what is possible in life and what’s going on in life.

And what you experience in church that day and, presumably, and I hope, in church settings and classes and the rest, is the continuing construction of and reflection on what that means inside a plausibility structure that makes that, in fact, a credible thing to say.

Berger: Yeah, well, I mean, for many centuries this kind of Christianity was taken for granted. That was Christendom. There were heretics and Jews and some other people who didn’t share this, but for most people in, say, medieval Europe, this was taken for granted.

It isn’t any more. That’s OK.

Lloyd: And yet faith is vulnerable if not sustained within some kind of plausibility structure that helps one to carry that along.

Berger: For most people. There are people who are so, what’s a value-neutral term, so self-strong, there are nastier terms to describe this…

Lloyd: I’ll do it on my own.

Berger: …that they can do anything, they can put them anywhere and they won’t change. Most of us are social beings, and we respond to our interlocutors around us.

Lloyd: You talk about how necessary doubt is to the healthy functioning of a democratic society. Could you say something about that?

Berger: Democracy necessitates compromise. You cannot have absolute positions in a parliament or in any kind of democratic institution. Well, doubt means that one is not absolutely sure of a certain course of action.

And I think, if you look at political decisions, there are some positions that are non-negotiable. I’ve been much involved in the discussion in Europe of what are European values—very interesting question.

And I gave a lecture in Berlin; it was two years ago. And the question was, how can one be certain of certain... What are certain, absolutely non-negotiable European values? Stop me if I’m going on too long.

The rabbi Hillel, the great Jewish sage of 200 B.C.E., was once asked, Can you tell the meaning of Torah while you stand on one leg? And he replied, Yes, you can, and made what I think was the first statement of the Golden Rule: Don’t do unto others what you hate being done to you. And then added, the rest is commentary.

Well, I think what European values are, and you can extend it to Western values, you can also say while you stand on one leg, and it’s one sentence lectures in Berlin, one sentence from the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. I think it’s the first sentence of the Constitution.

The rights of man are inviolate. Now, the rest is commentary.

There are lots of questions. What does this mean in this […] or that. You can stick to that principle. Absolutely, I think. But then, when you get to any question of application—for example, why did this discussion arise? Because of the large presence of Islam in Europe today. What can we accept? What can we not accept? Lots of commentary.

Well, in all of these questions, I don’t think an absolutist position is helpful. You have some basic principle, which you can adhere to, if you like, absolutely. But then you doubt any particular application of it. It becomes a matter of reason, of prudence, of negotiation.

Lloyd: One of the instances of that that I gather led to a lot of rethinking was when the subway bombing took place in London six, seven years ago. England had been carrying on an approach that often left the Muslim communities isolated and left to live their own fairly strict life patterns with one another but not engaging the more pluralist patterns of an open democratic society.

What clearly they realized as a result of that kind of event, that they couldn’t allow to live within their democratic society a group of people whose practices would, in some fundamental ways, be a challenge to the values of the society itself. And so you’ve got to find ways to negotiate between two drastically different ways of viewing human rights, viewing gender relationships, viewing what can be done and what can’t be done.

Berger: What I did in that lecture, and I’ve done it in other discussions in Europe, I would suggest a kind of triage. There are certain things that are totally unacceptable. We’re not going to permit them in Germany or in France or anywhere else: honor killing…

Lloyd: Honor killing…

Berger: Honor killing of women for adultery or whatever, genital mutilation of young girls, a number of things, and, of course, terrorism, military jihad. Those are not negotiable.

Then there are things which I think are easily acceptable, like giving people time off for prayer, Muslim prayer, during the workday, building mosques, a number of things.

Lloyd: Head scarves…

Berger: I would include head scarves in this.

Lloyd: France would not.

Berger: Some people would disagree. But in between, there are things that I think are not that clear. One should have a doubtful, prudent attitude. Like, should Muslim parents insist that their girls don’t participate in sports that include boys. Well, I don’t know. A number of other things like that. I think this idea of triage is useful in other morally significant issues.

Lloyd: And that’s a way of applying the notion of doubt, the acknowledgement in a democratic society that we aren’t living with a set of certainties and unquestioned imperatives, but we work with complexity and nuance. Would that be an accurate [statement]?

Berger: Well, we… certain, I would say, certainties, which are of a moral kind. But most of the issues are not that clear.

Lloyd: We want to go to questions from the audience about living with doubt in society, living with personal doubt. But one question for you, just as we wait for any questions to come, is back to the personal living with doubt.

We are celebrating doubt as a necessary quality of carrying our faith in a healthy way and in a society. What about the discomfort of living our faith while we also are, shall we say, burdened with doubt, riddled with doubt? Is it your sense that that’s an inevitable part of holding faith at all? Is it simply a burden we must bear, or is there some other way to look at that?

Berger: I think it’s both of the things you [were] mentioning a minute ago. I mean, yeah, there is some discomfort to this. That’s the attraction of fundamentalism.

Fundamentalist movements always have the same invitation: Come join us, you will have the certainty that you’ve always longed for. It’s understandable. It’s false. Those certainties are illusionary.

Yes, there’s a certain amount of discomfort but I think it can be sustained. We can find communities that sustain us in our beliefs, and it’s certainly a good thing for democracy.

Lloyd: At the end of the day, as human beings, all of our choices have an element of faith and risk in them, since we simply don’t know, so we have to risk ourselves, whatever faith we give ourselves to.

Berger: It seems to me, by definition, that the word faith means I don’t know. What I know I don’t need faith about. And that’s true of human relations. We have never met before. I know that I’m sitting in Washington, talking to you, I think I know that. I don’t know whether you are someone who’s going to kill me at the end of this conversation. I have faith.

Lloyd: You’re living by faith.

Berger: Yes, I trust you. You don’t look like a murderer.

Lloyd: Well, you don’t look like a cannibal, either, so... [laughter]

Berger: You have a job which seems to preclude being an axe murderer.

Lloyd: You hope.

Berger: It’s faith.

Lloyd: It is.

Berger: There’s a trust.

Lloyd: There’s a trust.

Berger: So it’s not just when it comes to faith in Christ or the Resurrection, it’s even in ordinary life, we live by faith. I’ll take an airplane this afternoon. I don’t know the pilot. Trust U.S. Airways? Maybe, reasonably? I don’t know.

Lloyd: Good. Question.

Deryl Davis: We have some questions here to start with, Dr. Berger. I would ask audience members, if you have questions, please continue to hand them to the center aisle, where ushers will come and collect those. The first question is, do you see the world further fragmenting between the extremes of relativism and fundamentalism?

Berger: I didn’t catch the middle part of that sentence.

Davis: Do you see the world further fragmenting between the extremes of relativism and fundamentalism?

Berger: I think most people manage some kind of, and certainly in America, some kind of middle position. Not everyone would have complete relativism, and real fundamentalists are a relatively small group.

Lloyd: At least I hear the question, do you see the problem of fundamentalism growing in the world and presenting perhaps even larger occasions for concern?

Berger: It depends which part of the world you are talking about. I don’t think it’s a terrible danger in America. The present political polarizations, most of it cannot be described as fundamentalist on either side. If I lived in Pakistan, yes, it might be more of a central problem. But I think, in Western societies, most people somehow manage to live on a middle ground.

Lloyd: Would you characterize what happened, say, in Nazi Germany in the Thirties as a secular fundamentalist mindset? In other words, would you say it’s possible in “liberal,” meaning reason-driven, enlightened societies, that it is in fact possible for a kind of fundamentalism to sweep through a country like that?

Berger: Yes. And Nazi Germany’s not the only case in point. Look, there are two versions of fundamentalism, the more ambitious [and] the less ambitious. The more ambitious is to have the entire society be dominated by your fundamentalist worldview. The less ambitious one is, just do it in a sub-culture, a kind of sectarian option. If you want to have the real ambitious option, you need the kind of totalitarian state, because you must prevent precisely the kind of interaction that relativizes.

Lloyd: That’s true.

Davis: This questioner asks, would you agree or comment on the proposition that sustaining a comfortable plurality of faiths is less about not being offensive…

Berger: For some reason, I can’t hear you. I just hear noise.

Davis: This questioner is asking if you believe that sustaining a comfortable plurality of faiths is less about not being offensive than not being offended.

Berger: It is less offensive…

Davis: That it’s less about not being offensive than not being offended. I think this person is asking, is maintaining a plurality of faiths mostly about not offending other people?

Berger: I think you can’t avoid offending some people. I think we’ve overly, certainly in Western society, we’re overly sensitive: I don’t want to offend anybody. I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude. Certainly you don’t want to deliberately go out and offend people. But, on the other hand, inevitably, in a pluralistic society, there are certain things which are going to be annoying to other people.

Lloyd: I wonder if we might say that maintaining doubt maybe is not so much about avoiding offending, but not impinging on the other person’s right to hold a view. I suppose we can preserve our right to be offended about anything, as long as we aren’t impinging on their right to hold a view.

Berger: Since the Fifties, really, inter-religious dialogue has been a cottage industry and I like it, it’s very good. Different faiths talk to each other. But it’s very important to understand, it’s not just committees of theologians and philosophers that engage in this. It’s children in grade school that have to deal with others. I could tell you some beautiful stories about this. So this is a process that’s going on, inevitably.

Fundamentalism is a negative reaction to it. Relativism is an overly positive reaction to it. And we have to find a balance.

Davis: This questioner asks, is the rule of law the middle ground between relativism and fundamentalism?

Berger: No, I wouldn’t say that. I would say it depends what law you’re talking about. Sharia Law in Pakistan is certainly not the middle ground. No, I think you have institutions which make that kind of pluralism civil and possible. I wouldn’t say law as such, I would say liberal democracy creates institutions, which make that living together without violence feasible.

Davis: This questioner follows up by asking, does this represent a natural secularization of moral values, where the former religious [leadership’s] influence is replaced by other forces in secularizing moral values?

Berger: I would say again that depends on the society. In Europe and North America we have a certain secularization of Christian values, which no longer require the older religious [legitimization]. People of different faiths, people of no faith, believe, for example, what it says in the German constitution about the basic dignity of human beings. So, yeah, I think it’s possible to find a, what shall we say, a viable way to do this.

Davis: This questioner asks you to envision what religion in the Western world will look like thirty or even fifty years from now. And can we imagine Western Europe becoming re-Christianized?

Berger: That’s what [Pope] Benedict XVI hopes. [laughter] We had the working group in my research center on religion in Europe and America. It’s a very interesting comparison, because two very modern societies, very different place of religion. And lots of people asked us, the three of us who wrote the book… I like working with people, so one of the people who’s a co-author, is a British sociologist, Grace Davie, who is also by the way a lay canon in the Church of England.

Lloyd: She is, yeah.

Berger: She and I have been asked a number of times, what’s going to happen in the future? Is Europe going to be Christianized? Is America going to look more like Sweden? All we can say, responsibly, as social scientists, there is no evidence in that direction right now. So if present trends continue…

Lloyd: No evidence in what direction?

Berger: That America is becoming like Sweden or that Sweden is becoming like Texas.

Lloyd: Yeah. [laughter]

Berger: Unlikely, OK?

Lloyd: You were so wrong thirty years ago, so you’re being very careful now. Do you see… It would look to me that there are, in the U.S., there are secularizing tendencies on the two coasts and in urban centers.

Berger: Yes.

Lloyd: But there continues to be these resurgences of passionately held faith as well.

Berger: Yes. And you have one thing in America, which is almost completely absent in Europe. You have a massive evangelical presence, which is millions of people. But also you have religious revivals in unlikely places. I had breakfast with somebody this morning, who told me about speaking to a group at the evangelical, passionately evangelical group, that they have at business school.

Lloyd: At Harvard Business School?

Berger: At Harvard Business School. That’s happening in a lot of places. I don’t know if that answers that question.

Lloyd: You don’t know.

Berger: We don’t know. [laughter] And in Sweden, there is a Pentecostal revival going on in Stockholm.

Lloyd: Is there?

Berger: Now it’s not massive, it’s not tens of thousands of people, but it’s interesting. And the Islamic presence in Europe is leading to… there are now about sixteen million Muslims in the European Union. And a lot of people are beginning to reflect, well, these people are very religious. How come? What about our roots of our culture? But the honest answer is, I don’t know.

Davis: I’m still wrestling with that image of Sweden being like Texas. How do you respond to the challenge of Sam Harris regarding the toxicity of faith in society?

Berger: The challenge of whom?

Davis: The challenge of Sam Harris, one of the neo-atheist authors regarding what he sees as the toxicity of faith upon society.

Berger: There’s been a lot of publicity about these new atheists, who strike me as 19th-century village atheists, returned to life in the twenty-first century… Much of this is very primitive. And the idea that, did you say toxicity?

Lloyd: Yes.

Berger: The idea that religion is particularly toxic, why, sure, there are toxic religions but there’s toxic everything. And in this connection I would quote Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who said that original sin is the only Christian doctrine which does not require faith. It can be empirically verified. [laughter]

When you talk about torture, mass murder, slavery, any number of unpleasant, morally reprehensible things that were done in the name of religion, they’re also done in the name of non-religious worldviews.

Lloyd: Any version of science, any philosophical version, anything can be taken and used destructively?

Berger: Absolutely. Yes.

Davis: This questioner asks, if doubt is so essential for us, then how do we determine what is truth?

Berger: It depends what kind of truth you are talking about. If you’re talking about religious truth, which seems plausible in this building, I don’t think there is a way of attaining, at least the way that I’m capable of, of attaining absolute certainty.

You follow what I call certain signals, which suggest, which make plausible, if you like, that certain religious affirmations are indeed true. And you bet on them.

When you get to politics, it becomes very much an empirical question. You ask, what are the likely consequences of this or that action? And are they acceptable, are the costs too high?

Lloyd: This goes back to your book, A Rumor of Angels, these signals of transcendence, these moments, experiences, insights in human life that keep pointing to a beyond of some sort, that then sends one looking for a narrative or vision that can make sense of those experiences that people are having.

Berger: I think the old scholastic idea of proofs for the existence of God doesn’t hold up.

But there are signals of the presence of God. They’re not proofs; they’re not absolutely certain. But they suggest it. We can intuit it, and we can follow these intuitions.

Davis: This questioner asks if the end result of the kind of ideological procedure of determining what truth may be, the middle way, the moderate path, is that in essence humanistic? Is that the logical end of this approach?

Berger: Is it what?

Davis: Is it humanistic? Is it a form of humanism, the kind of end result of the middle way?

Berger: No, I don’t think so. Certainly not in my case. The Christian faith, which is possible, there are also other faiths which are possible. But if humanism means a kind of secular worldview, no, I don’t think that’s a necessary consequence.

Lloyd: And humanism is itself an act of faith, a decision to see the world without a transcendent reference, without a notion of God.

Berger: Yeah. Look, Zijderveld, my co-author, describes himself as an agnostic. He hates atheists, like the gentleman you just cited. And how do they know? I don’t know. [laughter] And I think a good definition of atheism is a person who has heard a voice from Heaven that Heaven doesn’t exist. [laughter] I think that answers that question.

Davis: Another questioner asks how we may persuade those of fundamentalist ideology to think about following something that’s more of a moderate path or a middle way.

Berger: I don’t know. I don’t have a pedagogical method. There are some fundamentalists with whom you cannot talk. At that point, what is necessary is weapons, not arguments, to stop them.

But with others, if they don’t kill anybody, leave them alone in their little illusionary, I would say, world of certainty. But some become doubtful. And I would say in every fundamentalist, there’s a relativist screaming to get out. And one can tease that out by asking questions: How do you know this?

Lloyd: One last question. A few years ago you wrote a book called Redeeming Laughter. And I wondered if you could just say a word about what makes laughter redeeming. That’s a large claim for laughter. Why is laughter redeeming?

Berger: Because in the context of faith, comedy is more profound than tragedy.

Lloyd: That’s a large statement. Comedy is more profound than tragedy.

Berger: Yes, yes.

Lloyd: Why is that?

Berger: Because tragedy is the natural way of looking at the world if there’s no transcendence. Both I, everybody I love, everybody I care about, the whole universe is moving toward nothingness: that is a tragic view of the world.

As soon as you have religion, it becomes a comic view of the world. The end of history, of human destiny is not nothingness, it is some kind of eternal existence, which is blessed.

That’s comic. That’s the clown who won’t fall down, who sits up or stands up again. […] Wells, the English literary scholar, wrote the wonderful book about the history of the clown. She makes that point at the end of the book. In that sense, it’s redeeming.

Lloyd: And so, what does telling a joke have to do with things being redeeming? Is even laughing at human foibles or cleverness a sort of a harbinger or hint of a sort of cosmic laughter at the end?

Berger: From a religious point of view, yes, but even if you don’t want to add religion into the situation, laughter relativizes, debunks, makes less sinister that which threatens us. All authoritarian regimes know this, which is why they put people into jail for making jokes about the great leader.

Lloyd: And satire…

Berger: And satire. Soviet Europe was a paradise for this kind of joke. It debunks the authority and makes life more bearable. So even in a secular sense it’s redeeming.

Lloyd: So we should keep our sense of humor?

Berger: That’s very important, yes.

Lloyd: We’d better stop this very interesting conversation now. We hope you’ll come back next week, when we are talking to Os Guinness, who is a Christian writer about diversity, about faith in this changing world, and why civil discourse is as important now as ever.

We hope you’ll linger following this conversation for our service taking place at 11:15 today as we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, and we hope you’ll also stay in touch and let us know your thoughts and suggestions for where these conversations might go in the future. Please join me in thanking Peter Berger for being with us today. [applause]