Paul Clark

Doctrine Impossible isn’t about Tiger’s journey from Christianity to a more rational spirituality. Rather, it is a critique of conservative Christianity and an exposition of his views on spirituality. While I didn’t agree with everything he said, I enjoyed the book and learnt from it. It’s well written and coherent and comes in easily digestible chunks.

The book is in six parts, which cover rationality and faith, the Bible and its fetishisation by conservative Christians, sin, salvation, evil, and spiritual aliveness.

For me, the best part was the discussion of rationality and faith. He discusses the difference between knowledge, belief (which only happens where we lack knowledge) and faith, which he calls belief + trust. Faith, he says, brings with it a willingness to act in accord with our unproven beliefs.

It is not irrational to have beliefs that are unproven or unprovable. Neither is it irrational to trust in these beliefs (i.e. have faith). It is, however, irrational and delusional to have faith in something that is provably false. Thus Tiger disagrees with atheists who say belief in God is delusional, since the non-existence of God cannot be proven. Equally, literalist belief in the Biblical account of creation is delusional, since science has proven it to be false.

I also enjoyed Part Two, his discussion of the Bible. Tiger makes a powerful case for his view that the primary object of worship for fundamentalist and evangelical Christians isn’t God; it is the Bible. This leads to what he terms “blasphemous” conclusions. The conservative Christian will believe that God (an all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good being) condones the genocide, ethnic cleansing and slavery endorsed by the Old Testament, and that God has created a world in which the finite “crime” of not believing in him leads to infinite punishment in the fires of Hell.

(It should be said at this point that Tiger never quite says whether he believes in God, though he most certainly doesn’t believe in the monster he calls Bible-God.)

Parts Three and Four present a point-by-point demolition of the Christian doctrines of sin and salvation. Never having been a Christian myself, it felt to me that the author was shooting fish in a barrel, but I am sure many “recovering” ex-Christians would find these chapters very helpful.

Part Five is an insightful discussion on evil. I wish I had read it before my recent blog post on the question of morality, which I will have to amend in light of Tiger’s arguments. He accepts that logic cannot regress indefinitely, but rather than seeing God as a starting-point for moral philosophy, he sees it in the self-evident (but unprovable) axiom that the flourishing of human beings is a good place to start. Since he is a vegan, Tiger would extend this beyond humans to all sentient beings.

Part Six is an exposition of the semi-pantheistic “spiritual aliveness” that Tiger favours. This is offered in the spirit of, “This is what I think but you are welcome to disagree.” Fair enough, but it didn’t really work for me since my own views are more in line with an existential nihilism, even absurdism, tempered by humanism.

There are two other areas where my views diverge from Tiger’s. The first is that he regards Jesus as a great moral teacher, though he accepts that we can’t actually know how authentic the pictures of Jesus presented in the gospels are.

In my opinion, all of Jesus’ moral teachings have to be seen in the context of his core message (which was only for Jews) – the world as we know it is about to end and you have to repent and adopt a position of absolute morality so you can be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. Though there is a lot in his teachings that is beautiful, much of it is not appropriate for a world which (we hope!) is not about to end. And even if the world did end, that would be the end of us too. There wouldn’t be a Kingdom of Heaven that we should seek admission to.

My second disagreement is that the versions of Christianity he critiques are those which take the Bible literally. There have always been Christians who read the Bible allegorically, who see the story of Adam and Eve as nothing more than a creation myth with an important message about human fallibility. They don’t see it as literal truth, and as such their view of it is impervious to the kind of logical demolition that Tiger gives us in his sections on sin and salvation. (I would direct the reader who is interested in this kind of Christianity to the works of Karen Armstrong, especially A History of God and A Short History of Myth.)

Perhaps I am being unfair. Tiger’s target isn’t the liberal Christian but the fundamentalist and evangelical. And these are people whose noxious views deserve the harsh criticism Tiger levels at them with such aplomb. But I would have liked to see a little more about those Christians who have a lot of common ground with him and with liberal atheists like myself.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book very much and have learnt from it. I recommend it without hesitation, particularly to anyone who is “recovering” from dogmatic Christianity.

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