Review
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Title: Into The Headwinds
Author: Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens
Publisher: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company
Genre: Devotional/Religious
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 121
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-8028-8243-1
Price: $19.99
Reviewed by Doug Christensen for the Association for Mormon Letters
In Into the Headwinds, Terryl Givens and his son Nathaniel address questions about faith that seem especially salient in our age of information overload. Not only do we live during a time where the internet democratizes knowledge previously more onerous to access, but we are also blessed and cursed with an intellectual atmosphere where podcasts and the 24-hour news cycle curate and cater to our biases, at the potential exclusion of objective learning. These fire-hose conditions sometimes leave little room for carefully crafted, nuanced thought experiments. When it comes to the conversation of religious faith, the Givens provide a remedy with their concise but substantive analysis and defense of faith in an age that Charles Taylor has famously framed as secular. Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is asks questions about secularism and religious faith, imagining an audience populated by believers across that spectrum.
The book has only three chapters: “On Rationalism,” “On Scientism,” and “On Faith.” However, we should not overlook the introduction: “Secularism Is Not the Problem.” Here they begin with a resonant Charles Taylor quotation: “ours is the first era in which belief is one option among many: disbelief, indifference, agnosticism, or atheism” (1). As they assess the secular landscape, they acknowledge that economic conditions have made dependence upon God less relevant and urgent; a more educated class of citizens means a less superstitious one, the counterbalance of which generates skepticism about the reality of a higher power. Those who manage to hang on to religious faith in today’s world can only do so when they interpret their good fortune as somehow mitigated by providence. This move becomes even more challenging if one operates with what some have called a hermeneutics of suspicion. Nevertheless, the Givens point out that secularists overlook the benefits of religious faith beyond:
helping individuals feel better about mortality . . . religion fosters greater trust among adherents, which in turn enables easier and more extensive cooperation.” Citing Joseph Henrich, they suggest that religious prohibitions and prescriptions reorganized European kinship which “produced a culture that by and large is ‘quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers and anonymous others’. (7)
If this is true, that religion fosters cooperation and trust, it must be seen as a consequence of a more ancient hospitality ethic that has somehow crossed tribal boundaries throughout time.
Givens and Givens break secularism into two categories to set the table for the plausibility of faith. In the first chapter, “On Rationalism,” they lean heavily upon an analogy from Jonathon Haidt. After providing historical context for Haidt’s elephant analogy, the authors examine the difference between an elephant and its rider, where Haidt suggests that the rider represents rationality and logic, and the elephant represents an individual’s emotional, intuitive response to a given set of circumstances. Whereas the rider usually sees himself in control of the elephant (he or she imagines logic and rational thinking to be doing the steering), in truth it is the elephant that navigates the world independent of the rider. In other words, our intuition and emotions play a much bigger role in decision-making than we want to acknowledge. Moreover, the process happens without our awareness of it. The Givens write that the “hiddenness of the elephant, its inexhaustible reserves, and the sense-making tendencies of the rider conspire to cement the elephant’s control over us, which denies the crucial role that the elephant plays in our self” (29). This section, focused on the “divided-self” theory, leads the authors to conclude that we do not always know what we believe, and we do not always know why we believe, something that comes across all too clearly if you simply listen to people talk about their beliefs. The upshot of this part of chapter one comes across loud and clear: “Real beliefs drive our behavior . . . Real belief is measured by ‘skin in the game’ . . . How much you truly ‘believe’ something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it” (41). Even more complicated, the why of belief section contends with the inexorability of cognitive bias (one strain of which we call confirmation bias). They describe confirmation bias as the “tendency of our rational mind to seek out evidence that confirms our preexisting beliefs and avoid evidence that contradicts those beliefs” (46). The authors quote two cognitive scientists who conclude that “once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with people” you can understand otherwise difficult conversation strategies (47). A few pages later the authors refer to beliefs as instrumental, beliefs “held, not because they seem true, but because they seem useful” (51). The utility of our beliefs as a justification and explanation for them turns out to be an appropriate summary of this longest chapter.
In the second chapter, they apply a similar utility standard to scientism. In my own writing instruction at the university, I often remind students that the goal of academic writing is proof, not truth. Similarly, the Givens argue that there is a useful distinction between science and scientism. I like their definition of science or the “scientific attitude,” which they see as “an approach to solving problems by letting data have the last word . . . Scientism, by contrast, is a set of beliefs and assumptions about science. It takes all the follies of rationalism . . . and applies them to science” (57). The authors argue that this difference between science and scientism echoes the difference between the elephant and the rider. Arguments made against religious belief from the cult of scientism seem to forget an important point summed up by physicist Johnjoe McFadden: “The uncertainty principle represents a fundamental property of matter, rather than merely a limitation of our powers to perform delicate measurements” (71). The Givens do a thorough job of highlighting the strengths of science and the blind spots of scientism in this chapter. They draw heavily from a long list of experts toward the recognition that “even the hardest-nosed experimental scientist depends on bias and intuition (what we’d commonly call faith), while the most spiritual mystic relies on evidence and logic” (76). Given a thick rendering of technical examples, some readers may feel a little bit at sea in this chapter, while hard-nosed critics of religion may see the authors trying to do too much in so short a space. However, this book will serve a significant need for people who see scientific reasoning as the best way to understand the world.
Into the Headwinds makes the claim that faith has always been difficult. Faith didn’t begin to face difficulty in our postmodern, information age; challenges to belief are on display throughout history. The early pages of chapter three, “On Faith,” suggest a Cartesian justification for faith. The fact that we can and do think religious thoughts presupposes the conditions for the possibility of a higher power. For example, the authors quote the well-known philosopher of religion, Alvin Plantinga who “reasons, our very designation of something as ‘evil’ is a de facto appeal to a transcendent reality: in a purely naturalistic world, moral categories make no sense” (85). The Givens follow this up with an observation from the Dalai Lama: “Even scientists now say basic human nature is compassionate” (85). The authors build on this idea by suggesting that the human ability to learn from others and to feel what others feel, separates us from the rest of the biological world. Citing Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you” (91).
Against the backdrop of a naturalistic, scientific explanation for reality, individuals are left with the story they tell themselves about themselves. While individual actions tell one story, that might not always match up with the one we would like people to accept about us, a self-aware rider can become increasingly aware of the distance between the story she prefers and the one playing out in real life (the distance between rider and elephant or logic and intuition). The Givens refer to this awareness, this bridging, as a responsibility where we attempt to “reconcile our actual and received narratives” (101). Awareness about the gap between our logical choices and the evolutionary force of our intuition opens us up to humility. The secular humanist sees humility in our genuflection before nature, creation, and history. This existential awareness leads some to cynical, nihilistic despair and others to awe and wonder, and humanitarian altruism. Those who accept the ineffable wonder of the world’s magnitude as a sign of intelligent design bow before the laws of the book, whether Torah, Koran, or the Sermon on the Mount. Religious faith, according to Terryl and Nathaniel Givens leads many to what they call presumptuous certainty, something more like idolatry than faith (104). But in the spirit of Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty, others find their way toward trust in God, a surrender to a “reality beyond the capture of either science or pure rationalism” (110). I was grateful to see these authors invoking Enns, as well as Marilynne Robinson whose substantive essays on faith pose a significant challenge to the “new atheists” and those the Givens call the antitheists. Ultimately, the Givens argue for a relational faith that “begins with response to the first intimations that a reality more stable, more life-giving, more Good and True and Beautiful beckons, one anchored outside our own snow globe of selfhood” (113). In other words, they write, “most faith-wrestlers come back to one fear: How do I know that what I feel inside gives me any reason to believe in the reality of what exists out there?” (120). This is a legitimate fear and it requires trust in scientific reasoning and it requires faith.
Enns, Peter. The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs. Harper One. 2016. New York. NY.