In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner entertainment, a formal logical argument for the existence of God. Du Perron, formerly a Protestant, was now well on his way to becoming a cardinal. He was a highly intelligent and rhetorically gifted man and he performed his task well, to the great pleasure of the assembled nobility. Flushed with success, he then turned to his audience and announced that, if they wanted, he could prove the opposite case too. The king was not amused.
Most of us like to believe that we believe what we believe because rigorous reasoning and reliable evidence have led us there. Most of us are wrong. It isn’t that reason and evidence play no role in our religion or lack of it; rather that they are saturated with deeper emotional, social and practical concerns. As Julian Barnes writes in The Sense of an Ending: ‘Most of us… make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it.’
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