Julian Baggini on a new film about Lourdes that he sees as realistic about religion

This has at least three implications for how the current debate about religion is deficient. First, to those who say the importance of belief is overstated, the reality of Lourdes proves otherwise. All sorts of literal beliefs are held about the occurrence of miracles, the holiness of the water, the reality of Bernadette’s visions and so on. When atheists reject all these as superstitions, they are not attacking a straw man.

Nevertheless, the assorted fictional pilgrims in Lourdes truthfully reflect the extent to which different beliefs carry more or less weight for different people. Some may not hold any at all, but more common, I think, is for people to hold them with varying degrees of strength and seriousness. Many characters in Lourdes don’t seem to have strong views on what they do or don’t believe. The way they relate to doctrine is just not primarily a matter of acceptance or rejection. Belief is therefore less a question of which are true and more one of which matter and why. So, for instance, many pilgrims are sceptical about whether miracles have actually occurred in Lourdes, but what matters to them is that they nonetheless believe God’s grace is somehow at work there. Others are indifferent to most, if not all, of the specifics of Christian belief, but embrace the compassion and support they feel at the shrine.

In many ways the film shows this better than I can tell it. It certainly sounds horribly vague when turned into prose. But I think the film makes a convincing case that there is a real phenomenon worth our consideration here. Difficult though it is to understand, unless we do so, arguments for or against belief are going to miss a lot of the point.

Read it all.