Don Donovan: Gift of faith is enviable, but it's not for me, thanks

I have just finished writing and illustrating a book about country churches. Not because I'm religious - which I'm not - but because the architecture of many of the old churches that are dotted around the countryside interests me.

In the course of my three-year wanderings to find and research subjects, I've met lots of people connected with the churches and nearly all of them have, to a greater or lesser degree, been believers in God, in the gospels, and a life hereafter either in heaven or hell.

Some of them have, to my mind, incredible beliefs -blind and unquestioning adherence to doctrines such as the infallibility of the Pope, the total credibility of every word in both New and Old Testaments, or the certainty that the unbaptised child will not achieve salvation.

Many of them relish the fear of God and the delicious tortures of eternal punishment. But most of them exhibited a comfortable certitude.

The jury is still out on my beliefs, but I lean towards the atheist, or at least the agnostic. My ego wants me to be immortal through the immortality of my soul, but my intellect tells me I shall be, at my passing, a disintegrated residue of chemicals no longer maintained as a unity by the electrical impulses that fire my being.

In essence I shall be as a rusting appliance whose battery has gone flat.

What has fascinated me about those churches is that they were built, often with as much priority given to them as the erection of dwellings or the sinking of wells, by new settlers to whom a place of worship was a bare essential.

I would defy any of them to have provided me with proof of the existence of God (indeed, in the whole of human history to the present day I would challenge any person of balanced judgment to provide proof). But they didn't need proof because they had faith.

Faith, not proof, is the key to belief.

I daresay that blinding flash of inspiration has been experienced and debated by believers, infidels, scholars and idiots since we started to reason.

It's probably an old-hat concept. It's just that I've only just discovered it. So I'll say it again: Faith, not proof, is the key to belief.

Catholic friends from long ago smugly used to tell me in response to my questions that faith is a gift. They talked of the gift of faith as if they were privileged and I, not having been given it, were an object to be pitied. So concerned was one that she entered into a novena on my behalf, a nine-day prayerfest designed to imbue me with faith. It didn't work.

Those of my Jewish friends whose Judaism was spiritual as well as ethnic had no doubt that despite the regular misfortune of their sects of finding themselves pilloried for no good reason other than the accidents of their birth, they are The Chosen People. Chosen of God, that is, of whose existence there is no proof beyond faith. Chosen over me, over all other religions, over the animal kingdom.

Poor me, they'd look at me with resignation. I should be so unlucky.

I even have a Baptist friend who cannot understand how I can be so enchanted by my churches yet have no belief. "When you die," she said to me, "you're going to get a hell of a shock." Now there's conviction for you - her conviction that there is a hereafter in which I shall be convicted and go to hell. What a merciful God she worships.

It almost goes without saying that there's strong consensus that only humans have immortal souls; but you'd expect that from the only species that is able to reason.

I have been feeling a little sorry for the extreme believers these days because those who have applied their credence not only to God but also to his/her? earthly representatives have had some awful knocks, what with predatory bishops lusting after small boys and uncharitable nuns paddling pubescent pupils.

But no doubt they'll take refuge in the time-honoured illumination that God gives us free will.

Which is the usual explanation as to why their merciful, omnipotent God allows all nasties from anthrax and Aids to Middle Eastern suicide bombers to add to the seething populations of heaven or hell depending on what side you're on.

Oh me of little faith. But if there's one thing I do have faith in, it is the marginal capacity for the human race to have enough faith to do more good than bad. What's more, unlike theirs, my faith is based on proof.

First, because we're all still here; if we were more bad than good, we'd have destroyed our species by now.

Secondly, those country churches. The faith of anybody who can give a church a higher priority than, say, a hospital has to be envied. I just hope they're not let down at, as they say, the end of the day.