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Atheism

Creed

18 August 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 3: the secret about truth I learned at seminary

In the third of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper recalls learning a crucial lesson about her knowledge and her truth claims.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

An unfocused views down on to stacks of books in an old library.

Jana Kowalewicz on Unsplash.

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.

Here at Seen and Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.

For the first 20 years of my life, I thought religion was for stupid and weak people. I carried a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in my purse. I studied science as a way to defeat religion.

But one day, while titrating an iron solution in a laboratory, a sudden realization crashed over me. I remember just staring at the orange solution simmering in the beaker, thinking, “oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.”

The realization was that I had dismissed religion as stupid without ever engaging it. I had never even asked religious people what they thought! I had done all this while priding myself on open-mindedness.

This struck me as deeply hypocritical. I had always thought that one of the hallmarks of a good argument was being able to defend the ideas of your enemies. I wasn’t even close.

So, I printed 500 pages from the Zygon Journal of Religion and Science. I sat down with a cup of tea. And after reading just two pages, I set the stack of paper back down on the desk and thumped my head down on top of them.

Oh no.

The theologians had a point!

To seminary

Twelve months later, I dropped my duffel bag on the floor of my new room in Theology House. Theology House was the residence of the most earnest students training to be pastors at the Boston University School of Theology.

I was an atheist, but the seminary administrators gave me the benefit of the doubt when I told them I wanted to be as immersed in the world of faith as possible. We had house-dinner planned for that night, and school was to begin Monday. I couldn’t wait. I was going to get a master’s degree in theology as an atheist.

I spent the next two years proving my old self wrong. It was delightful. Every day was a new opportunity to unearth another bias I didn’t know I had, or to discover another philosophical approach I hadn’t known existed. It was occasionally difficult to let go of certain cherished ideas, but it was more than worth it. The intellectual richness of faith blew my mind over and over.

About six months into my studies, I ran into a secular friend I used to sit around and bash religion with.

“So, what have you learned at seminary?” he asked me, grimacing. I told him the simple but life-changing truth: Christianity is intellectually rigorous. It’s reasonable. It can even be beautiful.

“Did you become a believer?” he asked. “No,” I said, shrugging. “But I’m beginning understand why other people do.”

Why do we believe what we believe?

The most important question I ended up asking at seminary was about the nature of belief itself. I needed to understand: how could my roommates and I all work so hard to be reasonable, but still believe such different things?

Rationality, I learned, is always contextual. All of us would like to think that what we believe—what seems to us the obvious, “rational” conclusion—is the truth. But it’s not. There are eight billion people on this planet and every single one of us thinks we are right about everything.

Each conclusion each of us draws comes from deploying our best possible reasoning to the model of reality that lives in our heads. These models are always under revision; they are the result of the model of one minute ago plus whatever happened in that minute. This process stretches all the way back to before birth, since exposure to different sounds and nutrients in the womb impacted how we began making sense of the world. Then we were born into contexts that came pre-laden with various metaphysical presuppositions, attitudes, and values. Throughout life we did and continue to do our best to reason within these models and to steer their development.

This “best reasoning” is never pure intellect. There is no such thing as reason unbiased by feeling. It is now an accepted scientific fact that thought and feeling are always intertwined.

Indeed, rationality itself may be best thought of as a feeling. The philosopher William James says we deem things true when they give us the “sentiment of rationality”—that is, a feeling of satisfaction or harmony that occurs when an idea fits well with our current model of reality. This doesn’t mean reason and reasonableness don’t exist; it means that, contrary to the popular myth that quality thinking is free of emotion, emotional awareness is a key element of it.

My friends and I were all reasonable while believing different things because we each made sincere effort to improve our reasoning as thought-feelers born into different models of reality. None of us could claim with 100 per cent certainty that we were correct. What we could do was welcome new insights into ourselves, one another, and the world that would help us keep developing our models in the direction of truth.

The path to truth

By the time I graduated from seminary, I hadn’t changed my mind on God. I remained a firm atheist.

But I had learned a crucial lesson: my knowledge and truth claims were far from perfect. If I wanted to say true things or to keep getting closer to the truth—which I very much did, my loyalty to truth still my highest value—I needed to do two things:

First, I needed to keep untangling my own personal history, thoughts, and feelings. Only through self-awareness could I unpack my own biases, hone my capacities to reason amidst emotion, and discern the elements of my worldview worth keeping or leaving behind.

Second, I needed to keep engaging people who were different from me. Only through exposure to new ideas could I expand or develop my own.

Today, my model of reality includes something I thought it never would: God. But this change took twelve years of the most careful, self-aware, humble, prudent, and open-minded quest for truth I could manage.

I’m not done revising the model, and I won’t ever be. God will almost surely remain a part of it, but I’m open to the possibility He will not. I’ll keep learning about myself; I’ll keep learning about others; I’ll keep steering my model as responsibly as I am able.

The ultimate truth of things beats at the heart of all our eight billion different perspectives; the best any of us can do is keep working to beat in harmony with it.

Heading Home: a pilgrimage that breaks out beauty along the way

We can learn a new language together as we travel.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A shaft of light from an opening in a dome lights a cross on a pedestal.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Kieran Dodds.

This film, this pilgrimage, this story begins in Jerusalem in the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its Aedicule, a small chapel, containing the tomb from which Jesus rose.

Jesus' resurrection was revolutionary because it is the first fruits of a wider resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth, the new Jerusalem, where all that is harmful on earth is transformed into eternal glory and beauty.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre holds that vision within its walls, a vision that was then transported throughout the world through pilgrimage and creatively replicated in other locations so that all who entered their local church or cathedral would be transported through art and architecture to the New Jerusalem.

US philanthropist and author Roberta Ahmanson thinks that American Protestants, in particular, have neglected this story because of the Reformation's preference for word over image. As a result, in 2022, she gathered an eclectic group of Christian college presidents, church pastors, and Christian creatives taking them on a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to London via Italy and Aachen while filming their responses to the visual history of the New Jerusalem as found in the churches they visit. In their two-week journey, the group cover almost 2,000 years of church art and architecture.

Ahmanson explains that this search for the reality of the Kingdom of God as it is to be realised in the New Jerusalem at the end of time did not mean that pilgrims were to abandon the world. On the contrary, she says, "their job was to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home where their ultimate citizenship lay." That remains the aim of this art and architecture as:

“By studying the nature of that promised place, as artists and architects and writers of the past have sought to express it, we are schooled to live lives of wholeness and beauty right here on earth. The longing for beauty is ultimately a longing to be Home, to be in the place where we are whole.”

The beauty of the churches visited on this pilgrimage provided a vision of the New Jerusalem to those who entered in order that they took that vision into their everyday lives when they left. Along the way, the pilgrims on this trip learnt how artists, architects and theologians worked in parallel for many centuries – from Saint Augustine’s vision of a New Jerusalem to Dante’s admonitions about the Last Judgment.

The film combines scenes of beautiful interiors with explanations of their significance from Ahmanson and others, plus it shows the reactions of various of the pilgrims as they allow their sense of wonder and understanding of Church history to be expanded. David and Joy Bailey, founders of Arrabon which cultivates Christian communities to pursue healing and reconciliation in a racially divided world, are two of those to have spoken about the impact the trip had on the group of pilgrims.

Joy said: “Everybody was very literate coming from these strong traditions of faith being either oral or written but to see it so visually impacting, it was breaking us all open and trying to find language for that took the entire trip.” David suggested that: “What the trip was helping you to see was this deeper rootedness, this long tradition that, I think, could actually be very helpful for us today because some of the things that were there were the understanding of humanity as plain on the outside and beauty on the inside, the glory that comes with the inward journey that reflects on Heaven as it is on Earth.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience

As we travel further from Jerusalem in the film, we are surprised to find that the template of the Holy Sepulchre continues to inspire and shape the experience of pilgrims. Ahmanson explains that: “In churches across the old Roman Empire, from Africa and Palestine to the furthest reaches of Britain, liturgy was created to tell the story and to bring the spaces alive in the telling. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and later to Rome and then to the tomb of Saint James in Spain became a kind of geographic liturgy. When the trip became too long or … too dangerous, believers found alternative destinations. Across the continent, from Magdeburg in Germany and Constance in Switzerland, to Bologna and Pisa in Italy and London and Cambridge in England, round churches or smaller models replicating the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became pilgrim destinations.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience, particularly during Lent and Holy Week. Walking labyrinths, Palm Sunday processions and Passion dramas, praying the Stations of the Cross, washing feet on Maundy Thursday, sharing a Passover meal, the Good Friday three-hour devotional, and the Dawn Eucharist on Easter Day are among the many ways Christians continue to follow in the footsteps of Jesus while remaining where they are during this most special season.

Many of these practices provide the opportunity to go on pilgrimage while remaining at home. Just as with images of the New Jerusalem brought from Jerusalem to the churches of Europe, so with, for example, the practice of praying the Stations of the Cross which originated in medieval Europe when pilgrims were unable to visit the Holy Land, so instead “visited” the Holy places through prayer.

The film, and other creative off-shoots including exhibitions of photographs from the pilgrimage taken by Kieran Dodds and performances by spoken word poet Street Hymns (one of the pilgrims), with his fellow poets Hanna Watson, Jasmine Sims, and Lo Alaman, in response to images of the New Jerusalem, provide viewers with a similar opportunity to experience, reflect and pray. The aim of all these initiatives is, as Ahmanson explains, what has always been the aim; “to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home” where our ultimate citizenship lies, and to do so by “creating beauty in buildings and art and music and serving the suffering and those in all kinds of need”.

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