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Atheism

Creed

15 September 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher Part 5: leaping for truth

In the fifth of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper recalls the night she decided to do something, to get data about God.

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.

A black and white close up of a women in a street at night, turning to look around at a neion 'open' sign.

Trevin Rudy 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. Read part 1 here.

Inhale…two, three, four… Exhale... two, three, four…. Inhale… two, three, four… exhale… two, three four…

I was laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, doing breathing exercises trying to calm my body and mind. The clock on my bedside table flashed 3:59. I had a lecture on twentieth century French metaphysics to attend in four hours. But I couldn’t sleep.

Night time anxiety had been my habit for as long as I could remember. It all started when I was four years old and first asked myself what would it be like to be dead? while trying to fall asleep one night. Since then, my anxiety often started with normal, day-to-day worries (did I complete enough items on my to-do list today?). But they almost always spiraled into bigger concerns. I always found my way to questions like Is this really all there is?

I sighed and kept on with my breathing exercises. Inhale… two, three, four… exhale… two, three, four…

But then…

Then, I had an idea.

I blinked and sat up.

God might be there!, I thought to myself.

God might have been there all along!

I started to laugh, incredulous.

Here’s the two things I had just learned that made me finally wake up to this extraordinary possibility.

Interpretation is a choice

When I was an atheist, I often said that if God existed and wanted us to believe in Him, God would make it obvious. God would write something like 'Believe in Me!' in letters in the sky. God would give us indubitable evidence of His existence.

But interpretation is a matter of choice.

It’s like a story a man once told at my church. He was out walking in the woods at night. He said, God if you’re there, give me a sign! A shooting star went through the sky. He then shrugged and said to himself, oh, it’s a coincidence.

I had always told the story of my life as a string of coincidences. No matter how uncanny an event, I always assumed it was pure chance. But what if I had been ignoring the underlying narrative and purpose to things all along? God could be communicating with us and steering the course of our lives all the time, but if we never took the initiative to interpret our experiences with Him in them, we would never see Him.

The only way for me to assess God’s possible role in my life would be to start interpreting events as if God were the author. I wouldn’t have to get rid of my “pure coincidence” view. I would only have to add this new one. Then, I could compare the two.

Openness to evidence is a choice

The philosopher William James makes the extraordinary, underappreciated point that there are certain kinds of beliefs you can’t get the evidence for unless you believe them first. One example is jumping over a chasm or gap on a hiking trail. You can’t successfully jump over the chasm and get the evidence that you’re capable of jumping it unless you believe you can do it first.

God is similar in a very specific sense: evidence of God’s presence in your life is only available to you if you believe first.

Imagine your heart is a room with a door. God could be shining a floodlight at the door all the time, but if you don’t open the door a crack, God’s light will never be able to shine through. I now believe that God can do a lot of amazing things, but God doesn’t impose. It’s up to all of us to crack open our doors.

Once you do, you can start to get experiential evidence. This might be feeling loved, experiencing peace and joy that surpass your previous understanding, or unusual confidence or resilience amidst troubles. It might be a sense of forgiveness beyond what you’ve known before. Or it might be experiences of healing and personal growth—often of issues that you’ve tried to heal multiple ways.

The greatest hypothesis of all was out there waiting to be tested—and I wasn’t participating!

The leap of faith is a leap for truth

I used to think that faith was a betrayal of the truth. If I wanted to be loyal to the truth, I needed to stick to the “bare facts” provided by science. I shouldn’t ever claim anything beyond them, on the off chance the claim might be false.

However...

When it comes to God (as well as many other things, such as what it means to be a good person), the only way to find out what’s true is to put the belief into play. It’s to embrace a hypothesis, act on it, and see what happens.

When I jolted up out of bed that night, I realised that throughout my entire life I had thought that I was being loyal to the truth, but what I was actually doing was standing on the sidelines. The greatest hypothesis of all was out there waiting to be tested—and I wasn’t participating! The human species is in its infancy. There’s so much we don’t know about existence. What if the universe is lovingly Created? What if there are dimensions beyond what we can see and touch?

The truly courageous thing, I now believe, is the opposite of what I’d always thought. It isn’t to refrain from belief. It’s to dare to believe.

The verdict

That night, I decided I would try to get data about God. I’d walk into a life of prayer, worship, and faith. I’d work on re-interpreting my story with God in it. I’d identify biases or misconceptions I had about faith and educate myself about them. I’d ask God to help me see, feel, and believe, if He was there.

I’m less than a year in. But today I’m sleeping better, healing deep emotional wounds, overcoming unhealthy habits, finding peace, stepping deeper into joy, and experiencing feelings of invulnerability where I used to feel the most vulnerable. This sense of invulnerability is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before, like a spring of confidence and peace welling up from depths beyond me. I consider this data for God.

Might I be wrong? Absolutely. But at the end of the day I am just one person. All I can do is go out and get some data and share what I find, contributing my little piece to the species-wide quest for the truth of things.

So go out and get your data. Take a chance on God, if you like. Crack open your door. See if light shines through. Let me and others know what you find.

Article

Creed

18 November 2024

3 min read

John Smyth: how evil masks itself as goodness

Be alert to the cloaked and warped wherever it occurs.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

William Blake's illustration of Satan, a winged angel, flying over a prone Eve.

Satan Exulting over Eve, William Blake.

Getty Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

Much has been written over these past days about Justin Welby’s resignation and the turmoil in the Church of England. Attention has focused on who knew what, and who did or didn’t act on their knowledge. Less attention has been focused on the dark heart of this story – John Smyth himself and the way he conducted his sinister campaign of manipulation and harm. A campaign that was – the more I think of it – not just abusive, but demonic.

How could Smyth have got away with it for so long? How could he have persuaded these young men to go along with his sadistic beatings? Why did people try to ignore it, hoping they could keep it quiet?

If there is one note struck in the Bible about evil, it is its deceitfulness. Jesus called the devil ‘the father of lies’ – and lies always present themselves convincingly as the truth. St Paul once wrote of how “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.” The meaning of the name ‘Lucifer’ is literally ‘light bringer’.

This all reflects the ancient tradition taken up by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Satan as a fallen angel – one of the crowd of celestial creatures, usually invisible to humans, who appear at key moments in the Bible, like the visions of Isaiah or the birth of Jesus – one who unlike all the others, resented his subservient role as a messenger of God and set himself up as a rival instead. Yet the point is he still looks like an angel. And so, it seems, did John Smyth, with his fine words, clever sounding theology and earnest prayers.

A few days ago, I listened to an account from one of the survivors of the way John Smyth went about grooming his victims. Smyth presented himself as a father-figure for young boys away from home in boarding school, looking for older parental figures who would help guide them through the confusions and complexities of adolescence. To justify this, he would say that of course God is our Father, as Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer, but God is our Father in heaven, not on earth, and that he, John Smyth, was to act as their earthly father. And, as he claimed, fathers discipline their children, he had the responsibility to discipline them physically for their spiritual benefit, with the horrendous results with which we are all now too painfully aware.

The arrogance of this is breathtaking. For any being – human or celestial - to put themselves in the place of God, to presume to usher God into the distance and to step into his shoes, is an echo of that primal sin of Satan in the garden of Eden, who tells Adam and Eve that they don’t need to listen to God, but instead to him.

When you survey the carnage Smyth’s warped theology and evil practice has wreaked – most tragically to the lives of those he mistreated so deviously, it is hard not to see something more than merely sinful – but something demonic going on. John Smyth chose to obey the dark instincts of his heart, and to take the Faustian pact that grasps power over others at the loss of one’s own soul. He chose to give in to his evil desires entirely, cloaking them in phony but eloquent religious terminology.

Acknowledging the deceitfulness of evil is not to excuse those who tried to cover it up. In fact, recognising this is to hear a call to greater vigilance, in that when faced with something of this order we are not facing something obvious, ordinary, easy to spot. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” says the letter to the Ephesians, “but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” If we in the Church have not taken safeguarding seriously enough, it is because we have not taken the nature of evil seriously enough. Remaining alert for the evil that masks itself as goodness – whether in the church or anywhere else for that matter - is a spiritual and moral skill we need to learn more than ever.