Column

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

Ageing

Creed

Politics

Providence

25 July 2024

5 min read

Did God tell Joe Biden to stand down?

His story teaches us to listen a little more intently to what comes our way.

Graham Tomlin

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

President Biden, at his desk after announcing his decision.

Biden reflects after announcing his decision.

The White House.

Joe Biden has finally quit. After weeks of resistance to the clamour of Republican voices telling him to withdraw from the race to be re-elected, he finally gave in and pulled out. A tweet was followed by a press conference where a stiff and weary looking Biden told the world that his campaign for a second term was over.

Just a few weeks ago, when asked if he would step down, he had said that “If the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that, I might do it." Joe Biden is a man of faith. And so, it was a strange kind of prayer - perhaps just a throwaway line intended to reassert his determination to stand - but it raises an intriguing question. Did the Lord Almighty do just that?

I'm not sure what President Biden had in mind when he raised this possibility. Perhaps he envisaged some disembodied voice from the clouds, like Moses on Mount Sinai, booming out a personal message that it was time to step back? A vivid dream where God appeared to him? Maybe he was looking for mysterious handwriting on the wall, as happened to the Babylonian King Belshazzar? Was Joe waiting for something similar on the wall of the Oval Office as he drank his morning coffee?

As far as we know, none of those things took place. What did happen was more mundane. Struck down with COVID, holed away with his family and key advisors he was presented with evidence that there is no way he could beat Donald Trump and so he decided to pull out.

God normally speaks to us through ordinary human Interaction, through commonplace events that might happen to everyone.

Perhaps when most people think of God speaking, they have in mind a kind of Monty Python booming voice from the clouds, a message that is inescapably and undoubtedly divine. Yet the evidence of Christian history and the testimony of numerous Christians throughout the world and previous centuries suggest that that kind of communication is vanishingly rare. God usually delivers his message through more ordinary methods – so ordinary that it is very easy to miss it. In fact, the most definitive time God spoke to the human race, it wasn't in a booming voice from the skies, but in the words of a scruffy looking Jewish rabbi who looked as human as the rest of us.

Despite the mediaeval imagery, Jesus did not walk around with a golden halo around his head that served as a sign saying, ‘this is the Son of God!’ It was quite possible to meet Jesus, listen to him speak, even shake his hand, and entirely miss the fact that you were speaking to God.

As the early Christians thought through their Christology, in other words their understanding of how God and humanity came together in the person of Jesus, the main conclusion was that Christ’s divine nature did its work through, rather than apart from his human nature. It is not that some of his actions and words were divine (for example miracles, inspired teaching etc.) and some human (eating, sleeping and asking for directions) but rather that both human and divine natures were involved in all that he did - the human nature passively allowing itself to be the vehicle through which God did his work. So that when you met Jesus you could see God working perfectly through a human being in the way that we were always meant to.

For those who had the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it, although he looked and spoke just like an ordinary human, Jesus was far more than that - he was the one through which God definitively spoke to the human race.

All that suggests a very different way of God speaking to us. God normally speaks to us through ordinary human interaction and through commonplace events that might happen to everyone.

Joe's story perhaps teaches the rest of us to listen a little more intently to what comes our way.

So, when Joe Biden started to listen to the voice of his family and friends rather than stubbornly persisting with his doomed attempt to be re-elected, perhaps his secret prayer was being answered? Perhaps the Lord Almighty was telling him to step down, through the very ordinary voices of his friends and advisers. How do we know it was God? As I've argued elsewhere, in the question of whether God saved Trump from an early death, we can only definitively tell when God has intervened while looking backwards. Looking back on the past few weeks and months, might this be a case where we can begin to say with some confidence that Joe Biden was listening to the one voice that could have told him to step back?

It sounds like he obeyed unwillingly. In his speech from the Oval Office, he continued to claim that he deserved a second term (does any leader in a democracy deserve election? Is it not always a gift and a privilege?) He continued to proclaim a rather fantasy-laced vision of the USA: “we are the United States of America and there is nothing beyond our capacity”, claiming the limitless power of his nation at a time when he should have been more aware of his own limits and finitude.

But maybe we all do that from time to time. Let us give credit where credit is due. He did finally, reluctantly, perhaps grudgingly, listen to the voice of the Lord Almighty telling him to quit.

Listening for the voice of God is an art and not a science. Wisdom comes to us usually through very ordinary human means and it takes a lifetime of listening, reading of Scripture, discerning the difference between the kind of thing God would say - which is the kind of thing Jesus would say - and the things that he wouldn't. Joe's story perhaps teaches the rest of us to listen a little more intently to what comes our way, to hear when God might actually be speaking to us - through the ordinary events and voices that surround us every day.