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

Character

Creed

7 May 2024

4 min read

The zeal of Simon Reeve

Is personal conviction enough to persuade others to change the world?

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

An enthusiastic hiker stands in front of a view down a valley, smiling and holding his backpack straps.

Simon Reeve on his travels.

It wasn’t until I took my seat in Exeter’s Great Hall the other Friday that I noticed the title of the Simon Reeve show I had bought tickets for over a year prior - “To the Ends of the Earth” - and it was to prove apt.

The seemingly ageless TV presenter was his usual effervescent self as he regaled the audience with stories from some of his journeys to the distant place of the world - the Ends of the Earth.

We were taken from the hottest to the coldest places, the wettest to the driest; and alongside humorous and poignant anecdotes, there was also an almost evangelistic zeal in Reeve’s frequent pleas to “green” our money and time.

“Less screen time, more green time!” he revealed is a Reeve family motto.

And if he could give us one piece of advice, he said, it would be to “green” our pension - ensuring that the money invested goes to good causes that reduce our carbon footprint, rather than, say, to tobacco or oil companies.

It may not make us as much money, he said, but it would do more for the environment and reducing our carbon footprints than never getting onto another plane.

Food for thought.

Although, perhaps surprisingly, Reeve is actually somewhat of an advocate for tourism.

For despite the carbon footprint and potential to tarnish some of the best places on Earth, tourism also provides an important source of income and an economic reason to keep beauty spots special, he explained.

We can ask people as nicely as possible not to cut down trees or to look after wildlife, he said, but if they have an economic incentive, it’s likely to prove more persuasive.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the show was the passion with which Reeve spoke about the climate, “Mother Earth”, “Mother Nature”, “the natural world”, and “the spinning rock on which we live” - all phrases that he used.

At times, his language was almost spiritual.

But perhaps another motivator that could spur us on to action could be the knowledge that each of us have been charged by our Maker - another word employed by Reeve - with the responsibility to care for our world.

He talked about time in the great outdoors as being “good for the soul”. He even shared how on a recent visit to Greenland, it had made him - “as someone who is not religious” - consider whether there really might be a Creator, as it seemed as though the huge pool of ice there had been intentionally left there as a warning to the world not to melt it.

And as I reflected later on all I had seen and heard, I wondered whether, without a religious conviction, we may be lacking a persuasive motivation for people to stop destroying our planet ever further.

Humanists may argue that there's a shared humanity to fight for, but if we are just living for this one life, isn’t the most logical course of action to look out only for one’s own immediate interests?

Might we need another incentive, in the way Reeve explained that money can encourage people to look after their local habitats?

I wondered whether Reeve had known when he chose the title of his show that he was quoting the last words of Jesus, when he said his disciples would be his witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and “to the ends of the Earth”.

In the case of lovers of the planet like Reeve, perhaps their witness to the ends of the earth is the message of just how wonderful our planet is - and this is certainly a very valuable message.

It is to be hoped that the many thousands who will have heard Reeve’s message on this tour and on the screen will do their own bit to make our planet a better place.

I certainly find it a motivating factor.

And in spite of all our faults, Reeve said that the real highlight of all his travels has been the people he has met, and this has also always been my experience.

You can find such love in our species, he said - “the best species that there has ever been on our planet” - and I would agree, even if we reached the same conclusion based on a contrasting set of overriding beliefs.