Column

Atheism

Creed

29 September 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 6: making the leap

In her series’ final article, philosopher Stefani Ruper offers a new vision we all need.

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 skydiver in a space pressure shoot leaps from a capsule above the earth.

Felix Baumgartner leap set the record for freefall parachuting.

Red Bull Stratos.

Faith is irrational. Faith is against evidence. Faith is a threat to progress. Faith will bring about the downfall of civilization.

I used to think this, and I wasn’t alone.

In 2004 Sam Harris wrote that faith

“allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”

This quote appears in his book The End of Faith, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks.

Fellow pop atheist AC Grayling says that faith

“directly controverts canons of intellectual integrity…’Faith’ is not a respectable or admirable thing; having been so long paraded as a virtue and worthy of respect, the truth is otherwise… it is irresponsible, lazy, and too often dangerous.”

The real danger

When I was about 20, I realised that I had dismissed faith as irrational without ever engaging it. I had prided myself on open-mindedness while at the same time refusing to hear what people of faith had to say. This struck me as deeply hypocritical, so I went to seminary. I asked religious people about faith. I studied what theologians and philosophers said about it. I did this for about twelve years.

In this time, I confirmed my earlier belief that there are extreme examples of irrationality and close-mindedness in religion. Of course there are! But there are extreme examples of irrationality and close-mindedness in secularism, too. The danger isn’t “faith.” The danger is what I used to do: over-simplifying and reducing one another to easy targets so we can tear each other down.

Faith, I now know, looks very different to many people. Some forms of it are healthier than others. Some are toxic.

But after more than twelve years of study, I’ve come to believe a specific way of defining or practicing faith is not just acceptable for our society but crucial. I consider it the answer to many of our shared needs--especially for more love, generosity, justice, resilience, progress, and hope.

It's this:

a choice.

Faith is a choice.

Our society is unique among all societies that have ever existed. It is the first society where we must choose: to trust and believe just a little bit, or to distrust and believe nothing at all.

This is what “don’t believe” looks like:

Distrust. Stick to the “bare facts” of physical reality and science. Live as though there is no possibility of any dimensions existing beyond material reality as we understand it today.

There is no Creator, no ultimate love, no ultimate home. There is only the here and now. When you die, nothing happens.

I subscribed to this option for thirty years because I thought it necessary to be loyal to the truth. I thought that being a good person meant resisting the temptations of faith. I felt proud of myself for bravely accepting the emptiness of the world. But it was poor consolation.

Another reason I followed this option was because I—like most people in our culture—had a deeply rooted habit of suspicion and distrust. Authorities of all kinds have so routinely deceived and disappointed us that most of us live habitually expecting to be attacked, hurt, let down, duped, used, manipulated, and misled. We must always expect there’s a trick behind any promise. Every offering has a catch. We subconsciously live by the slogan “it’s too good to be true.”

This predisposes us to experiencing a specific kind of harm: when we anticipate being hurt, we often hurt ourselves first so that we get to be in control of the pain. For the first thirty years of my spiritual journey, part of my resistance to God was that I was so afraid of finding out He didn’t exist I never let myself take seriously the possibility that He might.

Here’s what “believe” looks like:

Trust. Take a look at your options and say “yes,” to the better one, the one rich in possibility and hope and light.

Embrace the possibility that there are dimensions of reality beyond our imagining that we cannot see or touch. Embrace the possibility that your story may be a part of some larger story. Embrace the possibility that what you do matters ultimately, and is a part of the great unfolding of a narrative beyond your comprehension.

Do this with lightness. Have a bold vision, but let a part of that boldness be its ability to change and grow. Trust the community of spiritual seekers all around the world. Hold all your opinions as hypotheses, and seek to refine them in community with others as different from you as possible.

Open yourself to the possibility that you might be able to experience the love of God and walk into greater peace, joy, resilience, and generosity than previously.

Responsible faith

Harris and Grayling say faith is belief against evidence.

However: faith can be deeply evidentiary. Done right, faith never contradicts evidence or quality reasoning. Indeed, to me, faith means being loyal to every scrap of evidence, including any that God may provide us, and constantly revising my views of everything.

There are two kinds of evidence for transcendent beliefs: intellectual evidence, which includes historical, archaeological, and philosophical reasons to believe (or not to believe), and experiential evidence, which comes from believing in God and seeing what happens.

For each of us, experiential evidence is personal, but we can, and should, always talk about our experiences with others. We should get feedback, compare, and learn from one another. I consider my experiences to be data points for God, but I’m open to being incorrect.

Faith of the sort I’m advocating doesn’t mean putting your head in the sand. It means walking simultaneously with trust and with your eyes wide open. It means embracing your own limitations and learning to delight in being proved wrong or revising your perspective.

The obligation to have faith

Many people come to faith in God through a major religious experience. They have a sudden shift. They go from skeptic to Believer with a capital “B” seemingly overnight.

That is not how it’s worked for me. I decided to see if I could believe. When I first set out to cultivate faith, I didn’t believe anything at all.

Why did I do it?

I had one very specific reason: it would make the world a better place.

I already knew that belief in God was reasonable, and that God might exist. I already knew that I could get evidence for God if I dared to believe a little bit first.

But what convinced me to finally try believing was an argument William James makes in his essay Is Life Worth Living? He says:

if there is something you can believe in that is reasonable, and that will make you either a happier or better person, or both,

then you are not just licensed, but obliged to believe it.

Not just licensed, but obliged. Believing in God was not just reasonable but would also make me more of all the things I always wanted to be: more joyful, more peaceful, more generous, more resilient.

Thus, I was facing a dual realization:

God might be real, and

Trying to see if I could believe—that is, intentionally opening myself to God’s potential presence in my life—would be an act both of exploring truth as well as making me a better person.

Put like this, the next step for me was obvious:

Do it.

Choose faith. Choose trust. Take a chance on God, and see what happens.

That was eleven months ago now, and I can honestly say it was the best thing I’ve ever done. My belief is far from certain, but it doesn’t have to be—indeed, in some ways it shouldn’t be.

I just keep saying yes to trust, and my heart is lighter and more free than I ever imagined possible.

Taking a chance on God

The secular poet Mary Oliver once famously asked us:

“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

What will I do? What will you do?

If faith means taking a chance on God and seeing what happens – and in doing so stepping into lives of greater peace, joy, resilience, and generosity, together –

What are any of us waiting for?

Article

Creed

Education

11 September 2025

5 min read

Our social problems need theology, here’s why

Taking the god’s-eye view develops critical skills

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

young people listen, and ponder, to a speaker off screen.

M Accelerator on Unsplash.

At secondary school level, Religious Studies continues to attract strong numbers. On the surface, this looks like a healthy sign for the subject. Yet, critics argue that appearances can be deceiving: many faith-based schools make the subject compulsory, artificially pushing up participation. The result is a stark disconnect when students progress to higher education. Here interest appears to drop off sharply, and several universities have been forced to close their single-honours degrees in Theology and Religious Studies due to unsustainable student numbers.

But this presents a misleading picture – even at tertiary level students are far more interested in Theology and Religious Studies than the statistics seem to suggest. While few undergraduates commit to a full degree in Theology, (in Scotland this is called Divinity) or Religious Studies, partly because career pathways outside of ordained ministry and teaching can seem unclear, many are eager to sample the subject alongside their main studies. This means that at the University of Aberdeen, the department of Divinity finds a different kind of relevance. Thanks to Aberdeen’s flexible degree structure, it is not unusual to find law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and even physics students sitting in on our undergraduate modules. This interdisciplinary mix brings a distinctive energy to classroom discussions, as well as a few challenges… and challengers.

Some students arrive never having opened a Bible, never having heard a word from the Qur’an, and never having engaged with any other religious text. Many are openly ambivalent about the existence of God, some downright hostile, and more than a few admit that they were drawn in by the promise of coursework-based assessment rather than traditional exams. Yet, once in the room, most engage with surprising enthusiasm, and even the challengers play a vital role.

What emerges is a lively space where students approach theology less as a matter of personal faith and more as an intellectual exercise, grappling with life’s big questions, testing out ideas, and debating seriously with the prospect that God exists. Far from diminishing the subject, this shift gives the Divinity department a new role: not as a training ground for clergy, but as a forum for critical thinking across disciplines.

In one of our courses for example, students are asked to debate this question: if a human chooses to go wild swimming in a crocodile’s natural habitat, does the crocodile have a right to kill and eat that human, as it would any other prey item that strayed into its path? Or, if a person with profound physical and intellectual disability is not able to live out many of the rights and responsibilities envisaged by the United Nations Convention on Human Rights, on what grounds are they still reckoned to be a human person? As we tease out the (multiple) possible answers to these questions, many of the turn out to be surprisingly theological. Whilst some students will work towards becoming better able to affirm and articulate their own atheism, others are surprised to discover that they have been living out a deistic morality all along; on the quiet, their internal moral compass believes in God.

But my sense is that even if students don’t walk out with an easy A, they walk out with a set of skills that is, in the long run, far more valuable.

Further to that, in an open letter the Theos think tank recently highlighted the role of theology in the ethical and cultural development of communities. They argue that theological study equips people to engage thoughtfully with different people groups and traditions, to develop skills in interfaith dialogue, and to promote communication across cultural barriers. Put simply:

“In an increasingly polarised world, it helps us understand other points of view.”

This insight is highly relevant to our students as they set out on varied career paths in an increasingly complex world. The skills honed in our Divinity classrooms – empathy, critical thinking, close observation, and clear writing – are both essential and transferable. Theology degrees do not lead only to ordination or teaching; they can open doors to careers in journalism, diplomacy, politics, community work, authorship, and screenwriting, among many others. As Professor Gordon Lynch, Professor of Religion, Society and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, observed at a recent panel discussion:

“It’s very difficult to think about a major geopolitical issue at the moment in which religion isn’t deeply implicated in some way.”

The relevance of theological training extends far beyond traditional disciplines. For example, law students will need to recognise not only that a person with profound disability is a human person, but also to understand the deeper ethical and theological reasons why society judges this to be so. International Relations students will need to appreciate why resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict is not as simple as drawing lines on a map, but is rooted in long histories of faith, identity, and belonging – histories which will reach their influence far into the future as well as the present. Sports science and physiotherapy students will need to empathise with the human drive to become ever faster and stronger, while discerning when to help people recognise the limits before injury occurs.

So, we gather all these students and more into our divinity courses, and work with them as they develop such skills. By discussing these matters as though God exists, in a space where there is unapologetic openness to confessional or deistic ways of looking at the world, students are freed to adopt a third-person standpoint, a “god’s-eye view” if you like, which allows them to critically examine both their own and other people’s perspectives. When this freedom becomes apparent, it is the challengers often find themselves the ones being challenged, and hostility soon morphs into vibrant dialogue. Also, for those who want “an easy A” it quickly becomes apparent that coursework-based assessment is in no way easier than traditional exams – if anything, it can be the opposite! Getting your ideas down on paper, coherently, and with relevant references to research from across disciplines is a sophisticated competency. But my sense is that even if students don’t walk out with an easy A, they walk out with a set of skills that is, in the long run, far more valuable.

With an eye to business models and balance sheets, many universities don’t think they need their theology departments anymore, and with the current financial precarity faced by the higher education sector, on paper this may be true. But society is crying out for complex ways forwards with complex situations, and the problems of social division are becoming more apparent than ever. Whilst it is clear that fewer and fewer students are choosing to do whole theology degrees, it is also clear the world still needs theologians.

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