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

Belief

Creed

Weirdness

24 June 2024

6 min read

Revival – really?

Are we moving beyond the secular scepticism of religion?

Abigail Frymann Rouch

Abigail is a journalist and editor specialising in religious affairs and the arts.

A cross held aloft is illumminated by a shaft of light that also reveals hands raised in priase.

Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash.

Whisper it if you will, but an increasing number of observers are wondering if we are creeping towards some kind of Christian revival. High-profile public figures such as former atheist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, novelist Paul Kingsnorth, comedian Russell Brand and storyteller Martin Shaw have converted. Articles and podcasts from secular writers and thinkers extolling Christianity’s influence on Western culture, the societal benefits of faith, or a renewed appreciation of the sacred, are becoming a more common sight than those tub-thumping for atheism.

Among these thinkers is historian Tom Holland, who has argued that Western values, including secularism, socialism, feminism and human rights have their roots in a “Christian seedbed”. Some secular female writers are finding in the sexual revolution much to regret: Mary Harrington, author of Feminism against Progress, and writer Louise Perry, who penned The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, are opposed to casual sex and in favour of marriage.

Then there’s the Canadian academic and YouTube hit Jordan Peterson, currently on a speaking tour titled, “We who wrestle with God” and offering Bible-based life lessons to his hungry, mainly male, hearers. Even the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins said in a radio interview this Easter that he considers himself a cultural Christian and “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.”

A term has been coined for someone close to Christianity but just outside it, such as Holland: “Christian-adjacent”. The broadcaster Justin Brierley has devoted a book to this apparent renewed interest, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. In it he argues the New Atheism that fed off the horror of the religious extremism behind 9/11 is “a largely spent force” that has splintered into factions. (Sunday Assembly, the gathering for non-religious people, has seen its income plummet from £267,161 in 2016 to just £28,120 in 2022. Its leaders were approached for comment.)

What does all this amount to? Are we moving beyond the secular scepticism of religion? Does anyone want to return to the judgemental, Anglo-centric Christianity of a previous age?

I wish to be somebody who goes, ‘But look, come with me, see this, see that. Does that speak to you?’ The whole of my writing is to help people get away from preconceptions.”

Iain McGilchrist

The author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says of a possible religious revival: “I feel that there is [one], and I feel that there will be. And I think it's important.” Already, he says, “It's much easier to talk about religion and one's religious beliefs … than it would have been 20 years ago [and] a lot of people say that.” Some young people who are not from a religious background have surprised him by finding their way to religion.

People he knows who have turned to Christianity in mid-life have moved “to the Catholic Church, but most of them to the Orthodox Church, because they see … genuine valid, uninterrupted tradition of the divine and the sacred, of worship of it, of the sense of wonder, the sense of relative humility, not triumphant exaltation, and the sense of a shared oneness that is encaptured in these ancient rituals.”

McGilchrist believes the route of fulfilment “is oneness with nature, with the Divine and with one another,” and that rediscovering a connection to the Sacred (he refers to the Sacred or Divine rather than religion) would address other pressing issues such as the “poisoning of the oceans”, due to “a proper understanding of our position in the cosmos, not as the exploiter, but as the caretaker.”

Of his own views, he says: “I genuinely am not sure how to understand what it means to be a Christian really, but I suspect that I am one.” He stresses that he doesn’t want anyone to be put off by their preconceptions of what that might mean. “I wish to be somebody who goes, ‘But look, come with me, see this, see that. Does that speak to you?’ The whole of my writing is to help people get away from preconceptions.”

“There is an intellectual revival, if you like, because the complacent secularism, which culminated in people like Richard Dawkins, is obviously broke.”

Andrew Brown

Mark Vernon, a psychotherapist, author and former Church of England priest, also perceives a shift in the conversation around religion, and a new sense of enquiry that did not exist 20 years ago. He believes “a mystical Christianity” would be needed to reach the many people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.

Author of Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, Vernon enjoys the silence of a Buddhist meeting or being out in nature on pilgrimage to holy places, “feeling different energies, different pulses, different rhythms … Being in a place where you just feel there's a different thing going on here, that can be healing. I think a lot of mental health is due to just people being trapped in very narrow worldviews.”

Dr Vernon, whose faith journey has included atheism, follows what he calls a “commodious” Christianity – “my perspective on the universal story, which I think is ultimately beyond any one expression of it – and focuses on the “Christ [that] lives within me”, in contrast to “more socially driven” or “conversion-driven” Western Christianity.

For Abby Day, Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, any talk of religious revival is “wishful thinking” but like Vernon she believes that if anything were to speak to the “spiritual but not religious” it would be “within them, or maybe within nature” and “non-institutional”.

Professor Day is wary of the interest in Christianity from the populist right, as seen in the European elections and US Evangelicals’ support of Trump. They “claim Christianity, but what they're claiming is a national identity, and so we're seeing Christianity be weaponised” to deliver a conservative agenda, she says.

Day, author of Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion, takes issue with some of Holland’s arguments, saying: “The Churches have not shown themselves to be exemplary models of equality or human rights.”

Veteran religious affairs journalist Andrew Brown, co-author of That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England lost the English people, is less hostile. He says: “There is an intellectual revival, if you like, because the complacent secularism, which culminated in people like Richard Dawkins, is obviously broke.” But he adds: “Most of the stuff that's interesting and new is coming from people who are either Christians or Christian-adjacent.” But, he adds, “It takes a long time for the ideas of the intelligentsia to filter down … “If there is to be anything like [a revival], it has to start locally, and far below the radar of news.” So, for example, what impact has 14 years of austerity had that have led to millions of people attending food banks and warm spaces in churches? (According to 2023 data from Savanta and the National Churches Trust 5 per cent of UK adults visited a church last year to access a food bank (equivalent to around 3.4 million people) and 4 per cent (2.7 million) for a warm space.) “That has to be doing something, but I don’t know what,” he laughs, adding: “There really isn’t enough decent religion reporting because journalism is in crisis.”

That puts established religion in good company. But the Churches the Boomers rejected may have become humbler during their exile, and alternatives are available that offer different emphases. Vernon notes that the Orthodoxy that has attracted Kingsnorth and Shaw – Vernon’s “favourite convert of this revival” – is comfortable with other faiths and is more about participation through liturgy than converting to safeguard your immortal soul. And one attraction of the silence Vernon enjoys is that it doesn’t give glib answers, including to the profound questions around meaning, purpose and identity that beset nation, Church and individuals alike.

Putin’s violent ambitions could yet drive people to prayer. For now, at least, the more thinkers publicly take Christianity seriously and rediscover its wonder and mystery, the fairer hearing its stories, values, social benefits and cultural legacy will receive in the rowdy market-place of ideas, offering – at the very least – the cradle agnostic a more informed choice.