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

Biology

Creed

21 June 2024

5 min read

We’re gonna need a bigger ontology

Orca attacks prompt questions about being.

Henna Cundill

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

A boat holding a camera crew drifts next to a whale fin.

Filming Shetland's orcas.

BBC.

In May 2023, British sailor Iain Hamilton was aboard his yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar when it was set upon by a pod of five orcas who succeeded in biting off both rudders, leaving him with no means of steering his boat back to shore. These enormous killer whales could have destroyed the small boat in its entirety, rounding off their escapades by making a quick lunch of Hamilton and his crew. But instead, they seemed content to merely play with the small vessel, pushing it around “like a ragdoll” for a while, before swimming away to find their next meal elsewhere.

How do we explain such behaviour? Environmentalists have been quick to suggest that the orcas are demonstrating their frustration with the human race – carrying out revenge attacks on those callous two-legged beings who overfish their waters and pollute their habitat. Other commentators propose a less anthropocentric view. One leading zoologist, Mark Cowardine, attributes the whales’ behaviour simply to play, “Boisterous play, yes, by animals weighing up to six tonnes, but nothing more sinister than that.”

The phenomenon of whales attacking boats is not new. Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby Dick (published in 1851) is a fictional tale of one such encounter, inspired in part by the real-life sinking of a ship, The Essex, during a whale attack in 1820. However, there appears to have been a surge in such incidents in European waters over the past few years – more than 500 orca attacks were recorded between 2020 and 2023 alone. It is thought to be largely the same pod of whales who are responsible, but scientist fear that other pods are beginning to learn the behaviour.

This raises the question: at what point should humanity intervene to prevent the spread of knowledge? Theoretically, it would be possible, to isolate the ring leaders and remove them from whale ‘society’ (send them to ‘whale jail’ if you like). And, let’s be honest, in previous generations, trophy hunters would have blithely exterminated the troublesome pod without a second thought. But we live in more enlightened times, wherein we respect nature’s right to be protected from human interference.

The whale world has its own language, with distinct dialects, and is even thought to have culture, including celebration of life events and rituals for grieving the death of a family member.

On the other side of the globe, this right has even been enshrined in law. Pacific Indigenous leaders from the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, New Zealand and Tonga have agreed a treaty that officially recognises whales and dolphins as having legal personhood. The Whanganui River in New Zealand is also recognised as a “legal person” – a move intended both to enact reparations for the damage done to the river by European settlers, and to protect it from any future harm by the human race.

A being that is recognised as having legal personhood is one which has “rights and duties itself and which can enforce these rights against other legal persons.” So far so good for a river, which is vulnerable, not sentient, and certainly needs protecting from our shocking ability to exploit and pollute the natural world. But what can we say about whales and dolphins? Unlike the river, they are sentient. The whale world has its own language, with distinct dialects, and is even thought to have culture, including celebration of life events and rituals for grieving the death of a family member. With such obvious evidence of moral intelligence, should we be considering the ‘duties’ inherent to a whale’s legal personhood, as well as the rights?

The whales still seem to be communicating the same message: our ocean is vast, and we can make you humans feel your tininess in it.

In parts of the Hebrew Bible, animals are already described as having personhood. In the creation story both humans and animals are described as having nephesh – a Hebrew word that is sometimes translated as ‘soul’, and which indicates certain aspects of what it means to be sentient and have a moral conscience. Intriguingly, God seems to employ this sentience – at times employing animals to communicate with humans.

One famous example even includes a whale. When the runaway prophet Jonah was thrown from a ship into the ocean, we are told that God directed a large fish to swallow him up, and after three days return Jonah to dry land to continue the work to which God has asked him to do. In another example, when the donkey of the prophet Balaam was being unfairly beaten, the Bible records that the donkey turned and said to his master, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me?”

It is clear that some of the biblical writers believed that God could and would use animals to communicate with the human race, either through their behaviour or even through direct speech. Therefore, these orca “attacks” make me wonder if God may still be doing so today. Whilst both humans and animals are described as having nephesh in the creation story, the story does then go on to distinguish humans as having ‘dominion’ over the created order. The idea of what it means to have ‘dominion’ has been interpreted differently through the centuries of Christian thought. In the time of Moby Dick, when the fashion for trophy hunting and taxidermy was at its height in the western world, dominion had a feel of superiority and dominance to it. These days, it is more common to hear ‘dominion over creation’ described in terms of responsible stewardship and care.

But whilst human culture has changed (arguably for the better) it is noticeable that between Moby Dick’s time and now, the whales still seem to be communicating the same message: our ocean is vast, and we can make you humans feel your tininess in it. The temptation is there for us to intervene, to prevent these boisterous orcas from perpetuating their violent behaviour. This would serve to silence the voice that reminds us, uncomfortably, of our fundamental human vulnerability on the ocean. But perhaps we should not be too hasty. We cannot know if, inherent to the personhood of whales, they have a ‘duty’ to keep us in our place. Perhaps it is even their God-given call to behave in a way that reminds us that creation is ultimately, untameably, wild. Listening carefully, we might yet discover that God is speaking to us in whale song.