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Atheism

Creed

18 August 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 3: the secret about truth I learned at seminary

In the third of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper recalls learning a crucial lesson about her knowledge and her truth claims.

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.

An unfocused views down on to stacks of books in an old library.

Jana Kowalewicz 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.

For the first 20 years of my life, I thought religion was for stupid and weak people. I carried a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in my purse. I studied science as a way to defeat religion.

But one day, while titrating an iron solution in a laboratory, a sudden realization crashed over me. I remember just staring at the orange solution simmering in the beaker, thinking, “oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.”

The realization was that I had dismissed religion as stupid without ever engaging it. I had never even asked religious people what they thought! I had done all this while priding myself on open-mindedness.

This struck me as deeply hypocritical. I had always thought that one of the hallmarks of a good argument was being able to defend the ideas of your enemies. I wasn’t even close.

So, I printed 500 pages from the Zygon Journal of Religion and Science. I sat down with a cup of tea. And after reading just two pages, I set the stack of paper back down on the desk and thumped my head down on top of them.

Oh no.

The theologians had a point!

To seminary

Twelve months later, I dropped my duffel bag on the floor of my new room in Theology House. Theology House was the residence of the most earnest students training to be pastors at the Boston University School of Theology.

I was an atheist, but the seminary administrators gave me the benefit of the doubt when I told them I wanted to be as immersed in the world of faith as possible. We had house-dinner planned for that night, and school was to begin Monday. I couldn’t wait. I was going to get a master’s degree in theology as an atheist.

I spent the next two years proving my old self wrong. It was delightful. Every day was a new opportunity to unearth another bias I didn’t know I had, or to discover another philosophical approach I hadn’t known existed. It was occasionally difficult to let go of certain cherished ideas, but it was more than worth it. The intellectual richness of faith blew my mind over and over.

About six months into my studies, I ran into a secular friend I used to sit around and bash religion with.

“So, what have you learned at seminary?” he asked me, grimacing. I told him the simple but life-changing truth: Christianity is intellectually rigorous. It’s reasonable. It can even be beautiful.

“Did you become a believer?” he asked. “No,” I said, shrugging. “But I’m beginning understand why other people do.”

Why do we believe what we believe?

The most important question I ended up asking at seminary was about the nature of belief itself. I needed to understand: how could my roommates and I all work so hard to be reasonable, but still believe such different things?

Rationality, I learned, is always contextual. All of us would like to think that what we believe—what seems to us the obvious, “rational” conclusion—is the truth. But it’s not. There are eight billion people on this planet and every single one of us thinks we are right about everything.

Each conclusion each of us draws comes from deploying our best possible reasoning to the model of reality that lives in our heads. These models are always under revision; they are the result of the model of one minute ago plus whatever happened in that minute. This process stretches all the way back to before birth, since exposure to different sounds and nutrients in the womb impacted how we began making sense of the world. Then we were born into contexts that came pre-laden with various metaphysical presuppositions, attitudes, and values. Throughout life we did and continue to do our best to reason within these models and to steer their development.

This “best reasoning” is never pure intellect. There is no such thing as reason unbiased by feeling. It is now an accepted scientific fact that thought and feeling are always intertwined.

Indeed, rationality itself may be best thought of as a feeling. The philosopher William James says we deem things true when they give us the “sentiment of rationality”—that is, a feeling of satisfaction or harmony that occurs when an idea fits well with our current model of reality. This doesn’t mean reason and reasonableness don’t exist; it means that, contrary to the popular myth that quality thinking is free of emotion, emotional awareness is a key element of it.

My friends and I were all reasonable while believing different things because we each made sincere effort to improve our reasoning as thought-feelers born into different models of reality. None of us could claim with 100 per cent certainty that we were correct. What we could do was welcome new insights into ourselves, one another, and the world that would help us keep developing our models in the direction of truth.

The path to truth

By the time I graduated from seminary, I hadn’t changed my mind on God. I remained a firm atheist.

But I had learned a crucial lesson: my knowledge and truth claims were far from perfect. If I wanted to say true things or to keep getting closer to the truth—which I very much did, my loyalty to truth still my highest value—I needed to do two things:

First, I needed to keep untangling my own personal history, thoughts, and feelings. Only through self-awareness could I unpack my own biases, hone my capacities to reason amidst emotion, and discern the elements of my worldview worth keeping or leaving behind.

Second, I needed to keep engaging people who were different from me. Only through exposure to new ideas could I expand or develop my own.

Today, my model of reality includes something I thought it never would: God. But this change took twelve years of the most careful, self-aware, humble, prudent, and open-minded quest for truth I could manage.

I’m not done revising the model, and I won’t ever be. God will almost surely remain a part of it, but I’m open to the possibility He will not. I’ll keep learning about myself; I’ll keep learning about others; I’ll keep steering my model as responsibly as I am able.

The ultimate truth of things beats at the heart of all our eight billion different perspectives; the best any of us can do is keep working to beat in harmony with it.

The insane economics of Jesus

Does he even know about inflation, budget fights, and mutual funds?

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

Splitting the bill?

The Chosen.

Written by David Clay. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 11 November 2025. By kind permission.

Having evolved into a month-long monstrosity of various parties and trunks-or-treats, Halloween has left my daughters with an absurd surfeit of candy. It’s enough to keep several dentists in business. Even so, my children still fear the annual imposition of the dreaded “dad tax,” which they argue is illegitimate due to their lack of representation. My kids have long since learned that no matter how impressive their hoard of candy, it always runs out eventually.

What seemed like an abundance the night before is revealed to be limited supply. In other words, my children are always shocked to discover scarcity.

Most people for most of history produced about enough to keep themselves alive. The Domesday Book (1086 AD), a survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror, shows that peasants (i.e., people with limited or no land ownership rights who were beholden to a local lord) made up 95 per cent of the population. While peasants in some cases achieved prosperity, this was the exception to the rule of subsistence labor, usually agricultural in nature. For almost everyone, the possibility of starvation was anything but theoretical.

In that respect, the situation in early medieval England was little different from that in first-century Palestine. There as well, nine out of ten people made just enough to survive — and, sometimes, not even that much. Both Josephus and the New Testament mention the mid-century famine (44–48 AD) that devastated Judea. There was no social safety net in that time and place. People could and did starve to death.

It was to people permanently conscious of scarcity, then, that a certain self-styled rabbi — until very recently a day laborer himself — said,

“Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? … But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

Jesus’ audience would have agreed that provision ultimately comes from God. But “don’t be anxious about tomorrow”? In a world where starvation is always just a bad harvest away? Jesus, with a straight face, is instructing his audience to live as if abundance, not scarcity, is the ultimate reality in life. Not for the first time, he seems more than a little disconnected from what it’s actually like to live on this planet.

Insofar as some of us moderns in industrialized societies are a little less worried about starving or dying from exposure, this is thanks to human ingenuity (thank you very much) coming up with ways to radically increase our productivity. An undeniably magnificent achievement — but also one that’s exacerbated other forms of scarcity.

Think, for instance, of the “attention economy,” the battle to secure ever-shrinking attention spans. The very computational tools that have made our contemporary standard of living possible have also hooked us up to a constant pipeline of far more information than we could ever possibly process. So much so that the act of paying attention, seemingly a basic feature of being human, is valued at an increasing premium.

Or, consider time. The mid-twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that automation and enhanced productivity would naturally result in less stress and more leisure time. What he did not foresee is that increasing productivity increases expectations of how productive we should be. Time, in all times and places, is the ultimate “vanishing asset,” but the proliferation of time-management strategies and gadgets tells us, I think, that time seems even more limited when we are expected (or expect ourselves) to hustle and grind.

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that scarcity is the single most pressing reality in human experience. In some form or another, this is true of every human culture. We combat scarcity with the urge to simplify, to streamline, to do more with less, to find life hacks, or invent new technologies.

Jesus, however, tells us to ignore it. Or, at least, to behave as though scarcity is not that interesting or important. God feeds the birds and clothes the lilies; you’re more important than a bird or lily to God; ergo, God will take care of you. Stop stressing.

This doesn’t feel aspirational or inspirational. It feels insane. I have a mortgage. I have three girls to put through college. I need money, energy, focus, and time, not the bizarre exhortations of some mystic. Does Jesus even know about inflation?

But the weird thing is that, yeah, he does. Jesus is very much not detached from the realities of everyday life in his time and place. He is up on current events like collapsing towers and the machinations of Herod Antipas (“that fox,” Jesus calls him. Not a compliment). He seems a little bored by politics, but he’s definitely not naive about the power structures and major players in Galilee and Judea. He makes a conniving, dishonest middle manager the hero of one of his stories. Politics, taxes, sectarian violence, collapsing infrastructure — the Gospels describe Jesus interacting with a world very different than our own, but one that’s still immediately recognizable.

The difference is that I tend to think of inflation data, budget fights, geopolitical maneuvering over scarce resources, and supply chains as “the real world,” while the kingdom of heaven is something lovely but also a bit airy, a little insubstantial. Jesus saw things in exactly the opposite way. The kingdom is Reality, while the lords of the gentiles, the payment of taxes, even the pressing daily concerns for food and clothing, are all fleeting or at most secondary. And the kingdom is abundant, for its King doesn’t give stones when his children need bread.

What does it mean to live as if abundance and not scarcity is the final word? I don’t know. What I do know is that what really feels insane, some days, is thinking I can conserve enough time, money, energy, focus or whatever else to build a life in which I find fulfillment or peace. There are cracks in my no-nonsense, economically rational world that beckon me to ask, what if I have no money, time, energy — nothing but my daily bread — only to find that I already have all I need?

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