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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.

Flags on lampposts are a cry from long-neglected communities

As banners fly, they whisper of pride and pain

Philip North

Philip is the Bishop of Blackburn

A St George's Cross flag flutters on a tower.

St Helen's Church, Welton, Yorkshire.

Different Resonance on Unsplash.

A flag meant to symbolise unity within a nation. Yet over the summer, flags in the UK became less a source of togetherness and more a flashpoint for division.

In towns and cities across the nation, flags of St George and Union Flags have appeared on bridges, on lamp posts and on buildings. The motivations of those hoisting the flags are often unclear, but the way in which different sets of people perceive these flags carries an alarming message about the widening gulf that now exists within our nation.

For one set of people, the flags are sinister and carry a deep sense of threat. For many people of global majority heritage, the flags bear an intimidating message that those with racist motives are claiming the nation 'back' from them, leaving them stateless and with nowhere to belong. Meanwhile for those on the centre or left of the political spectrum, the flags feel like a straightforward claim to power by the far right and a sign of the growing popularity of their policies and rhetoric. The Church of England has mostly placed itself on this side of the divide and many church leaders have spoken of the flag flying phenomenon with anxiety and distaste.

But there is another narrative at play. As the flags continue to flutter in the autumn breeze, something which is a symbol of fear for one set of people is for another a welcome sign of hope.

This was powerfully brought home to me during a meeting with a leading Orthodox rabbi following the synagogue attack in Manchester. In the course of a lengthy conversation, I asked him how he understood the flags and his comments were striking. 'When I returned from my holiday and saw the flags flying in Salford,' he told me, 'I felt the most tremendous sense of relief.'

So for that rabbi, the flags are claiming back a distinctive and confident British identity, lost by a failed experiment in multiculturalism that has left his own community deeply fearful. And he is far from alone.

One of the strengths of the Church of England is that we place well-trained, professional clergy and lay leaders in every neighbourhood in the country. That means that, in a culture of echo chambers and algorithms, we are uniquely placed to understand every side of a conflict.

When I contacted a group of church leaders from flag-flying communities in Lancashire, the results were intriguing. Of course they were aware of the darker side of this phenomenon. But they also understood the needs and fears of the people for whom the flags are welcome.

One priest told me of a volunteer in her church who assists with projects for the vulnerable and is good friends with asylum seekers in her congregation and yet she is still flying a flag because she feels that immigration has now 'gone too far.'

Another priest spoke of the flags as an outlet for the intense frustration of local people who feel left behind and ignored. Another spoke of them communicating a chronic disillusionment with a political system that has failed them.

For others there is frustration that their institutions seem willing to fly many different flags – the Ukraine flag or the LGBTQI+ flag – but perceive those same institutions to be embarrassed by the flag of their own nation.

Indeed, a chance to demonstrate a love for country was the most often cited reason. Many people take genuine pride in the flags flying over their communities as it gives them a chance to express pride in a nation that often seems to them to be overly apologetic about its past and embarrassed by patriotism.

Perhaps the most poignant reflection was a from a priest who has stood up to Tommy Robinson marchers on his estate and yet wrote, 'I think for some of those people who put up flags it was a desperate cry for their nation to take better care of them, like a neglected child trying to remind everyone that they're a part of the family too.

For many working-class communities, the globalisation and transnationalism that is viewed by those who hold power as the path to greater prosperity has been bad news. It has outsourced jobs, it has forced down wages so that many in-work people are still benefits-dependent and it has resulted in major demographic changes to communities over which local residents have no had no say.

Combined with years of grinding austerity and a political class that is quick to promise and slow to deliver, there is a powerful and intense anger in many parts of working-class Britain for which the flags have become a lightning conductor.

It seems now that one flag now symbolises two nations. And what is so alarming is that one side barely understands the other.

So how should Christians respond? A divided nation wants the established Church to take sides and indeed sees us as weak and vacillating if we do not. But the task of the Christian is not to take on one side or the other in every binary debate. It is to be on the Lord's side. And in this context, I think that means a twin response.

First it means attentively listening to everyone. We should hear the fears of those for whom flags are a sign of growing intolerance and so condemn racism and hatred. But equally importantly, even when we don't agree, we should understand and give voice to the anger of working-class communities who fear that the nation they love is being taken away from them. If that voice is not heard and attended to, then the far right will be all too happy to fill the vacuum that is left behind. In a divided nation, part of the vocation of the Church is to help one side to understand the other.

And second, it means speaking into the place of conflict words of Gospel peace. The Union Flag is more than a symbol of nation. It carries three crosses, each one pointing us to the saving work of Jesus Christ through which we are reconciled to the Father and so to each other. We listen, we understand, but above all we hold the cross high, for in that symbol is the only true and lasting source of unity.

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