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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.

Why the incarnation adds up for me

There’s much more to it than maths and linguistics.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

An abstract image of red and gold fluid shapes akin to stained glass, seem to depict a face and an upstretched hand.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

I’m rubbish at maths.

This hasn’t actually held me back all that much in life because I’m a theologian and biblical scholar by profession; I basically train vicars for a living. Being bad at maths means I fit in well in the Church because – I don’t know if you’ve noticed – Christianity is rubbish at maths too.

We go to school and we’re taught things like one plus one plus one equals three. We then go to Church and we’re told one Father plus one Son plus one Holy Spirit now somehow equals one God.

And the rubbish maths doesn’t stop there.

The Church also says that Jesus is God incarnate: that He is 100 per cent God and 100 per cent human. Even I know that this isn’t how percentages work.

But what does it mean to say that Jesus is 100 per cent God and 100 per cent human? More importantly: why should you care? What difference does this make to you?

What is the incarnation?

If you’ve ever had chilli con carne, you might know this literally means ‘chilli with meat’; ‘carne’ means ‘meat’. And the ‘carne’ in ‘incarnation’ is exactly the same: it means ‘meat’ or ‘flesh’.

So, we can think of ‘incarnation’ as ‘enfleshment’, or ‘taking on flesh’, or ‘becoming flesh and blood’. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘incarnation’: that someone or something has become flesh and blood.

In the Bible we read that, while Jesus “existed in the form of God … He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, assuming human likeness.”

And this is where the maths of the whole enterprise starts to get tricky.

The Bible does not claim that Jesus stops being God when He is human, or that He is somehow ‘less God’ in some way. Nor does it say that Jesus is anything less than completely human.

The word translated as ‘form’ in English – the ‘form’ of God, and the ‘form of a human servant’ – is morphē in Greek (the language the New Testament was written in). It’s where we get English words like ‘morph’. The animated character Morph is a little clay man who changes his form – his shape – at will. The Mighty, Morphing Power Rangers are people who change their form to become superheroes.

Something like this happens to Jesus in the Gospels, too, when Jesus’ face begins to shine like the sun and his clothes become unnaturally white. Most English translations say that Jesus is ‘transfigured’.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not a word I often use; things are very rarely ‘transfigured’ in my life.

The Greek word underlying this is metamorpheō, where we get English words like ‘metamorphosis’ from. Hopefully you can see that morph (the word for ‘form’) in the middle of the word metamorpheō. And whenever a Greek word has meta- at the start of it – like in metamorpheō. It’s to do with change.

Here, then, Jesus is literally trans-form-ed. Jesus, while in human form, is now revealed in His divine form.

It’s not that Jesus becomes God in this moment, or that he stops being human. Rather, Jesus is revealed in the transfiguration – in his metamorphosis – to be, and to have always been, fully God and fully human.

And so, when the Church celebrates the incarnation at Christmas, it celebrates God’s perfect eternal Son becoming embodied – taking on human flesh and a human body – in the person of Jesus.

This is not the life of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency I am so often encouraged to cultivate by the world around me. It’s a life of needing other people

Okay, at this point, you might be thinking: “That’s lovely, but who cares?”

Well, the Church’s claim that Jesus is 100 per cent God and 100 per vent human is deeply important for every one of us. Without it, we’re scuppered. In particular, the incarnation matters for at least four reasons.

First, the incarnation means we really do see God when we see Jesus. Jesus is fully God. In Jesus, “the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” to use the Bible’s language. In other words, then, there is no God hidden behind Jesus.

Jesus makes it genuinely possible to know God; if Jesus was anything less than fully God, then we would only know a diluted, watered down version of God through Him.

Second, without the incarnation there can be no rescuing of humanity, or of the world around us.

You don’t have to look very far to see the worst of humanity. All too often it feels as though those in power are exactly the last people we would want to wield it. Whether you’d call yourself a Christian or not, I think we can all agree that things need fixing.

The Church claims Jesus came to fix things.

Being fully God and fully human, Jesus acts as our representative to God, and God’s representative to us. He overcomes any difference between God and the world, and restores it to the glorious state in which God intended it to be.

But this act of fixing – of setting things right, of restoration, of transformation – is only possible for someone fully God and fully human. Only the incarnation makes it possible for us and the world around us to be put right.

Third, because Jesus is fully human, His life shows us what it means to live well.

Jesus is the most ‘human’ human who has ever human-ed. He is a human cranked up to eleven. Jesus’ life is what it looks like to live the perfect human life. He does not imitate our humanity; we imitate His. We are not the norm for what humanity looks like; He is.

But Jesus’ life does not look like my idea of perfect. Jesus’ perfect human life involved complete and utter dependency on other people.

As a baby, Jesus’ mum and dad cleaned up his poo and His sick; Mary probably breastfed Him. As a child, Jesus relied on other people to be educated. As a man, Jesus had no home: His dad probably now dead and His mum convinced he’d gone mad, He relied on other people for shelter, for clothes, and for food.

This is not the life of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency I am so often encouraged to cultivate by the world around me. It’s a life of needing other people.

The incarnation then, shows us what it does – and does not – mean to live well.

Fourth, and finally, the incarnation means that none of the awful things that we do to each other and are done to us by others define our value, our worth, or our humanity.

Jesus was a victim of sexual abuse.

Some people are very resistant to this idea. I wonder if there are misguided notions of shame at play here: as though this would somehow make Jesus less human, or less God, or less saviour.

Again, Jesus has other ideas.

All four of the Gospels tell us that Jesus was stripped naked as part of His torture and death at the hands of the Romans. And we know from historical records that this is what the Romans did to those they crucified: they stripped them and they tortured them nakedly and in public, as an act of very deliberate humiliation and degradation.

The radical claim of Jesus’ life – of the incarnation – is that this does not make Him less-than-human in any way.

No, remember: Jesus is more human than anyone who’s ever lived. He is the norm for what it means to be human, not us. Nor does it make Him less God, or less of a saviour. Jesus’ perfect life tells victims of abuse that their lives are not tarnished, or diminished, or downgraded through the actions of others.

The incarnation, then, is God’s decisive act to show the world, once and for all, that He is for us – that He is for you, and for me. So much so, that God has chosen to become entirely like us, that we might become more like Him.

In the incarnation, God decisively declares the goodness of humanity by freely choosing to become fully human. To be human, then, is not to be someone or something that God flees from. Rather, God loves humanity so much – He loves you so much – that He has decided He cannot be without you, and He cannot be Himself without becoming like you.