Column

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 news of the ‘Quiet Revival’ needs taking with a pinch of salt

When Christianity becomes cool, it has a tendency to lose its soul.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An ancient salt shaker sits next to a pile of crushed rock salt.

Out of the salt shaker.

Jonathan Tame on Unsplash.

Mark Twain, that purveyor of slanted wisdom, was wary of data. "Figures often beguile me," he wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

Now whether Disraeli ever said this is a moot point. The quotation has been attributed to figures as various as Walther Bagehot, Arthur Balfour and the Duke of Wellington. Either way it has gone down in history as expressing a certain strand of suspicion when it comes to statistical analysis of the future.

This phrase came to mind this past week when reading The Quiet Revival, a study conducted by the Bible Society that suggests that the long story of church decline in England and Wales is over. It claims that church attendance has risen by 50 per cent over the last six years and particularly young adult men are increasingly turning to the Church, especially to the Roman Catholic and Pentecostal versions of it.

The report been hailed and celebrated by Christian commentators, perhaps in a spirit of relief, thankful for some good news against the background of months of dreary and gloomy news of resigning Archbishops, looming splits in the church over sexuality and the ongoing seemingly inevitable process of decline.

Now I don't for a moment mean to doubt the results of the survey. Or to get all Scrooge-like at the findings. For those of us who have been part of the church for years it is indeed welcome news and a cause for some cautious optimism. It always lifts the spirits a little to feel that others see what you see, and you're not whistling in the dark when it comes to continuing to believe. ‘Revival’ is perhaps too ambitious a word to use right now. It would need a lot more hard evidence from bigger surveys and more observable results to deserve such a designation. But there do seem to be straws blowing in the wind, perhaps the first signs of a refreshing breeze which might yet sweep away some of the shadows of sceptical unbelief.

The appeal of Christian faith is precisely the fact that it's not based on how many people believe it.

Yet forgive me if I take all this with a pinch of salt. The popularity of Christianity has always waxed and waned throughout the last two thousand years. There are times when it has been the flavour of the month - or the century - such as when it started to become the official religion of the Roman Empire 300 years or so after the time of Jesus. Yet popularity brings its dangers. When Christianity becomes cool, it has a tendency to lose its soul, its radical nature diluted by the flocks of people drawn to the cross as a kind of fashion accessory. At other times it has dwindled to a few hardy souls braving it out, like the eleven fearful disciples huddling together in Jerusalem, looking for an escape route after the execution of Jesus, or the tough, rugged Christians who carried on praying during years of persecution, often paying for their faith with their lives.

Christianity’s claims to truth are not dependent on a referendum. For us Christians, our faith remains true whether or not people believe it. The fact that more people may be going to church now than a few years ago doesn't make the Christian faith any more or less true. I've never taken the predictions of the church's demise too seriously. Which is why I'm not one for putting out the bunting when the predictions go the other way.

This why it seems to me that, like Mark Twain, believers in Jesus ought also to be a little sceptical of statistics. Numerical projections and probability theory have their uses in trying to spot social trends, but they don't have much bearing on questions of truth. After all, statistical analysis of what tends to happen to dead people would never have predicted the Resurrection.

The appeal of Christian faith is precisely the fact that it's not based on how many people believe it. It centres on an event where the eternal became temporal, where God entered into human history in the shape of a Galilean rabbi. It therefore transcends time and space, opinion polls and surveys. It gives a confidence rooted not in the swinging mood of public opinion, up one minute and down the next, but instead something lasting, permanent and reliable.

So be glad, if you want, at the prospect of a coming renewed wave of faith. But don’t be fooled into thinking this proves anything. As Jesus once said: “Do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Give now