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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.

Did Nick Cave’s tour just take thousands to church?

He’s picking holes in the idea that religion is where freedom goes to die.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A rock star prowls the stage while behind hundred of faces tined red star.

Cave and the congregation.

Instagram/nickcaveofficial.

I recently went to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Wild God Tour.

I was told that it would be a terrific show, and it was. I was told that Cave would be more charismatic and commanding than he’s been in decades, and he was. I was told that it would be some kind of spiritual experience, and it was…

Kind of.

Those who are likening it to a ‘spiritual’ (including ‘This Country’ actor, Charlie Cooper) experience are certainly onto something, the whole production is designed to be transcendent, it’s just that the adjective they’re opting for is a little too vague. Instead, I would suggest that the show is a religious experience.

Now, hear me out - I know that we tend to feel nice and comfortable with the ambiguity of the former adjective, and much more cautious when it comes to rigidity of the word I’ve subbed it out for. If you just winced at the sight of the big, bad, R-Word, I get it. It comes with all kinds of wince-worthy connotations. A lot of it, deserved. Some of it, not.

But, like it or not, I truly don’t think that Nick Cave is giving us the comfortable luxury of vague-ness.

When I wrote about the Wild God album upon its release, I mentioned that the ‘Wild God’ to whom the record is an obvious ode is not abstract. Rather, the ‘wild god’ is the Christian god. The album attaches itself to a specific story, it finds its home within a specific paradigm. And the same is true of the tour. I would propose, if I may be so bold, that Cave and his Bad Seeds have spent the past few months telling the Jesus-story in every city they’ve found themselves, and subsequently, taking tens of thousands of people to church.

I would hate for you to think that my objective here is to stick a flag on the hill of this album/tour/artist. It’s not my intention to claim Nick Cave for ‘team Christianity’; it’s not necessary, he speaks continuously and profoundly about his own faith. Rather, as someone who has lived her life according to the very same Jesus-story, I’m simply offering you a lens through which you can gaze upon this touring work of art.

So, I’ll suggest it again – the Wild God tour is a religious experience.

And I know that sounds too constrictive of an analysis, but I think that’s on us for ever kidding ourselves into thinking that ‘religious’, ‘Christianity’ and ‘church’ were small words.

That’s certainly not the way Nick views them. In a recent issue of his Red Hand Files, he writes,

‘ I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church – that profoundly fallible human institution – that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.’

Fascinating, isn’t it? The concept feels kind of upside down. How could confinement cultivate liberation? How could boundaries ever encourage freedom, or particularity somehow hold entirety?

Can the ‘spiritual imagination’ truly be ‘both contained and free’? I think it can. In fact, I think that would be my own story, too. And, what’s more, I think the Wild God tour is some kind of proof of concept.

Can art be bursting with rage and religion? I think Nick has just proved that it can. I think he is probing, once again, at the myth that faith and hope can’t sit alongside carnage.

The whole show is framed by Cave’s joyous bewilderment at his own conversion – song by song, it tells the story of how he has been wading through the thickets of grief, his eyes steadily fixed on the God who rescued him ‘just in time’.

It’s specific. It’s religious.

And here’s the funny thing: the show having such a specific story to tell doesn’t seem to have a narrowing effect. Instead, songs about storms in the tiny town of Tupelo and girls who live on Jubilee Street seem to be swept up into a story that’s big enough to hold them, big enough even, to imbue them with yet more meaning. Doubt also sits comfortably here. As does anger and profanity.

Can something be sweary and sacred? Can art be bursting with rage and religion?

I think Nick has just proved that it can. I think he is probing, once again, at the myth that faith and hope can’t sit alongside carnage. He’s finding holes in the idea that religion is a place where freedom goes to die, picking a fight with the claim that ambiguous spirituality, or even outright irreligion, is more freeing.

It’s a big old fight he’s picked, one that’s been fought – in one way or another – since the beginning of time. I guess, as a Christian, it’s a fight that I have picked, too. I have placed my life (and, if we’re going to get weird with it, my afterlife) within the confines of a particular story. Am I certain that I’m right? Of course not – otherwise my faith would be faith-less, no? Nevertheless, I too have chosen to place my understanding of the eternal in the confines of the particular. I, too, am trusting that within the boundaries of the Christian story, there’s space for me to run free.

The word ‘religion’ is roomier than we are often urged to believe. Need convincing? Nick Cave is your man.