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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 derby, the downpour, and the death of a hero

At Anfield, grief and glory collide

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A mural on a side of a pub shows a footballer making a heart sign.

Diogo Jota commemorated, near Anfield.

Liverpool FC.

My wife and I went to our first game of the season recently: Liverpool v Everton, in the pouring rain. The stuff of dreams.

It’s a bit of a walk from the train station to Anfield and the whole way, I’d been so excited to get that first glimpse of the stadium, the fans, the atmosphere, the buzz. We turn a corner and suddenly you can see Anfield looming large between rows of houses. One more street and then we’re there and … flowers on the floor. Tributes to Diogo Jota.

Oh yeah. Diogo Jota’s dead.

We get a pie, a programme for Jo’s Mum and Dad (who lets us use their season tickets; thanks Jeff and Janet), find our seats. Kick off. Flags wave from the Kop as they normally do and … there’s one of Diogo Jota.

Oh yeah. Diogo Jota’s dead.

10 minutes in and Ryan Gravenberch scores a beautiful goal to make it 1-0 and Anfield is roaring. Then 20 minutes hits and everyone stands up to sing Diogo Jota’s song (“Oh, he wears the number 20 …”).

Oh yeah. Diogo Jota’s dead.

I hadn’t forgotten that Diogo Jota had died, but being at Anfield made me remember that Diogo Jota had died.

Being at Anfield – seeing the flowers and the flags, singing his song – all of it hit me and my wife unusually hard. With each new reminder of Jota’s death, I was taken back to the moment a mate messaged me to ask if I’d seen the news of his car crash. There I was again, no longer at Anfield watching the footy, but stood in my house, staring at my phone in disbelief.

For the last year or so, St. Mellitus College (where I’m lucky enough to teach) has been hosting a series of public events to celebrate 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea. The events have been fantastic and, one of the perks of the job is that I’ve had loads of chances to learn from some of the best theologians alive at these events.

In March 2025, Professor Trevor Hart was giving one of the public lectures for this project. The next day, I and the rest of the staff team had a chance to speak with the professor about his paper. One of the things that struck me in the conversation was what he said about trauma.

One of the key characteristics of trauma, he said, is that it interrupts our sense of time. I’m going about my day and – all of a sudden – something triggers my trauma response and the past (that thing or event that causes my trauma) is made very present again. I see it and feel it as if it I’m living it for the first time again; it is re-present-ed to me.

And this is exactly what happened to me, 20 minutes into the Merseyside Derby.

Look, I’m not saying I have PTSD about Jota’s death or anything like that. I didn’t know Jota; frankly he’s not mine to grieve and I don’t want to co-opt the loss that Jota’s friends and family will be feeling.

But, our first trip to Anfield since Jota’s death gave us something of a taste of how trauma re-present-s itself. The past became all too present as I stood there, thinking about the moment I heard of Jota’s death.

But, for a Christian theologian (like Hart), this aspect of trauma is very significant. Because this is exactly what happens in the sacraments.

The sacraments are bits of Church life in which Jesus Christ is really and especially present. Different Churches will disagree on exactly which events or rituals constitute the sacraments but most would say that baptism and Holy Communion definitely do.

Let’s take Holy Communion (sometimes called the Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper) as an example. Again, this will look different in different Churches, but in holy communion bread and wine is blessed and said to become Jesus’ body and blood. And here we see the rupture of past and present. The body and blood of Christ, broken and shed on the cross before being raised again, is re-present-ed here for me, now. It is made really present (both in the physical and temporal sense of that word).

Time and space collapse in on themselves as Jesus Christ – who created time and space in the first place and so can do what He wants with them, thank you very much – bends them to His will just to be present here, and now, with me.

I wonder whether something similar happens in trauma, too? If trauma, too, might function as a sacrament, of sorts? If the moment of the past rupturing the present when trauma responses are triggered is precisely where Jesus Christ seeks to meet and really be present with those people?

It certainly felt like it in the roaring, red cathedral of Anfield Road. The moments of remembering Jota’s life and having his death re-present-ed to us felt genuinely … sacred.

And look, it was the Merseyside Derby, our first in-person game of the season; I was obviously excited, so maybe I was just primed to be emotional when these memories of Jota appeared. Maybe. Who knows? But it would be entirely in keeping with what the Church knows of God’s character that he meets with us precisely at those points where time and space begin to fall apart: in the sacraments, and in trauma.

There will be flowers and banners and songs for Jota for some time yet. Whenever we drive from our house into Liverpool city centre, we drive by a huge mural of Jota that’s been painted onto the side of a pub.

It won’t be possible to forget Jota, and there will be lots of prompts to remember him. And in those moments of remembering, time and space may well continue to collapse in on itself. I may find myself once again in my house, staring aghast my phone. And I may well find that Jesus Christ is there with me too.

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