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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.

In praise of nuance

Life is complicated. The early Christians had a much better way than a dramatic headline

Graham Tomlin

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

A typewriter holds a piece or paper reading 'truth'

Markus Winkler on Unsplash.

Seventeen hundred years ago this year, the early Christians inched their way towards a landmark statement. The Nicene Creed was the result of 300 years of wrestling with a question at the heart of this new movement: if the Jesus they worshipped was in some sense the ‘Son of God’, what did that mean? Was he a human prophet, better than most, but fundamentally just like the rest of us? Was he God in human disguise? Or a kind of half-breed, like a centaur - half human and half divine? Bishops and theologians spilt blood, sweat and tears (literally) over these questions. Simplistic answers were put forward and found wanting. Treatises were written, synods met, opponents were castigated and excommunicated. Even riots broke out as the debates waxed fiercely across the Roman world.

Eventually, in 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea issued a carefully worded and hard-won statement. It said that Jesus was ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.' Every word was carefully chosen and the fruit of long debate, deep prayer and thought. It didn’t solve all the problems, but it has stood the test of time, and is still recited in churches across the world today.

I have been pondering all this during the summer as our political debates have raged.

Take the issue of immigration. On one side, there are the ‘refugees welcome’ banners, the suspicion that fixing a flag of St George on a lamp post is a sign of incipient fascism, and that claiming we have a problem with immigration is inherently racist.

On the other side, it is ‘stop the boats’, calls for mass deportations, protests outside hostels for frightened immigrants, the implication that all immigrants are scroungers, destroying the soul of Britain (or the USA) and the need to rapidly close our borders.

But it’s complicated. There are significant differences between the claims of legal migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Most would probably agree that offering welcome to people escaping warfare, persecution and famine in their homelands is right, proper, and in line with a long tradition of wealthy countries offering a refuge for others in need. People will always be on the move, and to close all borders is unrealistic and unjust. The moderate, fertile British climate, our historic economic and political stability, our well-regulated legal system, the Christian faith which shaped our culture, even the relative tidiness of our streets and countryside, are gifts we inherit from the past and should be generous with them.

Yet these are blessings that can’t be taken for granted. They need protecting, not just for our sakes but for those with a legitimate claim to make a home here.

So, most would also agree that illegal immigration is a scourge, with the ruthless villains enticing desperate migrants to climb on their flimsy boats across the channel deserving little else but criminal sentences. Yet even mass ‘legal’ migration will change the character of the nation. In 1990, net migration was around 20,000 a year. In 2024 it was 430,000. When 40% of primary age children have at least one foreign-born parent, and for one in five, English is not their first language, that can't fail to have an impact on the character of the nation, especially in areas where housing is cheaper and newcomers to the country find it easier to find accommodation.

But this complexity gets lost in the need for a punchy headline. Neither ‘send them home’ or ‘all migrants welcome’ capture the dilemma. It needs nuance. It needs careful, patient working towards the right balance between differing claims – compassion towards the stranger and the preservation of the very things that draw the refugees and the restless here.

The same is true of Israel and Gaza. For the pro-Israel lobby, just to draw attention to the suffering in Gaza is to be anti-Semitic. To urge restraint on Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas, even if it means destroying Gaza and much of its population in the meantime is to echo the death camps and to bring down Zionist wrath. Yet for Palestine Action and its supporters, Israel’s legitimate need to live in peace without a neighbouring state dedicated to its destruction seems to count for nothing. How can it be expected to live alongside a regime that brutally murdered 1,400 of its citizens in one day?

Even assisted dying – on which I and others on Seen & Unseen take the strong view that it is a bad idea – is not simple. The cries of those facing a long and painful death need hearing and people like me, who argue against assisted dying, need to promote solutions that will alleviate such suffering without crossing the red line of encouraging a culture of death.

The truth and the resolution of our dilemmas – on immigration, or Gaza, or even assisted dying, are seldom simple. They require nuance. They need forbearance.

It’s complicated. Most important things are. Anyone who has tried to lead a large organisation will know that it’s often a delicate matter of trying to chart a path forward while keeping competing interests and perspectives on board. You lose some people along the way, but you can’t afford to lose everyone, especially if both sides of the argument have some legitimacy.

The early church’s long struggle to define orthodoxy took time, patience, careful thought and restraint – even though at times it wasn’t very good at doing it. The result was a nuanced statement that steered between one pole – that Jesus was simply a very good human being – and the other – that he was God dressed up in human clothes. The truth eventually glimpsed and embraced was not at one extreme or the other, nor even a limp compromise, but the carefully crafted, unlikely and counter-intuitive idea that held together the best insights of both sides - that he was not ‘only human’ or ‘only divine’, or 50% of each, like semi-skimmed milk, but 100% human and 100% divine, and that this (for reasons too involved to go into here) was not a contradiction in terms.

The truth and the resolution of our dilemmas – on immigration, or Gaza, or even assisted dying, are seldom simple. They require nuance. They need forbearance. They need careful attention and listening to the people you instinctively disagree with to arrive at the truth. Yet our longing for a dramatic headline, our hunger for simple solutions, our algorithms that promote the most extreme opinions, all militate against this kind of patient, watchful political and social culture that would help us arrive at better solutions.

Life is complicated. People are complicated. Solutions to vexed questions are rarely simple. We need nuance.

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