Column

Atheism

Creed

15 September 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher Part 5: leaping for truth

In the fifth of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper recalls the night she decided to do something, to get data about God.

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.

A black and white close up of a women in a street at night, turning to look around at a neion 'open' sign.

Trevin Rudy 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. Read part 1 here.

Inhale…two, three, four… Exhale... two, three, four…. Inhale… two, three, four… exhale… two, three four…

I was laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, doing breathing exercises trying to calm my body and mind. The clock on my bedside table flashed 3:59. I had a lecture on twentieth century French metaphysics to attend in four hours. But I couldn’t sleep.

Night time anxiety had been my habit for as long as I could remember. It all started when I was four years old and first asked myself what would it be like to be dead? while trying to fall asleep one night. Since then, my anxiety often started with normal, day-to-day worries (did I complete enough items on my to-do list today?). But they almost always spiraled into bigger concerns. I always found my way to questions like Is this really all there is?

I sighed and kept on with my breathing exercises. Inhale… two, three, four… exhale… two, three, four…

But then…

Then, I had an idea.

I blinked and sat up.

God might be there!, I thought to myself.

God might have been there all along!

I started to laugh, incredulous.

Here’s the two things I had just learned that made me finally wake up to this extraordinary possibility.

Interpretation is a choice

When I was an atheist, I often said that if God existed and wanted us to believe in Him, God would make it obvious. God would write something like 'Believe in Me!' in letters in the sky. God would give us indubitable evidence of His existence.

But interpretation is a matter of choice.

It’s like a story a man once told at my church. He was out walking in the woods at night. He said, God if you’re there, give me a sign! A shooting star went through the sky. He then shrugged and said to himself, oh, it’s a coincidence.

I had always told the story of my life as a string of coincidences. No matter how uncanny an event, I always assumed it was pure chance. But what if I had been ignoring the underlying narrative and purpose to things all along? God could be communicating with us and steering the course of our lives all the time, but if we never took the initiative to interpret our experiences with Him in them, we would never see Him.

The only way for me to assess God’s possible role in my life would be to start interpreting events as if God were the author. I wouldn’t have to get rid of my “pure coincidence” view. I would only have to add this new one. Then, I could compare the two.

Openness to evidence is a choice

The philosopher William James makes the extraordinary, underappreciated point that there are certain kinds of beliefs you can’t get the evidence for unless you believe them first. One example is jumping over a chasm or gap on a hiking trail. You can’t successfully jump over the chasm and get the evidence that you’re capable of jumping it unless you believe you can do it first.

God is similar in a very specific sense: evidence of God’s presence in your life is only available to you if you believe first.

Imagine your heart is a room with a door. God could be shining a floodlight at the door all the time, but if you don’t open the door a crack, God’s light will never be able to shine through. I now believe that God can do a lot of amazing things, but God doesn’t impose. It’s up to all of us to crack open our doors.

Once you do, you can start to get experiential evidence. This might be feeling loved, experiencing peace and joy that surpass your previous understanding, or unusual confidence or resilience amidst troubles. It might be a sense of forgiveness beyond what you’ve known before. Or it might be experiences of healing and personal growth—often of issues that you’ve tried to heal multiple ways.

The greatest hypothesis of all was out there waiting to be tested—and I wasn’t participating!

The leap of faith is a leap for truth

I used to think that faith was a betrayal of the truth. If I wanted to be loyal to the truth, I needed to stick to the “bare facts” provided by science. I shouldn’t ever claim anything beyond them, on the off chance the claim might be false.

However...

When it comes to God (as well as many other things, such as what it means to be a good person), the only way to find out what’s true is to put the belief into play. It’s to embrace a hypothesis, act on it, and see what happens.

When I jolted up out of bed that night, I realised that throughout my entire life I had thought that I was being loyal to the truth, but what I was actually doing was standing on the sidelines. The greatest hypothesis of all was out there waiting to be tested—and I wasn’t participating! The human species is in its infancy. There’s so much we don’t know about existence. What if the universe is lovingly Created? What if there are dimensions beyond what we can see and touch?

The truly courageous thing, I now believe, is the opposite of what I’d always thought. It isn’t to refrain from belief. It’s to dare to believe.

The verdict

That night, I decided I would try to get data about God. I’d walk into a life of prayer, worship, and faith. I’d work on re-interpreting my story with God in it. I’d identify biases or misconceptions I had about faith and educate myself about them. I’d ask God to help me see, feel, and believe, if He was there.

I’m less than a year in. But today I’m sleeping better, healing deep emotional wounds, overcoming unhealthy habits, finding peace, stepping deeper into joy, and experiencing feelings of invulnerability where I used to feel the most vulnerable. This sense of invulnerability is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before, like a spring of confidence and peace welling up from depths beyond me. I consider this data for God.

Might I be wrong? Absolutely. But at the end of the day I am just one person. All I can do is go out and get some data and share what I find, contributing my little piece to the species-wide quest for the truth of things.

So go out and get your data. Take a chance on God, if you like. Crack open your door. See if light shines through. Let me and others know what you find.

Article

Belief

Creed

Leading

Politics

17 October 2025

5 min read

Let's keep hope weird, Zack

Amid growing grief for the future, the Greens' leader is calling for 'ordinary hope'

Lauren Westwood

Lauren Westwood works in faith engagement communications for The Salvation Army.

Zack Polanski returns to Manchester.

The Green Party

The recent Green Party’s political broadcast has been praised for its emotional clarity, moral urgency and a call to action that has seen party membership surge.

Looking down the lens, recalling his years growing up in the north of England, party leader Zack Polanski sighs,

“There was something in the air… a kind of ordinary hope.”

As he walks through a typical British city, filmed in Manchester, lined with terraced houses and bright-white lights beaming over takeaway shops and industrial bins, he diagnoses the collective hopelessness of a ‘people too tired to fight, to sleep.’

In just under four minutes, Polanski disarms objections to his cause with a sensitive, poetic script. He opens by referring to the common experience of a satisfying bowl of cornflakes – before plainly illustrating the socioeconomic injustice facing the everyman. He then makes the case for fair wealth taxation, and closes with the cheery challenge:

‘Let’s make hope normal again.’

It’s a compelling appeal that resonates with those weary of cynicism. But what does it actually mean?

To be clear, I call this to question because I desperately want good things for our country. Warm homes, clean air, safe streets and an NHS that works for all – I believe these things should be normal. But I’m not sure I want to normalise hope.

Because real hope is weird.

Hope is not to be confused with optimism, or good prospects, or a positivity about the future reserved for the privileged. It’s not increased with social mobility or sitting comfortably in a five-year plan. Hope is not even the belief that things will get better. Real hope is much truer than that. It is a deep knowing that all shall be well, even when that seems foolish – a glance through the ancient literature of the Bible points to hope as singing in a prison cell, relief in the wilderness, resurrection in the face of crucifixion.

As NT Wright, the theologian, puts it: ‘Hope is what you get when you suddenly realise a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word.’ This kind of hope doesn’t waiver with the housing market, interest rates, or inheritance tax. It’s not the result of good policy or strong polling. It’s the stubborn belief that love wins – and has, in fact, already won – even, or especially, when it looks like all is lost.

This is where Polanski’s got it right. There is a present and growing grief for the future. Across the UK, millions feel disengaged, disrespected and undervalued. Distrust of politicians, division in communities and loss of faith in the systems supposed to be for our benefit seem to be at an all-time high.

Polanski’s call to hope comes at a time when a redeemed order seems impossible or, at best, several generations away. But, instead of accepting the kind of ‘ordinary hope’ Polanski experienced back in his youth, the answer to our deepest longing lies in realising we need something extraordinary to happen and knowing that we’re allowed to believe that it will.

We don’t need to be desensitised to hope – we need the opposite. We need to be reawakened to everyday glimmers of redemption – the neighbour who pops by for sugar and stays for a safe conversation, the health worker who acknowledges a former patient with a grateful smile, the family whose fear is soothed by the kind gesture of an elderly white neighbour – and recognise our share and our part in bringing it on, believing there is yet more and better to uncover.

Polanski is incredibly perceptive in his address to the concerns of the hard-working plumber and the fledgling hair salon owner, nervous that their hard earnings and ambition will be cut short: ‘I wondered, “Why did they think I was talking about them?” And now, I get it. It’s because it’s too hard to picture.’

Hope, too, is hard to see. A better world is hard to imagine. Though Polanski is advocating for a public reform and reimagination of what it means to be taxed, our souls are capable of the sudden realisation that another way is possible. We can experience life-altering revelation that leads to fresh vision, both for what is seen and for the yet unseen.

For the Christian, hope is not some far-out abstract concept, but a gift made real through belief in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – a Middle Eastern man who walked the earth two thousand years ago, held no title, had no place to lay his head, and called himself the Way, the Truth and the Life. See? Real hope gets weird.

Instead of being content to accept an ordinary hope – made small, palatable and unremarkable – we can embrace hope as it was designed. A liberating reality that brings steady assurance to every thought, every reaction, every decision and, yes, every vote. This confidence comes not because we are sure of our own rightness, but precisely because we are not. We submit to its mystery because a hope that we can control, mediate and measure will never lead to the transformation we most long for.

Do I long to see an increased hope for the future across the UK? Of course. But do I believe we should ever grow accustomed to hope? I don’t think so. We need contagious hope – wild and holy and strange, anything but normal.

Tax the super-rich so that children can eat, parents can sleep, and ordinary people can be lifted out of extraordinary poverty, if you want – but let’s keep hope weird.

Support Seen & Unseen

Sice Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 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

Pledge a gift now