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.

Column

Awe and wonder

Creed

Film & TV

Re-enchanting

4 March 2025

4 min read

The great pie mystery

Some unusual graffiti give insight into reality’s mysteries.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A green bridge spans a motorway, on its side is graffiti that reads 'PIES'

The view on the M6.

drgillybean, Creative Commons.

Do you have a favourite piece of graffiti? I used to.

If you're travelling on the M6 around Cheshire, at some point you’ll come to one of those green motorway bridges. And on the side of it, overlooking the tarmac, you'll see in massive writing the word “PIES”.

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by this. It raises so many questions. Who wrote the graffiti? How did they do it? Was this person in favour of pies or against them? Was it about all pies or just some pies? What had happened in this person's life to make them have such strong opinions about pastry?

And it was just me. For nearly 30 years, people were left nonplussed about the graffiti as more and more instances of it began to crop up across the North-West of England.

And then, in 2016, the mystery was solved. Apparently, it wasn't really to do with pies at all. It was all the result of a Liverpool band called The Pies trying to promote their music. After getting stuck on the motorway one day, they decided to write the name of their band on the side of the motorway bridge because, well, what else are you going to do when you’re broken down?

It's fair to say, I was a little bit gutted to learn about the origins of the graffiti.

What was once an intriguing mystery that kept me up at night and haunted my every thought (okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration) was revealed to be something so … boring. With hindsight, I wish I'd never learnt the truth about what happened. I thought wanted to know the origins of the pastry-based vandalism but, as they say, ignorance sometimes is bliss.

You see, we sometimes need a little bit of mystery in life.

Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

This is evident in lots of different ways, but perhaps most apparent when it comes to entertainment and art. TV series Lost, for example, was a huge hit when it first came out. Why did the plane crash? What is the island? What is the smoke monster? Viewers were hooked and demanded answers.

But then answers came and everyone was upset. As Lost went through series after series, and explained more and more about what was happening, the audience slowly became more and more disenchanted with the program. The finale – where the programme’s biggest mysteries were finally revealed – was almost universally panned.

The same to be said of the recent HBO hit Westworld. Its first series was by far and away its best. But season two and three trailed off significantly as there was simply no mystery left in the programme after its spectacular first series. I wonder if this is precisely why the works of the late David Lynch were as compelling as they were? The still-incredible Twin Peaks holds up so well precisely because it categorically refuses to explain itself.

Elsewhere there is a growing tendency in video games, for example, for the narrative of the story to be hidden away, shrouded in mystery and atmosphere. Think of From Software games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, massively successful in part because they are so mysterious. In both instances, it’s entirely possible to complete the game and have no clue whatsoever that there was even a story in the game, let alone to understand it. The player becomes captured by the mysteries of the worlds they find themselves in, and it’s these mysteries, rather than any answers, than compel them forwards.

The reason why programmes like Lost and Westworld begin to lose their allure as they explain more and more about their world is that this jars with the reality of the world around us. Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

Peel back the world around us, however, and reality goes all the way down. And this is precisely what we would expect from a world created by a God, who is infinitely Infinite. Reality is not paper thin; goes all the way down. It is mysterious, unfathomable, and resists easy answers.

And so, when we get disappointing explanations about a plane crash in a TV programme, or the origins of our favourite graffiti, it rightly leaves us feeling unsatisfied. Because we are made to be at home in a world that is deeply real. We are made to be at home in a world where the reality has unfathomable, unimaginable depth to it. A world that cannot simply be explained away.

And this is why mystery is so important in our life. In the post-Enlightenment culture in which we find ourselves, a culture that demands every question be answered and every Scooby-Doo villain be unmasked, the notion of boundless mystery might seem somewhat disquieting.

But we are made for mystery. And this is why the best works of art trade more on the mysteries they introduce, rather than the answers that might be behind them. And this is why mystery can be found all around us. Even in a pie.

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