Column

Atheism

Creed

29 September 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 6: making the leap

In her series’ final article, philosopher Stefani Ruper offers a new vision we all need.

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 skydiver in a space pressure shoot leaps from a capsule above the earth.

Felix Baumgartner leap set the record for freefall parachuting.

Red Bull Stratos.

Faith is irrational. Faith is against evidence. Faith is a threat to progress. Faith will bring about the downfall of civilization.

I used to think this, and I wasn’t alone.

In 2004 Sam Harris wrote that faith

“allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”

This quote appears in his book The End of Faith, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks.

Fellow pop atheist AC Grayling says that faith

“directly controverts canons of intellectual integrity…’Faith’ is not a respectable or admirable thing; having been so long paraded as a virtue and worthy of respect, the truth is otherwise… it is irresponsible, lazy, and too often dangerous.”

The real danger

When I was about 20, I realised that I had dismissed faith as irrational without ever engaging it. I had prided myself on open-mindedness while at the same time refusing to hear what people of faith had to say. This struck me as deeply hypocritical, so I went to seminary. I asked religious people about faith. I studied what theologians and philosophers said about it. I did this for about twelve years.

In this time, I confirmed my earlier belief that there are extreme examples of irrationality and close-mindedness in religion. Of course there are! But there are extreme examples of irrationality and close-mindedness in secularism, too. The danger isn’t “faith.” The danger is what I used to do: over-simplifying and reducing one another to easy targets so we can tear each other down.

Faith, I now know, looks very different to many people. Some forms of it are healthier than others. Some are toxic.

But after more than twelve years of study, I’ve come to believe a specific way of defining or practicing faith is not just acceptable for our society but crucial. I consider it the answer to many of our shared needs--especially for more love, generosity, justice, resilience, progress, and hope.

It's this:

a choice.

Faith is a choice.

Our society is unique among all societies that have ever existed. It is the first society where we must choose: to trust and believe just a little bit, or to distrust and believe nothing at all.

This is what “don’t believe” looks like:

Distrust. Stick to the “bare facts” of physical reality and science. Live as though there is no possibility of any dimensions existing beyond material reality as we understand it today.

There is no Creator, no ultimate love, no ultimate home. There is only the here and now. When you die, nothing happens.

I subscribed to this option for thirty years because I thought it necessary to be loyal to the truth. I thought that being a good person meant resisting the temptations of faith. I felt proud of myself for bravely accepting the emptiness of the world. But it was poor consolation.

Another reason I followed this option was because I—like most people in our culture—had a deeply rooted habit of suspicion and distrust. Authorities of all kinds have so routinely deceived and disappointed us that most of us live habitually expecting to be attacked, hurt, let down, duped, used, manipulated, and misled. We must always expect there’s a trick behind any promise. Every offering has a catch. We subconsciously live by the slogan “it’s too good to be true.”

This predisposes us to experiencing a specific kind of harm: when we anticipate being hurt, we often hurt ourselves first so that we get to be in control of the pain. For the first thirty years of my spiritual journey, part of my resistance to God was that I was so afraid of finding out He didn’t exist I never let myself take seriously the possibility that He might.

Here’s what “believe” looks like:

Trust. Take a look at your options and say “yes,” to the better one, the one rich in possibility and hope and light.

Embrace the possibility that there are dimensions of reality beyond our imagining that we cannot see or touch. Embrace the possibility that your story may be a part of some larger story. Embrace the possibility that what you do matters ultimately, and is a part of the great unfolding of a narrative beyond your comprehension.

Do this with lightness. Have a bold vision, but let a part of that boldness be its ability to change and grow. Trust the community of spiritual seekers all around the world. Hold all your opinions as hypotheses, and seek to refine them in community with others as different from you as possible.

Open yourself to the possibility that you might be able to experience the love of God and walk into greater peace, joy, resilience, and generosity than previously.

Responsible faith

Harris and Grayling say faith is belief against evidence.

However: faith can be deeply evidentiary. Done right, faith never contradicts evidence or quality reasoning. Indeed, to me, faith means being loyal to every scrap of evidence, including any that God may provide us, and constantly revising my views of everything.

There are two kinds of evidence for transcendent beliefs: intellectual evidence, which includes historical, archaeological, and philosophical reasons to believe (or not to believe), and experiential evidence, which comes from believing in God and seeing what happens.

For each of us, experiential evidence is personal, but we can, and should, always talk about our experiences with others. We should get feedback, compare, and learn from one another. I consider my experiences to be data points for God, but I’m open to being incorrect.

Faith of the sort I’m advocating doesn’t mean putting your head in the sand. It means walking simultaneously with trust and with your eyes wide open. It means embracing your own limitations and learning to delight in being proved wrong or revising your perspective.

The obligation to have faith

Many people come to faith in God through a major religious experience. They have a sudden shift. They go from skeptic to Believer with a capital “B” seemingly overnight.

That is not how it’s worked for me. I decided to see if I could believe. When I first set out to cultivate faith, I didn’t believe anything at all.

Why did I do it?

I had one very specific reason: it would make the world a better place.

I already knew that belief in God was reasonable, and that God might exist. I already knew that I could get evidence for God if I dared to believe a little bit first.

But what convinced me to finally try believing was an argument William James makes in his essay Is Life Worth Living? He says:

if there is something you can believe in that is reasonable, and that will make you either a happier or better person, or both,

then you are not just licensed, but obliged to believe it.

Not just licensed, but obliged. Believing in God was not just reasonable but would also make me more of all the things I always wanted to be: more joyful, more peaceful, more generous, more resilient.

Thus, I was facing a dual realization:

God might be real, and

Trying to see if I could believe—that is, intentionally opening myself to God’s potential presence in my life—would be an act both of exploring truth as well as making me a better person.

Put like this, the next step for me was obvious:

Do it.

Choose faith. Choose trust. Take a chance on God, and see what happens.

That was eleven months ago now, and I can honestly say it was the best thing I’ve ever done. My belief is far from certain, but it doesn’t have to be—indeed, in some ways it shouldn’t be.

I just keep saying yes to trust, and my heart is lighter and more free than I ever imagined possible.

Taking a chance on God

The secular poet Mary Oliver once famously asked us:

“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

What will I do? What will you do?

If faith means taking a chance on God and seeing what happens – and in doing so stepping into lives of greater peace, joy, resilience, and generosity, together –

What are any of us waiting for?

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Creed

Wisdom

7 November 2025

6 min read

Forget AI: I want a computer that says ‘no’

Chatbots only tell us what we want to hear. If we genuinely want to grow, we need to be OK with offence

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A person hold their phone on their desk, a think bubble from it says 'no'.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

It is three years since the public release of Open AI’s ChatGPT. In those early months, this new technology felt apocalyptic. There was excitement, yes – but also genuine concern that ChatGPT, and other AI bots like it, had been released on an unsuspecting public with little assessment or reflection on the unintended consequences they might have the potential to make. In March 2023, 1,300 experts signed an open letter calling for a six month pause in AI labs training of the most advanced systems arguing that they represent an ‘existential risk’ to humanity. In the same month Time magazine published an article by a leading AI researcher which went further, saying that the risks presented by AI had been underplayed. The article visualised a civilisation in which AI had liberated itself from computers to dominate ‘a world of creatures, that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.’

But then we all started running our essays through it, creating emails, and generating the kind of boring documentation demanded by the modern world. AI is now part of life. We can no more avoid it than we can avoid the internet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

I will confess at this point to having distinctly Luddite tendencies when it comes to technology. I read Wendell Berry’s famous essay ‘Why I will not buy a computer’ and hungered after the agrarian, writerly world he appeared to inhabit; all kitchen tables, musty bookshelves, sharpened pencils and blank pieces of paper. Certainly, Berry is on to something. Technology promises much, delivers some, but leaves a large bill on the doormat. Something is lost, which for Berry included the kind of attention that writing by hand provides for deep, reflective work.

This is the paradox of technology – it gives and takes away. What is required of us as a society is to take the time to discern the balance of this equation. On the other side of the equation from those heralding the analytical speed and power of AI are those deeply concerned for ways in which our humanity is threatened by its ubiquity.

In Thailand, where clairvoyancy is big business, fortune tellers are reportedly seeing their market disrupted by AI as a growing number of people turn to chat bots to give them insights into their future instead.

A friend of mine uses an AI chatbot to discuss his feelings and dilemmas. The way he described his relationship with AI was not unlike that of a spiritual director or mentor.

There are also examples of deeply concerning incidents where chat bots have reportedly encouraged and affirmed a person’s decision to take their own life. Adam took his own life in April this year. His parents have since filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after discovering that ChatGPT had discouraged Adam from seeking help from them and had even offered to help him write a suicide note. Such stories raise the critical question of whether it is life-giving and humane for people to develop relationships of dependence and significance with a machine. AI chat bots are highly powerful tools masquerading behind the visage of human personality. They are, one could argue, sophisticated clairvoyants mining the vast landscape of the internet, data laid down in the past, and presenting what they extract as information and advice. Such an intelligence is undoubtedly game changing for diagnosing diseases, when the pace of medical research advances faster than any GP can cope with. But is it the kind of intelligence we need for the deeper work of our intimate selves, the soul-work of life?

Of course, AI assistants are more than just a highly advanced search engines. They get better at predicting what we want to know. Chatbots essentially learn to please their users. They become our sycophantic friends, giving us insights from their vast store of available knowledge, but only ever along the grain of our desires and needs. Is it any wonder people form such positive relationships with them? They are forever telling us what we want to hear.

Or at least what we think we want to hear. Because any truly loving relationship should have the capacity and freedom to include saying things which the other does not want to hear. Relationships of true worth are ones which take the risk of surprising the other with offence in order to move toward deeper life. This is where user’s experience suggests AI is not proficient. Indeed, it is an area I suggest chatbots are not capable of being proficient in. To appreciate this, we need to explore a little of the philosophy of knowledge generation.

Most of us probably recognise the concepts of deduction and induction as modes of thought. Deduction is the application of a predetermined rule (‘A always means B…’) to a given experience which then confidently predicts an outcome (‘therefore C’). Induction is the inference of a rule from series of varying (but similar) experiences (‘look at all these slightly different C’s – it must mean that A always means B’). However, the nineteenth century philosopher CS Pierce described a third mode of thought that he called abduction.

Abduction works by offering a provisional explanatory context to a surprising experience or piece of information. It postulates, often very creatively and imaginatively, a hypothesis, or way of seeing things, that offers to make sense of new experience. The distinctives of abduction include intuition, imagination, even spiritual insight in the working towards a deeper understanding of things. Abductive reasoning for example includes the kind of ‘eureka!’ moment of explanation which points to a deeper intelligence, a deeper connectivity in all things that feels out of reach to the human mind but which we grasp at with imaginative and often metaphorical leaps.

The distinctive thing about abductive reasoning, as far as AI chatbots are concerned, lies in the fact that it works by introducing an idea that isn’t contained within the existing data and which offers an explanation that the data would not otherwise have. The ‘wisdom’ of chatbots on the other hand is really only a very sophisticated synthesis of existing data, shaped by a desire to offer knowledge that pleases its end user. It lacks the imaginative insight, the intuitive perspective that might confront, challenge, but ultimately be for our benefit.

If we want to grow in the understanding of ourselves, if we genuinely want to do soul-work, we need to be open to the surprise of offence; the disruption of challenge; the insight from elsewhere; the pain of having to reimagine our perspective. The Christian tradition sometimes calls this wisdom prophecy. It might also be a way of understanding what St Paul meant by the ‘sword of the Spirit’. It is that voice, that insight of deep wisdom, which doesn’t sooth but often smarts, but which we come to appreciate in time as a word of life. Such wisdom may be conveyed by a human person, a prophet. And the Old Testament’s stories suggests that its delivery is not without costs to the prophet, and never without relationship. A prophet speaks as one alongside in community, sharing something of the same pain, the same confusion. Ultimately such wisdom is understood to be drawn from divine wisdom, God speaking in the midst of humanity

You don’t get that from a chatbot, you get that from person-to-person relationships. I do have the computer (sorry Wendell!), but I will do my soul-work with fellow humans. And I will not be using an AI assistant.

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