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?

Explainer

Creed

Leading

Politics

23 May 2025

6 min read

Why is it taking so long to find an Archbishop of Canterbury?

The Anglican tortoise and the Catholic hare.

Graham Tomlin

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

An archbishop raises a crown about the head of King Charles.

An archbishop in action at the 2024 Coronation.

It seems the Roman Catholics have put the Anglicans to shame by the speed with which they have managed to appoint a new Pope. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, 21 April. Pope Leo was elected on the 8 May. Seventeen days. Pretty impressive. Very few large corporations would replace a CEO in that time, or nations elect a new leader.

Justin Welby, however, resigned on the 12 November 2024. We won't know the name of his successor until the autumn, and that person won't start in place until the spring of 2026. Well over a year.

The Church of England is playing the tortoise while the Roman Catholics are acting the hare.

So why is it taking so long? Is this just fusty Anglican bureaucracy? A depressing instance of Anglicans taking ages over everything, whether sorting out our divisions over sexuality or choosing a new Archbishop?

As always, there is more to this than meets the eye.

The first thing to say is, of course, that events took everyone by surprise. Justin Welby would have had to retire before his 70th birthday in January 2026, and the assumption had been that he would announce the date at some point before then. A process was already in place to make the appointment so that a successor could be named before he departed and start soon after, as usually happens. No-one foresaw the events that led to Welby’s surprise resignation over his handling of the abuse committed by John Smyth, outlined in the Makin Review. In the usual course of things, there would have been a relatively smooth handover. What we have is unprecedented – a year with no Archbishop of Canterbury at all.

There is, of course, the shambles at the Canterbury end, where the diocese has taken three abortive goes at electing their representatives for the body that makes the appointment, the Crown Nominations Commission. More on that here, but even that has not had a significant effect on the timetable, which is following its predicted course, despite bumps along the way.

Even so, many will say, could the system not have been hurried up? Maybe so, and it might have been wise to find ways to hasten the process a little, but the more fundamental answer is that’s not the way the Church of England works and never has.

The biggest reason is that the Church of England and the Roman Catholic churches have different understandings of what the Church is and how it is governed. In short, the Archbishop of Canterbury is not the Anglican equivalent of a Pope.

Back in the days of the English Reformation, after Henry VIII’s ego-driven separation from Rome, which enabled him to divorce his wife who was unable to give him a male heir, and marry the younger and prettier Anne Boleyn, the English church found a kind of settlement under Queen Elizabeth I, several generations later. This proposed that the ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England was not to be the Archbishop of Canterbury but the Monarch. It was a way of expressing the idea that the Church of England is the Church of the people of England. It was the people of England at prayer. ‘We hold,' said Richard Hooker, the great architect of this vision, ‘that… there is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth.’

If you are a citizen of England, you have a right to be also part of the Church of England – to have your children baptised (once the vicar is sure you know what you’re letting yourself and your child in for), your marriage solemnised, and your body buried in the national church. The Church - although in a local sense is gathered group of Christians who attend public worship - exists for the people of England, whether or not they go to church regularly or not.

Because the Church of England is the church of the people of England, a much larger group of people need to be involved when an Archbishop of Canterbury is chosen. So far, there has been a wide period of consultation, involving the remarkable figure of 11,000 people who have given input – far more than most consultations of this kind. Moreover, the group that appoints the Archbishop is made up, not just of bishops, but lay people, priests, men, women, people representing the diocese of Canterbury, five representatives of the global Anglican Communion, others representing the national Church and so on.

The Church of England in that sense, is no respecter of persons, and refuses to treat the Archbishop as a Pope or a CEO.

For Roman Catholics, the church centres much more around its bishops. So, when it comes to choosing their leader, it makes sense to simply put all the cardinals (the most senior figures in the Catholic Church) in a room until they come up with a name from among themselves. Anglicans have a much longer, messier, more democratic process. It is not an election by a majority vote from a small electorate quickly convened, choosing among themselves, but a process of listening to a wide range of voices, both inside and outside the church.

Because he is not a pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury is in one sense, just another bishop (the next one may be a woman, but all Archbishops so far have been men). Yes of course, he’s an Archbishop, so higher profile than the others, but he is nonetheless a bishop who takes his place among the other bishops of the CofE. Archbishops of Canterbury are regarded with respect and honour by other CofE bishops and Archbishops around the worldwide Anglican Communion, as the (Arch)bishop of the first ‘Anglican’ church – Canterbury. Yet they have no legal jurisdiction at all outside England – or even outside their own Province of Canterbury in the southern half of England. He is not the ‘spiritual leader’ of Anglicans all over the world, like the Pope is for Roman Catholics.

As such, to put it bluntly, his appointment must take its turn among all the others in the queue. The Crown Nominations Commission is made up of people for whom this is not their day job, who give their spare time to it, and who have a programme of episcopal appointments to be made - the next in the queue are St Edmundsbury & Ipswich and then Worcester. Canterbury has to take its turn. To enable this one to jump the queue would be saying something that Anglicans have never said - that this role is much more important than any of the others and must be given special treatment. The Church of England in that sense, is no respecter of persons, and refuses to treat the Archbishop as a Pope or a CEO, without whom the church would fall apart.

The reason the Church of England can survive without an Archbishop of Canterbury for a while, is because its life is not dependent on a central figure, a charismatic leader, or a head office which issues instructions for all the branches to obediently follow. That may work in McDonalds but doesn’t work in the Church of England. The life of the Church of England is in its parishes and dioceses, which carry on doing their thing, even when an Archbishop of Canterbury is not available.

Of course, it might have been possible to speed it up a little. We have missed having an Archbishop speaking in to public life and providing a lead at the national level. But there are good reasons for taking time. And it’s not just inefficiency – it’s because the Church is made up of ordinary Christians, who all deserve a say – and that takes time.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 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