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

Creed

Politics

Suffering

Trauma

11 August 2025

6 min read

Dear Kemi, about that lost faith

Who stands with us when we suffer?

Graham Tomlin

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

Kemi Badenoch.

ARC.

Dear Kemi (if I may)

Lost faith is usually a sad tale. And you have told us how you lost yours. I hear your grandfather was a Methodist minister, and so as a young girl, you would pray, seeing answers from time to time for longer hair, good grades and the like. But when you heard the story of Elizabeth Fritzl, whose father Josef kept her captive underground for 24 years, repeatedly raping her, you began to ask why God did not answer Elizabeth’s prayers for release. And so you gave up on God.

Now I have real sympathy for you. I have struggled with this too. The Josef Fritzl story and the suffering he inflicted on his daughter is truly horrific. None of us find the problem of evil easy. In fact, I have never yet met a Christian who thinks they have solved it. Yet the remarkable fact is that many of us believe in God anyway. And it’s not because we haven’t thought deeply about it. Many people start with a simple faith in a God who answers prayers, and yet one day, they come across what seems like an anomaly – that some prayers don’t seem to find an answer.

Of course, you’re not the first to have stumbled upon the problem of unanswered prayer. For centuries, Christians have pondered deeply the strange persistence of evil in the world, from St Irenaeus to St Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, to any number of modern theologians.

They all knew that not all prayers get answered – yet even more, they knew that this is not a marginal thing for Christians, it actually lies at the very heart of our faith.

On the top of every spire, on every altar of a church, around many Christian necks, is a cross. It recalls the excruciating death of an executed innocent man. It is the universally recognised symbol of Christianity, as recognisable as the Islamic crescent or the Jewish Star of David.

Christianity centres on this remarkable claim: that God allowed his Son Jesus to die a cruel and tortured death, and did not respond to his agonised prayer: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” All he got was silence. Nothing.

So unanswered prayer is not something that lurks at the margins of Christian faith as a guilty secret. It lies at the very heart of it.

And yet I still believe. Why?

Why does God not intervene to stop the suffering of the world? Why did not God not stop the holocaust? Why does he not stop the suffering of the people of Gaza? Or the Israeli hostages? Or people who suffer from debilitating depression? Or long-term mental illness?

The answer is I don’t know. And why should I? For all I know, God might stop all kinds of things from happening – by definition I don’t know about thing that don’t come to pass. Yet I have to assume that God does not intervene to stop the vast majority of the suffering we inflict on each other. The best I can say is that he seems to allow us to have our own way, giving us the courtesy of accountability for our own actions. As a conservative politician, keen to stress personal responsibility, you should know that more than anyone.

Josef Fritzl was the cause of his daughter’s suffering, not God. Fritzl was himself the child of an alcoholic father who abandoned him when he was four-year-old and a manipulative and abusive mother who brought him up thereafter. Not that this excuses his crimes for a moment, but he was part of a chain of sin and suffering handed on from one generation to another that stretched back through his parents, their parents, back to the very beginning of human history and beyond. Evil and suffering are part of our world. Christianity knows about evil all too well.

All this might hint at an answer, yet it still doesn’t satisfy. It still doesn’t reduce the suffering. Trying to explain it doesn’t make it any easier to endure it. In fact, if what we Christians say about evil is true, we cannot explain it because evil literally makes no sense. It is the absence of sense, the absence of meaning. It has no point, because it is literally pointless.

The real reason we Christians continue to believe is not that we have a neat answer to it, nor because we haven’t thought about it, but because we know that, paradoxical as it may sound, God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, knows what it is to pray for something and not get an answer. He has been there too. Somehow, mysteriously, he stands with Elizabeth Fritzl, with Israeli hostages, with Palestinians hungry for peace and food, and with us when we cry out and apparently get no answer. In those moments, we are not, in the end, alone.

And yet, there is more. Despite that fact that we cannot explain the tangled, dark mysteries of evil in the human heart, we have been captivated by a story that tells us it has been overcome. Yes, Jesus died. Yes, he felt abandoned by God his Father. Yet the way the story turned out, the evil done to him was not the last word. God overturned the worst that the human race could do, when the most remarkable thing happened - his cold, abused, bloodied and battered body stirred once more into life. Yet this was not a return to this weary life all over again, back into the maelstrom of suffering and pain that we know it to be, but through the other side into a form of life beyond the grave that cannot be destroyed. Jesus was not ultimately abandoned, even if he, like us, like Elizabeth Fritzl, felt like it at the time.

This is what we get – not a neat answer – for that we will have to wait – but the gift of hope that it will not always be like this, that the Resurrection of Jesus is a foretaste of the Resurrection of all things one day.

And what about what you called your ‘stupid’ little prayers about hair and boyfriends? Why did they get answered and others didn’t? Again, I have no idea. It does seem that from time to time, God does something weird, brings some unexpected healing, things turning out miraculously better than expected, an unforeseen delight. Yet these are just hints, small signs of the great miracle, the Resurrection and the defeat of death. They are hints that even though God will not unravel the moral fabric of the world by intervening every time we do something wrong, occasionally we are given a small sign that he has not given up on the world and will one day flood it with his presence. They are signs to remind you, me, that all the good things we receive each day - food, sunshine, rain, air to breathe – are not accidents but come from a God who gave them to us out of love, and that evil is the anomaly, not goodness. We are left with a question – would we rather a world where that kind of surprising & delightful event never happened? Or one where it occasionally did?

The Resurrection is the ultimate reason we believe. Not because we can explain evil. But because it tells us we are not alone in our suffering. Because it tells us that evil is real, but in the end, will be banished to the pit from which it came. And because the alternative, when we think about that deeply enough – a world where monsters like Josef Fritzl get the last word – where hope is whistling in the dark and evil wins - is intolerable.

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