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2,600 Words

This is part 5 of my series ‘There and Back Again: An (A)Theist’s Tale’. This series is intended to tell you my story from the last few years of losing my faith and the slow journey of finding it again but not quite in same way as before.

The previous blog in this series (Part 4) ended by stating that if it hadn’t been for Western Christianity’s spiritual quest for certainty and fact, then Atheism might never have been born. Part 5 is all about exploring this close relationship between modern Western Atheism and Western Christianity.

You can find the rest of this series under the 'There and Back Again: An (A)Theist's Tale' tab at the top of the screen.

(Credit to Eleanor Vivian and Miki Kwek for their proof-reading and critical feedback)

 

“The more I thought about the material world and the whole of nature, as far as we can be aware of it through our bodily senses, and the more I took stock of the various theories, the more I began to think that the opinions of the majority of the philosophers were most likely to be true. So, treating everything as a matter of doubt, as the Academics are generally supposed to do, and hovering between one doctrine and another, I made up my mind at least to leave the Manichees*.”

-St. Augustine[1]

History has always been a great passion of mine, though it is I think a subject that is very much misunderstood. Unlike what most people think, although history is rooted in the past, the past is not its chief object of study. If it was, we would be frequently disappointed. It is a sad fact of history that there are countless civilisations, peoples and events which we will never hear about or learn anything from. They have returned to dust, and no one thought to leave anything behind. Moreover, even for the myriad of civilisations, peoples and events that we do know about, often what we claim to know is based on educated guesswork, attempts to put together jigsaws with missing pieces, and trust in the laws of probability. Even recent events are shadowed in doubt and possibility – why else are the events of 1948 in Israel and Palestine so hotly debated to this day? Though history can tell us about the past, its memory is often hazy. The point I’m essentially making is that that though we can certainly learn about the past through history, we can’t know as much about the past as we might like.

So how are we to understand history? That, perhaps, is a topic saved in its fullness for a future blog, but I will give you an early spoiler. One of most important ways to understand history is that it exists to tells us who we are. History is very often an exercise in identity-creation, laying the roots of the identities we occupy in the present. By showing where we came from, history helps us to come to terms with who we are now and even to some extent where we are going. Legend and myth bear similar identity-shaping functions, and so it is no surprise that it is often tricky to separate history from the two. Essentially, in a significant way history is the art of telling the relevant past – those bits of the past that interplay with who we are in the present.

In terms of this series then, there is one event of the relevant past whose story is worth telling. Through this event, we catch a glimpse of how two identities emerged at once so different but so similar. We see how the West found itself with a Christian Theism that in many ways became a very ‘Christian’ Atheism. Both identities shared the same foundation, they just chose to walk different paths. The story is ultimately one of how the West came to value certainty over belief, and unless we know it, we won’t get the chance to decide whether it is something with which we truly agree.

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“For modern Western atheism is chiefly a Christian heresy and could not have arisen in a non-Christian setting.”[2]

-David Bentley-Hart

The Heresy that Destroyed Christendom

That Western Christianity created modern Atheism shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise. After all, it is only in the West that Atheism is truly organic and indigenous in substance. Indeed, other Atheisms exist most famously in the Communist and post-Communist Atheisms of China and the former Soviet bloc. However, there is a difference in that in both cases their Atheism’s were at least in part imported from Karl Marx’s Western world and in both the relaxation of totalitarian control over religion has revealed a remarkable religious resurgence. However, no such resurgence is expected in the West. The difference? Only the West had the Protestant Reformation.[3]

The legacy of the Protestant Reformation is far too complex to be summarised in one simple blog post, but for my purposes here, suffice it to say that alongside forming the foundations for transformational belief in many people, it also laid the foundations for transformational unbelief. Truly, the Protestant Reformers were the first deconstructionists and they were merciless. For much of the previous 1,000 years, the Roman Church had held sway over the hearts and minds of the people of European Christendom. However, as the Reformation broke across Western and Central Europe, nothing in this long-standing tradition was secure. Long-standing Christian practices like pilgrimage, the sacraments and purgatory were ridiculed as ‘superstitious’. The Church and the religion it promoted was lambasted as corrupt, evil, manipulative and deceitful. Finally, the eternal Church was stripped of its perceived ‘illegitimate’ authority; authority was instead given to the individual, for it was up to each, without the mediation of any Church, to work out their salvation as they interpreted it from the Bible.

The intellectual conflicts of the Reformation are characterised by Prof. Alec Ryrie as a ‘Battle for Credulity’.[4] The Protestants labelled the Catholics as ‘credulous’ – willing to believe in anything including superstition. The Catholics responded in turn by labelling the Protestants as ‘incredulous’ – being stubbornly unwilling to believe and accept the limits of their reason. Prof. Ryrie points out that nothing demonstrates this more than the debate over the doctrine of transubstantiation. This Catholic doctrine states that during the Eucharistic Mass, the bread and wine offered to the faithful becomes the literal essence of the body and blood of Jesus. Moreover, the whole point of the doctrine is that there is no empirical change in the bread and wine; the change in essence must be accepted in faith for it is beyond reason. Like many today, the idea that you should believe this purely on faith in the face of reason and empirical evidence was deemed laughable by the first Protestants. This didn’t mean Catholics didn’t have sophisticated philosophical arguments that called on reason in defence of the doctrine, but rarely did Protestants feel a need to respond philosophically in kind. The doctrine was so laughable that it deserved nothing more than derision in their minds, and why waste brain cells when one impious joke about how Christ must feel every time his faithful go to the toilet says all that is required? In the face of this derision and incredulity, despairing Catholics, frustrated by their opponents incredulity, prophesied that “once you have put into their [the common people’s] hands the foolhardiness of despising and criticising opinions…they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty.”[5]

Unfortunately for Protestants, within two hundred years they discovered that the prophecy was true. For all their smug derision of Catholic credulity, it didn’t take long for people to identify Protestantism’s own credulousness. If Protestants refused to accept the authority of the Roman Church, why then did they so readily accept the Bible as the inspired word of God? If the Bible was all that was required for authority, why then had so many Protestant churches arisen, each stating their interpretation of Scripture as true? Weren’t Protestants then just as ‘superstitious’ and irrational as their Catholic rivals? So the West began to realise that the same arguments spoken in great piety by Protestants against the Roman Church could also be spoken with great impiety against God Himself. Just a century after the Reformation, English philosopher, Henry More, bemoaned that in this environment “the Tempter would take advantage where he may, to carry men captive out of one dark prison into another, out of Superstition into Atheism itself…Being emboldened by the tottering and falling of what they took for Religion before, they will gladly…conclude that there is as well no God as no Religion.”[6]

A ‘Rational’ Religion

“Instead of seeing the idea of God as a symbol of a reality that had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation, it was increasingly assumed that God was simply a fact of life like any other.”

-Karen Armstrong[7]

So it was in the 17th century as both Catholic and Protestant credulity was being made plain that a lifeline seemed to be thrown from the exciting new discoveries of the Scientific Revolution. Desperate to prove that their faith was not as superstitious, irrational and faith-based as their rival, West European Protestants and Catholics turned to reason and science to prove theirs as the ‘natural’ religion.

Likewise, many Christians today, desperate to gain credibility for the faith in the face of the secularist onslaught, are eager to point out that many of the first scientists and Enlightenment thinkers were Christians. Indeed, this is true. However, it should be noted that for many of these men, their intellectual pursuits were inextricably linked to their desire to vindicate Christianity as a ‘rational’ religion. Two Christians integral to the Scientific Revolution, a Catholic and a Protestant, demonstrate this well.

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) was wracked by philosophical scepticism in his early life, and so made it his life’s philosophical mission to determine what he could truly know. His hugely influential scientific and philosophical work Discourse on the Method was written to propose his method for true epistemology. In the book, he embraces radical scepticism and proposes a new method for thought based on mathematical and geometric reductionism by which he can therefore determine universal truths. Moreover, as a devout Catholic writing a book rejecting anything that can be doubted and emphasising a method for determining universal truth, it is no surprise that the fourth part of the book is given over to showing through his method that the existence of God can be proved. Descartes’s religion was one that could be proved; he was not satisfied with belief.

Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) meanwhile was also a devout Christian, though this time a Protestant, and like Descartes, he was keen to rid Christianity of mystery and superstition. While most famous for his scientific writings, Newton was also a theologian and in The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, he argued that the original true religion of ‘loving God and our neighbour’ had been founded by Noah, not Moses. This religion was free of superstition and advocated rational worship of the one God. In this rational, pure religion, Jesus was a prophet along with others like the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, but like the others he was not himself God. For if it is a nonsense to claim that bread and wine can be simultaneously Jesus’s literal body and blood, then so it is also a nonsense to claim that anyone could be both fully God and fully man at once. In a similar way, the God of this pure religion could not be a Trinity – another irrational doctrine lacking in logical rigour. Meanwhile, regarding his ground-breaking scientific works, Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion and universal gravitation showed for him the foresight and handiwork of the masterful Creator of the Universe. It made sense that rationality being the guiding light of humanity should be the handiwork of a God who was Himself Rational.

The lives of both men show how, in the aftermath of the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics were keen to vindicate their religion as rational and factual. Unfortunately, this trajectory would prove problematic for Christian faith in the West. Although future generations were greatly influenced by the scepticism and quest for certainty outlined in Descartes’s Discourses on the Method, they were less than convinced by the Theistic arguments he presented. Indeed, it could be argued that Descartes’s ultimate legacy was in shifting Western philosophical debate from the question of “what is true?” to the question “of what can I be certain?”. This shift would prove disastrous for immaterial faiths in the coming centuries defined by empiricism. Meanwhile, in making a mechanical understanding of the doctrine of Creation crucial to the conception of God, Newton had unintentionally made it possible to have a worldview without God. For if God is just an extension of the natural, physical order – ‘fact like any other’[8] to kickstart the Universe Machine – then ‘God’ becomes just one potential solution to an equation amongst others. As the 18th century philosopher, Denis Diderot, exclaimed, “Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.”

The post-Reformation baggage of Western Christianity was that it’s theologians and believers became gripped by both a desire to prove that God ‘existed’ like all other things in the physical universe and a fear that they would be charged with superstition. Neither this desire nor fear has yet to leave Western Christianity. It is witnessed every time Christians seek to pass the Bible off as a scientific textbook, describe the Gospels as ‘eyewitness’ accounts which can be trusted beyond any doubt, and present their belief in God as purely the result of reasoned argument and logical deduction. If Atheism seeks to pass off its beliefs as factual certainties, it is only because they are newly arrived players to a game Western Christendom began. The unfortunate thing being that though Christendom made the rules, the Atheists discovered they could play it better.

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This game is something I realised I didn’t want to play. In Part 2, I wrote how the false certainties of my Christian belief – that the Bible was unquestionably the inspired Word of God, that the afterlife was assured, and that the Christian life would be the best way for me to live – had been exposed; in Part 4, I wrote how the false certainties of my temporary Atheist unbelief – that all that exists is matter and that there is no afterlife – had also been unmasked. I now realised that both required belief but neither could provide easy answers. So rather than choose to play the game and pick a side, I decided it was better to leave the game altogether. If there was truth to be discovered, it would require a step into uncertainty, and a willingness on my part to forgo self-assurance. A pragmatic Agnosticism if you will much like that described by St. Augustine at the start.

Nevertheless, I did find myself ever so slowly beginning to be drawn back towards faith or at least a vague, quiet assertion that there likely was something more than the material. Partly this was emotional. Having been a minority, renegade religious person within a secularist ocean – in both China and the UK – for all my life meant that to continue drawing to Atheism was in some way to admit defeat. It meant accepting that the majority had been right all along; and my British underdog stubbornness would not allow that without more of a fight. Moreover, there was still the fear of fully losing the faith that had defined my life up to that point, and Agnosticism seemed a less sharp break. However, it was also because if Western Christianity had unconsciously walked into seeking to prove itself as a factual certainty, at least it hadn’t been born from that. Unfortunately, Western Atheism, being born as it was in the Age of Science, lacked an ‘atheology’ of uncertainty. There were no Atheistic dark nights of the soul I could relate to or draw on to help me through my greyness. To find this, I realised I would need to look beyond the particular Western Protestant Christian tradition I grew up with as well as the Atheism it had set itself apart from. I would need to learn ‘God’ afresh, as That Which I Could Not Know.

Notes

*Manichees were followers of Manicheanism, a gnostic religion that once spanned from Rome to China. You can learn more about it here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Manichaeism

References

  1. St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, circa, 397 A.D., Translated from Latin by R.S. Pine-Coffin, London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1961

  2. David Bentley Hart, No Enduring City in ‘Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays’, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016

  3. Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, London: William Collins, 2019

  4. Prof. Alec Ryrie, Lecture 2: How the Reformation Trained Us to be Sceptics in ‘The Origins of Atheism, a Gresham College Lecture Series’, 2018. URL: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/reformation-trained-us-to-be-sceptics

  5. Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond circa. 1580 in ‘Lecture 2: How the Reformation Trained Us to be Sceptics – The Origins of Atheism, a Gresham College Lecture Series’, 2018

  6. Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, circa. 1653, in ‘Lecture 2: How the Reformation Trained Us to be Sceptics – The Origins of Atheism, a Gresham College Lecture Series’, 2018

  7. Karen Armstrong, The History of God, Vintage Publishing, 1999

  8. Ibid.

4,700 Words

This is part 4 of my series ‘There and Back Again: An (A)Theist’s Tale’. This series is intended to tell you my story from the last few years of losing my faith and the slow journey of finding it again but not quite in same way as before.

Part 4 looks at my reflections on Atheism as I found myself without my faith. In so doing, this blog will touch on the relationship between Atheism and Belief in the West and ask the question: how did Atheism in the West become the default?

You can find the rest of this series under the 'There and Back Again: An (A)Theist's Tale' tab menu at the top of the screen.

(Credit to Eleanor Vivian and Miki Kwek for their proof-reading and critical feedback)

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

 

“From now on I began to prefer the Catholic teaching. The Church demanded that certain things should be believed even though they could not be proved…I thought that the Church was entirely honest in this and far less pretentious than the Manichees*, who laughed at people who took things on faith, made rash promises of scientific knowledge, and then put forward a whole system of preposterous inventions which they expected their followers to believe on trust because they could not be proved.”

-St. Augustine[1]

I’ve reached the part in my story where my faith is lost. My Christianity continues to exist but only in pretence, heartfelt but nevertheless lost. My mind is in a spin. What am I to think now? Who am I to become? A world of possibility lies before me. Do I forget religion and try to move on with my life? Do I go the whole hog and embrace Atheism? Or do I continue in greyness, sure of nothing but my uncertainty?

It was time for me to consider Atheism. I’d obviously considered the ship of Atheism many times before but that was when I was a sailor with a ship of my own, not now as I was, shipwrecked and thrashing in the water. Lost as I was, I wanted to be found, and this seemed like the obvious default. My very Folly Bridge epiphany had been “I think I’m an Atheist now” and as Part 2 describes, losing my faith had been in part due to coming to believe that the Atheistic view of the afterlife – that there was none – was indeed most likely. However, the more I thought, read, and reflected, the more I sensed that there wasn’t something entirely honest about the way Atheism as it stands in the West was being presented to me. Somewhat like Augustine with Manichaeism, though perhaps less effusively, I began to realise that if I was looking to Atheism to re-establish my certainty about the world, I was mistaken.

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What do you need to believe to be an atheist? It’s a thought-provoking question for the simple fact that we’re not used to associating the word belief with atheistic schools of thought. And why should we? After all, the whole mythos surrounding contemporary atheism is that it came to replace belief. As the dawn sun of the Enlightenment cast the light rays of the scientific revolution over a world darkened by centuries of religion, science with its accompanying empiricism, as the story goes, replaced ancient dusty texts – with their talking donkeys, angelic encounters, and strange laws – as our source of knowledge. The old religious ‘certainties’ were revealed for the superstitions they were and could finally be put to bed. Humanity was finally free to realise they didn’t need to invent any God(s) for their morality, happiness, metaphysics or meaning.

The myth is eminently charming and indeed surprisingly unquestioned by contemporary sceptics given how old atheistic schools of thought actually are. Indeed, many of the theories, beliefs and values emanating from Atheists since the Enlightenment can actually be traced back millennia. In the West, Epicurus in the late 4th century BC was a Greek philosopher who was inspired by the philosophical materialism of the 5th century BC Greek thinkers, Leucippus and Democritus. He endorsed their view that the universe was made entirely of tiny atoms and void, and from this, he argued that philosophical hedonism – the avoidance of pain and the seeking of pleasure (sometimes translated as tranquillity) – was the best way to live. He was also one of the earliest philosophers we know of to raise the Problem of Evil – if the gods are good, why is there so much suffering? Though he wasn’t actually an atheist in the strictest sense – he did believe the gods existed – Epicurus believed religion was fundamentally wrong. This was twofold: firstly because events in the natural world are explained by the movement of atoms and not the intervention of gods (who do not intervene), and secondly because the fear of divine punishment leads many people to needlessly live in fear rather than happiness.[2] Thus, Epicurus was what the 17th century essayist, Thomas Fuller, would have described as a ‘practical atheist’: not someone who ‘thinks there is no God’ but someone who ‘thinks not there is a God’ (think about that one for a minute). Indeed, the reflective among us today might recognise how the influence of Epicurus continues in the fact that if either is dying in the West, it is not God but religion – the practical manifestation of God in daily life.

However, before even Epicurus, Leucippus or Democritus, as early as perhaps the 7th century BC philosophers of Carvaka – an ancient Indian school of thought also known as ‘Lokoyata’ – had said many of the same things. Like with Epicureanism, most of their early texts have been lost to history, but with the help of quotations given in the texts of the philosophical writings of their rivals, we can piece together their thoughts. For instance, the 14th century AD scholar, Madhavacarya, recounts in the Sarvadarshansamgraha (the ‘Collection of All Philosophies’) how the name ‘Lokoyata’ signified their belief that only the material world – the ‘loka’ – exists.[3] Indeed, they believed the only ‘Heaven’ that existed was in this life on this planet and was a state where a man could live as he chose, free from the control of another (conversely ‘Hell’ was to live subject to another’s control). They also held that there was no afterlife, and that sense perception was the only source of knowledge. Like with Epicureanism, the ethical focus of Carvaka was fundamentally centred on enjoying this life while it lasts; as one saying went: “While life remains, let a man live happily; nothing is beyond death.” Finally, Carvaka taught its followers to hold religion – with its beliefs in reincarnation, karma and rituals – in suspicion, as it was nothing more than a fraudulent system devised by cunning priests to ensure their livelihood.[4]

Clearly then key elements of contemporary Atheism – philosophical materialism, disbelief in any sense of afterlife, suspicion of religious practice, and tendency for its ethics to centre on achieving happiness in this life – have long been in circulation. So why the secrecy? Well, that’s not entirely fair of me; after all, according to the Humanists UK’s website, it is common for the Epicurean refrain, “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind” to be spoken at humanist funerals. Clearly then, there are Atheistic Humanists today who rightly embrace their long and sophisticated tradition. Nevertheless, there appears – to me at least – to be a general reluctance amongst the areligious West to embrace its pre-Enlightenment forerunners. No doubt this in part due to the unfortunate historical circumstance that, as I pointed out earlier, many of these ancient texts have not survived in their original form to the present day. Furthermore, I suspect that the deeply embedded cultural myth of Progress that also came in the Enlightenment has made us moderns unwilling to recognise how little ‘progress’ there has actually been in our views about the world. However, ultimately, I think that this present amnesia is mostly because a phenomenon that prides itself on abolishing Belief does not like to dwell on times when its central axioms and tenets were exposed for what they really were – beliefs. For there is nothing factual regarding Atheism’s preeminent metaphysical claims that all that exists is material reality and that death is the end of ‘life’ in any real sense of the word. They are beliefs, and like all good beliefs, they have faded in and out of popularity in various guises over the centuries and millennia.

Now, please note that something can still be true without being factual. So please do not mistake my statements for disparagement; to state as fact that Atheistic premises are beliefs is neither to commend nor to disparage – it is simply to state what is. Those premises may be true; they may be false. But that material reality is all that exists can no more be a fact than that there is more to reality than the material.

Yet, I have heard and read many bright minds over the years speak of philosophical materialism (often known as ‘naturalism’) – the belief that only matter exists – as though it were fact. Always the reason for this is the same: science shows it to be so. And thus we discover how the West mistook its beliefs for facts. It is science, or rather a misunderstanding of science, that is to blame.

The Epistemological Revolution


“Perception indeed is the means of right knowledge. Since the means of right knowledge is to be non-secondary, it is difficult to ascertain an object by means of inference. There is no means of knowledge for determining the other world.”

-Brihaspati

The quote above is by Brihaspati, the legendary founder of the Carvaka school, and lays out in simple terms the school’s epistemology. Now, for those unfamiliar with the word, epistemology comes from the Greek word episteme which simply means ‘knowledge’, and epistemology is simply the philosophical study of how we know what we know. Like the vast majority of Atheistic philosophers that would come after, Brihaspati rooted his epistemology in empiricism, which simply means we can only know those things which we can perceive through our senses. Moreover, as you can also see from the quote, Brihaspati argued that inference – meaning ‘to make a conclusion based on reasoning or evidence’ – was a problematic source of knowledge. Later Carvaka thinkers explained what Brihaspati meant with the help of a parable. The story goes like this:

There once was a husband and wife. The husband was a materialist while the wife was a devout believer in the teachings of Brahman. The husband, frustrated that he could not convince his wife by argument of the falsity of her beliefs, came up with a ploy. When no one was watching, he went to the village crossroads and used his fingers to make markings in the dust mimicking the footprint of a wolf. When the marks were discovered, the local scholars agreed there must be a wolf. The husband then triumphantly told his wife to consider carefully the case of the Wolf’s Footprint.

The moral of the story is thus be wary of supposed ‘knowledge’ derived from inference. Yet, the story can be a little bit misleading. After all, it does seem perfectly reasonable for the local scholars, given their empirical knowledge that there are wolves in the area, to assume that the wolf print means there really is a wolf in the village! Indeed, Carvaka’s scepticism regarding inference was reserved solely for the supernatural, and the school was willing to accept that inferences drawn from empirical experience were valid. As one Carvaka verse reads, “Who will deny the validity of inference when one infers fire from smoke” – essentially, since at some earlier time we have observed for ourselves that fire produces smoke, when we see smoke it is reasonable to say we ‘know’ there is fire. Rather, Carvaka’s suspicion of inference was applied to those who inferred from sense-perception things which we could never hope to verify with those same senses – the supernatural. In Carvaka, to infer from the world of sense-perception something that is beyond our senses’ ability to detect is a gross error, whether that be an immortal soul, a life after death, or God(s). Indeed, the primary point of the Parable of the Wolf’s Footprint is that it is the ‘local scholars’, who represent the Brahmanical priests of Classical India, who are to blame for passing off their otherworldly inferences as truth. They convince the local people that they should let their lives be directed by a ‘truth’ which they can in fact only dubiously infer, and thus their misleading promises leave people squandering their lives on meaningless ritual and superstition when they could in fact just focus on enjoying their life here and now.

It’s a persuasive argument and has much to credit it. Why live your life as if there is a God or gods when you can never know – in an empirical sense – that they exist? Considering the tendency religions have to demand a substantial amount of commitment from their followers, it seems fair to suggest that too much is demanded for the sake of something we cannot empirically know. Indeed, as an example of this, look no further than the approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide currently fasting for Ramadan. True religion demands your life and will not be undersold. Meanwhile, irreligiosity demands nothing.

However, Carvaka, along with Epicureanism, both ultimately failed to make significant headway in either of their respective regions. Though they both enjoyed historically brief periods of popularity and continued to occasionally pick up admirers and followers down the centuries, neither anywhere ever came to dominate the philosophical mainstream on a large scale, that is until comparatively recently. It is beyond the scope of this blog to look into the reasons why, but suffice it to say that for the most part the mainstream of philosophy in either region didn’t ever come to fully buy either their metaphysics – naturalism – or their epistemology – empiricism; that is, in the West at least, until the advent of ‘Science’.

‘Science’ is one of those terms that everyone thinks they know the meaning of until they really start thinking about it. However, it seems fair to say that in the general modern consciousness the primary characteristic people associate with ‘science’ or the ‘scientific method’ is that it is empirical. William Whewell, an early writer on the history of science in the 19th century, described the Scientific Revolution as “the transition from an implicit trust in the internal powers of man’s mind to a professed dependence upon external observation”.[5] Knowledge was no longer looked for primarily in abstract, conceptual argument, but was rather sought ‘out there’ through the observation of the physical world.

After the Scientific Revolution, empiricism finally claimed the epistemological heart of Western philosophy. Indeed, the scientific method became so firmly rooted in our epistemological consciousness that by the 19th century, it had completely rebranded. What we now call ‘science’ had always been known up until this point as ‘natural philosophy’. Prior to the 19th century, the word ‘science’, coming as it did from the Latin root scientia (meaning simply ‘knowledge’), had always been used as a synonym for knowledge or study. Yet, times had changed, and the Method which had uncovered so much in the natural world that was previously hidden, became equated with knowledge – scientia – in its totality. Why language and words change is a complex business, but for my part, I suspect that to label as mere ‘philosophy’ that which was shining such light on our enormous universe seemed an injustice to those who increasingly relied on science for their certainty and knowledge.

Thus, it was in this environment that the marriage between Atheism and Science took place. In the Western philosophical tradition, only the practical Atheism of Epicurean indifference to the god(s) had previously been possible. Yet now, the astonishing accumulation of discoveries from the Scientific Revolution onwards enabled us to doubt whether God was even required at all for our universe to function. Theoretical Atheism had finally become possible in the West. Indeed, the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 was the cherry on the cake as even the last great mystery of human life had been explained. The puzzle of the universe and existence was now solved and God was not needed for the equation. Thus, Religion became the primitive precursor to Science – the attempt of premodern humanity to try to explain the mysteries of the natural world. This superstition could now be discarded; Science, not God, explained the universe.

It was in this atmosphere that the notorious War of Science and Religion was born in the Western world. Yet this apparent War has always been a cover for something much deeper. Place two prodigious minds (or even two fairly average minds) in a debating chamber to discuss this question, and it will quickly be resolved that to speak of Science and Religion being at war is nonsensical, for they are not of the same category and exist on different plains. It is only dogmatic Fundamentalist Christians who try to turn their religion into a science, and likewise equally dogmatic New Atheists who try to turn their science into a religion. The rest of us accept that you can embrace both Science and Religion without losing either.

And yet even after this question is essentially resolved, the debate so often continues. But what in fact continues is not actually a debate between the compatibility of Science and Religion – this is already resolved. No, what actually emerges is the debate that was always taking place, just in disguise – the question of whether our worldviews should be grounded in Fact or Belief. Unlike Science and Religion, Fact and Belief do exist within the same plain. They are mutually exclusive and something cannot be both a Fact and a Belief. And in our modern world, Science is code for Fact – certainty, truth, knowledge – whilst Religion is code for Belief – uncertainty, debate, opinion. To have a worldview based on Science is to argue for a life based only on Facts – that the world is purely and simply explained by the matter we can perceive, observe and know. A Religious worldview on the other hand is to argue for the permissibility of Belief in our lives – that the world might be more than just the matter we see. And so the debaters continue their debate, finally discussing something of true substance.

It is a world divided between Fact and Belief that makes Atheism the default position of the Western mind. Because ultimately, as much as they try to avoid the crude, unpopular terminology, the Theist must always persuade the Atheist to take a leap of faith – to live a life of believing and not simply of just knowing. The Theist must persuade their Atheist counterpart that there really is more than just the material world they can see, taste and feel. And to this plea, the Non-Religious are well-versed in their reply – “where is your evidence?” The Theist sighs. It is a refrain they have often heard, and they know the argument is being lost. They present the case of miracles; the response is the placebo effect and scientific studies on the inconclusive effects of prayer. They try morality; they are met by the existence of the noble, admirable Irreligious. They give religious experience a go; emotional manipulation and chemicals on the brain. Finally, they try the cosmos itself; how quaint – don’t they realise the universe was long ago lost to Theism? Always the Theist must infer from the material something more than the material, and always the Atheist can reply that the material itself is sufficient. Thus, the Theist leaves the conversation, deflated and niggled by doubt; meanwhile the Atheist remains, comfortably assured of the certainty of their convictions.

However, as I have already said, the convictions and certainties of Atheism are in themselves no more certain or sure than their Theistic counterparts. For Atheism is a philosophy built on wilful blindness and that its adherents are blind is no more or less legitimate than that its rivals claim to be able to see.

The Epistemological Sleight of Hand


“Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding.”

-Andrew Ferguson [6]

For those unfamiliar with the classical magic trick, ‘Sleight of Hand’ is where a magician, by the skilful and speedy movement of her hands, convinces her audience that something has happened which has in fact not. It comes from the Old Norse meaning ‘to use dexterity or cunning, especially so as to deceive.’ In the case of contemporary Western Atheism, the sleight is all the more cunning for the fact that most, friend or foe alike, don’t even realise it has been done.

So what is the trick? To paraphrase the quote by the journalist Andrew Ferguson above, what is in fact a premise of science has been presented as a finding.

As we’ve seen, Carvaka and Epicureanism had always sought to base their worldviews in naturalism, and they found they could do so quite comfortably without the instruments of modern science. Humanity has not required any enlightenment to recognise that it can be argued we can be more certain about the existence of matter than of any invisible God(s). St. Augustine, writing not more than a couple centuries after Epicureanism had reached its height in the Roman West, remembers how he thought of God as a child: “as some great person who could listen to us and help us, even though we could not see you or hear you or touch you.” The child Augustine was no fool and later in the same passage he isn’t afraid to imply how belief in this invisible Being was weakened when so many of his prayers to avoid a beating went unanswered.[7]

However, historically, any such scepticism about the supernatural had always been tempered by a stronger scepticism about the limits of empirical perception. For instance, Plato, the very ‘Founder of Western Philosophy’, is most famous for his Theory of the Forms. The Forms have been debated and discussed ever since Plato first proposed them – indeed he himself debates their validity within the very Dialogues in which he proposes them. Nevertheless, a crucial element of what Plato seems to be proposing in the Theory of the Forms is that what is most true, valuable and precious in this life must be from beyond the world of the senses and inferred through reason. For sense perception is deceitful and limited, and only reason and inference will allow us to see that to which we are otherwise blind. Building on this, Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave posits that those who rely on their experiences of the world alone are like prisoners trapped in a cave. They observe the shadows of puppets cast by a fire on the wall of the cave, and they spend their lives trying to find patterns and guess which puppet will appear next. Little do they know that beyond the Cave their lies a green, good and pleasant world lit by sunlight. Yet, the prisoner who escapes the confines of the Cave and discovers this world, then returns to share the good news with his former prison-mates only to be laughed away – the Cave is all that exists; anyone can see that.[8]

As with the Parable of the Wolf’s footprint, the Allegory of the Cave is imperfect. After all, the freed prisoner in Plato’s analogy witnesses both the Cave and the World of the Forms beyond the Cave with the very same senses. There is nothing immaterial about the new world the prisoner discovers. However, the point of the analogy is not that we can perceive this immaterial world of the Forms with our senses – Plato is clear that the World of the Forms is known only through reason – but rather that there is reason to be doubtful about the totality of the ‘world’ revealed by the senses alone. For all we know, the certainty’s conveyed by our senses are nothing more than shadows on a Cave wall, and our certainty blinds us to the possibility of a richer world beyond.

In many ways then, the history of philosophy has been shaped by the bounds within which philosophers have allowed themselves to be sceptical. Philosophers have chosen to be sceptical about reason, religion, our sense perceptions, and indeed about existence in its entirety. Two philosophers of the 2nd century A.D. demonstrate well the different routes such scepticism might take. In the case of Sextus Empiricus, the problem of scepticism meant we could neither affirm nor deny any belief as true or false. On the other end of the spectrum was Tertullian for whom the problem of scepticism meant we must accept that true living is found by transcending the limits of knowledge and accepting belief in faith; and so he famously exclaimed about the death and resurrection of Christ: “It is certain, because it is impossible”.[9]

Modern Atheism is thus the latest fashion in a long history of scepticism, only now the scepticism is reserved for the immaterial alone. However, while the empirical Atheists of Epicureanism and Carvaka were required to make the case for empiricism in a world where Atoms could be hypothesised but never demonstrated, modern Atheists have had the trappings of modern science to boost their case. There has been no better time to make the case for a materialist universe than when the primary method for determining what we know and don’t know about reality relies on empiricism in order to do so.

Indeed, through the sciences, empiricism has yielded results for humanity that the Ancients could only dream of. Unfortunately, as Ferguson writes, “the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist”.[10] So we see how science has been used to disprove God and indeed anything immaterial, for how can something exist which we cannot quantify? Much like a Prospector using a metal-detector to prove that nothing other than metal exists in the ground, those who use the scientific method, designed as it is to discover through empirical observation material and mechanistic causes for reality, will only ever find those material and mechanistic causes. As Dr. Jordan Peterson remarks, if we ever come to a place where we can explain everything including consciousness and other realities that currently elude the scientific method, it will only be because our understanding of the ‘material’ will have significantly changed.[11]

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“Only when a method is conscious of what it cannot explain, can it maintain a clear distinction between the knowledge it secures and the ideology it obeys.”[12]

-David Bentley Hart

These words by theologian, David Bentley Hart, highlight well the current sleight of hand so prominent in the West. Too many (though not all) contemporary Atheists have been unwilling to admit the limits of their method, and thus have been unable to see the ideology which makes them wilfully blind. Their desire to ground themselves in certainty and fact has made them blind to the fact that their certainty is a shadow in a Cave, and their facts are beliefs in disguise.

Yet, if Atheists are wilfully blind, then Theists wilfully see. We cannot escape the fact that our Western obsession with proving our religion or irreligion the most ‘rational’, the most ‘evidence-based’, and the most ‘logical’ is ultimately resting on whichever side the flipped coin of ‘dubious inference’ lands. For the Atheist asserts he is right in inferring from matter that there is nothing more, whilst the Theist asserts she is right in being sceptical about the claim that matter is all there is. Ultimately, neither of them can know, and where the coin lands has just as much to do with all that is gloriously irrational about ourselves as just what is rational. It is why no worldview remains simply philosophy. A worldview is always as much art, poetry, architecture and song as it is thought-through prose and argument. Worldviews attract more than they prove, and I for one found it quite beautiful recently hearing Atheist comedian, Ricky Gervais, paint a picture of the meaning that his Atheism gives him in the face of death (from 4min20sec). There is much that can be beautiful in Atheistic belief as well as in Theistic religion, and evangelism at its best in both Christianity and Atheism is not a point-scoring contest born out of insecurity but an invitation to a greater beauty.

So, I do not say all this because I want to argue for some free-for-all post-modernism where nothing is true. In my view at least, simply because we cannot know something does not mean there is no knowledge to be had about it. Truth remains true in the absence of certainty. I merely wish to inject some humility, honesty and understanding into the debate. Indeed, this is less a debate; more a glorious flower show. Amongst all the flora displayed for us to see and smell, there is a flower whose very beauty and essence is all-surpassing truth, but to say we know the flower we pick is the most true and beautiful is to somewhat miss the point.

Nonetheless, this spiritual quest for certainty and fact is nothing new. In fact, were it not for Western Christianity’s own ambitions for those very qualities, contemporary Western Atheism might never have been born.

Notes

*Manicheanism was a gnostic religion that once spanned from Rome to China. You can learn more about it here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Manichaeism

References

  1. St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, circa, 397 A.D., Translated from Latin by R.S. Pine-Coffin, London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1961

  2. Seth Eislund, ‘Was Ancient Greek Philosopher Epicurus Really an Atheist?’ in Historyisnowmagazine.com, February 25, 2018. URL: http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2018/2/25/was-ancient-greek-philosopher-epicurus-really-an-atheist#.XpsQZMhKjIU=

  3. http://www.humanistictexts.org/carvaka.htm - Adapted from Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha by Madhava Acharya, translated by E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough. Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trubner, London, 1914.

  4. Prof. Peter Adamson, Podcast: Episode 39: Indian Naturalism – the Wolf’s Footprint in ‘The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Indian Philosophy’, April 2, 2017. URL: https://historyofphilosophy.net/carvaka-naturalism

  5. Whewell, William, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840

  6. Andrew Ferguson, ‘The Heretic’ in The Washington Examiner, March 25, 2013. URL: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-heretic

  7. St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, circa, 397 A.D., Translated from Latin by R.S. Pine-Coffin, London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1961

  8. Prof. Peter Adamson, Podcast: Episode 26: Ain’t No Sunshine – The Cave Allegory of Plato’s Republic in ‘The History of Philosophy without any Gaps’, March 27, 2011. URL: https://historyofphilosophy.net/plato-cave-allegory-republic

  9. Tertullian, De Carne Christi (On the Flesh of Christ), Ch. 5 Vs. 4, Translated from Latin by Evans, 1956. URL: http://www.tertullian.org/works/de_carne_christi.htm#content

  10. Andrew Ferguson, ‘The Heretic’

  11. Dr. Jordan Peterson, Podcast: Episode 4: Religion, Myth, Science, Truth in ‘The Jordan Peterson Podcast’, December 30, 2016. URL: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-4/

  12. David Bentley Hart, Lupinity, Felinity and the Limits of Method in ‘Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays’, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016

4,000 Words

This is part 3 of my series ‘There and Back Again: An (A)Theist’s Tale’. This series is intended to tell you my story from the last few years of losing my faith and the slow journey of finding it again but not quite in same way as before.

Part 3 explores the paradox of emotions and feelings I went through as I saw my faith fall down around me.

You can find the rest of this series under the 'There and Back Again: An (A)Theist's Tale' tab at the top of the screen.

(Credit to Eleanor Vivian for her proof-reading and critical feedback)

Image by Layers from Pixabay

 

“It is very difficult and emotionally stressful to change what you believe about something as fundamental as who Jesus is and what the Bible is. It is highly traumatic. Most people who approach scholarship of the Bible are simply not willing to do it because they don’t want to be proved wrong…When I went through this at one point in my life I finally just said, ‘I’m just going to go wherever I think the truth leads me because Augustine said that all truth is God’s truth.’ If it’s true it comes from God, and so you shouldn’t be afraid of it. It may cause emotional trouble but you shouldn’t be afraid of the truth, and I was willing to change my life if it went that way.”

-Bart Erhman, renowned Biblical scholar and former Christian (now agnostic) (1)

The day I realised I’d lost my faith was very ordinary. It was my final week at Oxford University and I was walking home from college towards my room in the south of the city. I was nearing home and crossing Folly Bridge when with gentle bluntness and terrifying matter-of-fact-ness a thought crept into my head: “I think I’m an atheist now.” It wasn’t piercing, thunderous or dramatic. It just was. And in that moment, my world changed – I had no response to it; I knew it was true.

A friend who converted to Christianity as a teenager once told me: “I don’t think Christians realise how scary it is for people when they convert to Christianity. You have to totally re-think everything you thought you knew about life.” This really struck me at the time as, having grown up in a Christian family, even if I hung out with Doubt regularly, I could never truly relate to what it is to have to completely change your worldview – that is until that day crossing Folly Bridge. More recently, listening to Bart Ehrman summarise his own de-conversion quoted at the top really resonated with me. I recognised that emotional stress and trauma. I also knew what it was to unwillingly yet nonetheless doggedly follow where the truth led, continuing to take each step despite the mixture of painful emotions as well as the equally powerful desire to numb, forget and pretend it wasn’t happening. This is that story.

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Confusion and Distress

I often think that intentionality more than reason is the most ‘human’ of all our traits as a species. More than just the ability to make a choice, intentionality is that creative will to mould our lives according to a certain end. To borrow the language of the ancient philosophers, when we are at our most ‘animal’ is when we are acting without purpose – or at least a purpose beyond mere instinct and survival. At our most ‘animal’, there is no intention to our actions except what instinctually seems most appropriate. Intention meanwhile tames the wildness of nature, moulding all according to its purpose. It turns the streams into canals, the stallions into carthorses and the forests into cities. For the animal, the world around just is; for the human, the world around offers potential to become.

Now I do not mean this crude dualism between the ‘animal’ and the ‘human’ to be an unfair, snobbish indictment of any apparent ‘lower’ form of life of our animal brethren. You need only look around at the news to see how humanity’s intentionality has had many unintended consequences to the detriment of our natural environment. Indeed, there is something very precious and valuable to be found in that most ‘animal’ of qualities to live and just be. Nonetheless, there is also something very precious and beautiful in intentionality. After all, it is intention that invites the outcast into deep friendship, stays the would-be predator’s knife, and leads the artist to paint. But why intentionality is so particularly human is that we are lost without purpose. Indeed, even the Stoic who conforms her life to the pattern of nature is still moulding her life very intentionally according to what she believes is truly best.

When day-to-day survival is alongside our impending mortality so guaranteed, we search for a ‘higher’ purpose in which to root the actions of our lives. Yet, we do not search too hard, for intentionality is also exhausting in large quantities. As much as we are creatures of intention, the ‘human’ is a creature of routine. We would rather not have to think too much about what we must do. Thus, our religions through the ages have always helpfully routinized our years with holy days, festivals and pilgrimages that intentionally create space for important religious activities like fellowship and prayer. Indeed, social creatures that we are, we frequently opt to delegate our intentionality to the larger group. This, I believe, is the foundation of culture; for what is culture but the unarticulated intention of a group to live life according to often equally unarticulated purposes, values and reasons? The British person cannot tell you why they are always so polite, and the Korean cannot say why they always defer to the elder – they just do. The foreigner immediately, however, notices how ‘strange’ these behaviours are, and if you wish to learn about a culture, ask a foreigner before you ask a native.

Yet, for those who find themselves a minority, rarely do you find their intentions so shrouded in unarticulated mystery. Minorities of all stripes – whether religious, ethnic, LGBTQ+ or political – will almost always have the theory and terminology to hand to explain why they are as they are. Unlike majorities who can afford to lazily rely on the facile human notion that majority equals right, minorities have a constant existential pressure to justify themselves. Why are they not like the majority? A minority must always be ready to answer to this question. They can’t rest on the weight of cultural assumption. For this reason, an anxious doubt almost always lurks at the door of the minority in a way it simply doesn’t for the majority – what if they’re wrong and all this energy spent existing as a minority is for nothing? When this anxious minority comes into contact with the assured majority then, it frequently produces variants on two themes: a stubborn, obstinate false-bravado or a timid, worried apologeticness.

However, although there is this anxiety in minorities, there is also a paradoxical rootedness, security and purpose. Unlike most in the majority, a minority knows who they are and what they’re living for. Indeed, the problem with majorities that delegate out their intentionality to a common but unarticulated culture is that they can easily lose all sense of rigour and drive; they forget why they behave as they do and what they’re living for. Yes, their lives may lack existential anxiety, but their actions can become empty and their lives can grow stale. It can very easily become a life that ‘goes through the motions’. Thus, the unarticulated life is frequently the fruitless one. It never realised why it was living.

I say all this, because I want to try and help you understand the paradox of emotions I experienced when losing my faith. On the one hand, due to this ‘existential angst of the minority’, there was a deep determination to pursue the truth in case I really had been living a lie. Simultaneously, however, there was this deep sense of rootedness and purpose that Christianity gave me which meant I was greatly unwilling to let it go. I knew who I was; I didn’t want to un-know it.

Unless you know what it is to live everyday intentionally, choosing to be and live differently from the majority of the world around you, you won’t understand just how distressing and confusing it is to lose that sense of identity. This wasn’t just something I did on a Sunday; nor was it something I practiced in the ‘private sphere’ of my home. This was my life. Although not always consciously, everything I did, thought and said was intentionally weighed by Christianity’s measures. Thinking back to my university days, to list just some of the actions influenced by my faith is not difficult. Moreover, there must have been far many smaller decisions I made that were consciously influenced by my faith and even more that were unconsciously affected. What was my life now without faith? Who was I now if not a child of God? To leave Christianity was to enter a dismal abyss of uncertainty in which I saw no light. I had always known who I was, and thus what I must do. But now I was lost in a sea of uncertainty. I was an island beset by chaos; all order and direction had left me.

And yet, my life had already been set in a specific direction. A couple of months before my ‘Folly Bridge experience’ I had made the decision to spend the next year of my life working with a charity supporting Middle Eastern refugee Christians all because of a profound spiritual experience that meant I believed this is what God wanted me to do. I knew I would spend the next year visiting churches, interacting with Christians from all walks of life, and supporting the ministry of a high-profile Christian minister. I had even turned down a high-profile secular graduate scheme in order to do it. But now with my faith in tatters, I couldn’t decide whether I was in a tragedy or ironic comedy. Just a couple of months before, embarking on this exciting, faith-moulding year with a dynamic Christian ministry had made total sense. Yet now I had to contemplate whether to try and pull-off pretending to be a Christian for a whole year or just throw in the towel. I realised that continuing as if nothing had changed in me was most likely dishonest, hypocritical and insincere. However, I also knew that if I threw in the towel that would mean people would ask me why, and I couldn’t face that. If I admitted to the world the confusion I felt inside, that would make it real in a definitive way. But I didn’t want it to be real; I was good at being “Jacob the Christian”, and I had no clue how to live as “Jacob the…atheist or something-or-other?”

So I kept it quiet and ran from my demon. Indeed, the blessing of just having graduated was that I had a summer of no expectations before I went to work for this charity. University was now over, and I could return home to a quiet home to rest, garden, and watch TV. For several weeks, I had a quiet, domestic pattern. I saw the occasional friend but for the most part I either busied myself with jobs around the house or simply sought out the numbing properties of our media age. Yet, I couldn’t keep my thoughts at bay forever. I knew I was hiding. I knew the demon of my apparent deconversion must be faced sooner or later, but it all seemed too much

Fear and Loss

What is the truth worth? It’s a big question and we often find those individuals inspiring who, in pursuit of truth, went through much self-sacrifice, even at the cost of their lives, and in so doing, achieved a greater good. Yet, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us are probably not willing to pay the price. Bart Ehrman highlighted this in his quote at the beginning, and though he was specifically airing his thoughts on Christian biblical scholars, most people, Christian or not, are probably unwilling to earnestly and sincerely seek after truth when it will likely cost. So, if it is already difficult to pursue the truth for a greater good when there is a cost, is there any reason to pursue truth when there is no greater good yet the cost is still high? Does the pursuit of truth remain a worthy end in itself, regardless of cost? If it does, the end fulfilment seemed hollow to me. If my pursuit of truth led where I thought it was leading, then I saw no reward but the cost of abandonment and isolation.

With every passing day of that summer, fear of my eventual isolation from family and friends grew within me. Notice I say isolation, not rejection. The problem was not that I expected my Christian family and friends to want nothing to do with me upon discovery of my deconversion. Although I knew it would sadden them, deconversion is not an unknown phenomenon in the West, and I knew my Christian family and friends would still love me and continue to be there for me. Nonetheless, aside from the knowledge that it would sadden them, I had a deepening sense of fear and sadness because it increasingly became apparent to me how many of my relationships and joys in life were channelled through religious organisations, whether informally or formally. All the regular Christian events I attended like church, small groups, homeless outreach, Bible studies, and prayer groups provided an organised forum for honest, serious and authentic friendships that included but also extended beyond just fun and banter. I might not have to worry about active rejection, but the passive isolation of slow dissociation that would occur if I stopped attending these events hit me like a brick wall. It wasn’t that I had no good friends outside of Christianity. I had very dear friends who didn’t consider themselves Christian. But when I thought about it, even with them our friendship was facilitated through an equally organised institution – the formal higher education system. This had provided that space for serious and honest friendship to emerge alongside the fun and games. Yet, now with university behind me, it seemed that all the secular world could offer me was the lonely, surface-level world of pub and football to provide just a fraction of the interpersonal intimacy the Church had always given me without a second thought.

Moreover, there was the prospect of losing all the beauty and joy I had found in Christian worship, faith and community. Many of my happiest memories, my deepest contentments and my most precious relationships had been channelled through it. It transformed the world around me – the beggar became a brother, the bustling streets and quiet meadows were joined together as Creation, and even the greatest suffering was consoled in the arms of the Cross. Christianity had always been to me as much an aesthetic as a philosophy, a dynamic poetry as much as a codified dogma. Through it I saw the world, and it was very good.

So the fear of what there was to lose was indeed great. Writing as I do now from the perspective of having come ‘back again’, I do not seek to pretend that this fear had no impact at all on the fact that I ended up returning to Christian faith. Truly, even as the anxiety that I might be living a lie was pushing me out the door, the fear of all that I might lose was causing me to grasp with all my might at the handle.

Anger and Sadness

Human emotions, though, are conflicting and fickle things. Alongside the fear of what I might lose, there was a mixture of anger and sadness that I had to lose it at all. The exclusionary element of Christianity has often been criticised in the post-modern West. I’ve often felt this was unfair as it ignores how highly inclusive it also is—anyone “either Jew or Greek” to quote St. Paul (2) can be part of it. However, when I found myself outside the door of what I understood to be the Christian paradigm, I knew I could no longer partake in this form of life which I dearly loved. Again, like with my family and friends, there was no active rejection but rather an impending isolation. I’d become a ‘non-Christian’—the ‘them’ that was distinct from ‘us’. Indeed, I realised more and more how much the Christian language I’d used and heard growing up was one that portrayed people in very black-and-white, in-or-out terms. Yes, anyone could become a Christian, but there was no grey in-between. You were either saved or not saved, lost or found, a Christian or non-Christian. There was no space for those who wanted to keep a foot in both doors.

But this is where I was. I came to describe this grey-in-between as feeling like my mind was Atheist but my heart was Christian. After my epiphany, I could no longer admit to myself that I believed Christianity was a winning ‘bet’, but I was so invested in it emotionally, socially and psychologically that I would rather continue to back a ‘losing horse’ than go through the heartache of letting it go. I guess it was like a break-up in some ways—you know it’s over, but you don’t want to admit that it really is. So I tried to live as if there had been no ‘Folly Bridge experience’. I determined to go through the Christian motions, even if my mind didn’t buy it. Anything to avoid my fear of impending isolation. Anyway, why did there have to be such a cost to losing my faith? Couldn’t I have the community without the Christianity? The love without the faith? How could my faith betray me like this? Why, just because I was no longer ‘fully signed up’, did it have to take away everything I held dear?

No more was this mix of emotions – this anger and sadness – apparent than in my conversations with the few people I did open up to about my loss of faith. Because the other reason why I didn’t want to tell people about my loss of faith, besides the reasons I’ve already outlined, was I was afraid they would try and bring me back.

It is strange that, despite the fact that there was nothing I would have loved at the time more dearly than to have all my questions answered and find myself back in the Christian fold, there was nothing that annoyed and angered me more than the possibility that a Christian friend or family member might feel compelled to ‘bring me back’. I’d been around church long enough to know that a script existed for those who’d ‘fallen away’, and I would be damned if I was going to let someone play it on me. I didn’t want people to bring me back, I wanted people to listen. I didn’t want to be black or white; I wanted to know that I was accepted and loved as I was – this confused, grey-in-between. I wanted to be given time and space to work things out and not feel pressured to go either way.

Yet I did feel pressure. Not because of anything anyone did or intended, but rather because the articulated language of Western evangelical faith was so imbibed with this dualism of ‘us and them’. Now that I’d become a ‘stranger’ to the culture, a foreigner on the outside, it suddenly hit me how much of my Western evangelical Christian faith presented an exclusionary dualism. Even in its very inclusivity, there was an implicit otherness. Behind every invitation into the fold, there was the implication that one was outside it. Behind every call to accept Jesus into your heart, there stood an implicit assumption that Jesus was not there already.

Thus I knew my desire to live in the grey in-between was not possible. I must be in or out. Our language would not allow for anything different. I must either carry on the pretence of faith and go through the motions, and so hope to avoid losing that which I so dearly loved; or I must make known my greyness, but in so doing accept that I must take up a new mantle as ‘the other’ and so find myself placed into a box that felt equally as disingenuous and ill-fitting.

I chose to pretend. Accepting an ill-fitting box was easier than risking such loss. There was bitterness and anger in having to make this decision, but there was also relief. Pretending bought me time.

Hope

As I stated in the introduction to this series, when I say I had lost my faith, I do not mean that I discarded my Christian faith and so picked up another metaphysical belief system. Yes, I had an epiphany that I thought I was now an atheist, but once the shock of this had faded, I realised that this was more an epiphany about who I no longer was, not necessarily who I was now becoming. Indeed, even as my anger grew at the way my Christian language had pigeon-holed me into becoming an unwilling ‘other’, I was equally annoyed by the notion that my loss of faith equalled an atheistic conversion. In fact, as the weeks went on, my frustration with the whole dualistic paradigm grew. I was living between two worlds, even if neither world could conceptually accept that.

And that’s why I continued to pray. Yes, every prayer now was shadowed by a lurking thought that my words were but dust in the ether, but pray I did. As my life went into free fall and all the conceptual structures that once made it so safe, secure and certain fell down, I began praying with a brokenness which actually I had read about all my life in the Christian Scriptures. This is when I began to realise that perhaps the issue was not so much God or no God, but rather a total re-think of how I thought about and interacted with God. Perhaps it was not God who had changed, but rather the conceptual box which I had put God in. What if, rather than losing my relationship with the great I AM, I had seen shattered my conception of the rigid YOU ARE THIS?

The rest of this series is all about exploring the story of how I found my feet again after this profound season of lostness. But for now, I think it would be fitting to end this part with this excerpt of a prayer I wrote in my journal on July 6, 2017, approximately three weeks after my Folly Bridge experience.

Father God, You know I’m in an interesting time right now. I’m kind of on the cusp of becoming an ‘atheist’ and yet at the same time not, and continuing to pray to You. I’m learning a lot about things from science to theology and yet I feel like I know less. In some ways I can see that my mind has become atheist but my heart still ardently follows You. There is so much I do not know, but also much I know I must do. You have wiped away the façade of my brilliance. I have become one of the crowd. I have been brought to my knees as a beggar not knowing the certainties of the people around me, but being poor in spirit, aware that I’m not the bees knees I once thought I was. My story is being rewritten, and the plot that once seemed so clear stands now blurred and its conclusion shrouded in mystery. I do not know how my story will end, and I do not know how the next couple years will pan out… I am only certain of my uncertainty and that I do not want to leave my Jesus and I don’t think He wants to leave me. Daddy, hold me close; let this son of Yours not stray away. Bring me home to You.

References

1. This quote is from a recent debate between Bart Ehrman and Peter J. Williams on the Unbelievable Podcast/YouTube series – “The Story of Jesus: Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?” (starting from 1hr26min)

2. Galatians 3:28

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