THE CONFESSION OF A STRUGGLING ATHEIST

Daniel Jupp is a British author and political commentator with a Ph.D. from the University of Exeter. I admire his candor and his unflinching analysis of recent events in the UK and the world. In a recent column in his blog Jupplandia he explains his lack of Christian belief. I include it here because it expresses the view of many contemporary thinkers who consider themselves “struggling atheists”.

“I’m not a Catholic, and I’m only a cultural Christian. I’d say my position on faith is akin to that of Thomas Hardy or many of the British writers and thinkers who underwent the 19th century crisis of faith that started Britain’s journey towards a secularised spiritual emptiness (now rapidly being replaced by Islamic conquest).

I’m what might be classed as a struggling atheist. Intellectually, I find it very difficult to reconcile reality with the idea of a benevolent Creator. I don’t feel God’s presence, and never have. But I do feel God’s absence, and always have. It doesn’t seem to me that atheism, mine or anyone else’s, is an intellectual triumph. It seems to me to be a loss and a tragedy, both societally and for individuals who don’t have faith within themselves in a higher purpose and a spiritual dimension to our existence.

Hardy wrote an incredibly moving poem about this odd position to be in called God’s Funeral. He felt that God was dead, but not in the mocking or celebratory way that many since have used that phrase or considered it to be true. He felt it as the most all pervasive tragedy there is, the secret underlying all human suffering, and the cause of a sorrow less finite than God Himself. I expect any rational or thinking believer, certainly in the Christian tradition, knows that the struggle with doubt is integral to the profession of faith, but it’s a comnection less well known on the atheist side of the fence.

One of the great ironies of modern atheism, after all, is it’s strident, proselytising, hectoring certainty, a feature which seems to contradict its denial of faith by often being more of an insistent absolute than the thing it replaces.

I’m not that kind of atheist. I’m the kind that feels the absence as a wound, rather than declares it as a boast.

It seems to me that human beings must have meaning, and that meaning is as essential to our happiness as the things which we require for survival, and often more important to us than those necessities. And the world we live in now is proof of Chesterton’s assertion too:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

The absence of Christian faith and of a Church active in the lives of a once Christian people does not usher in, it at least does not long suffer to exist, a society in which Nothing reigns and in which men and women happily go around with no firm beliefs on anything. Instead, it opens up a gaping Void which both physics and occultism would tell you will soon be filled. What rushes into the secular society that turns from Christ is a horde of new faiths and new beliefs, which rush across the spiritual landscape with all the chaos and harm of barbarian tribes breaching an undefended border.

The two things, physical conquest and spiritual conquest, are of course intimately linked, and together explain the way in which Islam is achieving what a muscular Christianity of the past held back for centuries.”

But the welcoming void of secularism and of Christian retreat and absence is also the thing which made the worst tyrannies of the 20th century possible, with Communism, Fascism and Nazism all offering the fierce intensity of meaning, no matter how evil they were, that Christianity no longer provided. Atheism, for all its conviction and smugness, is never sufficient. It is a thing defined solely by what it declares itself to NOT be, rather than by any offering of meaningful content which the soul of man (even in those saying no such soul exists) still craves. Humans will believe, come what may, in Something.

And the most absurd insanities, the most comically inept constructions, the most viciously stupid ideas, can be stitched together in a form with all the threads showing and not a hint of beauty to it, and this New Faith won’t be judged on how ugly it is or how ridiculous it is, or even by how murderous it is…..but on how much opportunity for belief it offers, and on how confidently and ruthlessly it strives for dominance.”

This observation reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew 12:43-45 about the man who rejects one spiritual belief and then allows another to replace it. “The final condition of that man is worse than the first.” The absence of Christ in the heart of man is indeed a wound that needs healing. Only by acknowledging our need and Christ’s sufficiency to fill that need will the soul be healed. Let us pray for those we know who are struggling with this deficiency that they may come to know the loving presence of our Lord and Savior.