How to Be a Skeptical Atheist, or Believer

His first entry for Dispatch Faith is a reflection on the new book by journalist, editor, and novelist Christopher Beha: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha, a Catholic who became an atheist who became Catholic again, wrote the book to explain how atheism is a belief system built in many of the same ways atheists criticize people of faith for believing in. He does a fine job of that, Jacobs writes, but there’s actually quite a bit to the book for people of faith to learn, too, if they want to be honest in their belief.

And in case you missed it, below Jacobs’ essay is a peek at a feature story we published this week on our website on a pair of nuns whose sole mission is to reach Catholics who have grown disillusioned with the church—or left it altogether—because of ongoing abuse scandals.

There’s a wonderful passage in Annie Dillard’s 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where she discusses her experience reading the works of naturalists, ecologists, and zoologists—people who have devoted a lifetime to observing certain features of the natural world—who are always seeing things she has never seen and can’t manage to see. Snakes in a hollow where the locals think there are no snakes; tiny leaf cuttings made by tiny insects. Dillard is bemused by this, and after some reflection realizes that training and experience in a particular field enable us to construct what she calls the “artificial obvious.” These experts had to practice a devoted attentiveness, had to learn to read all the signs, and after they had done this long enough, things that were completely invisible to the ordinary person became obvious—to them.

I think that almost everything obvious to me and you and our neighbors is made so artificially. We are trained, habituated to certain ways of thinking. We hang around people for whom some views are unquestionable, for whom no alternative has ever been on the table. After a while, those views become unquestionable to us, too. 

This isn’t to say that when something becomes unquestionable through experience and training and habituation and social pressure it’s false. Often the things we believe as a result of our habituation are true. But the point is that we haven’t come to the world with a blank slate and complete objectivity of vision. We have been formed in such a way—artificially, as it were—that certain things become obvious to us.

You often find the debates between religious believers and atheists are conducted by people whose position is evidently true to them, and who have difficulty understanding how it could be otherwise for other folks. That leads, I think, to the assumption of either bad faith or stupidity on the part of those who somehow refuse to acknowledge what seems so palpably correct.

The primary purpose of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer is to show atheists—of two varieties, as we’ll see—that what is obviously true to them about their views is, in fact, something that has been constructed over a period of centuries. Previous thinkers, going back hundreds of years, built up, step by step and bit by bit, a frame of reference from within which religious belief is obviously wrong. Beha demonstrates that these beliefs have a history. If you endorse them completely and see no way they could be wrong, that’s possible for you because you are the beneficiary of centuries of labor to construct a worldview (Beha’s preferred term) that offers its adherents an “artificial obvious,” to borrow Dillard’s term.

The two varieties of atheism Beha treats are “scientific materialism” (think Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett) and “romantic idealism” (think Friedrich Nietzsche or Albert Camus). Both camps fiercely reject all forms of religious belief as illusory, but they don’t have a lot of respect for each other either. “Roughly speaking,” Beha writes, scientific materialism “holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans come to know this world through sense perceptions, and that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into objective facts about the world.” By contrast, “Romantic idealism generally begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. It takes this subjective will, rather than objective physical matter, as the bedrock feature of reality.” For the romantic idealist, scientific materialism gives us little or no reason to live. For the scientific materialist, “romantic idealism is just the latest form of religious superstition teaching people that how they ‘feel’ about reality is more important than the cold, hard facts of the matter.” No quarrels like family quarrels. 

Beha explains that when he abandoned the Catholic faith in which he was raised, it was romantic idealism to which he eventually turned—but what led him to unbelief in the first place was a book by one of the most influential scientific materialists, British philosopher Bertrand Russell. The book that did the most to consolidate Beha’s youthful atheism, and that also provides the shape of his title, is Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian (1927). 

And in two respects those are terms Beha still applies to himself. First, the inquiring habits of mind that Russell celebrates are habits that Beha continues to find admirable—which is why he turns them on the traditions of atheism that formed his adult convictions. The truly skeptical atheist must have the courage to look atheism “frankly in the face.” Beha writes that “the point” of such an outlook “is simply that you don’t take things on faith”—including your own unbelief. 

(Of course, it is often said that atheism is less vulnerable to wishful thinking than religious belief—wrongly, in my view. There are many people who would rather descend into nonbeing at the end of a long and happy life than to be what Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards called “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Blaise Pascal speaks a true word in his Pensées when he says that “People hate religion”—by which he means Christianity—“and are afraid that it might be true.”) 

Second, those intellectual habits learned from Russell have remained with Beha in his return to the Catholic faith and practice. He has not abandoned them—or, it might be better to say, they have not abandoned him. “Belief is not, after all, something that is done once and for all so that you can be finished with it. If the way to believe is to live, then you must keep on doing it, and you can falter at any time.” To persist in Christian living with imperfect knowledge, imperfect faith, moral and intellectual wavering—this is to be a “skeptical believer.” It is a way of life in which, Beha rightly believes, the Christian mystical traditions offer ample and coldly realistic assistance. (There is no skepticism that the great mystics do not know firsthand. It is from St. John of the Cross that we get the phrase “dark night of the soul.” And one of the great themes of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love is fear.)

Much of this comes late in the book, and Beha earns his articulation of his current Christian life with a long, thoughtful, serious, historical unpacking of the thinkers who constructed the “artificial obvious” of modern unbelief. The whole narrative is handled very well indeed: It’s like a version of Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age (2007) for philosophical laypeople, though Beha is more concerned than Taylor is to represent these traditions in language that their adherents would understand and accept. 

This is an admirable and important endeavor. My fear, however, is that the people most in need of this history will have no interest in it. To grasp that your central convictions have a history, that they’ve emerged genealogically, is already to allow the planting of a seed of doubt. To know that a worldview has emerged over time and developed in certain ways is, inevitably, to realize that it could have been different, that alternate histories could have occurred, that the basic framework of your belief could be “other.” The wrath that scientific materialists can unleash on romantic idealists—who, to many scientific materialists, scarcely deserve the name of atheist—indicates just how destabilizing such historical awareness can be. As Beha points out, “Christopher Hitchens’s anthology of atheist thought, The Portable Atheist, features more contributions by the illusionist Penn Jillette (one) than by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger combined (zero). One of the last things Hitchens wrote before his death from esophageal cancer was a critique of Nietzsche.” 

If we have settled on a particular set of convictions by which we direct our lives, it is painful to reconsider them. Hasn’t everyone who’s had an argument with someone who adheres to a very different politics than theirs experienced this? It’s difficult to get people even to articulate why they believe what they believe: Often there is no “why” to it. I believe it because it’s obviously correct. But what if that obviousness is artificially constructed? People hate views other than their own and are afraid that they might be true—thus the fierceness with which they repel any offered alternative. I found Beha’s book clear and compelling—but I’m not the audience. 

Or am I? Maybe not the primary audience, but these “confessions of a skeptical believer” are sobering, and meaningful, for me too. For Beha’s history is not meant merely to refute atheism, of either chief variety, but also to show why such atheisms arose. There are serious reasons why people doubt God, or lose their faith altogether. Is is not the Psalmist who cries out, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13) Beha turned away from belief and trust in God and then, after a long intermission, turned back again. But when one turns back so, those intervening years of unbelief are never forgotten. They continue to shape the character of one’s faith. This is a point upon which Beha is particularly insistent. 

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once wrote that “Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.” Beha has been called again. But those who have dwelt in the desert are always marked by that experience. There is, as Ricoeur said, a great difference between believing still and believing again, and to navigate from the first to the second is perilous. So the story Beha tells is profoundly challenging to scientific materialists, to romantic idealists—and to Christians like me.

On Thursday a man with a rifle rammed his car into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The only person hurt was the would-be attacker, who died there, and whose family members had been killed recently in Israeli strikes on Lebanon. In a report for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the effectiveness of Temple Israel’s security preparedness come these perspectives on being Jewish as antisemitism is on the rise: