Faith for atheists. Part 2

Faith for atheists

Part 2: Atheism only appears to be on high ground by attacking a false view of religion

It’s an impressive attack, and we must show why it is false, and how religion can be again the saving grace needed by atheistic society. I aim to do this entirely by using ideas that are easy for atheists to accept. For, it seems to me, religious and atheist arguments often appear to exist in different realms. Religious ideas gain no traction with atheists because they have rejected the entire package of ideas used by believers. So, they end up making appeals to atheists that atheists have already rejected as simply false. Clearly, many religious people still believe them to be true, but that cuts no ice with atheists. So, leaving traditional religious people happy in their faith, I am going to go seeking atheists using only ideas that make sense within atheism. I believe I will be able to show that having faith is an entirely reasonable and beneficial thing to do.

I should stress that I am not necessarily rejecting traditional Christian belief; it’s just that I don’t see any point in me happily continuing in forms of belief that atheists will not even consider. You will see that I am putting forward considerable modifications in my understanding of Christianity, which I think may be a better way of understanding true reality, but, ultimately, I am not in a position to judge with any certainty whether traditional faith is true or not. No-one is in a position to know that for sure. However, what I can do, is show that it is not necessary for me to persuade anyone that traditional Christianity is true. It may, or it may not be. What I can do is show that a modified understanding of Christianity can definitely be accepted by all.

Let’s go back to the deal that is the implicit basis of faith for many people: “You help me, God, and I will believe in you” – a deal that many people feel that God has broken and so such an idea of God needs to be rejected.

I agree! I reject that view of God too. I think it needs to be rejected, not simply because it’s too difficult to get the facts of people’s lives to fit into this view, but also because a better relationship with God is available if it is not dependent on this simplistic deal which is – perhaps – not very morally elevated.

Let’s consider the facts of people’s lives first. Great ingenuity is employed by religious people to show that the deal is, in fact, honoured by God. There are profound arguments to justify how evil and suffering can exist alongside an omnipotent and all-loving God, and in people’s ordinary lives it is often perfectly possible to show that a good God has guided and sustained you through the trials of life. Things did go wrong; life was very tough at times; but we held to our faith and God has drawn us safely through. However, these are the arguments of the survivors; the people who did not make it safely through are no longer here to accuse the faithful that they too had faith but it was to no avail. So, a different understanding of God and what faith in him means is required.

Then we can challenge whether the implicit deal with God was justified in the first place. I do not mean to assert that religion IS based on a deal between us and God, but I think that, in practice, the faith of the great mass of people in previous generations was fuelled to a considerable degree by this idea of a deal. Hence the mass of people in the UK have abandoned faith. I think there is a widespread view among such atheists that those who haven’t given up faith must therefore be somehow dim, or blind, or fooled into believing something that they can see is palpably false. However, I think we will find that many of those who are still faithful are able to do this because they have adopted a wonderfully profound understanding of who God is, and of what it means to live a life of faith, and it is this that I would now like us to explore.