Why am I an Atheist
A short essay by Ollie Killingback, Chair of Northants Secular Humanist Society
Well, I was asked, and I'd really like to be able to answer, tho' my first reaction might have been, to some interlocutors, "Why are you a Christian?" (or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jew). You only have to look to see that by and large (and there are exceptions) people do not choose their religion. Almost invariably the religion you have is that of the community in which you grew up. When the exceptions arise they are always to do with adults who for some reason have been prompted to think critically about their religion and rejected it, and sometime chosen another, such as the sudden rise in eastern religions that began on the American west coast in the 60s. Quite a few people who have engaged me have wanted to deal with why I rejected Christianity, their Christianity, and have been quite offended by that.
That is, in fact, quite a good way in, altho' I had moved a very long way from orthodox Christianity before I officially embraced atheism. However, the only way I can think about the question is to give the historical and biographical setting. We are all the children of our culture. It is inescapable that I grew up in North London just after World War II and would have been nominally Christian at least - that was the assumption of my culture, of my schooling. If you were in no way religious and had no beliefs or practice, and had to fill in a form that asked you to state "Religion" you replied "C of E" (Church of England). In fact my mother and aunts were regular church goers - my father had no time for the church at all. But the way of the world was that he was quietly ignored and we kids went to church with the adults that did go, were packed off to Sunday School on Sunday afternoons, and received an education in the faith over and above that assumed by society and taught at school. And even my father, whose beliefs were never ever discussed, found some benefits - we were out at Sunday School went he wanted his Sunday afternoon nap was one. And even he was amused when I took Scripture Union exams and wrote such gems as "Elijah was the first in a long line of propheteers".
So where did the move to atheism begin? For many years I have thought and spoken of my life in terms of a search for meaning. It was that urge to know and understand more than I already do that has driven me all my life and still does now in my 60s. I could always see a problem with what I was being told, and always had to take it on. I must have been about 6 when I had what I now call my first theological doubt. I remember being quite troubled by it at the time, but got no answer and those I mentioned it to took it as sweet, curious and amusing, It went like this: God can see everything I do. Therefore God can see me in the toilet. That would be rude. God is good and not rude. Problem. It was not until I was in my 50s that I heard of an order of nuns that bathed in their habits (or under a blanket, depending on the version) because God could see them in the bathroom, which brought back my childish problem to memory.
My teenage years and early twenties coincided with an explosion of interest in religion generally, and I devoured John Robinson's "Honest to God", then bought and studied works by Tillich (I started with "The Shaking of the Foundations") and Bonhoeffer ("The Cost of Discipleship") so by then I was questioning the simple faith I had received as a child and trying to put my Christianity into a coherent framework.
Finally I fulfilled a great ambition and was accepted for training in the Anglican ministry. In this I was extremely lucky - my diocese was Southwark presided over my Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, and I was trained on the Southwark Ordination course whose exams were supervised by the University of London which meant that when I won the University Prize in my first year I gained enormously in confidence. The Principal was Gerald Hudson who taught New Testament in a scholarly and critical way, introducing me to a whole new way of thinking about Scripture and who got me to spend a year studying New Testament Greek so that I realised that all Scripture, like all writing, had a context in time and culture and language. Gerald also had a vision about the shape of parish ministry for the future that encouraged us students to think creatively about the role of the church. And above all I fell under the intellectual care of Cecilia Goodenough who taught Christian Doctrine, who demanded that you thought seriously about issues, who would not accept second best or shoddy thinking, who supervised a year of study for me, and, above all, who believed in my ability.
This ethos propelled me into a decade of furious reading and thinking. I realised that even the most devout biblical Evangelical skipped over or disregarded some passages of both Old and New Testaments that are thoroughly uncongenial. I realised that there was no rhyme or reason to which passages were passed over - people didn't think about it, it was an automatic response derived from their personality. Of course, there was another reason - ignorance. People who read the Bible read the bits they like and never encounter great chunks. Careful study of the entire thing, with the benefit of a series of scholarly commentaries and, if possible a bit of Hebrew and Greek, poses a lot of questions by itself. And for me, because of Cecilia, passing over anything would not do. There had to be study and thought, and there had to be rationality. And of course the books I read were raising a whole lot more questions than they were giving me satisfactory answers: Maurice Wiles, Leslie Houlden, Don Cupitt, Harry Williams, CH Dodd, Edward Schillebeeckx, Jurgen Moltmann, Gustavo Gutierrez, more Tillich and Bonhoeffer and so on and so forth. I also took a course in the Sociology of Religion which lead me in due course to read Berger & Luckmann's "The Social Construction of Reality" which opened up for me question to do with why we think what we think.
At about the same time I began to read scientific topics. I started of with particle physics (The Particle Play by John Polkinghorne was one of the first, and indeed most interesting because Polkinghorne later became in Anglican priest). And I discovered Bertrand Russell and that opened up the whole field of philosophy. Then I ran into Stephen Rose and began to read biology, and Susan Greenfield opened other doors of enquiry. How does the brain work? What is consciousness? One fundamental assumption emerged from the reading of science and philosophy: the universe is comprehensible. I know, of course, that this is an act of faith, something that cannot be proved. But from what we have learned to date about the universe, from the physics of stars to the workings of neurotransmitters, to the structure of matter, there is no reason not to believe it to be true. We have made enormous gains in comprehension. It does seem to be true that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and for all time. And while the job is far from done, new data emerging all the time to pose questions to what we have so far understood, it does seem that there is a way to proceed. It is true that a physical theory of everything, embracing Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, will not tell us who we are and why our consciousness happens. But it will set a framework in which those studies can be pursued.
This, to me, is the fundamental issue between science and religion. The Darwin debate in the American education system is a side show. That is about people with certain religious beliefs not liking a particular scientific theory. It is a side show if you don't share those beliefs or if evolution is not important to you or if it is easily absorbed into your religious position. It is only important to you if your particular take on religion is challenged by that particular branch of science. There are lots of such side shows. The fundamental difference is that science believes that the world is comprehensible and proceeds step by faltering step towards comprehension, knowing full well that it has not yet arrived. Religion believes that it has the final answers, and that these include the fact that the world is a mystery that demands the existence of God. For the position of science there is evidence, for that of religion there is none. And I am persuaded by evidence.
As you'll see, I do not agree with those who say there is no conflict between science and religion. There is, and it is fundamental.
However, that is an anachronism in my story. It's an argument I would advance only after I finally abandoned my attempts to be religious. What I've tried to show up to here is that I grew up in a Christian environment but from the start had an enquiring approach because I realised that the things I was being taught raised a whole lot of other questions, and I began a pursuit for answers. The more I studied the more questions were raised, and the further the horizons became that had to be scanned. A lot of religion today is in fact the worship of a tradition (or the worship of a book). While that position might be internally coherent (altho' in the case of Christianity I am convinced that it isn't) there are invariably questions that can be raised as soon as it is seen in a wider context. The most basic of these is that there are a large number of religions, many of which are split in themselves, sometimes with a high degree of hostility. So why should an independent enquirer be attracted to any one of them? The followers mostly are followers because of their birth in a believing group. In most cases accepting one means condemning all the others as false. Again there are exceptions - some believers are able to see their religion as one path among many to God, despite its exclusive claims. And there are religions that explicitly state that all religions are part of their deity's self-revelation. But for the majority, acceptance of one means rejection of all others, and there are no rational grounds for that decision.
So, first I adapted my Christianity to a position where it was a religion among equals (or almost equals). On the way I read a lot of Buddhism and practiced Zen sitting (meditation). It seemed to me that Christianity described the world as I perceived it to be. To some extent that remains true. A lot of "official" Christianity is now repugnant to me, but there remains, for example, something in taking and breaking and sharing bread, and pouring out and sharing wine from a common cup, that resonates with me as being in tune with what is best in human nature.
However this left me wrestling with the official position of Christianity that there is something unique and necessary in the Easter events that are essential to us as human beings. In the end Christianity stands or falls by the truth of that assertion. To believe it you must be prepared to take it as given, as their is no evidence for or against. And as it depends on a view of humanity and its position in creation for which not only is there no evidence but a large amount of growing and ever more convincing counter evidence, that's something I can't do. I would love someone who has considered all the issues carefully to sit down with me and explain why they do accept such a view, but so far no-one has accepted that vacancy.
Now I have to consider another strand. A study of the history of religion and the development of doctrine reveals that there have been a lot of changes over time. This is as true of Islam and Judaism as it is of Christianity. Most believers today actually hold that their position is the right one, has always been, and will continue to be. This strikes me as extraordinarily ignorant of their own history. The relationship between doctrine and historical events is easy to demonstrate. The Church of England was born on a doctrinal issue, but in response to a historical need. Our capitalist system is based on a change in church teaching that came about when the Pope decreed that the ban on usury, lending money at interest, really meant lending at unreasonable interest (and left reasonable undefined). And that was because the church's assets were moving from being mostly income-producing land to other things. The same move has never been made by Islam which still teaches that lending money at interest is wrong and has therefore evolved a totally different banking system. Why has it not made the change the church made in the middle ages? It was never historically necessary in what remained essentially an agrarian economy.
From understanding this it is but a short step to the realisation that religion has evolved to meet human need and is in fact a wholly human creation. There is nothing supernatural in it. By the time I reached this understanding I was an Anglican priest working in parishes in Southwark diocese.
Two things came to my rescue - or rather two writers, Don Cupitt and Paul Tillich. Cupitt, and the Sea of Faith movement, hold that while God is not real (and therefore describe themselves as non-Realists) religion has an important and valuable role for human beings and society. Tillich could never have been a non-Realist, his God was very real to him. He saw God as the ultimate reality, the Ground of Being, the source of all that is and that to which all things return. It was, of course, Tillich that made it possible for me to flirt with Zen. Somehow I rode these two horses. I needed both because eventually I could not follow Cupitt. I agreed that God as described by the church, is not real, and I saw that religion had certain benefits. But it also had major drawbacks, as the vast majority of its followers were out and out realists, and were prepared in some circumstances to take up arms to defend their position. Terrible things have been done by sincere religious people, and by states in the name of religion, and this continues to the present day and threatens to destroy us all. Also, it was no good being a non-Realist and leading the congregation Sunday by Sunday to repeat the creed, which they took to mean what it said while I most certainly did not. That was simply dishonest. Cecilia Goodenough would never have approved, and I knew it.
On the other hand I needed Cupitt because eventually I could not follow Tillich. His Ground of Being either reduces to nature, and it makes little sense to build Christianity on that, or it is metaphysical mumbo-jumbo with no real contact with the facts of the world. At its very best, it is speaking about things of which we can have no knowledge. At worst the terms in which it is constructed are meaningless. Much as one might wish it to be true (and I did), the ground of being, that from which we come and to which we return, is described by astrophysics pretty well. If you mean instead not us physically, but that from which our personality comes, our awareness, then studies of consciousness pose questions that can't be gone into here, but for which religion, not even Tillich, has any answer.
There were people in the church willing to explore these things with me, but by and large, and very understandably, most were not. And I could not ride two horses alone for very long.
The end came with the death of a friend from cancer. She was herself a priest, and was much put out by the pratting about of certain clergy who felt it their duty to visit her but who had nothing to say. I remember sitting by her bed not long before she died, holding her hand, and she turned to me and said "Where's God in all this?" The only answer I had was that I didn't know. I couldn't bring myself to say that he didn't exist and that her impending end seemed to me to be exactly that, not a stage on the way into another existence. Instead I celebrated Mass for her at her request, in her room with just her family and mine present. I felt I'd failed her. A few days later I saw her body lying in the same bed shortly after she'd died. And I knew that she'd died because the toxins in her body had stopped her organs. Her brain had stopped. Everything she had been was a combination of her physical body and her personality, that is, the products of her consciousness, the activity of the chemistry in her brain. She hadn't gone somewhere else. She was right here in front of me, and stopped, dead. That's all there is to it.
In the weeks following my friend's death all the things I had been taught but knew were not true came back to me. There is no love or meaning, unless we can find a way to create one, in the premature death of a gifted person with a lot of good and creative things left to do in her life, from a disease that eats her from the inside, any more than there is in the death of an insect, paralysed by a wasp which has laid its eggs inside its body so that the wasp grub can eat its way out of the living flesh. All things are not bright and beautiful. Some things are, but a lot are dark and ghastly, and if the Lord God made them all he's got quite a lot to answer for. When I'm told that such things are a test of faith I think that if parents caused their child grievous suffering in order to test or educate her, then the child would be placed into care by the authorities and the parents would, correctly, be locked up. That there are religions where it is better that a child should die horribly than the name of the God concerned be insulted, so much the worse for those religions.
There you have it. I could go on and fill it out. This is an abbreviated account of a journey from faith, through doubt and exploration, to disbelief. As soon as you step outside the religious camp, which I did in 1999-2000, a whole raft of other things become obvious. Most of the other essays I have written or plan to write deal with these things from the perspective of my unbelief. This tells you how I got to where I am, as briefly as I can.
