Samuel Morris Brown: God, Atheism, and the Perils of Love

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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Introduction: Kate Rebukes Me

We were driving home from Pilates in a frigid April rain, too late in the spring to be so cold. My fingertips ached a little as they curved over the steering wheel toward the windshield. The heater in my car wasn’t working because thieves (“meth heads” in the bitter story I told myself) had tried to steal my car stereo, and the local garage didn’t replace the instrument panel correctly. I hadn’t joined my wife, Kate, at Pilates this week because I’d just lost a cracked second molar to an oral surgeon. I was biting down, a little too hard, on salt-wet gauze, trying to persuade the socket where the molar once stood to stop oozing blood. It wasn’t my finest moment as Kate’s companion and occasional chauffeur.

I’d been listening to the 2016 Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology during the prior week’s commute. The lecturer was an atheist cosmologist, Sean Carroll, a politer alternative to the more famous Richard Dawkins. After a lively introduction to particle physics and quantum field theory, Carroll was making his way through the philosophical problems that come after the theories of physics. He’s a confident and polished speaker. He was entertaining if a bit smug, and his early lectures flowed well. Then came the hard problems that have always been the Achilles heel for atheism: how do we explain consciousness, morality, and meaning? After much fanfare, foreshadowing, and throat clearing, Carroll’s solution to the big issues was to sidestep them. “Meh,” he seemed to say. They’re illusions. Get over it. Go be true to yourselves, whatever that might mean in a giant ball of quantum fields, and enjoy what time you have left with your illusions of love and consciousness.

I’d been hoping he would have something to say about the big problems of existence. I like to learn and was looking forward to new arguments. I found myself disappointed, even irritated. I meant him no harm, but I wanted to yell at my smartphone that there was nothing new in his pontifications. He had no more defended atheist naturalism as an overarching philosophy than he had bent a spoon with his mind. His account of empirical observations about particle physics seemed valid, but his defenses of his life’s moral compass were sophomoric.

As my wife and I chatted our way home, I complained about how stupid Carroll had been and how frustrated I was with the quality of his intellectual engagement with God and religion. Maybe, I suggested to her, I should write something about how dumb modern atheism is, using these obtuse lectures as the outline. The piss and vinegar in my brain leaked into my words.

“Maybe you should pray to love him,” Kate said.

My tooth socket buzzed with its loss and my embarrassment. I closed my mouth and drove into the rain, cursing under my breath. Sometimes I hate it when she’s right.

The Call of Atheism

I stare, sympathetically, at atheism from time to time. Maybe it’s because atheism is cool right now. That’s as may be. But I also remember its charms for me as a boy. I recall some of the emotional pleasure it brought, especially the sense of power that comes with incredulity. I enjoyed defying tradition. I liked how tidy atheism felt, like a bedtime story in a board book of bright reds and deep blues. Goodnight, Moon. God is dead. Don’t be naïve.

Atheism has been on my mind again of late. I suspect I’m thinking about it more these days because some people I love tell me that they are, more or less, atheists now. Whereas I’m religious and have been for thirty years. Why are they doing the same thing that I got so wrong as a child? I tell myself that the main thing that irritates me about atheism is that it is so obviously wrong. But I’m being simplistic. There’s more to it than that.

I wonder sometimes whether modern atheism affects me the way it does because I’m not naturally good at a life of faith. Belief is not my equilibrium—unbelief is where entropy pushes me. For a long time, I cherished being an unbeliever. Atheism is in my nature. Like many another feral impulse or appetite, this one happens to be misplaced, but that doesn’t change the basic reality. I know that for me life in God takes work, commitment, and resistance.

My affection for atheism is an emotional attachment. I know intuitively that what’s marketed as atheism isn’t rational in any non-circular sense. I get that it requires a kind of willful blindness. But I know how tempting it is anyway. So sometimes I suspect that when I hold atheism in my hands again, I’m like a sober alcoholic remembering the touch of single malt whisky on my throat as I pass by a liquor store. Or the adulterous man who can’t stop ogling a distant celebrity. I know the beauty and power of life in God but can never shake entirely the giddy stupor of my teenaged atheism.

There’s also an aspect of not wanting to feel embarrassed. I worry that religion makes us seem stupid or antiquated. I watch the responses to modernism from within fundamentalist Christianity and often cringe. I’m arrogant. I don’t want to look like a hillbilly. There’s enough of that in my socioeconomic background. I’ve spent adulthood fleeing from the painful humility of being too poor to fit in. I’m weary of a nagging sense of shame about religious belief.

Maybe that’s why I’m spoiling for a fight. I feel like the atheist entertainers like Dawkins and Carroll are peddling delusions in the hopes of persuading people to abandon the communities and modes of being that matter most—those grounded in the love of God. In place of God they sell a smug and stuporous modernism. And I know how persuasive those false stories can sound to people like me. I know how easy it is to become embarrassed by religious belief. It’s this beautiful thing, and people are throwing rocks at it because they pretend it is ugly. So maybe I also feel like I’m witnessing an injustice—to borrow the convoluted metaphor of postmodern argument, the atheist entertainers are “gaslighting” people, some of them my close friends.

The rhetorical problem: I love to fight

So why do I keep fighting in my head with the atheist entertainers? Why is there hatred rather than love in my heart? I like to argue. The fight has been in my heart since the beginning. The main thing I did in high school besides skipping classes and antagonizing authority figures was debate, the flavor we called “policy” or “cross-ex.” By the end of my senior year, half of my classes were directly supervised by our ever-indulgent debate coach. (I’d persuaded other teachers that it was in their best interest to not require me to stay physically in their classes.) I loved debate, and I was good at it. We spoke fast, twisted our words, and bush-whacked through logical arguments. At one point in my debating career, I wondered whether I should be a trial lawyer.

When I was an adolescent atheist, my love of argument aimed its sights on religious folk. I knew and loved the anti-Mormon and anti-Christian arguments. I felt strong and wise.

I still cherish a good argument. That much will never change. I think I feel about arguments the way culinary sophisticates feel about wine. I love them viscerally, delight in their strange terroir and the pleasant buzz that comes after.

But there’s something else going on. It doesn’t feel like a fair fight right now because the format of current debates about theism creates a handicap for people of faith. The atheist entertainers get to use the crass caricatures, the breezy dismissals, the crude jokes, and the curse words. Their polemical writings are often exuberantly fun. This bombast is part of their charm. And we religious folk are supposed to be quietly respectful, to avoid vulgarity and cruel indifference. We’re supposed to model true piety, to turn our cheeks to the mugger.

But I’m not good at being polite and respectful. I want to fight fire with fire. I’ve been planning a diatribe against modern atheism for years. I’d fill it with curse words, rude jokes, and caricatures. I’d make atheism laughable. I would, in a word, turn the invective back on religion’s critics. It would be awesome.

Until Kate rebuked me in the car, I think I’d believed that we religious intellectuals have given too much ground to our critics through polite restraint. We’re too prim for the real contests. There are exceptions—some religious thinkers do love to shout. But by and large we have been uncomfortable descending into the Colosseum in all its naked gore. Why shouldn’t a religious scholar use words that rhyme with spit and duck in a full-throated counter-assault in the war of words? Seriously. Why not? For years it seemed to me that such restraint was mere Victorian prudery.

But it has come to me after Kate’s correction that what we religious have to offer is not a simplistic argument or petulant turn of phrase. The reason the life of faith matters is not some high school debate trophy. God is about life, presence, and experience. Divine love is what’s at stake. And that love is inaccessible by way of rage or hatred. I’ve had to come to terms with that fact: however addicted I am to debate, the life of God does not come through animosity. It’s like trying to grow tomatoes in a beaker of sulfuric acid instead of a pot of soil.