The Religious Atheist

How I Lost God and Found Religion

I was brought up a devout catholic. I believed in God. He had a white beard and lived in the sky. He looked after everything, saw everything and could be directly addressed via prayer. If you prayed hard and he was so inclined, he might give you a break, buy you a bike, help you with your schoolwork. In many ways, he was not unlike a dad. As an altar boy, I asked the priest why at the end of the mass, he always said “Praise Peter God.” Was “Peter” God’s name? The priest thought this was a great gag and based his next sermon on it. My dad’s name was Peter and he thought in mixing the two up in mishearing “Praise Be to God” as my dad’s name, I was showing child-like devotion and wonder. Was the gist.

I went to a catholic primary school and a catholic secondary school and they were allowed to beat us, because religious schools had an exemption on the corporal punishment ban that had come in because of course they had. We had morning assembly with prayers and hymns and were taught by violent nuns and the occasional priest. As we approached the final year of our education, spooked by our imminent release into the wild, a spiritual retreat was organised for the fifth and final year in Castlerigg near Keswick, in the north of the Lake District. Here we were to sit around and talk about drugs and premarital sex with trendy likeable young priests who the church had apparently been keeping in reserve like secret weapons. Nothing like the hardly there old dodderers who we knew from Sunday mass. They played Joshua Tree by U2 and spoke about spliffs as if they knew what they were, and played mean spirited table tennis. We were impressed.

One night we went to chapel and were told to go into the woods and pick up stones. Then we lay on the floor of the chapel and were told that these stones were god. And our relationship to god could be thought of as our relationship to the stone. There was the idea the stone had been there before us for hundreds of years, thousands perhaps. And would outlive us likewise. And yet here it was in our hands. In our hearts. It was very moving. Some shy souls cried.

The next day walking up to Castlerigg stone circle - Catholicism forever has a fondness for the pagans - I walked with L. who I had come to greatly admire/love in the previous few days. Ardently. I told her I’d been greatly moved by last night and the talk of rocks and hundreds of years, and our hearts and hands and God. She nodded, laughed and said that in her opinion it was all - and I quote - “complete shit.”

And my belief in god was gone.

I’m not sure if it made a noise as it went, like whoosh, or an agonised cry. But it was gone, nonetheless.

Everyone expected me to come back from Castlerigg with the post-transcendent glow which seemed to affect all who went. My brother had given away his pocket money to Africa for two weeks following his own trip and forbore to beat me, becoming a regular Padre Pio in the process. As the more religious of the clan, (I’d even considered joining the priesthood after watching Jesus of Nazareth), my mum was expecting frankincense to issue from my armpits and hosannas from my arse.

Instead she got Friedrich Nietzsche also-sprach-Zarathustra-ing all over the shop. “God is dead,” I told her. And then waited a week before calling L. to ask for a date. She laughed her head off and hung up. Rather than shake my faith in my newfound faithlessness it only cemented it more firmly. Only an idiot would’ve gone out with me when I was 15, Jesus. Her good sense made her theological conclusion all the more solid.

Since then I’ve not believed in god at all. I’ve been aware of some substitutes slipping in: socialist revolution was one which married blind faith, I hope that people would just stop being dicks, with some idea about a time in the future when things would become good and stay that way, at least for a while. I’ve sought in certain writers and philosophers for an all-encompassing system which would explain the world: PG Wodehouse and James Joyce, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut. I even ram as fast as I can into books about Quantum Mechanics hoping to get as far as I can before the limitation of my own understanding wrestles me to the ground.

None of it has really worked. But then again, maybe it has.

For centuries, the purpose of religion was to answer questions which were at that time unanswerable. Who are we? Where did we come from? How did we get here? What happens after we die?

But these questions have now been answered.

a) Homo Sapiens Sapiens. b) Africa. c) Evolution and migration. d) Nothing. We’re done. We don’t exist once we die in the same way we didn’t exist before we were born.

Some of these answers are not the ones we wanted but they are demonstrably truer than the versions that have been given by religions. Although religions don’t always seek to offer certainty. After all, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. And the further East you go, the richer in paradox and conundrum you become.

The so-called “God of the Gaps” - yes, but what happened before the Big Bang? - has got a second wind with discoveries in particle physics and via the James Webb telescope creating a whole new set of questions. But those new questions were created by science for science once more to answer. Science has the advantage over religion because it is a machine for asking AND answering questions. It has a methodology that doesn’t care about the answer per se as long as it is provable.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: so far, so Dawkins.

But here’s the thing.

One of the reasons I have never even been tempted to return to Catholicism isn’t because it’s too religious; it’s because it isn’t religious enough. All the priest I ever met felt nothing but acute embarrassment when asked a genuine religious question. On the other hand, ask them about what to do with your genitals and they were as happy as Larry. Catholicism was too much ping-pong; too many droning songs. I accidentally tuned into a channel in a hotel room that was streaming a live broadcast from Lourdes and it had Dementor levels of misery in the “celebration” of the mass. All the stuff about sexuality and abortion, fish on Fridays (used to be the case, believe me) and premarital sex appears to me at least to be so far away from what are actual religious questions.

Religious questions are those questions which have an occult nature, as in the answers are hidden by the very nature of the question. An origin, for instance, is traceable. Eminently knowable. But a question about what it feels like to be, to exist, has too many moving parts and push at the inadequacies of language to offer even a rough approximation, which is why you can see the whole of art and literature as attempting to shave off parts of the question at least, but while they’re answering the question they’re adding other questions as well: such as “What is it like to be you reading this book, watching this film, regarding this work of art?”

Science can help to narrow religious questions down and there’s no telling when a religious question might suddenly fall into the lap of the knowable. But science rightly will hold up its scientific hands at the truly religious question. So it will tell us the age of the universe with remarkable accuracy (currently being corrected but there you go) and its composition in terms of the twelve fermions and five bosons which make up the standard model but it won’t tell us why the universe exists (yet). It can tell us who we are as biological entities but not how we can fulfil our lives with a sense of purpose? Sometimes the hidden is in full view. So the most interesting question might not be “What happens after we die?” but instead “What is this life that we are currently living? This instant of now right now? What is this moment? How does this moment relate to the rest of time?” Some graffiti from Belfast asked “Is there life before death?” That is a deeply interesting religious question. Much more so than rituals to do with diet and hygiene from centuries ago or taking orders from the Pope or not which caused all the horrible violence in that now thankfully relieved place.

Paul Tillich is a fascinating theologian in this respect with his idea of God as the “ground of being.” In other words, God doesn’t exist. Existence is God. Which means you are God, your fingernails and your hair, every planet and star, every atom and every subatomic particle and the space between, the very warp of space-time is God.

Now, the good side of this is: everything is imbued with numinous importance, with divinity. And we can even see how an ethical regard for the universe around us and each other would shine with a meditation on this. We are all God’s children, etc.

But the bad side of this is that it is self-cancelling. If God is everything, God is nothing also. He’s both good and bad, and beyond such categories, so he has nothing to do with ethics. He is pollution and natural beauty; he is nuclear war and peace, indifferently. He is Hitler and the victims of the Holocaust. His existence and not existence are practically the same thing. We could disappear up our own semantics.

There’s another version of God who has come round recently and that comes from Simulation Theory. In this idea, the universe is a simulation created by a higher intelligence. Once more this Ready Player One version of God doesn’t help us much with living our lives. If we found out tomorrow that the universe was a simulation, it wouldn’t change the basic mystery of our own experiences. We would know why the parameters of the universe had been set in such a Goldilocks fashion - not too hot, not too cold - but at lot of fundamental questions would remain. It likely wouldn’t help us morally either. What if the Player One of the universe decided they would come down and take their pleasures in their creation. It’s more likely that he’d look like Elon Musk than Jesus Christ. And anyway the simulation just leads us to a Matryoshka universe. The simulation, after all, has to be inside a universe. Player One might be God to us - as in a a superior being that created us - but that gives them no moral supremacy.

God is a distraction. We put all our religious questions into a very recognisable man-shaped box - at least in Western religious traditions - and ask for the answers. When religions deplore the caricaturing of their beliefs as “believing in some guy with a white beard who lives in the sky,” I think they might be missing a trick, because ultimately that’s what we end up with any way and that image is - have to say - pretty cool. I’d be tempted to back that.

Not believing in God frees me up to think about religious questions. Here’s one I think about a lot. Where do emergent properties exist? The economy, breathing, termite mounds, the mind, languages, ideologies, culture are all emergent properties for instance that don’t exist in their component parts but emerge from the interactions at a certain scale. Religions too are emergent properties, answering to needs, climates, historical moments, individual personalities, societal structures, oppositional forces, fears, and emotions generally.

This essay is an emergent property. It’s like life. It exists as a solid block of data, of language. You can print it out and hold it in your hand. But you can only activate it meaningfully by running it in one direction via your eyes through your mind. And at any single point, you’ll only have a part of it available to you. A small fraction. Some will be in the past. Some might still be in the future. And then, leaving you with more questions than you had before, it will suddenly and inexplicably stop.