WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST
A. Kissel 1/98

I am a Protestant, and I think I know why.

I believe that God, the Creator, had good reasons, whatever they were, for creating this world and for getting humans into it. For these reasons God has an interest in humans, a compelling interest that I identify with love. Yet as creatures we are quite obviously imperfect: we can will things that cannot be; we lack knowledge and understanding; we make mistakes; we die. In some fundamental sense we fall out of full communion with God. I believe that God, loving us, has decided to do something about these problems. I believe that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is an essential and true story about God's chosen way of starting to bring about a full communion with God.

Why do I believe all this? Eight years ago I didn't believe a word of it. Without that first step, a belief in God, the rest of theological belief is not even an issue. Does God, a real being, exist--or not? Is there only, in Kenneth Burke's words, a God-term, but not necessarily a God?

It is easy to get confused by Burke's definition of the supernatural as the ineffable, as though we could cut neatly between those things which we know to exist and those things that we can never know anything about. But God, or an apple, or anything else, as Burke points out, has properties that we can know, just as well as properties we can never know.* We do not normally speak of an apple as supernatural simply because the word apple never quite matches a real apple or because two people's different experiences of the apple give different meanings to the term. Rather we think of an apple as natural because it has properties that we have observed and properties that we can agree upon. It is not the case that we accept an apple-term but reject the possibility of the apple's existence.

In the same way, I consider God to be partly knowable and partly unknowable, but existing nonetheless. To me, then, God is a perfectly natural part of my ontological system. But the relevant difference between an apple and God in this discussion is in the way we learn about their attributes. Unlike our agreement about an apple, we cannot all agree on even one attribute of God, including God's very existence. If God is only transcendent, ineffable, or supernatural, then by definition we never have, never can, and never will know anything about God, nor could we ever even hope to perceive anything about God's action in the world. It would never make a difference whether God existed or not.

On the other hand, if God has a natural component, that is, if God does act in the world, we can develop not just a God-term but a knowledge, however small, of God. But first, what do I mean when I offer the possibility that God is acting in the world? I am not referring to miracles. We cannot experience the ineffable. We can only understand God's "naturalness," and then only with reference to other natural phenomena.. We hear a voice, we see the Red Sea parted, or we follow a fiery cloud. Or we see justice served and say, "God must have been behind that." In the same way that we jump from sense impressions of an apple to a real belief in the being of the apple, we jump from these events to a knowledge of God. But if we only experience God through God's "natural" intrusions into the world, we always can decide to interpret God's actions as though they came from some "natural" causes other than God. How can we tell that God is acting in the world through an event?

Natural theology, presenting God as the answer to the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?" comes quickly to mind, but natural theology fails to answer the pre-existing challenge "Why bother to ask the question?" To follow this line of reasoning, we must be convinced that why questions are the right questions to be asking in the first place, but this path inevitably leads us back to questions of ultimate values and purposes. Natural theology turns out to be a circular argument. Take it or leave it; we cannot decide for or against it. Here is the first good challenge to my religion. We notice a coincidence or a seemingly random event that has manifold interesting consequences: did God orchestrate it, or not? We can decide either way, and we have no way, on the face of it, to know the difference.

This agnostic challenge is a good one, but it leaves the question open rather than closed. On the face of our experience, we have no reason to believe or to refuse to believe in God. Yet I believe that nobody can be an agnostic for long; either God is, or is not, behind a given "natural" event, and a thinking human being cannot live long without caring about the meaning of or trying to interpret at least one event. I suggest that we try out both possibilities. One: God does not exist; we humans construct our own meanings. This is the atheist's option, and it presents a strong challenge because on the face of things there seems to be no ground on which to argue. Two: God exists and defines the ultimate meaning of events including our own existence. This is the option of faith.

You may have noticed that I have just weaseled a vital part of my religion into the discussion: the doctrine of free will. I believe that each of us is free to choose whether to have a theistic or an atheistic faith. But free will, too, can be taken theistically or atheistically. To me, the fact of free will shows that God does not compel belief but shows such a deep respect for our choices that we could choose to exclude God as a possibility. An atheist has two choices about free will. If we make our own meanings, free will can be understood however we like, as though it were just part of the nature of things, or it can be denied, as though it were a vain hope of us collections of conscious molecules predestined to obey the immutable laws of physics. Again--take it or leave it. You decide.

The atheistic challenge to theism is strong because, arising from the agnostic challenge, atheism differs from theism primarily in the meaning ascribed to the same "natural" events (such as free will or existence, or something more mundane like an apple falling from a building). In the absence of any experience that seems to weight the odds in favor of Option One or Option Two, both possibilities--prima facie--seem equally likely. When we go "behind" events to develop conceptions of possible meanings, however, we present ourselves with a finite number of possible retellings of these events from which to choose. (Some stories will include God; others will not.* An atheistic story, for example, will claim that all stories, whether they include a God-term or not, are simply man-made.) Then, in determining which story seems most plausible, we have to consult our past experience and any meanings that we have ascribed to anything else so far.*

If you look at your own life and try a few different stories out, you generally will end up in the realm of either Option One or Option Two. In examining my own life and what I understand to be the history of our species and our universe--to make a set of very long stories unfairly short--I find that my overall story falls wholly on the theistic side: God exists. (I summarize my overall story in the first paragraph.)

As soon as one becomes a theist, one can start to talk about the attributes of God. The theist, to continue to use Burke's word, normalizes God. But such a normalization remains mine; God is part of my web of beliefs, not necessarily a part of yours. Furthermore, my experiences might lead me to a vastly different story of God's attributes compared to another theist's story based on a different set of experiences and web of beliefs. Although we might all use
apple-terms and believe in apples with considerable agreement about what all of us mean,
God-terms and notions of God and religions often turn out to be rather bitterly disagreed upon.

But this challenge of religious pluralism, against any particular religion, is weaker than it seems. At root this challenge is no different than the challenge of agnosticism. Outside of any actual beliefs and experiences,* it is simple to pretend that any story might be as good as any other. To adapt physicist Steven Weinberg's idea, the religious pluralist accepts only a certain set of "wave equations" and doesn't care what "particles" get spit into existence by the theory. But once specific "initial conditions" are defined--in other words, once we take our own experiences into account in order to search for possible meanings--we limit the kinds of stories that can be told. And all people share a considerable overlap in our experiences: we are born; we find ourselves to be imperfect creatures; we lack knowledge and understanding; we make mistakes; we die. Ethnographers find many more commensurabilities. We share a great deal of common heritage and history as human beings; all stories must take these facts into account. The most we can acknowledge is a very limited form of religious pluralism based on our overlapping experience. We have not six billion kinds of religions, but fundamentally two, in their many families and subfamilies: theism and atheism.

John Godfrey Saxe's poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant" brings a well-known image to mind:

[Not reprinted in case of copyright. Each blind man feels only a part of the elephant and comes to a different conclusion.]

But, they all agree, it's still an elephant, waiting patiently to become better known. Saxe's poem does not, as is commonly supposed, encourage a radical religious pluralism. By pointing to the very difficult problem of interpretation, however, Saxe promotes merely a limited form of pluralism within theism.

Indeed, interpretation of experience seems to be one of the most difficult tasks of human beings. Though we know so little, we have no scarcity of empirical truth all around us; but what does it mean? By believing in God I accept as fact that people don't make ultimate meanings; God does. But if God then is trying to communicate some of those meanings to us, perhaps by revealing God's own attributes to us, how do we interpret those communications? Again I must leave the problem of interpretation, the mechanism of our leaps of faith in apples or in God, to a later essay.*

NOTES