At some point while reading both Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Douglas Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop, I managed to consolidate my thoughts on God. And to ruin the climax, my conclusion was simply this: That God is real, (s)he just doesn’t exist.
What do I mean by this? Well, stop reading for a second and think of someone you know well, a confidante, a friend.
Though they may not be present where you are this very moment, the prompt alone triggers a whole string of thoughts. A mental picture of the person, memories of time spent together, distinguishing characteristics, their likes and dislikes, things you want to tell them next time you see them & c.
These thoughts correspond directly to actual neural structures in the brain, where concepts are a complex web of synaptic connections in which details are strung together allowing us to build an extraordinary amount of detail into a comprehensive picture.
I think of my father. As he lives in England my interaction with him these days is occasional and generally happens through the mediacy of the internet. But he raised me and I have had innumerable formative interactions with him. For this reason, even when Dad is not available in person, I can have conversations with him in my mind and be pretty sure about what his response to my questions, decisions etc. would be. Thoughts of him even raise perspectives I would not have considered aside from his influence.
My father exerts a real and informative influence on my life from within my own mind. This will continue to be true even after he has died. That is, he will be real to me even though he no longer exists.
I was raised in a Christian home and had a real and active faith myself. I chose to study theology over philosophy due to my conviction that it would be a deeper well of truth. I ran church youth groups and trained to teach religious studies at high school level. God the father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were all almost life-long friends, teaching, guiding, and comforting me for over 20 years.
I believe unequivocally that my relationship with God made me a better person and helped me through some of the darkest times in my life.
God is as real in my brain as is my father. Meaning that there is a neuronal structure in my brain called God that exists in very much the same form as the structure called Dad. The only difference is that my father exists as an entity in the external world and in my belief, God does not.
But why does the idea that God was real to me only as a psychological construct necessarily mean that (s)he doesn’t also exist outside my brain? In short, it doesn’t. Not necessarily. But I think of it this way: As a “third culture kid”, the Christian notion of being ‘citizens of heaven’ has always been especially poignant. In much the same way as a nationality colours your perception of the world, so Christianity was my worldview, it was a filter through which I perceived everything. When I was training to teach Religious Studies I had to learn to present six of the world’s major faiths from a neutral perspective. Looking at common themes like prayer, worship, and devotion, made me realise that despite vast differences in theological belief, when it came to an individual’s experience of faith, the testimonies were strikingly similar. From people’s conversion stories to their tales of transformation (freedom from addiction, depression, anger & c.) faith seemed to have the same effect regardless of the God they believed in.
Seeing this and taking it at face value prompted me to ask questions of myself about how much of my experience of God may have been interpretation rather than interaction. In thinking this through I decided that so much of my faith had happened within my own mind, that I was left with no evidence of an existent God present and acting in the world.
Reaching this point of non-belief did not feel like a burden being lifted, or some kind of existential emancipation. Unlike some of my friends, whose rejection of faith was for them a positive thing, it struck me hard, as an unwelcome and tragic reality. Honestly, it felt like my best friend had died and part of me along with ‘him’. Because, although I did not believe God existed, God was real.
For me, being Godless meant being purposeless, being hopeless and being superfluous. That this made life seem futile, meaningless and bleak, however, did not seem sufficient cause to retreat from my conclusions.
Many atheists or post-Christians I see in the media seem to be of the angry or bitter variety (read Richard Dawkins), I am not one of these. I am a sad atheist. As a Christian I had issues with the church and with theological fundamentalists, but as an atheist I still wish there were a God.
My Christian heritage continues to play an important role in developing my ethical stances and I in no way reject the wisdom and insight into human nature I find in scripture. How Christianity can be a rich and important resource for atheists, however, is the subject for another post.