What Inspires Unbelief
A few years ago, I was asked to attend Access Church and to explain something to their (largely African) congregation. Their pastor, an old friend, said: “Our people want to understand the British people, but one thing we can’t make out is how so many Brits say they don’t believe in God. For us, it is just obvious that God exists, so we find it hard to believe that people are serious when they say they don’t believe in God. Could you help us make sense of this weird aspect of Western culture?”
I crowdsourced some thoughts from my ‘weird’ Western friends and went to Access Church ready to describe seven things that inspire unbelief, together with some thoughts about how a Christian might respond. Here they are, plus a bonus eighth.
Before getting going, it’s worth noting that there is often a difference between the reasons we name for our beliefs (or unbelief) and the things that actually underlie our convictions. As Pascal put it, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (Pensées, 423). It can take a while - or require a special moment of insight - to discover what is really in our hearts or in the hearts of our friends. It’s always fascinating when conversations with friends go deeper, move beyond fine-sounding arguments and start to touch on those ‘reasons of the heart.’ Only if we obey the apostle James’s command to “be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:17), and often only if we listen ‘between the lines’ will we discover the heart of anyone’s convictions.
So, I offer the following list in the ope that it might help you to discern the nature of your own doubts and the unbelief of the people you love.
1. Evil and Suffering
This is, by far, the most common reason given for rejecting belief in God. The logical argument goes that, if God is all-loving and all-powerful, he would find a way to eradicate evil and suffering, and so their existence proves that God lacks love or power or both, or does not even exist.
There is, of course, a simple philosophical answer to this apparent conundrum. It is that God, being cleverer than we can imagine, can have reasons for tolerating evil and suffering that are perfectly valid, only beyond our understanding.
Still, that very logical answer rarely helps a broken heart. Heartfelt doubts will rather be soothed through fresh and compelling evidence of God’s love and power, as may be experienced through answered prayer, through the undeserved and transforming mercy of other people, or through contemplation of the redemptive suffering of the God-man, Jesus.
2. Comfort and Pleasure
The human heart is complex! If suffering and pain may inspire unbelief, then so too may comfort and pleasure.
Proverbs 30:8-9 reads, “Give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’”
One of our former church members, Clayton Peel, grew up in Zimbabwe, then lived for many years in the UK, and has now returned to Zimbabwe, where he works in journalism. He has seen tremendous evil, pain and suffering, and observed the impact of material wealth. He writes: “In the more successful countries, life can be extraordinarily kind. When you have most comforts and the ability to get more is within reach, the role of an unseen God fizzles in the mind of many of the contented.”
Thus, C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Of course, however much we might wish for someone to become more spiritually aware, it would be most unkind to wish them to experience pain. A more loving approach would be to pray that they would see the limits of earthly pleasures and become aware of their God-given yearning of eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
3. Rationalism
This is the belief that an idea cannot be trusted just because it works or feels right. Instead, it must be logical and supported by objective evidence. If divine activity does not adhere to those categories (as it often does not, being done out of love, rather than for show, it is therefore rejected for being uncertain.
Rationalism gained tremendous energy from the development of scientific method around 400 years ago. It shaped Western culture throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, attacking all superstitious thinking and expecting to make rational progress towards a better world. Today, its cultural position is more complex. One the one hand, everyday lives in the West depend utterly on the fruit of scientific method, for everything from plastic items to satellite navigation. On the other hand, we are well acquainted with the destructive power of technology, and we no longer hope that reason alone will lead to world peace.
When religious folks are challenged by rigorous logical questions, a common response is to seek rigorous logical answers, but that doesn’t always help. The Hebrew book of Proverbs (26:4-5) says:
“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.
Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”
There are times when it is best to answer the question being asked, and there are times to step away from the demand of rationalism, knowing that it represents an overly narrow way of looking at the world.
4. Nihilism (and Existentialism too)
If we sometimes demand that things makes rational sense, we may at other times despair of anything making sense at all, and doubt that there is any meaningful truth. The word ‘nihilism’ comes from the Latin nihil meaning ‘nothing,’ and describes the view that our lives have no proven meaning or purpose.
This variety of unbelief has become more common as the amount of information available to us has increased.
In 1941, the Argentinian philosopher, Jorge Luis Borges authored a short story titled The Library of Babel. He imagined a world consisting of a vast library of 410-page volumes, enough books to contain every combination of letters and words. Somewhere in that library, Borges wrote, there must be a book that truly makes sense of the entire world, but how would a reader recognise that unique book among all the others?
When my father-in-law preached to his church in the 1970s, his voice was their primary source of theological learning. His teaching was received as simply authoritative and his congregation were people of firm belief. Today, when I preach, I expect the members of my church to search the internet while I am still speaking, checking the arguments around anything I say, reading arguments and counter-arguments that I’ve never known, and finding reason for scepticism. My congregation can be a little harder to convince than my father-in-law’s flock.
The exponential increase in available information today actually makes it harder to be confident in the truth.
Of course, it is impossible to live consistently as a nihilist. We simply cannot sustain the idea that every decision we make is totally arbitrary. So, many Westerners are caught on the horns of a dilemma: struggling to believe, yet unable to live without belief.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) was a Danish philosopher and a devout Christian who felt this dilemma deeply. He wrote about the sense of elevation that comes from making a choice to believe. In English, we talk about a humdrum life as ‘mere existence,’ but the Danish word eksistens works the opposite way, implying a life elevated above the everyday. As Kierkegaard wrote about all this, he became known as ‘the father of existentialism,’ that is, the idea that we find the meaning of our lives through the choices we make. Later existential philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), argued that we do not find but rather define meaning for ourselves through our choices, so reducing God to nothing other than a creation of our fertile minds.
From its origins in highbrow European culture, existentialism is now everywhere, and as Disney’s Zootopia (2016) put it, “Anyone can be anything!”
While this is hugely liberating, as it allows each person to throw off any social expectations placed on them, it is also hugely tiring to have to invent yourself (as Tim Keller described so ably). In recent years, more young people have preferred instead to adopt a tried-and-tested identity from a wider community, as seen in the rise of identity politics (on the left) and nationalism (on the right) and in the growing participation in faith communities.
5. Immoral Believers
In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), Prof. Alec Ryrie recounts how many people have been led to disbelieve Christian teaching because of the appalling behaviour of Christian leaders. Instead of guarding, guiding and giving generously to their flock, many church leaders have exploited people in their care: for money, for sex and simply to bolster their insecure egos.
People have been drawing public attention to such sins since the invention of the printing press. In 1530, William Tyndale wrote in The Practice of Prelates about how priests “enhanced themselves, and turned all to themselves, diminishing the poor people’s part and increasing theirs,” and so turned the common people away from Jesus. “Faith waxed feeble and faint; love waxed cold; the scripture waxed dark; Christ was no more seen.” In the following century, Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan about the “injustice, cruelty, profaneness, avarice and luxury” indulged in by “unpleasing priests,” whose actions caused many people’s faith to fail.
In the twentieth century, the Lutheran Church supported the Nazi party. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church supports the invasion of Ukraine.
Today, too, there is a constant stream of news about sexual, financial and spiritual abuse perpetrated by Christian leaders from every strand of the global church. So, let us weep with the victims and amplify their voices, and let’s build healthy, transparent and accountable cultures in our churches, that faith may not fail but rather find a safe space in which to grow.
6. Fear of Religious Conflict
Europe has a long and bloody history of violence being justified by religion:
The Crusades (Christian vs. Muslim)
The Reformation (Catholic vs. Protestant - plus, Calvin vs. Anabaptists, etc.)
English Civil War (‘Via Media’ Anglican vs. Puritan)
The Troubles in Northern Ireland (Catholic vs. Protestant)
These conflicts have left the West with a deep distrust of fiery religious convictions. When, in 2012, we sought planning permission for a Christian-ethos primary school in Oxford, local humanists opposed it, not on the basis that we would teach falsehoods, but that it would stoke community tensions.
We can argue that religious violence, at least for the Christian faith, happens when leaders cynically co-opt spiritual language to justify worldly goals, and that it has no basis in Jesus’ teaching, but I have never seen that argument help an anxious heart. It is much more effective to show how faith contributes to a peaceful society, e.g. through organising an interfaith ‘walk of friendship.’
Five years after Oxford humanists were concerned about Tyndale Community School stoking social unrest, the head teacher got a phone call from the team organising a visit from the King and Queen of Spain. They were looking for a group of schoolchildren to welcome the royal couple to the city, who would display friendship across cultural differences - and they’d heard that this new Christian school was good at that. I love the photos from that day, and I love telling people how the school welcomes children from different religions and speaking many different languages, while remaining distinctively Christian. This goes a long way in helping some people to overcome their fear of believing of God.
7. Simple Choice
Sometimes, our (un)beliefs are simply what we have chosen. In Ends and Means (1938), Aldous Huxley wrote:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom… There was one admirably simple method of… justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
In my time as a pastor, a handful of people have told me honestly that they very much want to pursue something that they believe God to be against (a particular career, an affair, gender reassignment…), and so they are choosing to dispense with belief in God.
There is an element of choice in all our decisions about faith in God. Jesus, lamenting over the city of Jerusalem, said,“I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37). And so, however much we dislike it, we all benefit sometimes from someone calling out oour bad choices and challenging us to change our minds (i.e. repent) and to believe (Mark 1:15).
8. A False Vision of God
When people poke fun at Christian belief in a ‘sky fairy,’ I realise that I also disbelieve the existence of the God that they reject. When a gay friend says that he cannot believe in an angry old man to whom his very existence is an abomination, I know that his image of God is a long way from the heavenly Father who hears my prayers.
Almost always, when I talk to Christians and to sceptics, their greatest obstacle to belief in God is a wrong impression of what he is like. I recommend looking at Jesus. He is the exact representation of God’s being (Hebrews 1:3), and learning about him corrects our vision of God.
Perhaps you have read this blog thinking mostly about your own wrestle with faith in God, or perhaps you have been thinking about the non-believers in your life.
Which of these eight reasons for doubt do you reckon to be relevant?
How can you pray for change?
What could you do that would help foster life-giving faith?