Ep. 396 Christopher Beha - Why I Am Not an Atheist

Chris grew up Catholic, lost his faith in college after his twin brother nearly died and he was later diagnosed with stage three cancer, and spent years immersed in atheism shaped by thinkers like Bertrand Russell and the New Atheists. In this episode, we talk about the limits of scientific materialism and romantic idealism, the problem of suffering, the reality of consciousness, and why atheism is never just disbelief but always carries a worldview. Chris shares why he ultimately returned to Catholicism, how he holds faith and doubt together, and why hope, transcendence, and human dignity still matter in a culture shaped by fear, anxiety, and self-interest.

Christopher Beha is former editor of Harper's Magazine; the author of a memoir, The Whole Five Feet; and the novels Arts & Entertainments and What Happened to Sophie Wilder. His most recent novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award. 

Chris' Book:

Why I Am Not an Atheist

Chris' Recommendations:

Madame Bovary

The Dying Grass

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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Transcript

Christopher Beha: 0:00

When you write about something like faith, and you write from the perspective of someone who has it, and you are trying, in part, to appeal to an audience that doesn't have it, it's very, very easy to fall into the trap of presenting yourself as one of the good ones, but I feel myself to be one of the weak ones. And that's not just a kind of rhetorical moot. That's really existentially what I feel. And so I feel like someone who needs this faith, I also happen to believe it's true, which is a help you.

Joshua Johnson: 0:40

Chris, hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, now there was a moment in college when everything Chris thought he knew about God collided with an ICU room his twin brother was hit by a car and nearly died. A few years later, Chris was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkin's lymphoma. These weren't abstract theological puzzles he was trying to solve. They were lived questions about suffering, fear and whether belief in a loving God could survive contact with reality. In this conversation with Christopher beha, we trace his journey from Catholicism to atheism and back again. We talk about the pull of scientific materialism, the allure of romantic idealism, and why both worldviews felt compelling but ultimately incomplete. What do we do with consciousness, with anxiety, with the sense that we are more than self interested consumers, but less than self created gods. Chris's return to faith wasn't a triumphant sense of certainty, it was honesty about weakness and mystery. Faith, for him, is not a badge of moral superiority or a tidy answer to mortality. It is a dependence. It is a way of living in this world with hope that does not deny despair and with love that refuses to reduce other people to side characters in our own story. So join us. Here is my conversation with Christopher beha, Chris. Welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me.

Unknown: 2:20

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. You grew up

Joshua Johnson: 2:23

in Catholicism. You grew up with a faith felt like comfort to you. When did faith and belief become impossible for you growing up?

Unknown: 2:34

This happened during my college years. There was a couple of major external life events that prompted it. The first was I have a twin brother with whom I'm very close, and we went off to college together, and within our first month in college, he was hit by a car right off of campus and nearly died. I went with him. My we have also have an older sister who's just three or older. For the three of us were are very, very close, and we were all at school together, and my sister and I went to the local hospital where he'd been brought by the ambulance. I actually rode with him in the ambulance, and he was in good shape in the ambulance. He had a broken leg, but he was his spirits were okay, and then, as around the time we were arriving, he kind of got very disoriented. He stopped making sense. His oxygen levels started dropping. ICU doctors very quickly intubated him, and then eventually put him in for sedation and essentially a medical coma, because his lung function had stopped, and my sister and I were told by a kind of classic emergency room doctor who did not have a light touch with patients that he wasn't going to make it through tonight. And he did. So we got very lucky from that front, and he's, he is, you know, up there, 100% today, and was within a couple I mean, it was a long physical rehab, but within a couple of years was 100% but it was a what, in the parlance of today, we would call a traumatic event for all of us. And it really brought home to a much greater degree than than any kind of theoretical, abstract conversation in a high school religion class did the problem of suffering in the world and how one reconciles events like that with the existence of a god that is both omnipotent and benevolent. And so it's just started me down a road of questioning, and then, because I've always been a reader and a writer. By this point in college, I already kind of knew that's what I wanted to do with my life. Inevitably, the way I sort through questions I have is through reading. And one of the books I read soon after that, which is a book whose title my own book's title echoes, is Bertrand Russell's classic work, why I'm not a cop? This joke. This is a few years before a lot of the new atheist texts came out. This is about 1999 or so, but Russell was kind of the proto new atheist. You know, that's where, if you were starting to have these questions and you wanted an intellectual response from the side of the disbeliever, that's kind of where you wound up. So I read that book, and it had a really formative impact

Joshua Johnson: 5:25

on how is there suffering in this world? I mean, that's a question that so many people are asking, because we live just in a horrific world full of suffering, and how can this loving God actually be be here in the midst of suffering and pain and sorrow. And I think Russell one of the things he says in his book, he talks about fear and religion and how really religion is, really is built on fear, and without it, it doesn't really hold up when you were starting to wrestle with that question about religion and fear, what shifted and changed in your relationship with fear? What was happening?

Unknown: 6:08

You know? What's interesting? I was quite struck by by that argument by Russell that night, when we got this news about my brother, the first thing that my sister and I did was was to pray together, and that was a response to the fact that we were very afraid. And, I mean, we knew it at the time. It wasn't as though, but we thought that was an appropriate response. You know, Russell, like a lot of Russell's arguments, that argument goes back, you know, a long way, and in particular to David Hume. David Hume is the early modern thinker who was probably most influential on this whole school of thought. And he believed that religion's origins, and really belief in the supernatural, the origins anthropologically, not just psychologically on the individual level, but going back to pre history, was was fear. Was living in a world that we can't control, that has a certain kind of mastery over us and wanting to control these forces. So I found that quite compelling after that moment. But what was interesting about it is, of course, you know, as Russell himself knew, to recognize religion as a response to this fear, and then to decide that that makes religion kind of de facto illegitimate, and then to abandon it. It doesn't actually make the fear go away. So a few years after my brother's accident, I got diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. It was at a fairly late stage, and then I was myself faced, when I was 22 years old, with the possibility that I was not going to live for for, you know, more than a few months into the future, I was, it was a stage three. I was, I was quite sick, and I had, I had tumors, really, all over my body. And in that case, I didn't, I didn't pray, because I was already past it. As with my brother, things turned out, well, you know, my cancer was responsive to the treatments, and eight months later, I was in remission, and I have remained so for the last 20 years and so, on one level, you could say, you know, you got the thing that you were asking for. But in any case, my response to to that experience was that I ultimately, I just became deeply afraid of of mortality. I was acutely aware, in a way, that everyone becomes eventually, but probably most people are not. At 2021 22 that I was going to die, and what that would mean, and the fact that I maybe recognized that, or believed I recognize the religious tradition in which I've been raised as a sort of inappropriate response to that natural fear was itself not a solution to the fear. In fact, it meant, okay, now I don't have the solution to it that I've been raised with. So I was, I was terrified, and I and I had a real existential crisis over it.

Joshua Johnson: 8:53

So be being honest about the fear and saying a there's an existential crisis here. I'm facing mortality. I mean, you say early on in the book that you wanted, you had a commitment to looking the world frankly, in the face for what it really is, and it scared you. What did you turn to? Were you trying to find comforts? What were you trying to find within this structure that was that fell apart for you?

Unknown: 9:20

I did turn to, I turned to a lot of reading literature and art, but also reading philosophy and trying to find some other answers to these questions. That was a major part of what seemed to me, the alternative, on a practical human level, to be frank, a lot of what I turned to was drinking, you know, was self medicating, dulling the fear through those kinds of means, but on a more kind of, like, high minded, aspirational level, I was trying to answer the fear through through art, through literature, through the intellectual project of, you know, trying to figure out the

Joshua Johnson: 9:53

world, doing this, and you have unbelief, you're moving towards atheism. You talk about, there's a distinction. Between atheism as disbelief and atheism as a worldview. When did you realize that atheism wasn't just neutral, but it carried its own metaphysical assumptions?

Unknown: 10:13

So I would make a slight distinction from what you're saying, and I would say that atheists, I don't know that you could say atheism as such as a worldview, but atheists have worldviews. That is to say that necessarily everyone must have one. And so atheists who say, well, atheism isn't a worldview. It just means I don't believe this other thing. In a sense, they are correct. But the question is, what do you believe instead? And here is where what a particular brand of atheists would say is, well, I don't have beliefs. You know, as Russell said, I look the world frankly in the face, you know, I have knowledge, I have fact, I don't have belief. I don't have hope. I don't have a worldview. I just view the world neutral. You know, the neutral world that is out there that anyone else who can strip away these layers of superstition and wishful thinking. This is the same world that they would see. Because the world is a material object that is, that is neutrally out there. So I don't think that is what I what I object to. You know, I think that I mean what I've just expressed there is itself a worldview. It is not possible to not have a worldview, and that's something I came pretty quickly to understand. As I sort of alluded to a moment ago, my early days as an atheist coincided with the rise of the new Atheism in the first decade of the 21st Century, which starts with Sam Harris writing very soon after 911 a work called the end of faith. And then that is quickly followed by Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett, all writing their sort of contributions to this movement. And by and large, they share an atheist worldview that I refer to in the book as scientific materialism, and that is roughly the view that, as a metaphysical matter, the material, physical world is all that exists. There is no sort of other spiritual or mental or some other entity or world. And then as a epistemological view that the way that we can come to have knowledge about that world is, you know, through the senses, through experience, but also through a particular way of using sense experience to arrive at sort of general laws about physical reality that is very bound up in quantification, experimentation, objectification, all of these sort of hallmarks of the Physical Sciences. And then the third piece of it generally, is an ethics, a utilitarian ethics, that says that given those two things that I've just said, if we want to have a conception of the good, it can involve abstract principles like justice or like the good, it has to be grounded in something that can be physically observed and can be quantified, and what they arrive at is the physical sensations of pain and pleasure. So anyway, that that's, that's, that's roughly that view. And at the time, it was very much the prevailing atheist worldview among people who were sort of self consciously atheists, self described atheists of the new atheist sort. And that view goes back, really, to the rise of empiricism, to bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, people like that. But there has always been a competing atheist worldview, which I call romantic idealism. But that basically is the flip side of that. Instead of saying physical reality is all there is, they say, Okay, well, wait a second, all of our experiences are mediated through our own subjective consciousness. In fact, we don't have any access to a neutral physical reality. We just have access to our own mental experiences. And so they they put the mental or conscious experience subjectivity at the center of reality. And this movement tends as you go from a Descartes to a Spinoza on to Kant, and then the particular strain of post Kantian atheism, it's Schopenhauer Nietzsche et cetera, tends to really emphasize authenticity and the ideal of sort of living out our own reality in an autonomous way that becomes the ethic, instead of the utilitarian ethic. What's changed over the last 20 years since I kind of became an atheist, is that, I think that is is much more prevalent now among among atheists, and so a lot of what is generally called post modern thought, but also a lot of, you know, identity politics that has to do with, you know, where. I am situated as a subjective individual conditions my reality. And you know, my sort of main ethical imperative is to live out and live away in a way that's true to that reality, that's that's a form of romantic idealism. And you see that, I think, on both the left and the right, a rise of it, whereas kind of what we think of as within our political culture, the kind of moderate centrist, tends to still be basically a utilitarian materialist.

Joshua Johnson: 15:33

As you were looking at both scientific materialism, you're looking at romantic idealism, and you're looking at these things, what did you find in there that was really, like, attractive and true that you wanted to hold on to?

Unknown: 15:47

I mean, what's attractive about, about materialism, or about that that strain, which also, I should say, one other important distinction is that the first strain of atheism really highly values human reason and believes that through kind of disinterested, unemotional, rational thought, we can arrive at truth and we can improve the world and improve our own material conditions. Obviously, there's a lot to be said for that, and a huge amount of our of the material progress and technological progress that has been made over the last 300 years comes down to applying empiricism and reason to the world. So that's, you know, right there, very attractive. But also, if you're someone who tries to answer these questions through thinking, through reading, through writing, a system of thought that says that, you know, the big questions about reality can be answered through reason, through the application of sort of disinterested thought. That's that's very attractive. It's Russell who, who spoke about, you know, what you quoted before looking the world frankly in the face. But there is a strong sense that people in that tradition have that, you know, I see things as they actually are, whereas other people allow their emotions and their fears and their hopes to color what they see. I see things as they are. So that's what's attractive about that view. The problem with the view, and as I see it, is that, in fact, the idealist critique is correct. We don't. There is no neutral point of view from which we can see things uncolored by our own experiences, uncolored by our own emotions. That's a fiction. It may at times be a useful fiction, but it doesn't exist. There's no way for us to get there. We can't stand step outside of our own experiences. And then there are things you know, which that idea of experience, you know, raises the problem of consciousness. In particular, it just it seems that, if we are honest about our own experience, that there do exist phenomena that are not material phenomena. I'm not talking about the existence of ghosts or spirits our own minds. You know, we have, we have a we had an ongoing conscious experience that that no one else can observe, that cannot be subjected to the kind of, you know, Imperial empirical objectification that this school of thought says something needs to have in order to be treated as a reality.

Joshua Johnson: 18:18

Consciousness is a is a crazy thing, like, we can't observe it. We don't know where it comes from. What do we do with that? That's a great question. So as you then saw, okay, idealism was is really going to answer a lot of these questions that I'm having here. As a writer, you're probably excited about authenticity, creativity, self expression, like this is part of your your profession, your job, of your vocation, of who you are in this world. What did that give you that materialism wasn't giving you as you were engaging with the world?

Unknown: 19:57

Well, it can be incredibly inspiring. It does seem to speak to this profound intuitive truth about the centrality of subjective experience to our own picture of reality. And then does as you were saying, you know, I was someone who was who was setting out to be not just a writer, but a literary writer, a writer of fiction, an imaginative writer, and it does place those kinds of imaginative efforts at world building really at the center of reality. And it says that we are charged with making our own meaning, that that's the project. And if you are someone who is dedicating your life to something like writing and fiction, that's going to be very appealing as well. Now I would get right into what I saw as the limitations of the of that view, which are the mirror image, the reverse image of the limitations of materialism, because the fact is that we have a lot of evidence that suggests that a. Material world outside of us does exist, even if we can never have unmediated access to it. We know that as much as we might think that everything is mind and that we have a kind of potentially heroic control over our reality that you know, as the materialists would say Facts are stubborn things, and then, in fact, we do constantly come up against a world that is obviously in profound ways outside of our control. The other thing that idealism often has a hard time with is the reality of other people and the kind of Nietzschean Superman to take an example of the ideal that romantic idealism holds up, or the Heideggerian or sartrean existential hero, or the schopenhauering artist as sufferer. You know, these are all isolated individuals, and the real, I think, challenge that romantic idealism presents to us is, how do you not just recognize that there is a world outside of our own mediating experience, but that there's there's countless other human beings whose own subjective lives are as rich as ours, and how you find some way to connect up with those people. How do you bridge that gap?

Joshua Johnson: 22:23

Aren't they just NPCs in our own world?

Unknown: 22:27

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's also it's, it's, the thing is, right? That what romantic idealism asks you to do without is any kind of pre existing structure for meaning, right? So what a romantic idealist won't say is that it's wrong to participate in a religious faith because the religious Faith's claims about reality are untrue. It does think that those claims are untrue as a metaphysical matter, but that doesn't that's that's fine because it doesn't value truth in the way that scientific materialism does. Right, we are allowed to have our own truth, but there's something inauthentic about accepting some ready made truth that like the tradition you happen to have born in, been born into. So your your job is to make your own truth. Now, the thing about that is it's very, very, very difficult, and that is why, you know, if you're, if you're a niche and it's, it's not a mere human being who is your model. It's a superman. You know, the existentialist Kierkegaard is very interesting because, of course, he is a Christian existentialist, a religious existentialist, but he introduces this idea of anxiety as being a profound part of human reality. And then Heidegger and Camus both take that in this atheistic direction, where they say that facing up to the anxiety of our existential situation is, is, is, is part of that project of authenticity and responding authentically to that anxiety. Well, we happen now to live in a time, going back to to Kierkegaard, anxiety was a relatively niche emotion in some ways, you didn't have a lot of people talking about that as central to the human condition. Now it's everywhere. It is all well and good to say that. You know, we shouldn't dull our anxiety with drink and drugs. We should face up to it. But again, it's, it's it's difficult. It does seem like acknowledging that anxiety, just like acknowledging the fear in the way that Russell does doesn't, doesn't solve your problem.

Joshua Johnson: 24:26

So what did you turn to? I know that you returned to Catholicism. You said you needed some dependence, that you were dependent, not just on yourself to make meaning from your own self and you being your own savior, but you needed something that's outside of you. So what did that look like, and why? Why did you turn back into a faith and a belief system?

Unknown: 24:54

I mean, one way to think about it is, I've sort of suggested these two traditions as kind of antitheses, right? There's the holy objectifying one, and there's the Holy subjectifying one. There's the one that is entirely about disinterested reason, and there's one that seems entirely about your authentic emotional response to the world, right? And so if you find something valuable in both of them, but you find that they're both profoundly limited unlimiting, you are going to naturally look for, what is the proper synthesis? What? How am I going to get the best of both? Right? So you're looking for a worldview that acknowledges the reality of the material world, the physical world, outside of your own mind. And also, you know, believes that humans have the capability of coming in important ways to know that reality, even if they can never have the sort of direct, unmediated access to it they might want. And that reason has an important role to play in that process. And then also acknowledges subjectivity, the emotional. Challenge of of our existential situation. The thing that I, you know, I came to view as the synthesis of these things, is an understanding of the world having both a material or physical and a spiritual component, and understanding the world is the product of creation. And then there comes further from that, understanding the world as the product of loving creation, understanding ourselves as having been created for the purpose of loving this created order, loving our Creator, and, very importantly, loving each other. And so that's that, that's I don't know that I would have, you know, sort of come up with that idea on my own. But I found, when I started looking back to the tradition I'd come from, that it's spoken profound ways to these two traditions, and seemed to have an answer for how they could be united.

Joshua Johnson: 27:01

So many Christians believe that the purpose of Christianity is to go to heaven when he died, but he's making argument that really the purpose is that God is coming home to Earth to dwell among us, meaning that this earth matters, and who we are matters, and what we do here on earth matters. And it feels like there's like, hey, some of this part scientific materialism, like the objectivity of the Earth, like we're not just trying to escape it. We're trying to actually say we could make things new and better and back to the created order that God wanted in the first place. How does something like that sit with you as you've walked through some of these held on to some things that you say, oh, there's some good things here. There are some good things here, but it doesn't explain everything. How does something like that sit

Unknown: 27:58

I spend very, very little time thinking about the afterlife, or thinking about the component of my own belief that suggests that we have immortal souls, you know, thinking about the fact that you know the people who were close to me who have died, that my worldview suggests that one day I will be united with them in some powerful way. Or about the fact that if I, you know, lose the people close to me now, that will happen. It's not a big part of what moves me on a daily basis, about about this belief. And yet, going back to the earlier parts of our conversation, and this idea that that religion exists to address our fear, and particularly our fear about mortality, you would think that that would be a huge part of it, you know. And of course, it is for many people. But if you know religion as it is described by someone like Russell, you would think that what it really is almost exclusively about is what is going to happen in quote, unquote, the next world, you know, or what is going on in some other realm than the world we're in now. But what moves me about about my faith, isn't almost entirely about what it means for how I live in the here and now, about what it means for how I should be engaging with other human beings, for how I should be engaging with nature, for how I should be trying to understand the world around me, for how I should be trying to act in it, for the view I should take of things, and yet, as a practical matter, it has had the effect that I guess Russell says it would, which is, I don't stay up at night anymore thinking about the fact that I'm going to die one day. But it's not because I reassure myself, well, you're not really going to die. It's just your sort of Mortal Coil you're gonna slough off. It's because that that's just not a thing that presses upon me in the same way, because I have a different context and a different sense of the meaning of of what I'm doing.

Joshua Johnson: 29:53

As you turn back into Catholicism, you're not turning into something where everything is certain. No, not at all holding on to certainty like you could hold the faith and doubt there. So what does it look like to hold faith and doubt that certainty isn't the end goal, but I could actually hold these two things in tension

Unknown: 30:14

as I understand it. You know, a big part of of the power of Catholicism is that it recognizes that there's something fundamentally mysterious about our experience. You know, we talked about the appeal for someone who has an artistic bent of romantic idealism, but the Catholic faith also has real appeal in the sense that it believes very strongly in the power of ritual, believes in the power of religious art, and it believes that there are truths that can't be approached in the kind of direct, discursive way of philosophy, that have to be approached in experiential ways, by way of the imagination. But then obviously there is also a very strong, Catholic intellectual tradition. That does say that there are part of what we are trying to do is apply our reason to understand the world, and has a faith that reason is in part to the task, because it believes that the God who created us wants us to understand this creation in some way in order better to love it. So there are elements of both of that. But I do think that as I write in the book, it's, it's, it's right in the first pages of the Catholic Catechism that there are that the Catholic tradition, and all religious traditions, are limited human attempts to understand something that ultimately outstrips our understanding. I don't want to speak kind of sociologically about about other traditions, particularly traditions I don't know nearly as well, but that that is a central component of Catholicism.

Joshua Johnson: 31:52

As the atheist and others are living in a world without transcendence, or a transcendent one. What do you think that looks like in the world. How is that shaping the world when so many are living without transcendence?

Unknown: 32:10

Well, it does. It has a lot of effects. And I should say that lots of people who would describe themselves in the abstract as religious believers still, you know, live out a life of that kind, right? But it means from the more sort of scientific, materialist side, right, which this empirical and utilitarian tradition has also like, very closely bound up with the rise of capitalism. Because if you believe that the that the only goods are human, is is essentially human pleasure. And you believe that the way that one arrives at at good is through the utilitarian means of giving everyone maximum freedom to kind of you know, trade relative pleasures. You, you do, you arrive at the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of the of the good. And so we have, we have that without doubt, in our in our society, it is submitting everything to market forces. And really a quite, you know, low anthropology in the sense that it does not believe that humans fundamentally are capable of transcending self interest, that even what seems like a kind of loving selflessness. You know, there's a quasi evolutionary explanation for why that's ultimately in our own self interest. You know, all we are is maximizers of our own self interest, even if reciprocal altruism exists, or something like that, any apparent selflessness can be explained through the lens of rational self interest. I don't think it's true, but I also think it's a very low way to think about humanity. So that's the thing that happens. The other thing that happens is the flip side, the sort of romantic idealism thing. Piece of it there. It can be a real self involvement in that if you think that the meaning of reality is you personally sorting through what it means for you authentically to live in the world. Then, as, as we were saying before you, you treat other human beings as essentially ancillary characters in in that project, in your story, to put it in the in the kind of novelist term, everyone is living out their own first person narrative, and there doesn't exist the kind of omniscient third person narrator who can put us all into a relationship with each other, where the ultimate meaning of the thing transcends any individual. And then the last thing you know, Spinoza is sometimes considered one of the earliest modern atheist thinkers, although Spinoza did not himself consider himself an atheist at all, but spinoza's ideal of reason was to see things under the species of eternity, as he said, basically, to see yourself as a as a piece of a larger whole, and to View your own misfortunes, but also your own pleasures within this much larger view. So it is possible for now, again, as I said, he considered himself a theist, but it is, it is possible for for forms of atheism to take that kind of view, but we do seem to have almost entirely lost that view. So we're in a relentless presentism, and then when we happen to live in a time where the President, you know, is quite grim, it leads to some real hopelessness. I attend church in a quite liberal, progressive Catholic parish in Brooklyn, heights, and I remember going back to 2016 when Trump was elected and the priest did not talk explicitly electoral politics from the pulpit, you know, but, but everyone kind of knew pretty well that the people in the pews did not want Trump as president, and neither did the priest up on the altar, and without naming him or saying more about politics, this priest started his sermon. In the week after the election, by speaking about the need for hope and the sin of hopelessness and despair. And said, As Catholics, we cannot believe that one election is the end of the world, because, as Catholics, we do not believe that the end of the world is the end of the world. And that's something I think about all the time. Is just, you know, how do we find a way to have hope about things getting better in the future, but also to see the challenges that we're facing now within the context of a very long human history that has seen ups and downs and progress and setbacks that on some level, requires not transcendence in the sense that you're that you believe there is a world above the natural world, but it does require somehow transcending your own moment and situation to see things subspecies at trinitatis.

Joshua Johnson: 36:58

So what do you think that will do to transcend our moment in time, and maybe, you know, have some transcendence, so that we could actually see things like forgiveness, moral clarity in the in the moment that we're in human dignity for for all people like, is it a a worldview? Do we need to shift our thinking? What do you think it looks like for us to get to that place where we do see those things,

Unknown: 37:25

I don't know. I mean, I so I'll be, I'll be 100% transparently honest here, right? We're having this conversation in a week where I am feeling about as, as close to despair about the trajectory that our country is on as I have felt. You know, for the last decade, while, I've had a lot of friends who have been feeling this kind of despair day in, day out, I have been the one saying you need to take the long view. You need to not spend your whole day on social media, Doom scrolling. You need to understand that there are people on the other side, who you can, you know, try to make common cause with. You need to have hope for a better future, etc. And I still believe all those things in in the abstract, but at the moment, I feel like we're in a really bad place. And it's, it's work for me too. I have a quote in the in the book from Wittgenstein, he says Christianity is for the man who needs endless help and and I didn't write this book out of a sense that I had the answers for other people. I wrote this book out of the sense that I had gone on a journey, a journey that was very much bound up in my own sense of weakness and fallibility. So I wish I had a good answer for you to that question, but I want to be honest to the fact that I do not present myself as someone who who has all the answers. And you know, particularly at a moment like this, I heard recently a story that sums it up for me, which is that Thomas Merton was involved in the education of novices who came in to be Trappists, that at his monastery of Gethsemane down in Kentucky, he said to them, always remember that you are not here because you are too pure to live in the world. You're here because you're too weak to live. And I think that when you write about something like faith, and you write from the perspective of someone who has it, and you are trying, in part, to appeal to an audience that doesn't have it. It's very, very easy to fall into the trap of presenting yourself as one of the good ones, but I feel myself to be one of the weak ones. And that's not just a kind of rhetorical moot that's really existentially what I feel. And so I feel like someone who needs this faith, I also happen to believe it's true, which is a help. There are some people who believe in the abstract that's true, and then don't center their lives around it. And maybe they don't feel like they have to center their lives around it, but I do. And so it can, it can be, actually be your catching me in a moment where I am feeling the despair that a lot of people are feeling. But it also can just be helpful to remind yourself, as you counsel hope for other people, that part of the reason we need to try and work towards hope is because we are we all have moments of despair, and because there are things about the world we live in where it seems to us that some level of despair seems like the appropriate response.

Joshua Johnson: 40:28

I don't have all the answers. Is probably answer that we need right now, is that if we could all see each other as weak, that we are all not 100% correct and and right, that then hope maybe we could come together in a way where we could see each other that, oh, we're all weak vessels and creatures that we need something else to depend on so that we can get through this moment. So I think your your answer was, was pretty, pretty good. Answer. In the midst of the despair and helplessness we actually do feel about our country at the moment, and so many people do, I feel it as well. I would want to know if you, if people pick up your book, why I'm not an atheist, what hope do you have for your book?

Unknown: 41:17

I mean, I would, I would like it to be, to be read by people who have gone through, or are going through some of the same challenges that I went through over the last 20 years, and for it to make a human difference for them. You know, I think because part of what I am trying to do is give it an honest, fair account of these atheist worldviews, I would I would love it if some religious believers read it and came out of it having a better sense of what a lot of atheists believe and why those things are actually themselves, coherent worldviews and why someone will believe it at the same time, I would hope that some atheists who read It have a better sense of why it is potentially credible to have faith. I won't say I'm not looking to change any minds. You know, I it would be great if, if, if I did. But at the same time, to me, the success of the book does not stand and fall on whether or not someone who gets to the end of it finishes feeling that now they, you know, have they believe my answers to these questions?

Joshua Johnson: 42:30

That's great. I have a couple of quick questions here at the end. Chris, one, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give now,

Unknown: 42:37

I guess, well, that's, that's, that's a hard question for me. I think what I would say is, and this, this goes back to, you know, what I was just saying a moment ago, is that you have to keep in mind the fact that you're never going to have all the answers, that you're never going to have it all figured out, while at the same time still feeling that getting towards the best version of those answers You can is something of an imperative.

Joshua Johnson: 43:03

It's really good. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend.

Unknown: 43:07

I always read a lot of 19th century fiction, and often it's rereading, and I'm usually going through a particular author and going back through and right now that person is Flaubert. I just reread Madame Bovary, which is one of my favorite novels of all time. And I just read for the first time very strange novel of his called salammbo. And now I'm about to start sentimental education, which is after Madame Bovary, his other big kind of 19th century realist novel, which is another favorite of mine. So I'm going to continue through and probably be reading. He has wonderful letters and journals and read those, and there's that right now I'm reading a book by William Volman called the dying grass, which is a book about the Nez Perce Indian Wars, and is is part of a series of his called The Seven dreams, which is a series of novels about European settlers interactions with indigenous communities in North America. The first one, which is called the ice shirt, is about the, you know, Norse landings in in Greenland, and the very first sort of European contact with the indigenous North American world. And then it goes through the history. There's a one called fathers and crows that is about French Jesuits in Canada. And now we're up into the 19th century with this is the fifth of seven, and I think it's like one of the great literary projects of the last 50 years or so.

Joshua Johnson: 44:47

Great recommendations. Thank you. Why I am not an atheist. Will be available anywhere books are sold. People could go and get this great book. I really enjoyed reading it, and so thank you for, for this, this conversation, I want people to get the book. Is there anywhere else that you'd like to point people to, to connect with you? Anywhere else you'd like to point people to?

Unknown: 45:10

I don't, I don't really do social media, so I don't have a something like that to point people to. I hope people will, will read the book. I put a lot of me in it. So and and part of my argument about the longer view is is not being in the daily churn and instead being a little more sort of contemplative. So that's to the extent that people want to get my thoughts on this and other matters. I would say, read the book, but don't look for my kind of offhand thoughts on the internet.

Joshua Johnson: 45:44

Well, that's good. I think we all need a little bit more contemplative action in our lives, that we need to take the long view and so, yeah, hopefully people go out give the book why I'm not an atheist. Fantastic. So Chris, thank you for this conversation. It. Was really good. I really enjoyed talking to you, walking through your journey as you laid it out here. So thank you so much. It was fantastic. Thank you. It was a pleasure. You