By Dale McGowan
Managing Editor, Patheos Atheist Channel
About twice a week, as I’m drifting off to sleep, the deep unfairness of conscious mortality takes a bite out of me. I flinch and gasp; my wife stirs and grumbles, “You’re fine.”
No, I think, I’m really not. And neither are you. And I go to sleep, and in the morning, I’m fine. Mostly fine.
In addition to the undeniable luck and wonder of being alive in the universe, there’s also something outrageous about our situation. We live in soft bodies that die if you poke them hard enough—and we live in a very pokey universe, one that neither knows nor cares whether or when we get poked. Once it happens, that’s it forever. Worst of all, we’re endowed with a brain large enough, and sometimes even well-oiled enough, to grasp this.
Just about everyone feels the abyss opening under their feet at some point. We can rationalize it all we want, but it’s really a completely bullshit situation we’re in, just simply Not Okay.
So humanity has found a way to reject it out of hand, to declare it untrue. We wrote a better story. I am loved and protected by an ultimate Good, and everything is part of a plan. When I die—assuming all of the correct levers have been pulled (see manual)—I will live in eternal bliss, reunited with those I had loved and lost.
See? A much better story. Sominex for the soul.
I think about mortality more than most people, in part because of my dad’s death when I was young. But things like regular meals, shelter, education, and health care have shielded me from being consumed by existential terror. Oh, and one other thing has helped: the complete absence from my life of an overbearing, fundamentalist religion specifically designed to preserve the terror that justifies the Story.
As a result of that lucky buffer, I was able to chase my curiosity where it led and ultimately to see the world as it really is. I’m grateful for that. It’s more honest than the Story.
Frank Schaeffer had no such luck. Growing up in his missionary father’s fundamentalist evangelical commune/school in Switzerland, he had constant reminders of the terrors and of the Story that banishes those terrors. Some people raised in that interwoven package of sickness and cure run straight and hard for the Story, smiling way too hard about their escape from the abyss, praising the One who made it possible, and doggedly denying anything that runs counter to the approved narrative.
It’s deeply dishonest. Twice a week, though, for a few seconds, I get it.
Many of those raised as fundamentalists make the break and run fast and furious into pure materialist atheism, one that’s often tinged with a deep antipathy to the world they left behind.
As the title of his latest book makes clear—Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God—Schaeffer’s path out of fundamentalism was more interesting than either of these. His father moved from theology into American conservative politics, co-founding the Moral Majority movement in 1979. At first Frank tagged along. But after his father’s death in 1984, he veered into the Greek Orthodox church, directed a few B-movies—and along the way, encountered the gorgeous, terrifying universe revealed by science.
His intelligence and curiosity wouldn’t allow him to drown out that reality with ecstatic hymns, as so many of his fellows had. But because of his years staring into the abyss beneath all human feet—which you’ll recall is a real thing—he couldn’t completely renounce the Story that had banished it for us.
You might think he’d become an agnostic. But as he says in the book, “An agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves in God. I’m not that person.” Instead, he ends up frozen with one foot in each of the antonyms of God and not-God: “I believe and don’t believe at the same time.”
Agnosticism finds insufficient reason to believe either way. But Schaeffer finds both conclusions too compelling to be false. So he flips agnosticism inside out and believes both, not in alternation, but at once. He believes and he doesn’t, right now.
This is more than enough to send an atheist straight to the CAPS LOCK key, informing Schaeffer (by mustering the full faith and credit of the Oxford English Dictionary and bloody common sense) that YOU CAN’T BE AN ATHEIST IF YOU BELIEVE IN GOD.
And I have to agree with them. He’s absolutely wrong. By any sensible definition of atheism, you can’t do it. And yet it’s done.
I feel the same about a recent book title that says Atheists Can’t Be Republicans and a Virginia politician who recently said you can’t be a Christian and a Democrat—assertions disproven by the actual existence of atheist Republicans and Christian Democrats.
What these declarations mean is not that these things are impossible but that they are, in the speaker’s view, boneheadedly inconsistent. The ability of people to hold ridiculously inconsistent positions is well enough established that we ought to stop saying it can’t be done. Maybe it can’t be done rationally or consistently, but that’s another question.
Schaeffer’s position is deeply inconsistent, and frequently infuriating for that. But he’s reflecting the impossible situation in which he finds himself, trying to capture a position between two opposites, neither of which he finds he can reject.
It’s not a position I hold myself or even fully understand, but there’s a strange kind of honesty in the attempt. Remember when two ideas, both irrefutably true and absolutely contradictory, collided in the mind of Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? How is Schaeffer any different?
Well for one thing, Phaedrus had the good manners to go insane.
But there’s another difference, one that makes Schaeffer’s position a little more tenable. The two ideas in Phaedrus’ head (I’ll pretend I remember what they were) were true according to the same rules, namely logical principles. But God feels emotionally true to Schaeffer, while not-God is intellectually true. Different rules. It’s like God has won a soccer game while not-God has won in backgammon, and everybody gets a trophy.
Schaeffer denies this head/heart dichotomy, but it explains things too well, and his own statements throughout the book reflect exactly that.
That’s why he can know Earth is 4.54 billion years old and believe that his dead mother arranged to have him sit next to a professional opera singer on the plane, and that her recent performances were somehow engineered to speak to his life circumstances.
That’s why he accepts evolution but seeks and finds convenient openings for the Story:
My brain is not evolved enough to reconcile the collision of my genetic imperative with transcendent experience. My brain recognizes but can’t explain how love and beauty intersect with the prime directive of evolution: survive. Nor can I reconcile these ideas: “I know that the only thing that exists is this material universe,” and “I know that my redeemer liveth.” Depending on the day you ask me, both statements seem true.
I can argue these points with Schaeffer all day. He’s really not trying hard to see past the difficulties, something Richard Dawkins has called the “argument from personal incredulity.” But reading this uniquely moving and elegantly written book, I was less interested in arguing than in watching. Most of the time, I like to sit back and watch him dance, even when I can’t imagine the tune he’s hearing. And once in a while, I can:
I realize now that my parents were often right for the wrong reasons. For instance, I feel guilt when I shout at Lucy and Jack. And when it comes to the “big sins” I would not have burned in hell for sleeping with the many women I’ve looked at longingly, but adultery would have ruined my marriage and the home where I play with my grandchildren… What I fear today isn’t God’s theoretical wrath but my family’s palpable sorrow when I hurt them.
The book has plenty of the wishful thinking commonly seen when an intelligent person tries too hard to fit reality to his or her preferences. Schaeffer admires the ability of a child to accept mutually exclusive ideas as both true, for example, something I find adorable in a four-year-old but problematic in her father, especially if he’s driving anywhere near me on the freeway. And Schaeffer leaps much too quickly on tentative findings (or wild conjectures) in epigenetics and quantum theory, not to mention simple coincidences, if they support his desire to keep believing in a beloved idea.
Science is a way of getting desire out of the way so you can focus on what’s true, and God is a way of getting what’s true out of the way so you can focus on what is desired. Schaeffer is determined to have them both. To a certain kind of mind, that attempt to have and eat his cake will just be too much to stand. But the anthropologist in me found it impossible to resist watching a human heart and mind simultaneously at war and at peace with each other over how to respond to our unbearably beautiful and deeply crappy situation.
This post is part of a roundtable on Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God, hosted at the Patheos Book Club here.
DALE McGOWAN, Ph.D., is a committed atheist, a devoted husband and father, and a recognized expert on raising caring, ethical children without religion. He is the author of the new In Faith and In Doubt: How Religious Believers and Nonbelievers Can Create Strong Marriages and Loving Families. Other books include Parenting Beyond Belief (AMACOM, 2007), a collection of essays by and for loving, thoughtful nonreligious parents hailed by Newsweek as “a compelling read,” and Raising Freethinkers (AMACOM, 2009), the first comprehensive resource addressing the unique challenges secular parents face. He teaches workshops to nonreligious parents throughout the United States and Canada and was named a Harvard Humanist of the Year. Dale also serves as Executive Director of Foundation Beyond Belief, a charitable organization dedicated to encouraging and demonstrating acts of humanist generosity.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In