How an Atheist Can Believe in God
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life recently released results of another huge survey of American religious views.
One of the more reported features of the survey (it’s on page three–five, as they number it–of the eighteen page summary) involves the claim that some twenty-one percent of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God! What’s more, about forty percent of agnostics say they are certain there is a God!
The Secular Coalition for America, a group which mistakenly associates secularism with freedom and which claims to promote the interests of atheists, agnostics, and humanists, tries to make the case that these odd statistics along with some converse statistics indicating that seven percent of protestants do not believe in God are evidence of how difficult it is for an atheist to “come out of the closet.” Clearly, the data is not in support of their claim. In fact, quite to the contrary of their claim, the fact that twenty-one percent of atheists say they actually believe in God indicates that they have some motivation for calling themselves atheists other than identifying their actual beliefs. Apparently, there is some appealing glamor, distinctiveness, or reactionary image they associate with the word “atheist.” And the fact that only seven percent of protestants admit they do not really believe in God is no surprise at all to those who recognize that there are plenty of people in Christian congregations of all kinds who are there because of the tradition or social networking rather than to further their relationship with God.
Once those ideas are on the table, the question of how an atheist can believe in God has two aspects. First is how an atheist can stop being an atheist and become a believer. That aspect of the issue is easy to address here, albeit cursorily. People who do not believe in God become believers in God all the time. Some argue that evidence finally tips them over the edge toward faith. Others say they are simply passive participants in a miraculous transformation. Still others realize the emptiness of their chosen unbelief and choose rather to believe. All three of those perspectives have profound schools of thought at their bases and represent three incompatible approaches to apologetics: evidentialism, presuppositionalism, and fideism. An evaluation of those apologetics will comprise future posts here. For now, the point is simply that it is obvious that an atheist can believe in God when conversion enters the picture.
But the question at hand is how a person can claim to be an atheist and believe in God at the same time; or how a person can claim to be an agnostic but be certain there is a God at the same time. What it means to be an atheist is not to believe in God. And what it means to be an agnostic is not to be certain there is a God.
Of course, one of the things this survey reveals is that those definitions are not accurate after all. Two things are probably going on. First, many people are using the word “atheist” to describe their resistance or reactionary stance to institutional religion. Institutional religion may be as particular as a specific congregation, or as broad as a cultural movement. In the case of the former, a woman may call herself an atheist as a way of saying she is rejecting the church where she was raised and has not replace it with any other congregation. In the case of the latter, some people probably see religious and political conservatism as a monolithic force with which they wish to create some separation. And the only sufficient separation probably involves rejecting the most basic claim of the movement–that belief in God governs moral and political involvement. So one way an atheist can believe in God is that they never really did not believe in God to begin with.
But the other reason is slightly more pernicious. As the first way addresses a new use for the word “atheist” or “agnostic”, the second way addresses a different use of the word “God.” Apparently, a lot of people use the word “God” in reference not to a personal being or even a more generic spiritual power, but to a concept. Claims that “there is a God, but he’s in you and me, the human spirit” reveal this way of thinking. Holding “God” as nothing more than a term for whatever is good in people, or whatever seems beautiful in the universe, or whatever is most highly valued, makes statements about whether a person believes in God inevitably vague.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life performs a great service in American life by conducting their surveys. But believers should keep in mind that the purpose of the surveys is to cover as broad a swath of the population as possible. The broader the swath, the less agreement not only on the answers to the questions, but also on the meanings of the questions and even of the individual words in the questions. So when an “atheist” says “I believe in God” every reader should be considering what that person means by “atheist” and what they mean by “God,” not to mention what they mean by “believe.” Every term is critical.
To be transparent: what I mean by “atheist” is a person who claims not to believe in God as a real being/person, but in reality is hoping to avoid future accountability for choices made in this life (see Psalm 14 or 53); what I mean by “God” is the most perfect (complete) Being–the Trinity, with Whom a relationship is possible only by grace through faith in Jesus; and what I mean by “believing” is committing life to Him.
