Psalm 14
"The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'”
In the very early years of this blog (and now Substack newsletter), I expended a lot of effort in trying to make my faith intellectually respectable to atheists. I was all aboard the "religionless Christianity" train. In my own eyes, I was one of the sane and reasonable Christians. I was the sort of Christian an atheist could respect.
I still hope that is the case. I like to think of myself as both sane and reasonable, given a lot of what is going on in Christianity today. I'd like to be the kind of person an atheist would enjoy talking with, about all manner of things, God among them. Given my own long history with doubt, I'm not particularly triggered by anyone's faith struggles or lack of belief. I get where they are coming from.
And yet, over the years I've grown disillusioned with this sort of thing, the attempt to make faith respectable to those who claim "there is no God." For the simple reason that the cost of "intellectual respectability" is to so water down the claims of Christianity that they become bland observations everyone already agrees with, no matter your worldview. You're always trying to fit Christianity into an existing consensus held by elite, intellectual, scientific, creative, or activist classes, or some other collection of cool kids you'd like to hang out with. "Christianity is inoffensive," we implicitly argue, "because we already agree with you."
And yet, Psalm 14 haunts.
I expect my more traditional and conservative readers will jump in here to say, "Of course it is foolish to think there is no God!" This is a no-brainer for them. But for Christians who have spent a lot of time in cultivating the image of being "not one of those crazy sorts of Christians," a Christian who is viewed as intellectually respectable among non-believers, Psalm 14 is a jolt. In this era where doubt, deconstruction, and deconversion are all the rage, it is bracing to say to the world, "It is foolish to doubt the existence of God." If you say stuff like that out loud, you're going to sound like a holy-roller, a Bible thumper, a foaming at the mouth tent revival preacher. The sort of Christians you don't want to be associated with. People who actually believe this stuff. You'd rather hang out with the cool kids.
Today, though, I'm happy to say Psalm 14 aloud without embarrassment and without a quick, knee-jerk need to calm any ruffled feathers or to make the medicine go down more smoothly. I'm not interested, all that much anymore, in trying to convince atheists that we believe the same things.
We don't.
It certainly depends on who one is talking to. If I am talking to a confident atheist, I agree with your posture. However, if I'm talking with someone who is struggling with doubt and is feeling like there is no God, I don't want to pull out this verse. I want to walk with them and say it is not foolish to feel doubts about God, but actually wise to test one's intellectual assumptions because it can help strengthen one's faith.
I have a close atheist friend and we got to talking about her beloved astrophysics. I say " her beloved astrophysics" as though I hold it in low regard, which is not the case at all, but she really, really loves the whole of space in a wide-eyed wonder way. We spoke in lay terms about the same atoms being both here in our hands and somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy. We spoke about the unimaginable scale of cosmic events, and distances that bamboozle Newtonian laws. We spoke about other dimensions, about the mystical boundary between finite and infinite. I asked her if it's possible that what I call metaphysics is what she calls physics. She shrugged.
I am a Christian who often struggles to believe, and often struggles to feel well disposed towards other Christians who seem to find non-believers unpalatable. This sort of conversation with an atheist tends to result in a distinctly theological mood, and a satisfying clicking into place of ideas; Atheists are very important.
I had a further thought during our talk, but didn't impart it to my friend because I felt my coolly rational posture might be fatally undermined:
Is it coincidence that the iris resembles a nebula being sucked down a perfectly round back hole? If I do indeed have galaxies for eyes, then yes, it does seem a teensy bit foolish to say in my heart there is no God.