When I was young, the concept of abandoning belief in God was unthinkable. I remembers as a young teenager visiting the home of a Baptist minister with my parents. The Methodist preacher Dr Leslie Weatherhead had just published his book The Christian Agnostic, and our host was distressed by the very title. To him, in his certainty, the words ‘Christian’ and ‘agnostic’ did not belong together.
The battle I faced as a young person was not over belief in God, but over belief that the God I knew was there would accept me, that I would discover the right hoops to jump through, the correct combination to open the lock. The hoops I kept flinging myself through in desperation did not, as I’d hoped, lead to another dimension. The padlock remained resolutely closed when I selected the number strings which others assured me had worked for them.
And yet the doubts were there. In my twenties, I read Christian books on ‘doubt’ seeking reassurance. But the doubts these books addressed were always the sort of doubts Christians would have, of the ‘How can I be sure that I’m a Christian?’, ‘How do I deal with contradictions in the Bible?’ variety, rather than doubt over the most fundamental issue of all – ‘Is God there?’
My doubts arose from the usual sources – the fact of suffering, an uneasy sense that Christian theodicy was an attempt to cobble together explanations which did not really hold water, the sheer vastness of the universe. If God exists, I reasoned, then God must be immense beyond understanding. Is it reasonable to think that this immensity would have any concern for one small planet in a backwater galaxy? Isn’t it more likely that God is simply a projection of human longings? And there was my own sense of God’s absence, God’s silences when I invoked God, deep calling to Deep.
As the years passed, I was initially afraid of falling into atheism. I think it was when I realised that I was free to choose, free to embrace atheism if I felt the evidence led there, that I also became free to find and embrace faith, to know myself loved by the perplexing otherness we call God.
In April 2008, I watched on-line at a talk on ‘Science and the God Delusion’ given by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness. I found his arguments against the existence of God cogent and powerful.
The next day, I took our dog Mollie for a walk across the Islands in the River Ness close to Inverness city centre. It’s an intensely beautiful corner of the city: the Islands are covered with great trees rising beside the river as it purposefully glides down to the Firth.
As Mollie and I crossed the bridge from one island to another, it seemed to me that it would be so easy to believe that there was no God, that it was all, all the stunning beauty of it, an amazing miracle of chance. A miracle more wonderful, more miraculous than the miracle of creation would be.
It as though I was standing in a beckoning doorway, and that just one step would take me in to atheism. On the far of the door lay freedom from all the questions about God and guilt and suffering.
There was simply a clear focus on courageously living to the full, relishing the flickering beauty of my brief life, seeking to bless others, knowing that tragedy was arbitrary and death was the end.
 |
| Ness Islands, Inverness |
As I stood there in the sunshine, surrounded by trees in a million shades of green, the river sparkling at my feet beneath a blue spring sky, it seemed that nature had never before had such beauty, such intensity. I remembered the old Christian song
Heaven above is softer hue
Earth around is sweeter green
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen
It was as though the journey from belief offered the same initial heightened sensitivities. And yet I stepped back, and did not enter. What made me turn away wasn’t conscience, or fear of change. It was the thought of Easter Sunday, an open tomb, a risen Jesus. I remembered trhat there is strong evidence to suggest that something decisive happened that particular morning, that death was overcome, that Jesus was alive.
That day on the Ness islands, as Mollie strained at her lead, I chose to continue believing. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, after all, there is no more to the Easter rising than a powerful symbol, perhaps my yearning for God is no more than a construct of my heart. But that day, I committed myself once again to a life shaped by faith in a living Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment