In 1927, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell gave a lecture in London titled, “Why I am not a Christian.” It was later published as an essay, translated into multiple languages, and remains popular nearly a century later. Remarkable at the time, the arguments Russell presents are ones we have likely all heard for why the idea of God is illogical and why Christianity’s immoral teachings and practices over the centuries render it unworthy of people’s loyalty.

With a nod to Russell’s title, American writer Christopher Beha’s new book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer was published last month. Beha was raised in an observant Catholic household but stopped practicing while in college. His doubts found expression in writings like Russell’s and many others. But while atheism explained what he didn’t believe, he found that he lacked a clear explanation for how he should live.

That recognition launched him into a years-long exploration of the great Western philosophers. The bulk of the book describes that intellectual journey and, ultimately, Beha’s frustration with it. But then, he fell in love, married, and started a family. This new situation pushed Beha in a new direction, as he explains in a quote cited in a book review by Martha Anne Toll.

The best thing that had ever happened to me had undone fifteen years of work…. My life was filled with love, but there was something in this love that demanded that I make sense of it. The light and the warmth of this sun were baffling. Where were they coming from? What did they mean?

As Toll goes on to say, “love brings Beha to faith” and to his Catholic roots, but now in a less traditional mystic form, represented by the likes of Theresa of Avila and Flannery O’Connor. And I suspect that Toll is right in noting the significance of Beha’s move from ponderous philosophy to novels and poetry. Those are pages where love finds a much more comfortable home. And that, as Beha concludes, is where his atheism fell short.

I had thought that once I’d faced down death without God, I could never possibly have need of him again. It turned out that the thing I couldn’t face without God was love.

Reviews I have read of Why I Am Not an Atheist, including Toll’s, have been mixed. While they agree Beha’s survey of great philosophers is an impressive achievement (Timothy Egan in The New York Times says Beha is “the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era”), it was mostly a distraction from his more important personal experience of faith coming, going, and returning again.

What Beha’s story illustrates is the ongoing confusion over the difference between faith and beliefs, which is common among both believers and nonbelievers. St. Anselm famously defined theology as “faith seeking understanding,” but what is often missed is that faith exists prior to and independent of understanding. Yet the church has often been obsessed with getting Christianity “down on paper”, often to enforce its authority and make sure people held the “right” beliefs. As a consequence, “paper Christianity” has long been the target of skeptics’ criticism, and often rightfully so.

I am not surprised by Beha’s return to faith after discovering mystical Catholicism. The mystics have always downplayed the value of ideas over experience in coming to faith, and in knowing God rather than trying to understand God. They are very much in harmony with the teaching of the ancient Chinese Tao Te Ching, which begins:

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.

In a recent blog post, Marshall Davis tells of learning from a Jewish scholar that when Moses asks to know God’s name, what God gives him really isn’t a word at all. Rather, it’s just a string of vowels, not a name but an unpronounceable sound. The Bible returns often to the theme of God’s unknowability in terms of concepts, in contrast with God’s reliability as an experience of compassion and love.

Religion may be teachable but faith is not. Today people have little interest in the doctrines and theology that the religious fight about among themselves and with anti-religious atheists. The Father God in the sky is indeed dead and gone. Rather, people, like Christopher Beha, want to know the One, identified by whatever word or name, that can support and make real for them Paul’s triad of faith, hope, and love.

The god of the philosophers and the God of the theologians are both phony. One extrapolates a “first principle” or “prime mover” from logic and from nature. The other extrapolates a Supreme Being from Bible stories and teachings. Neither is rooted in the only way we actually know anything: our conscious experience.

In his landmark book, The Mythic Past, Old Testament scholar Thomas Thompson says that, in the Bible, God is a story character like all the others. I still remember this being a stunning “aha” moment for me. Of course, we don’t encounter God in the Bible but rather the ideas ancient people had about God—and those ideas didn’t all agree. Not even close. We go from the thundering Zeus-like God of Mt. Sinai in Exodus to the barely veiled atheism, or at least agnosticism, of Ecclesiastes.

Thompson concludes that the one consistent message of the Bible is that God is unknowable, at least in any conceptual sense. This is behind the Jewish and Muslim practice of avoiding the use of a name for God or even the word “God.” I think it was a great mistake that Christians did not follow suite, leading often to a confused and presumptuous chummy familiarity with the divine.

In the 1960s, Vatican II theologian Karl Rahner said Christians should stop using the word “God” for fifty years because people had become so confused about it. Obviously, his proposal was not adopted. But it likely wasn’t enough, anyway. What we probably need is to do drop it altogether and view it as a relic of the past with little relation to a contemporary experience of genuine faith.

This, of course, has been the inclination of mystics throughout history. For them, there is no word or name that encapsulates the experience that transcends all experience. Words can only point: the one, the holy, light, darkness, source, unmoved mover, ground, Being. Following the medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt, 20^th century theologian Paul Tillich used “ground of being” in his work. In this vein, the Tao Te Ching goes on to say that “the Tao existed before God.” Ponder that for a while, and all the questions it generates.

For God to be meaningful, it has to arise out of our personal experience. Stories and ideas, ancient or modern, may be helpful in interpreting that experience. But it is the experience that has to come first, and it will always be unique. It will always be our experience. Then it will be real and will need no proof or defense or explanation. For then it will become a part of who we are, because as Swiss psychologist Carl Jung once said, we will truly and simply know.

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