Last week I was on the Today programme with Terry Eagleton discussing his new book Culture and the Death of God.  It’s a fascinating work, typically engaging and learned, which discusses the difficulty of finding satisfying, coherent replacements for (specifically in the West) Christianity. He looks at idealism, romanticism, art and a whole range of other systems and ideas which human beings have set up as alternative saviours. He is an honest about the fact that aside from God himself, Christianity gave us many things which we don’t want to lose but don’t quite know where else to ground: a basis for objective human value, morality, meaning and a hopeful transcendence. He doesn’t argue that none of these things can be grounded outside of Christianity, but that it is difficult, and nothing yet has provided quite as a holistic or convincing base. Ideas, whether of the state, or philosophy or the family get us so far, but they don’t like God go “all the way down”.

Evan Davis, the Today programme presenter, was clearly irritated by the implication that these kind of systems are “substitute gods” and the suggestion that atheism is difficult. He might have been further enraged if he had realised that the book seems to be arguing, at least implicitly, that atheism is not just difficult for societies but individuals. The fact that Eagleton refused to answer the question about whether he was in fact an atheist himself was telling.

Another piece on the subject appeared this week in the New York Times, entitled Is Atheism Irrational? an interview with Alvin Plantinga, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and former president of the American Association of Philosophers. A month ago Oliver Burkeman wrote in the Guardian about the theology book he thought held a serious challenge for atheists. And I've recently spoken to several atheist friends  who admit that in the after glow of New Atheism, things are neither as simple or as satisfying as they might have thought- both intellectually and existentially. Some, like the novelist Julian Barnes, feel "I don't believe in God, but i miss him". 

All of this is of course gratifying for theists. For those of us who been banging the drum that Christianity has intellectual credibility and doesn’t involve shutting down your educated brain every time you enter a church, the temptation to tweet smugly links to all these clever people making your case for you is pretty strong. And it is a great relief to see the heavily guarded, orthodox narrative that atheism is the obvious endpoint for anyone with an intellect being robustly challenged.

However, I think we should pause. For the sake of the long-term honesty and graciousness of our public debates about belief and unbelief, jumping up and down with glee is the wrong reaction. In the case of Eagleton and Burkeman, it required quite a lot of honesty and humility to write as they have. Another example of this spirit is Julian Baginni, a committed atheist who is not afraid to admit how difficult that sometimes is to live with.

I think it wouldn’t hurt Christians, and by this I mean all Christians, not just those comfortable with the “liberal” label, to admit that belief is pretty difficult too. I don’t think this is primarily because of the intellectual questions around faith, although the so-called “problem of pain” is a pretty stubborn one, but it is partly because of how we’ve been trained to understand what belief is. In a post-enlightenment world, belief is (as Francis Spufford’s wonderfully-called “evidence Daleks” define it) a purely rational, evidence-based set of conclusions. Although some do come to theism like this, notably Anthony Flew, most don’t. Very few people encounter God in a library. Really believing in God, the Christian God at least, requires something more (although not less) than argument. It requires letting go of the things that our society has taught us to hold most dear, the primacy of the self, our pride and independence, and their ability to legitimise all of our decisions. It requires letting our guard down in order to encounter someone bigger and better and more important than ourselves. None of this comes naturally. It’s terrifying and mysterious and wonderful and not like anything else. It is also changeable. Some days God is as obvious as a hand in front of our faces, and other days, well, he’s not.

Given how our society has taught us to come to our decisions, I’m not surprised that some people are atheists. I have had a go at it myself, and failed. I just can’t seem to shake God off, even on the days when I want to. But I know that’s not because of any special powers or intellect or holiness on my part. Being a Christian is the least automatic thing in the world. It is not something we do for ourselves, it is a gift. 

This doesn’t mean that I think that I'm wrong about God existing, nor that I think knowing and being known by God is not the very best thing, perhaps the only really lasting thing in a human life, nor that I wouldn’t love to see everyone in the world encounter this. It just means that in public, a bit more humility and honesty about what it’s really like to believe might just be what is required.

Elizabeth Oldfield