In his 1955 spiritual memoir, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis refers to himself as a “reluctant Christian.” As an homage to this writer for the ages, I will present myself here as a “reluctant atheist.”
In this regard, I suspect I am not alone. For only an atheist married to his spite would hesitate to switch teams if the universe were found to have a grand infrastructure of coherent meaning and morals propping up the materialist wonders of colliding galaxies, exploding stars and ravenous singularities — and all of this grandeur orchestrated handily by a personal deity — equal parts light, love and kindness.
If such a universe were found to exist, then spiritual belief would flow naturally, would be quite rational. The path to human solidarity would be apparent. We — the human species — could do no other than settle our fealty upon this god-head, and know our duties and obligations toward this new god — and also toward each other — as we know our multiplication tables.
But I have not been persuaded that this loveliness is at the core of our universe. To me, such explanations for those things not seen smack of an attempt to anthropomorphize, or spiritually colonize something which cannot take our form.
Classic rhetoric identifies three paths to persuasion:
- logos: the facts and formal arguments that support your case
- ethos: appeal to the credibility or character of the speaker
- pathos: appeal to the passions, imagination of the audience
I recently watched a debate in which Christopher Hitchens (peace be upon him) challenged a professor of Islamic theology: did the Imam really and truly believe that the Prophet Mohammad — quite literally — flew into the heavens astride a winged horse and split the moon in two? The Imam replied that yes, he believed in ‘the miracles.’
Herein lies the problem.
The hard-core atheist believes the path to Truth can only be ‘all logos, all the time.’ Any belief system explained solely in terms of its miracles and internal narrative, can never supply evidence on the level demanded by the atheist. When viewed exclusively through the strict lens of logic, the atheists are entirely correct: all of religion and spirituality are an insult to the thinking man and abhorrent to the rational mind.
But by constraining his analysis in such a way, the atheist must completely dismiss the fact-in-evidence that 90% of people on the planet are believers. Are the atheists prepared to defend the premise that the vast, vast majority of their fellow hominids are living out the lives of beguiled primitives?
Perhaps the atheist might find a portion of serenity, if he could hollow out a space in his intellect for the possibility that something unknowable might one day seize his heart. And if billions of the hominids he decries have experienced engaging on the level of the spiritual, and he has not, then perhaps it is not that those who believe are irrational, but that our atheist is incomplete.
“And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:7
But the hard-core religionists also get it wrong. They meet their gods entirely on the fields of pathos. Each deity on offer is synonymous with everything noble, worthy and virtuous. To believe thusly is to know the incontrovertible Truth. But these truths can only be substantiated by first accepting a crisscross of lesser truths.
So, when an epistemological accounting for how all of this comes together is demanded, the believers respond with an odd mixture of the serenity of St. Francis and the “fuck thou” ethos of Travis Bickle. Predictably, it all loses cohesion and devolves into a janked polemics unfamiliar to the classicist.
There are no satisfying conclusions.
There is not enough common ground to bring these to camps together. And if some commonality does exist, it is negative in nature. Our atheist may jab his finger at the irrationality of faith, but at the end of the day — as we bring in the laundry — the universe, as our atheists experience it, is little more rational than the space journey of Mohamed.
Once we exit the biosphere, exit lower Earth orbit and enter the expanse of space, our judgement and the language available to describe such an experience by necessity becomes metaphorical. Every tool in our evolutionary kit comes up hard against problems of scale.
While our fabulous brains can calculate if we are likely to make it to the next watering hole before dark, or the distance the dale with the ripe huckleberries, such comfortable distances are wholly unfit for a cosmic journey.
Human milestones, those that describe the distance a man might walk in a day, by necessity, turn into leaps of light-years (9.46 trillion kilometers). The portion of the universe we can observe with current techniques is 46.5 billion of these light-years in diameter. Just to be clear, this means that light emitted from a source at one side of this expanse would take 46.5 billion years to make the crossing.
The human brain has no frame of reference for anything like this.
The smart ones might learn to pronounce the words associated with the first few orders of magnitude beyond decimal “10” required for this journey, but even so, this language is not grounded in experience. While we might have been told that Taylor Swift’s newest single has hit a billion hits on Spotify, or that some poor slob won $12.5 million in Lotto 649, no human being has ever encountered a billion — or even a million — of anything we can reach out and touch, or gather up in our arms.
If we cannot even fathom the attributes that describe a thing, how can we claim it is “known” to us, or even knowable.
So perhaps we can find a poor man’s analog between Mohamed’s cosmic journey and ancient light that will not reach us until billions of generations after the death rattle escapes the last man.
By Paul R. Bond
© Paul R. Bond (2026)
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