Intro:
Many Christians have, over the course of their ministry, made it a point to bring up the fact that they were once atheists—but have now since found Jesus. Yet if you look into their life as a so-called atheist, you will often find that it was, more or less, liberal Christianity. Granted, even liberal Christianity seems pretty atheistic in dense pockets of Evangelical and Fundamentalist belief, but even the famed C.S. Lewis wasn’t a true blood atheist. He grew up in the Church of England, had a brief stint in college where he questioned his beliefs, and in this period of his life, for his own reasons, he didn’t feel he believed perhaps as much as a devoted parishioner should, and on this ground declared himself an atheist.
This is what I consider to be a type of pseudo-atheism. It is when the believer is critical minded enough to recognize their own doubts, but it isn’t skeptical enough to actually renounce their spiritual beliefs altogether. Even C.S. Lewis held on to his Christianity through his brief flirtation with “atheism,” although I hesitate to use that term for him. For Lewis, and many like him, it wasn’t really nonbelief so much as unbelief they grappled with—and there is an important distinction. Nonbelief is to atheism as unbelief is to agnosticism. Having studied C.S. Lewis thoroughly, I would not call his form of atheism the type of atheist I view myself as. Rather, Lewis was, by my account, a strong agnostic who questioned his beliefs—a healthy thing for anyone to do.
After a short time questioning the existence of God, C.S. Lewis found logical ways to justify the lingering Christian beliefs which he clung to, and filled with the righteousness of a deeply spiritual man, C.S. Lewis had a revival as one of Christianities greatest apologists.
Indeed, C.S. Lewis often had a way of simplifying complex theological and philosophical questions in such a way, as was his fashion, to make the layman positively delight in the simplicity of the choices (but I would caution Lewis, a trained reductionist (as are all men of literature), was often guilty of oversimplifying). C.S. Lewis once affirmed that “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
I would be remiss, however, if I did not correct Lewis’s assumption, for it is mistaken. When he claims that the most probable explanation is that of another world, I call fallacy. Can we honestly assume Lewis experienced all the desires, and all the corresponding experiences therein, that this world has to offer? Because this is what Lewis is tacitly admitting, that he has experienced everything there is worth experiencing in order to quench the thirst for some unexplainable thing. Although, it is a little dishonest of Lewis, as learned as he was, to suggest he experienced all the desires and experiences worth experiencing. But before he could begin on a proper journey searching for the answers, he quickly settled back into the Christianity of his youth. Lewis was of the same mind as the Christian poet and theologian Thomas Traherne, who affirmed, “There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing?”
Christians all ultimately profess they feel being drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing. For them, they call this thing God, or a “personal” relationship with God. For as Trahern also informs, “Being made alone, O my soul, thou wouldst be in thy body like God in the World, an invisible mystery, too great to be comprehended by all creatures.”
There you have it—God is both to great to be comprehended and invisible. The difference of opinion here should be obvious—Christians believe this means God is Transcendent—whereas atheist interpret this as nonexistent. The question is, what would it take to convince a skeptic that something which is both impossible to comprehend and invisible to our senses actually exists? And the answer is: evidence—real tested and proved—and tested again—evidence. Without any empirical evidence, all theists have is an incomprehensible invisible nothing which they call God. Can you blame atheists for not believing in such a thing?