How To Be An Agnostic
than that. For what happens after Peter makes his confession
to Paul is not what Peter had feared. Paul is not crushed by the
revelation. He does not take it to mean that his life’s work has
been in vain. He knows that his encounter with this man Jesus
changed him. It spoke to him of far more than facts. Now, years
on, even an apparently devastating exposé of what actually hap-
pened cannot remove the glimpse of truth he gained. This is the
reality that is most immediate to him. Christianity had become
for him a way of life, one that was powerfully transforming. In
the closing scene of the play, the two apostles hold each other
and prepare for the moment that they had long known their
commitment would bring them to – the time to die.
Religion is not just a set of beliefs or a moral code. It is a way of
seeing the world and a way of approaching what’s unknown. As
Theo Hobson has described it, ‘Faith is a form of hope that sticks
its neck out’. This is why it is so resistant to being questioned
and mocked, why attacks with reason and ridicule are as likely
to sustain it as undermine it. The scientifi c revolution may have
undermined mythical ways of understanding. But while making
religion forgetful of the unknowability of God, and aggressive
towards its despisers, it still thrives because it is a thing of the heart
fi rst, and then the head; it is not done in abstract but in lives.
This also adds to why, although I lost my faith, I found atheism
unsatisfying. Atheism is not a practice but a principle. You can
no more believe in atheism than you can in science: the whole
point is that you don’t believe; you know. Life may be explored
by the arts, offered to others in transcendental causes, mirrored
in nature. A lack of spiritual belief may be supplemented by faith
in the power of empirical discovery, and a conviction that mate-
rialist explanations for things will be able to accommodate every-
thing in the natural world in the end. But what of the soul – the
facet that needs to reach out to concerns aside from the mate-
rial business of life, in order to connect with what is called the
spiritual, the transcendent, God? There’s this sense that human
beings are the creature for whom our own lives are too small for
us. We need something bigger than ourselves to be ourselves. My