Christopher Beha. Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Penguin Press, 2026. $30.00. 432 pp.
In 2009, Richard Dawkins and other British atheists paid for an advertising campaign that plastered London buses with a simple message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
At the time, Christopher Beha was a young aspiring novelist who believed there was no God, and he closely followed Dawkins’s arguments. But he couldn’t stop worrying, and he didn’t enjoy his life.
Why I Am Not an Atheist is Beha’s account of why he decided, after a 25-year quest, that atheism was incapable of giving him meaning or answering the questions that plagued him. Part memoir and part history of Western philosophy, this book is Beha’s exploration of the existential questions that have troubled some of the world’s greatest minds for centuries and an analysis of why atheist thinkers have failed to provide compelling answers to them. As Beha shows, most atheistic philosophers have not been able to stop worrying and enjoy their life, because atheism, when properly understood, does not offer any basis for the glib confidence that Dawkins’s message expressed.
Beha began his life as a churchgoing Catholic. His theological grounding was never very deep, but going to Mass each week was part of his cultural identity, and he embraced it. But when his twin brother was hit by a car, Beha found his faith shaken. His own years-long bout with cancer in his early 20s further eroded whatever faith was left. He found the amount of suffering in the world incompatible with his picture of God.
Instead of dependence on God, Beha wanted courage, and he identified courage with a resolute determination to face death with no religious crutch—to look it in the face without the aid of God. He found inspiration in Bertrand Russell’s assertion in Why I Am Not a Christian that belief in God is a product of fear. Beha refused to admit that he was afraid—which is why he refused to believe in God.
(Indeed, Russell’s book was so influential on Beha’s journey away from God that when he finally returned to a Christian faith, many years later, he titled his own faith memoir Why I Am Not an Atheist as a parody of Russell’s book title).
As Beha now admits, he was never as fearless as he let on, which is why he could not face his life without the aid of a prodigious amount of mind-altering substances. He drank heavily every night and also indulged in plenty of illegal drugs. He was deeply depressed and suicidal. He distracted himself with partying and solitary writing. But most of all, he devoted himself to reading philosophy.
Beha wanted to find a philosophical answer to three questions: “How am I to live? What do I owe to other people (or even to myself)? What is the meaning of life?”
Even though some of Beha’s questions sounded ethical in nature, he wasn’t interested in what could be learned from a textbook on ethics, because he wasn’t looking for something practical but rather existential. “I was after more than rules of conduct,” he said. “I wanted a meaningful life.” Most people, he realized, did not ask the questions, “What am I doing here?” and “What is the point of all this?” nearly often enough, but he couldn’t let those questions go—and as a result, he kept reading.
Scientific materialists (a category that includes “new atheists” such as Dawkins) were completely uninterested in Beha’s questions, because they consider them meaningless. Scientific materialists believe that material reality is all there is. And if that’s the case, not only is there no transcendent purpose for the universe or for individual people, but there is also no soul in the machine of our bodies. We have no free will, because we are simply a chemical computer. There is no fundamental difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, except that human intelligence is a biological composition of purely immaterial forces, whereas artificial intelligence is an electronic composition shaped by human intelligence. But in the end, we’re all purely material compositions of one type or another.
Beha couldn’t accept this. The impulses he felt—the drive toward free choice, the passions, the literary longings—felt real to him, and he refused to believe in a worldview that claimed that all of these were merely an illusion caused by a trick of the chemical atoms in his brain. He had to find real meaning—and he could never do that through a theory of scientific materialism.
But Beha discovered that scientific materialism was not the only type of atheism on offer. There was an older type of atheism that was the atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger—an atheism that Beha calls “romantic idealism.” Romantic idealists believe that a person’s “subjective will, rather than objective physical matter, as the bedrock feature of reality.” It “treat[s] our subjective experience of reality as the proper grounds of knowledge.” While scientific materialists, following the scientific method, want to transcend our subjectivity through empirical observation, romantic idealists think that we can find truth about ultimate reality only by looking within and following our own subjective longings.
There have been many romantic idealists, both inside and outside of Christianity. The American transcendentalists of the 1840s were romantic idealists, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was a romantic idealist par excellence. (Emerson’s 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance” begins with the statement “Every man is his own star,” and continues with the line, “Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string”). Nearly all Hollywood movies, along with numerous novels, poems, and other works of American art and literature are in some way influenced by romantic idealism and its notion that if we follow our heart, we’ll find the truth. I suspect that the number of Americans today who believe Shakespeare’s line “To thine own self be true” greatly outnumbers those who are full-fledged scientific materialists.
And not all those people are agonizing in quest for ultimate purpose in the same way as Beha. Most secular romantic idealists today would probably take their philosophical guidance from mid-twentieth-century secular French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who encouraged people to find their own subjective meaning simply by daring to make choices, regardless of whether those choices connected to the transcendent.
Beha read Camus—as well as earlier philosophers who influenced Camus, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger—but he also sensed that something was missing in these thinkers. He found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Camus a valuation of freedom. What he also found was despair. Camus’s hero was the “absurd man” who “knows that he cannot answer the question of meaning.” “He has two certainties: his own hunger for the absolute and the utter impossibility of satisfying that hunger in the world.”
Much of Beha’s philosophical search for transcendent meaning parallels the book of Ecclesiastes, and with similar results.
“I had freed myself from the chains, and I had come to recognize the shadows on the wall for what they were—insubstantial appearances,” Beha writes. “But I had also come to understand that there was no way out, apart from death. The idea that one could somehow escape to some higher reality was just another shadow dream. I vacillated between a romantic pessimism that wallowed in these facts and a romantic affirmation that attempted to will meaning in the face of them.” If there is no God, there can be no ultimate meaning or purpose.
Then, after reaching this realization, Beha found love. It started by falling in love with a woman, which suddenly made him happy in a way that he had not been for years. “Somehow, I was giving in to the temptation to exist,” he said. He suddenly wanted to get married and have children. A week before the wedding, he even quit drinking.
Yet rather than distract him from his quest for ultimate meaning, this sudden happiness raised new questions. “My life was filled with love, but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it?” Where did this love come from? He felt grateful for his new life, but he “had no framework for this gratitude”—no one to be grateful to.
In his search for something larger, he finally went back to church. He enjoyed it, but belief was not instantaneous. For a while, he simply sat through the services each Sunday, taking in the liturgy yet not allowing it to change his life.
Yet one Sunday, after attending church for a few months, he heard a reading from 1 John: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”
As Beha heard the rest of the passage, he was struck by the phrase “God is love.” God abides in us through love, Beha realized. In all of his years of seeking freedom, he had been running away from God, because he had resisted love. Now that he found love, he was ready to find God. He accepted God’s love, which he found “spoke to my deepest needs.”
Suddenly, Beha had a transcendent purpose, because he now knew that “the purpose of our existence is to know and love the created order and through doing so to know and love God. Love is the cause of the world. . . We are here to love.” This, he realized, is what the Catholic catechism had taught all along: “If man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence.”
As Beha says, he is still a romantic idealist, but now he is a Christian romantic idealist—someone who takes more inspiration from Søren Kierkegaard than Albert Camus. He found God not by meditating on the external evidence of the natural world but by listening to the voice within. And for that reason, he ends his book by saying, “If you have been expecting me to conclude with a rational proof for faith, I have to disappoint you, because I don’t think that such a proof exists. But I do believe it is possible to make a rational case for listening to the whispering voice within our souls.”
Because Beha has little regard for empiricism, he is not particularly interested in discussions of evidence for Jesus’s divinity from the historical record, as recorded in scripture—the sort of thing that C. S. Lewis argued for in Mere Christianity and that numerous other books of Christian apologetics, including Timothy Keller’s Reason for God, also emphasize. Instead, he emphasizes his own experience, not as a form of mere pragmatism, but as a form of real knowledge, arrived at subjectively.
“All I can say is that I tried it [that is, living without God], and it didn’t work for me,” Beha says. Christianity, he adds, quoting Wittgenstein, “‘is only for the man who needs infinite help.’ Over many years I have come to discover that I am that man.”
Christians will recognize in Beha’s story a narrative of true Christian conversion: the realization of the need for grace and the trust in Jesus as savior. The fact that God has saved Beha is more important from a Christian standpoint than the epistemological path that he took to get there.
But since Beha’s book is largely about epistemology, I must at this point raise a critical question about his epistemological assumptions. Beha began and ended his quest as a romantic idealist—that is, as someone who thinks that the best source of truth came from looking within, in contrast to scientific materialists, who look to the objective world as a source of truth. And in keeping with his romantic idealism, Beha insists at the end that he cannot offer a rational proof for the Christian faith but can only appeal to his subjective experience.
This subjective epistemology of experience has pervaded mainline Protestantism for more than a century. There are also plenty of contemporary evangelical Christians who share a similar epistemology. There are even Bible verses that may, on the surface, seem to support it. “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority,” Jesus said in John 7:17 (ESV)—a statement that appears to support the idea of an intuitive perception of divine truth among those who want to follow Jesus.
Traditional Christian epistemology is thus compatible in some ways with romantic idealism, but not fully compatible with it. The idea that we cannot find a basis for knowledge of God in the rationality of the material universe is based not on traditional Christian theology but instead on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who drew a sharp divide between the realm of reason and the realm of faith.
Beha assumes this division is axiomatic, and he has little regard for the proofs of classical theism or the empirically based arguments of Christian apologists who try to make a case for Christianity from historical or scientific evidence. But until the nineteenth century, nearly all orthodox Christians in the western world believed, in accordance with Romans 1:20, that one could find sufficient evidence for God’s existence by observing the natural world, even if such evidence was not enough for salvation.
Even the Westminster Confession of Faith, representing a Reformed tradition that has often been skeptical about unaided human reason, includes the line, “The light of nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all; is good, and doeth good unto all” (WCF, 21.1). The current Catechism of the Catholic Church, reflecting Catholicism’s Thomistic tradition, says something similar: While “God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith,” “the proofs of God’s existence . . . can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 35).
Both the Catholic tradition and the Reformed tradition are grounded in pre-Kantian understandings of epistemology, so they understand the natural world (and natural reason) as a reliable guide to objective truth, since they are the creation of the one true God. In our finitude and in our fallen state, our understanding of that objective truth is flawed, but nevertheless, there are still objective truths of the world that can be perceived and that do point to God, as Romans 1:20 suggests.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church points to two types of “converging and convincing arguments” for knowledge of God’s existence, apart from the divine gift of faith. The second of those is the type of evidence that Beha emphasizes – the subjective sense within us that we long for something more than the material world provides. “With his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence,” the catechism states. “In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul,” which “can have its origin only in God” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 33).
Beha devotes his entire book to the subjective journey that the catechism describes, and in the end, he found that it pointed him to “signs of his spiritual soul,” just as the catechism promised.
But while I can understand why that evidence was sufficient for him, given his temperament and background, I am disappointed that he directly denies the usefulness of the type of the first category of evidences for faith that the catechism affirms: the “physical world.” Echoing Thomas Aquinas and the other scholastics—and citing Romans 1:20, as well as a statement from Augustine—the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 32).
Kant denied this form of evidence, and Beha assumes that Kant had good reason for doing so. So, in the end, Beha remains what he calls a “Christian existentialist”—that is, a Christian who is still committed to romantic idealism, but who believes that God has broken into his subjective experience to give him true knowledge of God within himself.
While one can certainly be a regenerated, theologically orthodox Christian while also being a Christian existentialist or romantic idealist (as Kierkegaard arguably was), I think that we lose something by denying the possibility of arriving at objective, rationally compelling evidence for God from the external world.
We lose an important connection between God and creation. We lose a historic part of the Christian tradition that both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin shared. And we lose the capacity to provide a compelling apologetic to scientific materialists who aren’t moved by the subjective arguments that Beha cites and instead want a more objective argument grounded in the scientific evidence of the universe’s origin and cosmic order.
Fortunately, Christian apologetics gives us both sets of arguments, even if Beha gives us only one. Beha’s book is a very important work for those who gravitate toward romantic idealism, as many contemporary Americans do, at least in part. But for those who are empiricists, tempted perhaps by scientific materialism, there are other works of apologetics that go far beyond Beha in their willingness to consider objective external evidence for God’s existence.
There is room for more than one approach to Christian apologetics, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church suggests. Why I Am Not an Atheist is an impressive example of one of these approaches. It will likely appeal mostly to those who gravitate toward a subjective epistemology compatible with romantic idealism. That’s certainly not the case for every atheist – but for those for whom it is true, Beha’s book may be the text that God uses to show them the futility of trying to find purpose and meaning apart from God.