St. Anselm’s famously convoluted “ontological” argument for the existence of God opens by invoking Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no god.’” This is not exactly a constructive opening to engage skeptics. Castigating the atheist as a “fool” is a conversation stopper.
O. K. Bouwsma, an American analytic philosopher you’ve probably never heard of, has a fascinating take on Psalm 14 (and Anselm). What if the one who says, “There is no god” is not shouting it in defiance but is whispering it “in his heart” as a despairing conclusion? What if this is less a refusal of faith than a loss of faith? What if the unbelief is born not of hubris but of wounds? Bouwsma has sympathy for this “fool”: “He is desolate, tender with memories, but without hope. God, too, is only a memory.”
Christopher Beha, the author of Why I Am Not an Atheist, is no fool. Nor does he treat the skeptic or unbeliever as a fool. But he knows of the loss of which Bouwsma speaks. Why I Am Not an Atheist is a memoir of his journey from cradle Catholic through painful departure, followed by intellectual wandering and wondering while trying on varieties of atheism, only to find—much to his own surprise—his way back to faith and the church. His foil is the famous British analytic philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell, whose book Why I Am Not a Christian was published 100 years ago.
Beha is an accomplished novelist. His most recent novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts—an ambitious, intricate story of colliding destinies and divergent aspirations—was longlisted for the National Book Award. His earlier novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is a sensitive exploration of our modern experiences of malaise and meaninglessness, faith and doubt. With this new work Beha returns to nonfiction, very much in the shape of his debut book. In The Whole Five Feet (2009), Beha recounted a harrowing year in which he attended to his dying aunt while also reading the entire shelf of the Harvard Classics—Charles Eliot’s anthology of literature, history, philosophy and science from Plato to Darwin.
Why I Am Not an Atheist is also something of a bibliomemoir. But here Beha recounts decades of seeking through reading, trying to find the shape of a meaningful, sustainable worldview sans Dieu. Readers of Augustine’s Confessions will find a familiar mix: a young prodigal’s adventures entwined with an array of philosophical toe-dipping and the donning of various intellectual personas—all ways of trying to find himself.
A prelude provides the personal exitus: experiences of suffering and illness and disappointment that withered Beha’s faith. The postlude provides the (expected) reditus: Inching his way into sacred spaces while finding new light in love, Beha finds his way back to the church. Faith has the shape of a new plausibility in his life. Meeting with a priest to talk about his intellectual struggles, Beha recalls: “He made no attempt to clear up my uncertainty, but when I’d finished talking, he offered to take my confession.” This moving episode (“By the time he offered my absolution, I was in tears”) exhibits Beha’s new realization: Faith does not require certainty. One could receive the gifts of the Eucharist as a “skeptical believer.” This is faith characterized by what Paul Ricoeur calls a “second naïveté,” a recognition of the importance of sincere beliefs but also a faith informed by critical analysis and consideration.
The heart of the book is 21 chapters between these autobiographical bookends. The reader will find another “five feet” of philosophers and scientists who were Beha’s companions after relinquishing faith as he was trying to figure out “what to believe instead.” In these chapters, Beha’s gifts as a novelist are deployed to provide clear, lively encapsulations of philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein, including perspicacious engagements with figures like Spinoza and Schopenhauer. If you weren’t paying attention in college, this book is a liberal arts education pressed between two covers. Even as he is recounting thinkers whose ideas he ultimately rejected, Beha’s expositions are generous and irenic. He has learned something from all of them.
Beha sees two versions of atheism as live options for trying to carve out a meaningful life in a world without God: either scientific materialism or Romantic idealism. Scientific materialism culminates in the so-called new atheists, but Beha tracks the intellectual roots of this in modernity. This is the path from Bacon to Bertrand Russell. If a young Beha was once tempted by this coldhearted option, the temptation wore off. Too melancholy and artistic for scientific materialism, he found the real intellectual tug was exerted by what he defines (somewhat curiously, I’d say) as Romantic idealism—the existential endeavor of forging meaning if we assume we are the only ones in the cosmos and this life is all we’ve got. Think: Camus as secular saint.
As one might expect, Beha finds both options wanting. But their inadequacy was unveiled not by despair or suffering. What these atheistic worldviews couldn’t explain for Beha was the arrival of joy. Instead of the problem of evil, Beha faced the problem of happiness: “I had no framework for this gratitude.” The arrival of love felt like a gift. He began looking for a Giver to whom he could return thanks. “I thought that once I’d faced down death without God, I could never possibly have need of him again. It turned out the thing I couldn’t face without God was love.”
There is much about Beha’s journey that is moving, and his philosophical expositions are illuminated by a liquid prose. (If you’ve ever tried to read Immanuel Kant, you’ll appreciate the magic Beha pulls off in making him comprehensible.) But there is a turn—a rhetorical move—at the end of the book I found maddening.
Beha keeps saying he wants to answer the question How to live? But much of the book feels like he’s focused on the question How can we know? That is a different question, I think, or at least a particularly narrow take on the first question. It is a question haunted by what Richard Bernstein once called Cartesian anxiety: the worry about whether the little theater of consciousness in our minds is really projecting true representations of reality. (Richard Rorty pined for the day when we would stop trying to sucker freshmen into worrying about the artificial problems of “the external world” and “other minds.”) In the end, Beha seems to think that the meaning of love needs the scaffolding of metaphysics, and that the antidote to Romantic idealism is a correspondence theory of truth that guarantees the ideas in my head represent the world outside it. I have my doubts about this. (I don’t think Beha has adequately absorbed Wittgenstein’s insights, but I won’t play the pedantic professional philosopher here.)
Instead, I would say that this sort of Cartesian anxiety explains why Beha’s project all feels just a tad bourgeois—a latent sort of therapeutic individualism reflective of the liberal status quo. I do not mean to dismiss the anxieties or the personal intellectual wrangling. They are real and many of us experience them. My question is more a matter of relevance and urgency. Is this the argument we need to address challenges to Christian faith today?
This explains my perplexity, even anger, when Beha, near the end of the book, tries to pin Christian nationalism and what he calls modern-day illiberalism on the legacy of Romantic idealism. His strange—and I think mistaken—claim is that “the rise of illiberalism has gone hand in hand with a decline of theistic belief and religious practice.” (A reminder from Logic 101: Correlation is not causation.) Donald Trump, “the avatar of right-wing illiberalism,” is somehow the manifestation of Romantic idealism—“our first Nietzschean president.” And what about all of his support from Christians? Beha dismisses it as merely a form of identity politics. Those Trump supporters who “claim to be Christian tend to do so as an expression of a particularist identity rather than metaphysical belief.”
This, to put it mildly, is an all-too-convenient parsing of current realities. Metaphysics won’t save us from the specter of religious hatred and aspiring tyrants. One could argue that JD Vance shares Beha’s faith and metaphysics. He is no doubt committed to a correspondence theory of truth to boot. When Vance and Pete Hegseth invoke God, they are pulling the levers to power, not donning some pious mask. When you take them seriously, Beha’s attempt to play the cool-headed liberal feels like willful blindness.
What most makes God un-believable today? I don’t think we are haunted by the ghost of Descartes’s evil genius. Faith is undermined by what people who claim to believe in God do in God’s name. I am reminded of Bouwsma again. Commenting on the fool’s despairing conclusion, “There is no god,” Bouwsma cautioned: This “must not be taken as a reaction to God. It is a reaction to men who do believe.”
What will speak most powerfully of the love that is God today? I don’t think it will be philosophical justifications of metaphysical truth. It will be those martyrs who defy tyrants. While Beha pens his Summa Contra Gentiles, we await another St. Oscar Romero.
This article appears in May 2026.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts