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Do You Feel Like an Atheist?

February 4, 2025

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Emma Camp said, “I only believe in God about 30 percent of the time on a good day.” The historian Tom Holland put the point this way, “Sometimes I can feel—I can believe—that the Spirit is real. I can believe that the story of the Passion and the Resurrection is so strange that it is not a cultural accident, that it is expressive of something that is true. And there are other times when I think, ‘No, it is all complete nonsense.’”

I know how they feel. In fact, I sometimes feel that it is obvious that there is no God. In this, I am not alone. In his classic work Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis reflected a similar insight, “Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.” Do my shifting moods mean I go from being a believer to being an atheist and back again, sometimes more than once in the course of a single day? 

Not in the least. Faith and feeling are simply not the same thing. As Lewis noted, “Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience.” The great philosopher Alexander Pruss put the point this way:

Sometimes, Christians worry whether they might not have lost their faith. . . . Faith being a gift of grace, it is not possible to lose faith without losing sanctifying grace. It is not possible, however, to lose sanctifying grace but by committing a (formal) mortal sin. Therefore, faith can only be lost through committing a mortal sin. But in a serious Christian, mortal sin is very unlikely to be something done casually—it is a free and conscious rejection of God’s love, after all. Faith is not, then, something one can “just lose.” It is something one can reject, but only by a mortal sin. 

Faith is a theological virtue which is received in baptism. If you have been baptized, you have received the gift of faith. This gift is not revoked in the least by the shifting moods of the moment. 

Faith and feeling are simply not the same thing.

So, faith is a bit like marriage. After your wedding, you are married, regardless of how you may feel at any given time about your spouse or about being married. Moods don’t change the reality of marriage. Likewise, when you are baptized, you receive the gift of faith and become an adopted child of God. This gift of adoption remains regardless of how you may feel at any given time about God or your relationship with him. 

If your feelings waver like mine, fear not. The moods you have at any particular moment are influenced by manifold factors totally out of your control: how you slept last night, whether dinner disturbed your digestion, whether the sun is shining or the rain is falling. Faith does not depend on any of these passing things. 

Faith can also be compared to physical life. We did not give ourselves our own lives. We received life from our parents and from God. Now that we are alive, we can take care to nurture the life we have been given and protect it from harm, regardless of our current feelings. We need to feed our bodies to survive and flourish; so, too, we need to feed our faith for it to survive and flourish.

When in the flux of feeling atheistic, we can follow the example of C.S. Lewis who wrote, 

Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

And how do we train this habit of faith? Lewis continues, 

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. 

As a marital relationship needs good communication to flourish, faith in God needs prayer and study to flourish. 

So, we need not let shifting feelings trouble our faith. As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus—another convert—said, “If you would believe, act as though you believe, leaving it to God to know whether you believe, for such leaving it to God is faith.”