Since this site began I’ve written a few posts about Francis Spufford, a Christian writer who can’t stop attacking New Atheists, and in the most insupportable and mean-spirited ways.

Spufford has just issued his recent book (which came out in March in the UK) in the US; it’s called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.  Although I’m burnt out on reading apologetics (Spufford aspires, I think, to be the modern C. S. Lewis), I did read this week-old interview with Spufford on book Tumblr. The interviewer is Luis Rivas from the Spanish Catholic weekly Vida Nueva, so of course the interview is sympathetic. As we’re leaving this morning for parts unknown, I can only reproduce and comment on a bit of the interview.

Here is the Amazon blurb for the U.S. edition issued on October 15:

Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the “new atheist” crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience.

Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford’s crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis.

Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.

I wasn’t aware that many believers felt they were being “patronized” by New Atheists, although of course we’re all aware of the accusations that we take religious belief literally—that we make the mistake of thinking religious people actually believe to be true what they say they believed.  Here are five select questions from the interview and Spufford’s answers (all indented). My own remarks are flush left.

Does faith prevent Christians from being intellectuals?

That music you hear in the distance?  It’s St Augustine, St Teresa, Teilhard de Chardin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Simone Weil all singing together, and what they are singing is that, as Christ commanded, we are supposed to love God with our minds, as well as with our hearts and our souls and our strength.  It is an illusion to think that there is any necessary conflict between a Christian commitment and free, adventurous thinking.  No-one ever does their thinking on a blank sheet of paper. Every intellectual of every kind is in a conversation with some set of ideas, doctrines, ways of seeing the world, and that’s what makes their own thinking serious.  The Christian conversation with Christian ideas, and with every other kind of idea, need not be defensive or imprisoning.  Why is there a stereotype that says you have to choose between faith and thought?  Two reasons, I think.  One, that people think belief means entering a kingdom of fixed answers — when, in my experience, it really means living with more and more questions.  Two, that people imagine religion must shrink as science grows bigger.  But they don’t do the same thing, or occupy the same space.  There is plenty of thinking room for both.  The great contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson says there is nothing like a subscription to Scientific American to fill you with wonder at Creation.

It is an illusion to think that you can reconcile rational thinking with a bunch of myths for which there is no evidence. When you hear the term “conversation with ideas,” you should run (just as you should with the word “nuance”), for what that “conversation” denotes is a contorted process to convince you to accept what your intellect tells you is unacceptable.

And really, if Spufford thinks that most of the faithful don’t think that religion provides “fixed answers,” he’s wrong. Sophisticated he may be, but if religion provides “purpose and meaning” for people, how can it do that without answers?

The history of science tells us that as science expands, religion shrinks, and we have numerous examples of that: evolution, free will, consciousness, the origin of the universe, and so on. And many of the faithful still make statements that there are scientific facts that can be explained only by God. (Example: “the Moral Law”—our “innate sense of right and wrong.” That, says National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, can be explained only by God.)  My new book has a large section of one chapter on (and a refutation of) this “new natural theology.”

. . . Does it make sense to go on being a Christian in the 21st century?

Yes!  And, what is more, the same kind of sense it has always made.  No matter where history takes us, we will still be sinners in need of redemption, prodigal daughters and sons hoping that God is running towards us on the long road, with His arms open wide.

Well, if by “sinners in need of redemption,” Spufford means, “nobody’s perfect,” he’s pretty much right. But somehow I think he means more than that. For there’s no evidence of any God running towards us with open arms. This is the kind of doublespeak believers use to conflate a perfectly aceptable statement into some kind of reason for belief in God.

Isn’t there a paradox here?  Impenitente is directed towards atheists and agnostics…

… and yet it is finding an audience among believers.  I think this is because I decided that the best way to try to explain us to atheists and agnostics was to lay out the emotional phases and qualities of faith, which can be recognised even by people who are very resistant to the ideas.  And so I tried to paint a kind of portrait of the Christian heart, using my own chaotic and imperfect heart, which I know best, as the model.  I meant to make us recognisable to others, but by accident I seem to have given some Christian readers the pleasure of recognising themselves.  Flatteringly, they seem to see their portrait in my portrait, their doubts and dilemmas in my doubts and dilemmas.  It’s an accident, but one I am very pleased by.

This is absolutely predictable. Spufford’s arguments against atheism, like all such arguments, are unconvincing, and his are particularly unconvincing because they’re (or have been) motivated completely by what he finds emotionally congenial. Of course such appeals will find their natural home with believers, not atheists.

Why did atheism disappoint you?

It turned out not to contain what my soul needed for nourishment in bad times.  It was not any kind of philosophical process that led me out from disbelief.  I had made a mess of things in my life, and I needed mercy, and to my astonishment, mercy was there.  An experience of mercy, rather than an idea of it.  And the rest followed from there.  I felt my way back to Christianity, discovering through many surprises that the religion I remembered from my childhood looked different if you came to it as an adult with adult needs: not pretty, not small, not ridiculous, but tough and gigantic and marvellous.

This is quite revealing. Atheism disappointed Spufford for, despite being the only credible intellectual response to a lack of evidence, it didn’t satisfy him emotionally. He had a rough time, and religion brought him the solace he needs. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that there’s a God, or that the tenets of Christianity are true. Some find solace in the bottle or the joint, others in God.  The difference is that alcohol and marijuana actually exist.

. . . How can we reconcile the idea of a good God with the world’s suffering?

I can’t.  Can you?  All of the theological justifications have something valuable in them, but in the end, none of them seem complete.  But luckily we have something beside theological ideas: we have Christ crucified, joining with us in the sufferings of the world.  Like most Christians, I am not comforted by abstract ideas about God, but by Christ’s own presence, in the gospels and in bread and wine.  As I say in the book: we don’t have a justification, but we have a story.  A true story, of God redeeming the world.

I’ve always said that theodicy—the ineffectual religious rationalization of evil, particularly “natural evils” like childhood cancers or natural disasters—constitutes one of the best arguments against the existence of an omnipotent and loving God. This is nothing new, although the faithful continue to confect new explanations about why God would let kids get leukemia, or kill thousands in tsunamis.  Their explanations remain ludicrous and convincing only to those who want to believe. The existence of a crucified Christ who also suffered (and how does Spufford know that that happened?) doesn’t make matters any better.  Does a crucified Christ palliate the sufferings of children with cancer, or the grief of those who have lost friends or relatives in natural disasters?

The words “we don’t have a justification, but we have a story” should be the very motto of all theologians. If they can make something up, they’re satisfied. As for it being the “true” story that Spufford thinks, one involving God redeeming the world, well, how does he know that? Only because his emotions make him think it is true.

It’s no surprise that atheists would find such a book unconvincing, but believers would be drawn to it like flies.