A little while ago, there was a viral clip simultaneously going around Christian/atheist Twitter of a young atheist named Alex O’Connor, expressing his frustration that no matter how hard he’s looked, he can’t find God. When he reads David’s words in Psalm 139 —“Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”— he says that he is overwhelmed, “not with a sense of beauty and consolation, but envy and disappointment.” This powerful sense of God’s presence that the psalmist experiences is completely foreign to Alex’s own experience, even though Alex has done all the right things. He’s read the Bible and the church fathers, made Christian friends, taken classes from Christian professors, studied philosophical arguments for God’s existence, visited churches, gone to Bible study, even prayed, and after all this, he reports that he feels nothing. He’s had no Damascus road flash of insight, heard no voice from heaven, felt no inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Nothing.
From this, Alex concludes that God doesn’t exist. Because surely, if God did exist, He would have let someone like Alex know by now. God hasn’t done so. Therefore, God doesn’t exist. Q.E.D.
People can watch the bit in context here (which happens to come from a debate Alex had with a friend of mine, Jonathan McLatchie). Alex is presenting himself as Exhibit A of a “non-resistant non-believer,” as part of a more general argument that the existence of non-resistant non-believers disproves the existence of God. He believes it’s already “asking a lot” of an atheist to demand that he seriously engage with a religion he doesn’t believe in. But Alex has gone “above and beyond.” He’s done everything a good atheist could do, and much more. He’s even planning as he speaks to attend yet another Bible study, on the wisdom literature, “reading it again, to see if this time, I might feel a divine presence seeping from in between the lines.” And for all these efforts, Alex has been “rewarded with radio silence.”
A lot of Christians were unimpressed with this monologue and said so, some more savagely than others. A lot of atheists and agnostics were angry in reply, insisting that Alex was sincere and didn’t deserve all the dunking. I added my own mild poke, quoting the bit from Jesus Christ, Superstar where Herod unsuccessfully tries to coax Jesus into putting on a miracle show: “So if you are the Christ/You’re the great Jesus Christ/Prove to me that you’re no fool/Walk across my swimming pool.” Someone got offended and said this was a flippant dismissal of an eloquently heartbroken atheist’s testimony.
People can judge for themselves if Alex seems heartbroken here. He’s certainly intelligent and articulate, and I choose to take him at his word when he says he really does want God to exist, Christianity to be true, etc. Whether he has formed an accurate picture of God and Christianity in his mind is another question.
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