Agnatheist Apologetics

 

If God is no less and no more than love, what about God isn't there to believe in?

This is why I'm an agnatheist: someone who is agnostic about whether or not there is really such a thing as an atheist.  

I have dear friends who describe themselves as atheists, and I mean them no disrespect.  I just question whether their atheism applies to the form of theism to which I subscribe.

Whenever I get into a conversation about matters religious with self-professed atheists, I ask them:  "Which God don't you believe in?"  And always they answer with a description of a God I don't believe in, either.  Some them get upset when I tell them what I mean by the word God, and say that I'm not a Christian!  They don't want to be associated with the supernatural God they associate with Christianity, and don't want their disbelief system to be confounded by the possibility that post-supernatural theists like myself can be Christian.  They don't believe in divine omnipotence any more than I do.  But why wouldn't they embrace amipotence - theologian Tom Oord's term for the divinely attractive, creative power of love?  Hence my agnatheism. 

I think that many atheists are awetheists.  They experience the same kind of reverential wonder and respect for life and the highest human values that we associate with religion at its best.  I use Christian language to describe that deep humility.  I feel God when I mindfully and humbly encounter the miraculous natural world around and within me.  

I experience God as the essential creative nature of the universe.   Some Christians say that this makes me an atheist.   In this, I find company with St. Paul.  In the New Testament, in the book of Acts, there is the story of Paul visiting the Areopagus in Athens, where stood statues of the Greek gods.  One vacant plinth was dedicated to "The Unknown God", which Paul said was the real God.  If the real God was unknown, or at least non-anthropomorphic, did that make Paul an agnostic?  Paul and other early Christians were considered atheists because they did not worship the Greco-Roman gods. 

Given this history of the faith, it only makes sense that progressive Christian churches should be fully open and affirming and inclusive toward self-professed atheists, welcoming them into our communities - whether or not we are certain that atheism is really a thing!
 

 

(See more of my "musings" here...)