Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As I looked across all these different flavours of atheism, I think I intuited something that Christopher Beha makes explicit in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha argues that it is a fallacy to define atheism as simply an absence of belief.

Atheists sometimes like to portray themselves that way. They like to tell what philosopher Charles Taylor calls subtraction stories: Over the last thousands of years religious people built up all this mumbo-jumbo about the supposed supernatural world. The job for any reasonable person is to strip all that away and get down to reality itself—the stuff we can see, feel, and measure. In this telling, atheists don’t subscribe to a creed or a faith; they are just taking a neutral, objective look at empirical reality and following the evidence.

Beha counters that this is nonsense. In fact, atheists have a worldview just like anybody else. A worldview is a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, where we should go for wisdom.

Beha is not just idly speculating about this. After he lost his childhood Catholic faith, he spent decades of his life as an atheist—sometimes depressed, spiritually lost—desperately reading through as much of the atheist literature as he could find in order to answer the fundamental questions about life: How am I to live? What do I owe to others? What is the meaning of life?

He concluded over the course of his quest that atheistic worldviews can be grouped into two large families. The biggest family is materialism, the belief that the material world is all there is and that we come to know this world through the power of evidence and reason. The philosophic heavyweights of materialism would include people like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and Charles Darwin.

Materialism usually comes with certain articles of faith built in. The first is scientism, the belief that the scientific method can be used to solve every human problem. All of reality can be quantified and objectified. We can use quantification to measure people, rank people, understand behaviour like who marries whom and how to build a good social order.

The second article of faith is utilitarianism. Materialists naturally seek to build an objective science of morality. They do this by identifying evil as anything that produces measurable pain and good as anything that produces measurable pleasure. Using this data, you can calculate what will produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

The third article of faith concerns motivation. Materialists have long had trouble talking about the forces that drive people, because you can’t see and measure and touch these things. But then along came evolutionary psychology and with it the theory that humans exist to pass down their genes. A man doesn’t love his wife because of some mystical adoration; he loves her because he reads her waist-hip ratio as a sign of fertility that sets off fireworks in the primitive regions of his brain.

The materialist worldview comes with other personality traits. Materialists tend to assume that altruism and lofty ideals are mostly sentimental myths. The great atheist philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote that the concept of natural inalienable rights was “nonsense on stilts.” The materialists tend to believe that everyday pleasures are all we can hope for in this life—good food, sex, conviviality. They also tend to believe that humanity progresses as we assume control over nature and diseases and so, in an ideal world, life would be perfectly controllable.

I confess, I always found the materialist worldview kind of ludicrous, even during my godless heathen days. Most of the New Atheists were insufferably arrogant. I always wanted to ask them: Are you really so certain of your intellectual superiority to Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and Dostoevsky that you can dismiss their lifetime commitments to God as mere superstition? I also found them insufficiently humble about all the parts of reality their creed cannot explain. How does this ineffable thing called consciousness emerge from the material meat of the brain? What happened before the big bang? Where does free will come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? Quantum mechanics teaches us that electrons leap from one spot to another without travelling through the space in between. What’s up with that?

More broadly, materialism doesn’t explain the lushness of life, the way the human experience really is. I accept that living creatures seek to pass down their genes, but if that’s all there is, how am I to explain the human tendency to create works of towering beauty like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Chartres cathedral, or The Brothers Karamazov? As my friend Catherine Cox once observed, when her first daughter was born she found she “loved her more than evolution required.” Much of human life is more than evolution requires.

Daily life is lush with subjective experiences—all those emotions, passions, aspirations, intuitions, and longings. But materialism, so fixated on objective material reality, does not offer a good account of subjective experience.

Life is lush with moral yearnings. Most people do not only enjoy sensual pleasures; they need to have a sense that their life has meaning and purpose. They struggle and even endure suffering on behalf of moral ideals—the noble, true, beautiful, and good. As Viktor Frankl reported, when all is stripped away and people are put in a concentration camp, one thing that doesn’t go away, and actually comes to the fore, is their spiritual natures. Materialists have never even successfully constructed the objective moral system that can guide you through life. Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyev once sarcastically summarized the materialist morality this way: “Man is descended from the apes, therefore we must love one another.”

Life is also lush with human dignity, the sense that most of us have that there is some creative spark in each person that gives them infinite value. We are not equal in our brainpower or in our muscle power, but each human life is equal because each person contains this noble spark. Materialism, which cannot account for this spark, also cannot fully explain why slavery is an abomination and not merely an inefficiency.

Even day-to-day perception is lush. Materialists think they can use their senses to derive objective knowledge of the world, but sense perception is what neuroscientist Anil Seth calls a “controlled hallucination.” The brain uses the incomplete data that the senses gather to imagine and construct a model of the world. The mind tests that model through a process of prediction and correction. There’s no such thing as purely objective perception. It’s subjective experience all the way down.

The materialist form of atheism never appealed to me, and it seems to have had little appeal for Beha, but fortunately there is another family of atheism that is much more humane. Beha calls it Romantic idealism. The big-time philosophers in this school (not all of whom were atheists), who would include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Arthur Schopenhauer, were influential in the development of the idea that while there is no God to give us meaning, humans can create their own meaning. The Romantics argued that the materialists had alienated humans from their true essence by their overemphasis on reason; and that the way to truth, beauty, and goodness is precisely through the subjective experiences that the materialists flee from: imagination, creativity, intuition, and passion. We can live in the higher realms of the spirit by consuming literature, music, art, and culture more broadly. If the materialists are the party of the head, the Romantics are the party of the heart.

The Romantic atheists have their own articles of faith too. The first is that each of us possesses an inner light. There’s no bearded God on Mount Sinai out there, but there is an inner god deep within each of us. Our mission is to make authentic contact with the god within, to self-actualize, to self-express, to self-examine, to be true to our inner angel. As Baruch Spinoza put it, moral truth is “written by nature with ineffaceable characters in the depth of my heart.”

The Romantics put creativity at the centre of spiritual life. Those who create artistic works of beauty and grandeur—like Beethoven, Wagner, and Shakespeare—are the secular saints who unveil and enliven our spiritual essence. Romantics value maximum individual freedom. Humans should not conform to the shallow habits of civilization but instead break free from convention and feel what their inner light really feels, and express what their imagination really creates. Each individual is a law unto themselves.

The Romantic tradition does a much better job of making contact with the richness of life. When he was going through his dark night of the soul, Beha gravitated toward the Romantics. (He’s also a fine novelist, whose The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is one of my favourite recent novels.) Unfortunately, he gravitated toward the German branch of Romanticism. If I had known him, I would have screamed at him: “If you’re depressed and already thinking a lot about suicide, do not read German philosophy!”

The British Romantics are more congenial: Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Ruskin, and I guess Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill. Matthew Arnold, for example, was a Victorian poet and thinker who serves as sort of bridge between the Romantics like Wordsworth and more modern, intellectualist thinkers. He wrote in his famous poem “Dover Beach” about the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of religion, as it faded from public life, and believed that at least culture could impose order on the affections the way religion can.

When I was in college at the University of Chicago, I experienced the best version of this tradition. There wasn’t much religious faith there, but we were told that if we read Plato, Thucydides, Dante, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Twain, we would acquire the keys to the magic kingdom that would tell us how to live. My professors were moralists, not nihilists; they placed us in the great human conversation that constitutes the eternal search for meaning, from generation to generation.

I understood even at the time that there are some flaws in the Romantic worldview. Beha, who is more intellectually rigorous than I am, makes them explicit. The first is narcissism. If you believe that each individual is in charge of coming up with their own meaning, and if the ultimate moral authority is yourself, then, given the realities of human psychology, that is going to produce a lot of self-centredness, self-worship, self-obsession. The second problem is formlessness. The Romantics reject the coldness of rationalism but then make the opposite error of worshipping pure subjectivity, pure feeling. Romantics, in my experience, are perpetually having these exciting spiritual epiphanies, say, before a sunset, but when you ask them what the epiphany revealed, they can never tell you because it was just a passing feeling.

Beha calls Romantic idealism “a way without a way.” There are no evaluative criteria to discern truth from falsehood, right from wrong. When you put people in this formlessness they are going to grade themselves on a forgiving curve; they’re going to think and do whatever seems easiest. Rabbi David Wolpe once had a telling indictment of this whole “spiritual but not religious” approach to life: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”

The third problem with Romantic idealism is that it shreds the moral order. All morality is privatized. It’s up to each individual to find their own truth, their own right and wrong. As Beha testifies from personal experience, “Constructing your own worldview is incredibly isolating.” You wind up with a society in which there is no shared moral order, no ability to trust each other, because we don’t agree on what each person ought to do.

Romantic idealism begins with the kind of great moment of liberation expressed in a song in the movie Frozen:

But it ends with a lot of loneliness, distrust, alienation, sadness, and meanness. It ends with: I have responsibilities to myself, and no one else. Even during the high moments when I was worshipping culture and all those great books, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the genius secular saints the Romantics admired were actually selfish jerks: Picasso, Gauguin, Tolstoy. This is a bit unfair, but I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of the philosophers I was supposed to be consulting to teach me how to live had one thing in common: No woman would go near them. A lot of them were bachelors who lived mostly in the solitude of their own head: Hume, Kant, Bentham, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Many of them were blind to the systems of care that make up the fabric of society.

So far I’ve been describing the parallel journeys Beha and I took through the landscape of non-belief. But I should emphasize that temperamentally we are quite different. There’s a sentence deep in the book that struck me with the force of a thunderclap: “The fact that I would die—that all my hopes and dreams and efforts would ultimately come to nothing but dust, along with everyone I ever loved—was my first thought upon waking up each morning and my last before going to bed.” Wow. That’s intense. I confess when those sorts of thoughts begin to creep into my own head, I just turn on ESPN and they go away.

Beha was raised in a Catholic family in New York City and went to Catholic schools. When he was fifteen, he began to experience visitations by angels: “An angel of God came to me at night, pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I put my trust in the Lord. This was no dream. I was awake—I am as certain of that as I’m certain that I’m awake as I write these words—and a terrifying presence was communicating with me.”

Beha lost his faith during college and beyond. His brother was nearly killed in a car accident. He himself nearly died of cancer. Death ripped through his family during these years. He suffered from depression, drinking too much, taking drugs. These experiences didn’t push him toward God but pushed him away. “I spent much time during my twenties and early thirties contemplating suicide,” he writes. “I was never at serious risk of committing the act, but it was a matter of abiding fascination.”

And so began his journey through all the books I’ve described above. He didn’t need them to further dismantle his belief in God; he needed them to tell him what to believe instead. He knew that his life lacked meaning, but as he writes, he figured he could outsmart the problem if he just read enough books. Just as Catholicism had once been central to his identity, “atheism represented not just a rejection of that tradition but the embrace of a new me.”

As he began to appreciate the flaws in the atheist worldviews, he suffered a crisis of faith in atheism. But there is a big difference between losing faith in atheism and discovering faith in God. He seems to have experienced the pause between those two states that many have experienced. Kierkegaard famously likened it to being suspended above water and doing the motions of swimming without actually being in the water and swimming. In some ways the hero of this book is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was no Christian, but he understood that “if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” He understood that there is an unutterable mystery at the centre of life we should be humble before: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof we cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

As people read about Beha’s anguished journey through atheism, many will want to scream at him: Put down the damn books! Go work in a soup kitchen! What happened instead was that he met a woman. During their first dates he tried to impress her and bombed. Then he just tried to make her laugh, and that worked like a charm. “I realized that I was still capable of being happy, that I was capable of making someone else happy. And making A—— happy seemed like the best possible way I could be spending my time.” They were engaged within six months. He stopped drinking. His life was filled with love. He writes, “The light and warmth of the sun were baffling.” He told almost no one, but he started attending Mass once again. “I would not have said that I’d returned to the fold. In fact, I still considered myself an atheist. I didn’t take Communion, and I didn’t say the creed when the time came to declare our faith. Mostly I just listened.”

Gradually, gradually, Beha was broken open by love.

When you look back at the earlier parts of Beha’s book you see that he was researching life. In this mode the researcher is the master—the explorer, the evaluator, the decider. But love puts you in a different posture. Something greater than yourself has taken control of your life. When that happens you realize that life is not solved by exercising mastery, but by vulnerability, by a willingness to go where love takes us. It is a response, an obedience, an interaction. It is opening your eyes and looking into someone else’s eyes and feeling the resonance, the harmonious dance of emotions between you. As Hartmut Rosa writes in his book The Uncontrollability of the World, “Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from outside.” Resonance has the capacity to transform. Love, after it has erupted, is so obviously a force that is deeper than reason, a force that scientific rationality is inapplicable to. To borrow one of Oliver Sacks’s phrases, before love many of our lives felt “unmusicked.” Now, captured by love, our whole lives are “musicked.”

Once that happens, the capacity to love has a tendency to expand. We English speakers ask too much of that little word “love.” We use it to describe our love of pizza, of our kids, of our country, of God. Those seem like very different things. But if there is any wisdom in our usage it is that once romantic love enters your life, it makes you more vulnerable to the other forms of love. A person in love feels a “fullness,” which Taylor describes as a perception of life that is greater than can be captured with naturalistic explanations. Such a person senses that the world is fundamentally good, just as the Old Testament tells us it is. That life is not meaningless, that people are worthy of infinite respect and reverence.

To believe in love, Beha writes, means abandoning strict materialism. It also means abandoning Romantic idealism, the idea that our experience of the world is a product solely of our own creation, that meaning is created when we project our self onto the world. It’s a brief step from that acknowledgement to the God of love described in John’s First Epistle: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” Beha came to realize that you don’t study God; you abide in God.

So Beha, like me and so many others, took the leap of faith, and landed in the world of religion. Now, religions are a pain. Most believers I know are exasperated by some of the people and practices contained within their religion. But there’s something nice you discover after you’ve made the leap of faith. The religious worldviews have a lot to offer that the materialist or the Romantic worldview can’t explain. The first is a fuller account of human nature. I confess I often experience God’s absence, but in those moments, I can look around and see his presence in the way humans are made.

If materialists are the party of the head and the Romantics are the party of the heart, the religious worldview celebrates both those parts of our nature but also acknowledges the yearnings of the soul. There is some central piece of each of us that gives us infinite value and dignity, that justifies wonder and respect. Obscenity, Roger Scruton observed, is anything that covers over a human soul.

The soul yearns. It yearns for goodness. If God is dead then everything is permitted, but even atheists don’t mostly behave that way. Atheists are pretty much as moral as believers because, even if they don’t believe in it, they possess a soul that drives them to perform the acts of voluntary unselfish behaviour society is built on. People don’t only want to be happy; they want to be worthy of happiness. True depravity exists, but for most humans it’s surprisingly hard to sustain. Because of the soul’s yearning for goodness, most of us would find a meaningless life intolerable, filled with despair, and so we hunger for virtue.

The soul also yearns for transcendence. We are not truly happy when we devote our lives to intermediate goods like money and physical beauty; but only the infinite goods. “Man is driven toward faith by his awareness of the infinite to which he belongs,” Paul Tillich writes. The soul yearns not just for goodness but for holiness. The great British art critic Sir Kenneth Clark had no faith, but he, like most of us, still had the capacity to experience the numinous. It happened to him one day in an Italian church: “I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before.” Religion isn’t made of these moments, Christian Wiman argues: “Religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.”

Humans are structured in such a way that it is hard for us to feel content unless our mess of desires is drawn by something outside ourselves, some supreme love that harmonizes them. Humans were built in such a way that it is hard for us to find peace through self-analysis, as the rationalists might suppose, or self-creation, as the Romantics argue, but only through the self-emptying love that flows from a sanctified soul.

The second advantage of the religious worldview is that it provides a structure for that yearning; it provides a way. Many secular worldviews are neutral about ends. It’s up to each person to define the goal of their life. (This is not true of Marxism, which is a religion without God.) Many secular worldviews have failed to come up with compelling systems of morality precisely because without a concept of what life is for it is hard to come up with justifications that separate right from wrong.

Religious worldviews, by contrast, are not neutral about ends. Religions tell stories that capture the direction of our lives—and our common lives—together. The exodus story toward the coming of the Messiah. The Jesus story toward his second coming. Religions have very concrete ideas about how to answer the questions Beha was obsessed with during his travails: How am I to live? What do I owe to others? What is the meaning of life? These answers are often expressed not in arguments but in lives: Moses, Abraham, Mary, and Jesus. Religions express values that are frequently unexpected and startling. In an age of primogeniture, why was God always working through second sons: Abel, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph? When God comes down in all his glory, why is he born in a manger? As the old Puritan prayer puts it: “To be low is to be high, that the broken heart is the healed heart, that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit, that the repenting soul is the victorious soul.” Religions provide communities with precisely the sort of shared moral order communities need if we are to live harmoniously together and trust one another.

The third advantage of the religious worldviews is that they capture the full amplitude of human good and human evil. The materialist mindset leads people to see human nature the way classical economists do: We’re rational creatures calculating ways to maximize our utility. In the Romantic worldview, worshipping the angel within often takes a naive view of that nature. If people behave badly, it’s often because society represses our urges.

During the civil rights movement, many secular, Northern, educated liberals believed that segregationists could be educated out of their racism with the right sort of consciousness raising. The religious folks who actually ran the movement in the South, emerging from the prophetic tradition, had a much more realistic view of human savagery and sin, and also a more realistic view of the power of aggressive love to confront that savagery.

The fourth advantage is that religious worldviews offer a more comprehensive account of ways of knowing. To borrow from Jane Austen, materialists offer sense, and Romantics offer sensibility, but knowing in the Bible is a whole-person experience. To know is to study, but it is also to love, to bind oneself in covenant, to give oneself over bodily. Religious epistemology is the work of the whole human package—head, heart, soul, imagination, aspiration, intuition, and desire. Faith is both a commitment to a creed and a movement of the heart. This worldview serves as a corrective to the sins of over-intellectualism that people like Beha and I and maybe you are prone to. As the anonymous English monk or priest who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing puts it, “God can be loved but he cannot be thought.” Life is not ultimately a problem you can outsmart.

I hope I’ve communicated the arduousness with which Beha undertook his faith journey. His book is mostly a rebuttal of atheism, not a description of faith. For those who like to read about these philosophers it is an intellectual joyride, but it is a ride that leads out of pure intellect and into a wider world.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “Man is a useless passion.” His fellow existentialist Albert Camus argued that the absurdity of the human condition is contained in the fact that man longs for meaning in an utterly meaningless world. For many people those sentiments just feel true. But for many of the rest of us they just don’t accord with reality as we experience it. So we go off on these educational journeys in search of ultimate meanings. And the key moments during those educational journeys don’t consist of sitting around with a bunch of big books and assessing the relative merits of worldviews; they consist of unclogging the arteries so that the love between God and us, and between us and each other, can more forcefully flow.