I give thanks to God for the 21% of atheists who, according to the recent study by Pew, affirm their belief in Her or Him, and I am blown away by the holiness of such people who manage to pray once a week. In fact, I think that I aspire to being one of them (though with a bit more regular prayer).
Of course the quick response to such a finding is that American atheists must not be a very bright group if over a fifth of them say that they believe in God. Don’t they know what the word means?! But in truth, they may be way ahead of many of us who count ourselves among the faithful.
The disbelief of these atheists sparkles with a holiness that in Jewish tradition has been the hallmark of none less than the biblical Abraham and the great Moses Maimonides. It was the latter who insisted that no positive statements could be made about God because they would constraint an infinite being to finite language.
According to Maimonides, one could not speak of God as great or merciful or anything else that relied on human experience to understand. One could only affirm the existence of a god who was beyond all measure and comparison – in other words, One who is truly infinite.
Abraham knew that long ago, which is why the Bible’s first monotheist is also its first atheist. It was Abraham who heard God’s plan about destroying Sodom and argued that doing so failed to meet the criteria of good judgment; that if God was the most righteous, He should act more justly! In effect, Abraham was willing to deny God’s godliness if He didn’t measure up to Abraham’s understanding of justice. While that might be a bit arrogant, it strikes me as a very healthy corrective for the same man who was willing to “blindly” alter his life and that of his family just because God called him to do so.
It seems to me that Abraham’s holy atheism is the needed balance to a life of passionate faith in which one give’s themselves over to that which they most believe. In fact, the more we believe in something, the more ready we need to be to question it and even to walk away from it. Abraham lived that lesson and so I think, do those twenty-one percent.
For more really fascinating responses to the question of what it means to be a self-defined atheist who believes in God, check out responses at the Newsweek & Washington Post site, On Faith.