LETTERS TO A FRIEND: Humbug

Dear Friend,

 

          Years ago while on vacation, my 5 year old daughter, Elizabeth, came down with a dangerously high fever.  We took her to the nearest emergency room.  The physician on duty, after examining her, said, "Your daughter's fever is idiopathic.  She needs a full spectrum treatment."

 

          I said to him, “You mean you don’t know what’s causing her fever.” Surprised, he said, “Well, we’re not sure, and we think it’s better to try several approaches.”  After seven years of Greek in college and graduate school, I knew that "idiopathic" meant "one's own suffering."  He was saying that her fever was unique and thus couldn’t be diagnosed.  He didn't know what was causing her high fever.  "Full spectrum" meant that he would throw everything at her, hoping that something might stick.  Happily, it did.

 

          The physician's language was humbug.  Max Black, late professor of philosophy at Cornell University, in his book The Prevalence of Humbug wrote that humbug is a "deliberate misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed" (Cornell University Press, 1983).  Not wanting to admit his ignorance, the physician used a word which was a "deliberate misrepresentation, short of lying."  Isaac Asimov called the word "a high-flown term to conceal ignorance."

 

Theologians and ecclesiastics use a lovely word to conceal their ignorance.  Sometimes, they act as though they’re saying something when they’re not.  The word “mystery” means "an unknown later to be revealed."  Words such as eternal, immutable, immortal, and unchangeable are, as Alfred North Whitehead said, “compliments hurled at God.”  They convey no knowledge other than that we don’t know anything about God.  Theological language about God is humbug, but then again theology is not about God but about human beings.  If I say God is my father, I mean to say I am a child of God which is to say that theology is really anthropology.

 

Also, “syndrome” which is used by psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and physicians means no more than a collection of symptoms, not what in the hell is really going on.  Often, they use the phrase “black box” as if to say that they know the stimulus and the response,  but they don’t know why the person chose the response.  Whenever people deliberately use obscure language, chances are, as with ancient priests, they’re concealing their ignorance. 

 

          There are a lot of mysteries, idiopathies, and syndromes in life.  As Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Laureate in physics who was known for his work in quantum mechanics and the development of the principle of indeterminacy wrote: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

 

          I write all of this in response to your questions about faith and knowledge, especially the religious groups who claim to know the truth.  Faith is not knowledge.  For one thing faith cannot be proven or disproved.  Claims to know the absolute truth are, on the face of it, humbug.

 

          Corollaries to faith are presuppositions and assumptions.  We can’t prove them, but we use them to make sense out of our experiences.  For instance, it makes more sense to understand our experiences in the context of a universe, but we can’t prove it.  We cannot claim as a truth that the laws of physics are the same throughout the world because no one has ever run such an experiment.  We assume it.  Also, it makes more sense to believe that this complex universe did not appear by accident, as though it were happenstance, but again such a belief cannot be proven.  We presuppose it.  The most complex organizing principle we know is the person, so it is not unreasonable to believe that something close to a person but far beyond a person is behind this vast complexity.  Again, this is an assumption which is to say that a belief in God is an act of faith, not knowledge.

 

          Now, where everyone seems to go astray is when they claim that their presuppositions are true which is humbug.  Presuppositions and assumptions are only useful when they can explain everything in its breadth and in its depth.  Although physicists often speak about the beauty of their theories, their theories do not explain either beauty or mercy.  No such presupposition as ever been discovered that comprehends the whole of it.  Werner Heisenberg put it simply: “Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability." As Saint Paul said, “We see through a glass darkly.”
 

 

          If you’ve come along with me this far, then the question of good and evil arises.  Again, as I look at the world, I can assume that it is evil, indifferent, or good.  If I say that it is either evil or indifferent, I have the problem of explaining away goodness, and, conversely, if I believe it is good, I have the problem of explaining evil or indifference.  No matter which was I turn, I face the inexplicable.  To me it is a far better quandary to be in if I am faced with the problem of evil because evil is in many ways a corruption of goodness.  We cannot tell a lie without first knowing the truth.  A betrayal first requires trust to make any sense.  Loyalty is never a corruption of deceit.  Ultimately, it is a matter of faith, and, thus, not truth.  There are no presuppositions or beliefs that can explain everything, so we make choices about what to believe which are acts of faith, acti fidei.    

 

          If someone or an institution, such as a church or a scientific association, claims truth for their propositions, they are forever trapped in their truth, unable to learn anything new.  Of course, all of this raises the question of doubt because no presupposition is ever entirely satisfactory.  Faith implies to doubt.  Indeed, I don’t see how anyone can have faith or believe without doubt which is to say that anyone who claims to know the truth and has no doubt is preaching humbug.  I like another quotation from Werner Heisenberg.   “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

 

Dana Prom Smith (10/21/2012)

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2012

RELIGION AND FAITH

Dear Friend,


You raise the issue of religion, saying that as a child you were taught that Christianity is the only true religion and superior to all others as well as being the only way to be saved. I’m sure that’s the case. I heard the same thing, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to my ordination. I went to college, theological seminary, and graduate school where I learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Being exposed to sophisticated theological thought during those years enabled me to winnow out the nonsense and keep the heart of the matter, and I realized that a good bit of what I was taught in a fundamentalist church was, in fact, a distortion of the gospel.

In the first place, religion is not faith. Religion is the paraphernalia of faith, all the customs, ideologies, and organizations. For instance, the organizational chart of the Roman Catholic Church was taken from the Roman Empire, a quite natural adoption since it was the only organization anyone at the time had known. Such an organizational chart is religion and has little to do with faith. It was not directly received from heaven. It is really a top-down type of bureaucracy favored by most governments and corporations which, sadly, inevitably leads to ossification.

The petty moralisms and extravagant enthusiasms which seem to afflict a good bit of Protestantism really have little to do with faith and reflect an attempt to prove a moral superiority in small things and provide excitement for dull people. It is understandable, but it is not faith. So it is with the claims of superiority. Claims of that sort are stultifying and function only to protect people who wish to maintain themselves in a superior and thus safe position.

Religion is the chaff of faith and is not the heart of the matter. As a matter of fact, religion is often a substitute for faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German theologian who was hanged by the Nazis in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp
for his part in the plot to kill Hitler, wrote: “Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian 'conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient.” In other words, the correct doctrine of religion is a substitute for faith.

In an intriguing dialogue in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray between Dorian Gray and the Duchess of Monmouth this kind of distinction was made as the Duchess tries to pin Dorian down.

'What of Art?' she asked.
'It is a malady.'
'Love?'
'An illusion.'
'Religion?'
'The fashionable substitute for Belief.'
'You are a sceptic.'
'Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.'
'What are you?'
'To define is to limit.'

Religion is “a fashionable substitute for Belief.” Religion is the trappings of piety, but one error pervades all religion. It reduces faith to codifications, rules, and customs, and regulations. Bonhoeffer makes the point that religion is a substitution for faith by an intellectual assent to a series of propositions. As you pointed out, many of those substitutions are ludicrous. The Gospels and the prophets make the same point time and time again, as when Jesus chased the money changers out of the temple.

Elton Trueblood, a famous Quaker theologian of a couple of generations past, often made the point that the trappings of religion are, in fact, umbrellas by which the religious attempt to shield themselves from the demands of faith.

In Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, a black South African priest quotes Hebrew to 10:31: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” The
South African priest meant that faith in God puts demands on the faithful. For many those demands are too onerous, such as loving those who despise you, caring for the poor and suffering, and fostering justice for those you dislike, and they choose a substitute that has the trappings of faith, but not its substance. Being loved by God is not always an easy thing.

Part of the problem is the words themselves. In the New Testament the word for faith is pisteo (the verb “I believe”) and pistis (the noun “belief”). In English there is no verb form for faith with the result that often faith comes to mean a commodity, as in customs, ideas, doctrines, and manners.

Faith is essentially that to which a person has committed himself or herself. Christians are those folk who have committed themselves to God’s grace manifested in Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean that they are superior. It means that they attempt to embody in their lives a grace they have experienced themselves. A graceful life is not always a bed of roses especially when the grace is applied to social concerns and is translated into social justice. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, it is an impossible ideal, but the only relevant ideals are the impossible ones.



In the second chapter of Genesis, when the Lord God encounters Adam and Eve in the garden, He asks them where they are standing, not who they are or what they believe, but where they are standing. Of course, they are hiding because they have chosen the false security of knowing everything. The Greek word is hubris, pride, the primal sin of claiming superiority. Christians are called to serve with grace, not claim to be better.

The real issue is not what religion is better. Debating whose chaff is better is a fool’s errand. It is what a person does with his or her life, that essential decision of grace. If we choose to believe in God’s grace, then the prophet Micah says it best: “”And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (6:8)”

CYNICISM, SKEPTICISM, DOUBT, and DISBELIEF

CYNICISM, SKEPTICISM, DOUBT, and DISBELIEF

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/28/2011)

In his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote a delightful piece of repartee between the Duchess of Monmouth and Dorian Gray in which she is trying to get him to reveal himself. When she asks about his religion, he replies that religion is “A fashionable substitute for Belief.” Probing further, she asks, “Are you a sceptic.” He replies, “Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith.”

In a somewhat flippant and paradoxical way, Wilde was onto the paradox inherent in faith because skepticism, unlike cynicism, assumes that something worthwhile lies behind and beyond the surface. Even the word “cynicism” gives a clue as to its meaning, originating, as it does, in the Latin word for dog, canis, from which we get our word “canine.” Cynicism is the snarling of a dog, a snarling that too often passes for sophistication. The snarler assumes that there is nothing worthwhile, obscure or hidden. As such, cynicism is a form of intellectual sloth.

Plato built his intellectual edifice upon a distinction between appearance and reality to the effect that appearance was merely a fading semblance of reality. Such a distinction haunts most thoughtful human beings. What is real? In a way, faith assumes skepticism because one cannot be a skeptic without believing there is some kind of reality behind the flux and flow of appearance. They’re also skeptical of claims for truth and ultimacy. A skeptical faith assumes a reality behind the appearance which means that the faithful are never absolutely sure of their convictions. Faith does not lead to absolute certainty but to the ability to live in uncertainty. Taking things at face value is to mistake things.










Doubt is another matter altogether. Doubt is the capacity to question one’s own convictions. In a graduate seminar years ago at the University of Chicago, Paul Tillich, one of the great theologians of the 20th century, said that “doubt is the growing edge of faith.” A person cannot doubt without first believing.



Convictions and beliefs are those intellectual afterthoughts that take place subsequent to a spiritual experience in which a person tries to understand the experience. There are always doubts when we I try to grasp the meaning of the experience. If we’re in a darkened room and catch a scent of perfume, though we may not see anyone, we may assume that someone has been present or is present. A lot of the most important experiences of our lives are like a darkened room where we sense a Presence all the while without seeing. Of course, there are lots of people with punk noses who never sense anything. They are called disbelievers. They live without awareness.

As we try to figure out the meaning of that haunting and illusive aroma, doubt is a necessary element in that I’m never absolutely sure that I’ve figured it out the right way. However, if I hear a rustling sound, I’ll be a little more certain even though I’ve never seen a thing. Disbelievers’ awareness has been dulled by a flat-lined secularity, leaving them adrift in a world that is “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.”

Disbelief arises from a thwarted imagination. Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we no know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”


Plato’s point was there is more than the apparent. The disbeliever says “That’s all there is.” The cynic simple believes that whatever it is, it’s rotten. The doubter and the skeptic believe there is more than what they know and can prove. The skeptic questions claims to truth and the doubter is never sure of the truth of his own explanation. In short, the secularist lives in a closed world while faith leads to an open universe.

Stephen Pepper in his great book, World Hypotheses, in describing all the various metaphors that have been used to understand the universe, says that if a world hypothesis is broad enough to explain a broad range of facts, it will lack depth. If it has great depth, its range will be limited. Our mechanical universe stemming from Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle lacks comprehensiveness. It has no place for beauty, love, hate, belief, disbelief, paranoia, and so forth. For this reason, doubt is essential because nothing can ever explain everything in depth. Faith is the ability to live amidst ambiguity and uncertainty with an imagination to believe over the horizon of our knowledge a Presence abides. “Just beyond the skyline He may stand.” Eugene Mason (1862-1935).

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

BLACK BOXES

BLACK BOXES


Dear Friend,

Gretchen tells me that I was somewhat short with you when you asked me for my definition of God. Upon reflection I fear that I was, and for that I apologize. So many people have asked me for my definition of God or given me theirs that I have become both wearied and bored with the question. Alas, you were the recipient of my irritations because of that weariness and boredom. I've been listening to people spin their theories about God for about 65 years. The questions and assertions are spun out of the asylum de ignorentiae because no one really knows what they are talking about. I am somewhat of a curmudgeon because I've concluded that most of what I hear is a freshened package of what I've heard in the past which didn't make much sense back then.

My answer was that to attempt to define God is an act of attempted deicide because if we can contain God within the limits of a human proposition, we no longer talking about God but some type of totem or tribal idol. "To define is to limit," was the answer Dorian Gray gave to the Duchess of Monmouth in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray when she asked him to describe himself. The subject in theology is not God, but our experience of God. Even John Calvin pointed out that we have only human knowledge, not divine, in thinking about our religious experience.

I never knew my father as himself within himself. I only knew him as we related to each other. When I talk about him, I am really talking about my experience of him. I found him to be loving and sometimes fearsome, but I could never define him, only describe my experience of him. Everyone, including ourselves, is a black box in that we are without knowledge of the internal working of the human mind. Just think of the complexity of past experiences, motivations, and ideologies that make up the decision process of human beings. This is why the social sciences are such chancy endeavors. So it is with claims about knowledge of God. I think anything else is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

In short, nobody knows. The church has a nifty word for this ignorance: mystery. Theology begins with a chastened agnosticism about God, but not about our experience of God.

As for those people who claim to be atheists, I've always been puzzled by their assertions of nothingness. How can one believe in that which one does not believe? Wonder is all about me, the love of those who've loved me, the sky, a flower, a symphony, women, Shakespeare, John Donne, Rembrandt, Mozart, Bach, trees. It goes on and on. How can one believe there is not at least something going on behind and beyond?

In my beginning Greek class at Princeton, one of the students proclaimed that he was an atheist as though that it were an achievement with the implication that believers were dolts. The professor who later became president of the university replied, "My dear young man, the question is not whether or not you believe in God, but whether or not God believes in you."



All of the wonder, the tragedies, the heartache, the joys of life cannot in my mind be random and chance. It seems to me that there are three possibilities: a world which is cruel, indifferent, or favorable. I've chosen the favorable with all of the profound contradictions that implies. Nicolas de Cusa, a medieval theologian and philosopher coined the phrase, coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. He was fed up with all the thinkers from Aristotle onwards who wanted a neat, achievable system that would explain everything. I find it a fruitful way to think. The world is too vast to be enclosed in a syllogism.









The more comprehensive a system the less it explains in detail, such as Newton's universe had no explanation of beauty. A philosophically limited physicist once told me I was wrong and pointed to the colors in the spectrum of light. My reply was that his illustration was not art but analysis and that he should try Rembrandt’s use of light. Also, the deeper an understanding, the less comprehensive it is. Psychodynamics isn't very useful for rockets or an appendectomy.

An indifferent or cruel world cannot explain the experience of love and is therefore nonsense. I, frankly, have little patience with those who believe life is cruel, indifferent, or nothing. They have not built the colleges, schools, and hospitals, and they dismiss the love of a mother for a child as though it were an aberration.

Compassion is a far more effective response to life than retribution which I've concluded is mindless sloth.

These all lead to my belief in Jesus Christ, the experience of love in the midst of hate. If there were ever a coincidentia oppositorum, it is the
crucifixion and resurrection which is a model by which to experience life. The goodness and love of God was crucified by the justice and the righteousness of human beings. In short, I am a believer in Jesus, not because that belief explains everything but because it enables me to live with the inexplicable which is my understanding of my experience of God. For me, everything else is vain speculation.

Yours,

Dana


P.S. Saint Paul said that God has not left himself without witness throughout the world which means everyone has something to say about their experience of God, some of it good, much of it nonsense. I believe that the paradigm of the crucifixion and resurrection is the best means to assess it all.


Also, Saint Paul said that we live by faith, not by knowledge, which means for me that all the claims various people make to possess the truth must be viewed with skepticism. The spiritual experience is not a set of doctrines but a faith. Along with that I believe Anselm had it right when he said that the simplest explanations are the best as in not multiplying ideas beyond their necessity. I am puzzled about the complexity of doctrines espoused by many creeds, cults, and churches. Fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, Mormons, New Agers all believe too much. Multiplicity isn't necessary. Anyone or group who claims to possess the truth lacks faith while trying to claim knowledge.

Over a glass of wine I asked a famous Jesuit theologian and friend of mine the basis for his theology. He replied, “I believe in Jesus.”
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

THE BIBLE

LETTERS TO A FRIEND

Dear Friend,


You asked about the Bible, whether or not I believed in it. No, I don't. I embrace its message. The word "believe" is a tricky one. It can be followed either by a "that" or an "in." "That" is reserved for ideas, "in" for people. One believes in Jesus Christ. One believes that the Bible is the Word of God, but even that is tricky. It does not mean that the Bible is a collection of the words of God. It means that the Bible contains the Word of God, or the Logos, the message. Martin Luther said that the Bible is the cradle in which the Word lies. In other words, the Bible is the Word of God only as it bears witness to Jesus Christ.

The beginning point for interpreting the Bible is the person and deeds of Jesus Christ which means amongst other things that not everything in the Bible is of equal value. Many people treat the Bible as though it were a text book penned by God. Clearly, it is not, and any attempt to treat it that is a misuse of the Bible. The best way to read the Bible is to start with the Gospels, especially the passion narratives, and work backward through Saint Paul and the epistles to the prophets of the Old Testament and then the rest of the Old Testament. Of course, one should always pause amongst the Psalms because they are such beautiful poetry.

In many ways, the Bible is the history of God’s interactions with his people, as recorded by his people. The clear aim of selecting his people is that they were to be a light to the nations. It was not a call to privilege, but to service. Alan Paton, the South African author of Cry, the Beloved Country, wrote: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” The fascinating thing about the history is how honest were the historians about the ways in which they as chosen people so often got it so wrong.



In contract, an example of thinking that the Bible is a collection of the words of God is the attempt to interpret homosexuality by some obscure references in the book of Leviticus whereas the only sound way is to evaluate homosexuality in terms of the message of grace in Jesus Christ. Nowadays, many socially tyrannical people try to convert the Bible into a text book to justify their restrictive social views. The result is an unholy alliance between Fundamentalists and right-wing politicians in which inhumane policies are justified by a wrong-headed view of Scripture.

Any view that sees the Bible as the words of God is inherently idolatrous because it turns the vehicle of the message into the message itself. I suppose many people want a tangible security for an inherently intangible experience. The problem is that they miss the point and end up contorting the point at best and at worst destroying it. It’s an attempt to replace Jesus Christ with the words of the Bible.

The final effect of this distortion is a morality that is basically anti-vice rather than pro-grace. Amongst many Fundamentalists there is precious little mercy. Admittedly, some conservative Christians are actively involved in charitable projects, but, on the whole, there is more emphasis on personally purity and its attendant self-righteousness than social charity.

One of my chief criticisms of Fundamentalism other than it being idolatrously wrong-headed is that it is so often corny and fatuous. As a young man, I attended a Fundamentalist church and was always a quite uncomfortable with the trappings of Fundamentalism, especially its intellectual dishonesty, fatuous sentimentality, and bad taste. It was not until I went to college where several of my professors were devout Christians, such as the great historian of the Renaissance and Reformation, E. Harris Harbison, and Alonzo Church, whose field was mathematical logic, that I began to see that there was another way. Then in theological seminary I understood even more that one could believe in Jesus Christ with intellectual rigor, spirituality, and social awareness. Indeed, such belief enabled me to see clearly, invest myself in social justice, and live with a sense that a Presence always abided.

Sir Herbert Butterfield, the Regius professor of history at Cambridge University, once wrote, “If history can do anything, it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.” At the conclusion of his history of modern Europe, he wrote, “Hold to Jesus Christ, and to everything else remain uncommitted.” The Bible is the Word of God as it bears witness to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It is he who abides.

AGNOSTICISM

AGNOSTICISM

Dear Friend,

Agnosticism is simply the position of “I don’t know,” which theologically is about as stunning as saying the sun rises. Of course, we don’t know, and the fact is that not knowing is not a belief, an article of faith. Faith is not knowledge. Faith is what a person presupposes that makes understanding knowledge possible because knowledge is quite different from understanding.

We make all kinds of assumptions everyday as we try to figure things out. Charles Darwin through his voyages throughout the world encountered a whole set of facts which the traditional theory of creation did not seem to explain to his satisfaction. As a result, he latched onto a theory of evolution which for him explained his boat load of new facts. The theory of evolution had been around a long time before Darwin. Anaximander (610 B.C.-546 B.C.) viewed the universe as a boundless, open primordial mass in which human beings were gradually transmuted from other species, such as fish. Now, since so many people have come to believe the theory of evolutions, they have come to see it as fact which, of course, it isn’t. It is a theory like any other theory used to explain the interrelationships amongst the facts at hand. It certainly makes sense; however, we don’t know for sure.



By the way, the early church theologians and many medieval theologians did not think that the creation narratives in the book of Genesis were factual, but were rather told to explain the human condition, much like parables. For want of a better word, they are legends. The first narrative was probably used in the liturgy of the Second Temple about 500 B.C and was used to reassure people on a time of chaos. The second narrative dates from about 1300 B.C. and is a charming, insightful story about the hazards of hubris.

A belief in God is not a piece of knowledge. It is an actus fidei, an act of faith, which is not a claim to know anything about the existence of God. It is a presupposition. So when someone claims to be an agnostic, he or she is simply saying that they presuppose nothing which is an untenable thing to say since we all makes presuppositions every day of our lives. The question then of the agnostic is not that he or she doesn’t know anything, but what are his or her presuppositions. In short, I don’t much care to hear that you don’t know when I don’t know as well. I’d like to hear about your faith. On what or whom are you betting your life? That is the nature of faith.



Sadly, lots of people nowadays are without faith and attempt to pass off skepticism as faith. While skepticism is a necessary, built in “crap detecting machine,” to use Hemingway’s phrase, to avoid nonsense, such as claiming to know something about God, it is not replacement for faith, but more of that later.

Agnosticism is simple a statement that a person doesn’t know. Since that applies to every human being, it has little or no meaning. We all face the same set of brute facts. The real issue is how we arrange them into patterns of meaning. That arrangement is faith or presupposition or theory. Some theories or statements of faith make lots of sense in that they explain lots of things. Some don’t.

Standing on the sidelines is not much of a place to stand. "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those in a time of crisis maintain their neutrality." Dante
1265-1321.



Write to you later.

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2011

ATHEISM

Dear Friend,


You mention atheism as though it were a reasonable position to take. Atheism, as the word suggests, is an assertion of not something, a denial. It is not enough to be against something. That's the ideological position of a two-year old in the throes of just saying "no," as with the Republicans. To have a position one has to be for something.

The basic problem with atheism is that it is boring. When I was in a class in logic while working on a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Arizona in the 1960's, after the professor went though all the traditional tests of truth, such as, correspondence to the facts, internal coherence, pragmatic workability, and authority, he ended up the lecture waving his cane in the air, declaring "that at minimum, the truth had to be interesting." Nothingness is boring.

I've never met an atheist in the throes of trying to prove nothing, an impossibity, who was not a complete bore, and a condescending bore at that. Atheists usually announce their nothingness as though they were adopting a morally and intellectually superior position to that of a believer. I see no superiority in boredom. Atheism is an archetypal nihilism. The most sensible response to an announced boredom is a yawn.
The atheist claims the existence of God cannot be proven. Of course, the existence of God can't, only a medieval scholastic or a perfervid Fundamentalist would try. A belief in the existence of God is a presupposition, not an argument or a proposition. People presuppose the existence of God because it allows them to make sense out of things, specifically their lives. A belief in a coherent universe is more likely to come to pass with a belief in the existence of God rather than by happenstance and chance. That is not a proof of the existence of God, it is a presupposition used to make the coherence of the universe intelligible, an act of faith. Chance and happenstance are also presuppositions and acts of faith.

Albert Camus said it best, "I would rather live my life as if there was a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is." "You pays your money and takes your choice."

None of this has anything to do with the nature of God because speculation about the nature of God tends to be humbug. Max Black, late professor of philosophy at Cornell University, wrote that humbug is a "deliberate misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed" (Cornell University Press, 1983). Much of contemporary religious language is humbug.
The fact is that everyone begins with a faith. A scientist presupposes that there are universal laws in the universe, but since no one has ever been to all places in the universe to test that proposition, it has to be a presupposition. There is no way to prove the existence of God, and, as such, it is an act of faith, a presupposition.

Belief, finally, comes from experience, not rationality. As such, it is primitive, that is to say, before reason. A disbelief in God renders life "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," and, therefore, I choose to believe that which makes life very interesting with "glimpses of eternity" that can be stretched out a whole lifetime. “I all but touch Him with my outstretched hand.”