This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
When a Christian friend texted me an interview with Alex O’Connor, I expected my reaction to be an eye-rolling “Can you believe this guy?”
O’Connor—whether technically atheist or agnostic—is one of the most prolific YouTube/podcast skeptics of religion today. More than once, the algorithms have fed me video clips of the 26-year-old cynically dismissing the “superstitions” of Christians and the Bible. So I expected more cynicism, but then was surprised to realize that I was actually the cynical one. The clip moved me and prompted me to examine my own heart.
O’Connor, host of the Within Reason podcast, with over a million subscribers, was in conversation with host André Duqum on the Know Thyself podcast, which seems to be on the New Age side of the “spiritual but not religious” spectrum.
In the clip—excerpted from a much longer conversation—O’Connor displayed a kind of vulnerability quite rare for a person who has built his platform on confidence and rationalism. He confessed a pull toward cynicism, and said he didn’t like where it had taken him:
The person who looks at everything with a sharp edge and tries to debunk and criticize everything—it’s easy and it’s doable and I’ve certainly been there. I know in my family, when I was living at home, it was sort of constant. And you can always fall back on this idea of “I’m just trying to get to the truth. You said something I don’t think is true, and I’m just asking you a question. I’m just trying to understand your view.”
“But sometimes it is just inappropriate to do that,” O’Connor continued. “The intellect is like a knife or a chisel that you can use to tear away at false stuff, but you’re supposed to do it in the service of creating sculpture. You’re supposed to be bringing something out of whatever you’re chiseling away at.”
“If you take that chisel and just knock it all the way down through,” he said, “then you end up with nothing. … It’s like somebody trying to understand the Mona Lisa by looking through a microscope at the paint strokes.”
O’Connor then pointed to the famous philosophical thought experiment of a patient named Mary, who has lived all her life in a completely black-and-white environment, having seen no color at all. She’s been given voluminous factual information on the color blue, “about the wave length, about the effect it has on the consciousness—everything that could be even known and written down onto paper about blue.”
“The question is, when she steps outside of that room and looks at something blue, has she learned anything?” O’Connor asked. “And intuitively the answer is yes. Surely there is something that you can know that is not reducible to words on paper.”
O’Connor confessed that thinking this way—recognizing forms of knowledge that are non-propositional—is not easy for him, trained as he is in syllogisms and argument. But he recognized that there’s more to truth than what can be quantified and measured:
I think C. S. Lewis once wrote about how he realized that the problem with his worldview before he became a theist was that he was being asked to take the things that are most unnatural to him—numbers, abstraction—and say that’s the true thing, the thing that’s really there: the math, the syllogism. Whereas the thing that was most real to him—the narrative, the feeling, the experience—that’s the thing that’s wrong and fake and we should be suspect of. It seems like it was kind of the other way around.
This certainly isn’t any kind of conversion story. O’Connor will no doubt be back at the syllogisms this week in cyberspace. He is not at all backing down on his vision of a world without God. But consider the courage it took for him to say what he said—knowing that someone like me would say, “Aha! See! I caught you!”
Yet to do that would take cynicism on my end too. It flattens O’Connor to a collection of arguments rather than seeing him as a human who can image back the mystery of a personal God, a complicated person who can remind me of the things that matter most. Perhaps O’Connor had been cynically trapped in his syllogisms, but my first expectation of him was cynically trapped in somebody’s algorithms.
That’s the problem with so many of our public debates about God and the meaning of life—for Christians as well as for non-Christians. Most of the time, we are just giving Mary another set of facts about the wavelengths of blue.
To some degree, that’s what we must do. Paul debated the skeptics at the Areopagus and in the court of Agrippa. We are dealing, after all, with matters of a God who entered history in space and in time in the person of Jesus, and this “has not been done in a corner” (Acts 26:26, ESV throughout).
At the same time, God is not reducible to syllogisms and testing. If “in him we live and move and have our being” (17:28), then to examine him the way we would quarks or quasars would require godlike perspective, the ability to stand outside of and thus be able to interrogate the one who says, “I am who I am” (Ex. 3:14). The perplexity before a mystery we cannot comprehend is not an obstacle to our discerning the ultimate but rather a necessary first step.
That’s why the vision of God revealed in the Scriptures is quite different from the way we debate God as just another political or philosophical or cultural dispute in order to find who’s the winner and loser of the argument.
The message is to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). When we ask, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” the message doesn’t give us statistics but instead says simply, “Come and see” (John 1:46). We can’t do that standing from the outside, examining good tidings of great joy the way one would a thing or a concept.
As Christians, we lose sight of this. We become cynical, and that cynicism is easy. In a time like this, it can be mistaken for a sign of intelligence. If I assume that everyone is fake, everything is a scam, then I will turn out to be right much of the time. And I will protect myself from the kind of vulnerability in which a Christian can sometimes admit doubting and an atheist can sometimes admit wondering. That leads us to joylessness, to a lack of wonder and awe, without which we cannot remove the veil that shields us from the glory of God (2 Cor 3:18).
Sometimes we get a little glimpse of how hardened we’ve become, how little we expect the Spirit to move in us or in others. Every once in a while, though, someone reminds us. Sometimes, at least once for me, that’s an atheist on YouTube.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
