An interview with Christopher Gasson
If God is truly the Almighty and the basis of our existence, Christopher Gasson says, then everything anyone can say about life and the world will tell us more about God’s nature—to the point, he believes, that “we can find God in works that are savagely opposed to God.”
A journalist, publisher, Anglican and amateur theologian, Gasson is the author of The Devils’ Gospels: Finding God in Four Great Atheist Books. Inspired by conversations with a youth discussion group he led at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford University, Gasson’s book examines four key atheist texts, which he attempts to read as “holy scripture” to seek traces of the divine: Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
To help promote the book, Gasson commissioned an online survey of 10,000 people in Britain, which found that people in their teens and 20s, known as Gen Z, are much less likely to be atheists than their parents and grandparents. The survey found only 13 per cent of people under 25 identified as atheists, while 62 per cent said they were “very” or “fairly” spiritual. Meanwhile, up to one-quarter of those between 45 and 60 identified as atheists, compared to 20 per cent among both millennials—those between the ages of 25 and 44—and baby boomers, aged 65 and older.
The Anglican Journal spoke to Gasson about what he learned from his study of four atheist books. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the idea for The Devils’ Gospels came from?
I was faced with a group of teenagers who I wanted to engage in coming to my discussion group and I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to work just talking about Bible stories. What they were finding in the outside world was a lot of atheist challenges to the existence of God and it was even a bit taboo for bright young people to be considered Christians. They wanted better answers to atheist challenges to religion.
So we started to read atheist books. The big one’s obviously Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion. We worked our way through quite a few different angles on this. Then COVID came and everything wound up and I thought, “Well, this is quite interesting. Why not turn it into a book?” Because I know that the parents are actually more interested than the children in answers to this. Growing up, I really felt that I missed having any hard-talk discussion about what atheists say about religion. I was interested for my own self to see whether I could go through these things and actually come out of it feeling that my faith was as strong as it was when I went in.
You’re writing about religion as an interested lay person.
Yeah, that I think is quite important. I don’t know whether it’s the same in Canada, but clergy just can’t say anything. They’re so afraid of being considered unorthodox or not getting progression in the church because they say things which other people might disagree with. It ends up being incredibly difficult to know what the answers are to some of these questions. So I think it is important that I’m saying this as a lay person rather than as a clergy person.
Why did you choose these four texts?
They fit together quite well. Each of them addresses a different angle and they also open out to each other quite well.
With Nietzsche, I’m asking the question: Is God good? That is really the first question a lot of people have about religion. They look around and see religious violence and they see quite a lot of bad behaviour in the church. That is the first question: Is this good, or is it just some abusive group which should be avoided?
What you find in Nietzsche is that he imagines a world without God, and that is a world of power. I think that explains a lot about where the church has gone wrong and where a lot of other religions go wrong as well—that they turn religion into a vehicle for power. That is actually the opposite of love. I think that’s the first step—to understand that we are worshipping a God of love and a God that is good.
Derrida is probably the most obscure name in this list, but I use him to answer this question: How can we know God? The issue there is that we are finding God in scripture, and what Derrida is saying is that actually, you can never reach final truth in a text. You are always pursuing meaning through the deferral of meaning in the way that language works.
When you look at the Bible, it is a complete mess in terms of trying to make sense of it. The fact that we have four gospels rather than one shows that there’s multiple ways of looking at things and understanding things. What I take away from Derrida is that this idea of uncertainty that exists in the Bible—it’s a feature, not a bug, that tells us how we’re supposed to believe through this idea of continually following a scent, rather than feeling that one’s arrived at complete certainty in understanding who and what God is. That movie recently Conclave that speaks [of] certainty being the enemy of the church, I think that that’s very much what one can take away from Derrida.
The next one is Stephen Hawking, and he’s got quite an interesting challenge to religion, in that what he’s trying to say is that there was no time before the Big Bang. If you look at the nature of relativity and quantum theory, which were essentially operating together at the time of the Big Bang, you get this concept that time slowed to zero. Before the Big Bang there was no such thing as time, which completely messes up any concept of causation that you might have. [Note: In The Devils’ Gospels, Gasson writes that based on his reading of Hawking, “there is no space or time for God to exist in before the Big Bang” and that causality “simply does not exist in the absence of time.”]
Before I really read Stephen Hawking, I felt that God made the world with the Big Bang. But if you don’t have that causation, one does need to think a little bit about it. How can we have this situation where there isn’t causation? Obviously the first answer is, God is impossible to understand, so this kind of paradox is par for the course. But it also made me think of what placeholder we should have for our understanding of God, and that probably the best placeholder is one where we think of God as being in the world. The whole universe is actually part of God. That’s how we should be imagining the relationship with physics—that it isn’t something which is separate, it’s something which is all part of the same magisteria.
Furthermore, this idea that we are all part of God makes this problem of evil, which is again one of the subtexts of Stephen Hawking, more understandable. Rather than thinking that God is out there somewhere beyond the universe and he’s just sitting by watching bad things happen and giving people like Stephen Hawking motor neuron disease, we should be feeling that we’re all part of God. That is how we can offer comfort to people in that kind of situation.
That then takes us onto Richard Dawkins. His main concern about religion is the idea that it’s both dangerous and idiotic; it’s dangerous because it’s idiotic. If you have a circumstance where faith means believing six impossible things before breakfast, then it becomes very difficult to find reason in anything. You become very much subject to what you’re told because you’ve essentially got to surrender your reason as soon as you get to religion.
Now, the Church of England, the Anglican church, was founded on the three-legged stool of scripture, tradition and reason. The way I read Richard Dawkins is to say, what he’s really asking us is to not ignore reason. We cannot give up reason if we are going to be good humans. I think that obviously God gave us reason for a purpose and it wasn’t to ignore it.
How do you square that with this question of faith? Let’s look at what faith is. I suspect that what has happened over the years is that faith used to mean having trust in the promise of Jesus despite its unlikeliness or unclarity of the situation. It’s become that the more impossible things you believe, the stronger your faith is, and that’s incredibly dangerous.
If we can understand that faith and reason are completely compatible and that faith is in fact really a way of seeing the world and a way of seeing the possibility of God in that, it is much more in tune with the way of the world then this business of just trying to pile in possibilities on things which I think separates Christians from the world that they live in.
At the start of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the character Zarathustra says God is dead. Nietzsche’s main struggle is against nihilism in the absence of God. But you conclude from reading Nietzsche that God is good partly because when you see the existence of Zarathustra without God, dwelling alone in a mountain cave, it seems like a solitary, barren existence.
That’s what it is. It seems the opposite of what people want to have in life. It’s probably true about saying the will to power exists and that every living creature wants to have more power. But it becomes this very barren life if it doesn’t connect with other people. Nietzsche’s view of life is a subjective one: he’s the only one who exists and he’s playing it as a first-person shooter game. Actually, the way that we find richness in life is through connection with other people.
Derrida is famous for his view that “There is nothing outside the text,” that the meaning of words is fluid and can be constantly deconstructed. Applying Derrida to your reading of the Bible, you conclude that revelation is infinite.
It tells me that religion is a chase. It is not a destination. That is the nature of text and it’s also the nature of what our relationship with God should be. Achieving the full understanding of God would put one in an extraordinary position—an extraordinarily dangerous position.
Throughout The Devils’ Gospels, it feels like we’re trying to define what God is. Your answer is that God is indescribable.
That is very much the point of God. It would be rather extraordinary if one were to have some words which magically create this thing which is supposed to be so infinite.
If we can’t define what God is, though, a young person who has questions about faith might ask what the purpose of belief in God is.
But that is part of the joy of it. This question is what I think our job as Christians is: to think each day, what is the will of God? If we think we just come up with the answer one day and that is the only answer that is needed, then that’s probably where religion ends.
You conclude from your reading of Hawking that God is with us. Many religious people today believe God created the universe through the Big Bang. Philosophically, however, one could object that the notion of a time before time is an absurdity. You explain Hawking’s conception of time by comparing time to space, saying for example that nothing is more south than the South Pole.
This is the problem. If one’s saying that there’s no time before the Big Bang, there can be no causality, so you’ve just got to not use that language. Now, it could just be that this is part of the paradox that one has to swallow when one starts trying to figure out God. But I think that it is reasonable to try and consider how one might make things compatible with a world that has a finite beginning, before which there is no time.
Part of the problem is that people are trying to anthropomorphize God. Because we live in time, we tend to try and look for explanations for the passage of time which make sense to us. The fact that time didn’t exist before the Big Bang—[for] a human trying to anthropomorphize, what was happening at that stage is pretty difficult.
In the Dawkins section, you conclude, “Faith is a way of seeing.” How did you draw that conclusion from The God Delusion? What do we mean when we say faith is a way of seeing?
It’s active looking for things. It’s about looking for purpose, meaning and the potential for God in the world and seeing this; the nature of love and how that works in the world and seeing the God in that. It’s something with anticipation. Faith should be having trust that it’ll all come [out] good, rather than I have agreed that certain impossible things are true and therefore that gives me faith, but then I don’t need to be active in my engagement with God in the world thereafter.
The sort of faith that Richard Dawkins would be very unhappy with is one that says, “OK, I can now believe in impossible things and therefore from now on I am a Christian.” Whereas I’m saying that actually, it needs to be more of an active seeking of God in the world as one lives that is the faith, and the faith is what is driving one to seek that.
Dawkins was a leading figure in the New Atheism movement along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher. It’s interesting how each ended up on the political right, singling out Islam for criticism more than any other religion. You say conservatives have become more wedded to the cultural aspects of Christianity. It’s ironic that Dawkins is an outspoken atheist, yet recently declared himself a “cultural Christian.”
I’d say he always was a cultural Christian. When our vicar retired, he came along to the retirement dinner and sat next to my wife. He’s always been quite keen on the cultural aspects of religion.
But what you’re saying is interesting because [of] this survey that we did looking at belief in Britain showing that atheism has tailed off among Gen-Z people. I think when one talks to Gen-Z people about atheists, it is that cultural turn that these atheists have made towards being more intolerant of particularly Islam which has really turned young people off atheism. Initially, they might’ve been attracted to atheism feeling, “I’ve been born into a Christian culture, therefore I could have been born into a Muslim culture and I could be any religion. Therefore, all religions must be false.” That argument in favour of atheism seems to be slightly negated nowadays by the intolerance that it’s now associated with.
In your book’s introduction, you talk about the culture wars and how nationalist politicians like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have used Christianity for their own ends. Can you tell me a little bit more about how the culture wars influenced your decision to write The Devils’ Gospels?
I felt that Christianity was on this burning platform. On the one hand, young, more progressive liberal people were being drawn towards atheism. On the other hand, the church itself, particularly in places like Russia and in parts of America, is becoming a political instrument. At some point it will sell itself.
You’ve probably been following this spat between [U.S. Vice President J.D.] Vance and Rory Stewart over ordo amoris. [Note: Vance recently argued about theology over Twitter/X with British academic and former Conservative MP Rory Stewart. Vance said it is a Christian concept to first love one’s family, then one’s neighbours, community, fellow citizens in one’s nation, finally the rest of the world. Stewart protested that Vance’s ideas were more “pagan” than “Christian” and ignored the Christian message to love one another. Vance retorted by invoking ordo amoris, a Latin phrase meaning “order of love.”] I think that’s really the point. When you start turning away people who are suffering because they’re not your people, that’s when you cease to be a Christian. The whole simple bit of Christianity is its universality. As Jesus said, even the pagans love their own.
This is the problem when we are seeing people associating Christianity and pro-gun groups and so forth. You feel the religion here is actually turning into something quite different. It is turned into a political identity, which is supposed to be an untouchable political identity because it is a religion rather than a faith and you can’t criticize people’s faith. That is a real danger. It’s certainly a big turnoff to young people joining the church. Equally, this idea that intelligent people should be atheists is also a danger to the church. I wanted to show that there was space between those two extremes which made sense.
