Between Faith and Doubt: A Deep Philosophical Dialogue on the Existence of God

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"Standing in the shadow of those great cathedrals in Europe, you get the sense that those medieval peasants understood something that has since been lost in the modern age."

This was a conversation on the Vox podcast The Gray Area. The host, Sean Illing, is a skeptic who openly admits to having once been a "New Atheist," while the guest, Liz Bruenig, is a writer who has re-embraced Christian faith within modern society. This dialogue didn't linger on the tired "theism vs. atheism" debate; instead, it delved deeply into the nature of faith, who has the authority to interpret experience, and the dangers of religion becoming politicized. This article attempts to trace some of its most illuminating threads of thought.

Treating Faith as "Bad Science": A Common Misunderstanding

The starting point of the conversation was a sharp challenge from the host: religious people often "want to have it both ways." When they talk about God, they describe God as an entity acting in the world—God heals, commands, creates, punishes—all of which sound like "empirical claims" about reality. But when asked for evidence, God suddenly becomes "ineffable." In his view, this is a kind of "dodge," turning faith into bad science.

Bruenig's response carried considerable philosophical depth. She quoted the philosopher Žižek's famous line: "The reasons for falling in love only make sense once you've already fallen in love." Likewise, the evidence for God's existence can only be understood after you've already accepted that God exists. She further invoked Thomas Aquinas's view—that "understanding follows faith, not the other way around."

This position has deep theological and philosophical roots. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the most important scholastic philosopher of the medieval period, and his maxim "Credo ut intelligam" (I believe so that I may understand) actually derives from the earlier Augustinian tradition, later developed by Anselm into "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum). This epistemological stance stands in stark contrast to modern science's "hypothesis-verification" pathway: it holds that faith is not the endpoint of rational deduction, but rather the precondition upon which understanding can unfold—similar to what Wittgenstein later called "hinge propositions" in On Certainty, where certain foundational beliefs must be accepted before other knowledge can be built upon them. This position was revived in the 20th century by "Reformed Epistemology," with philosopher Alvin Plantinga arguing that belief in God is a "basic belief" that requires no proof from more fundamental propositions—just as we believe that other people have minds or that the past really existed. In other words, faith logically precedes understanding, which is precisely the opposite of our conventional cognitive path of demanding empirical evidence.

Proving God Through Science? An Ever-Receding Trap

One of the brilliant critiques in the conversation was directed at attempts to "prove God through science." Bruenig mentioned a parabolic chart at the opening of a book: in the early days of the Enlightenment, many phenomena treated as "evidence for God's existence" (such as geocentrism) were, with the advance of science, explained one by one through natural laws, and believers drifted away accordingly; and now some again claim to have found new scientific evidence that "cannot be explained by natural phenomena."

This practice is known in academia as the "God of the Gaps" argument—an epistemological trap with a long history of criticism. The concept was first proposed by the 19th-century theologian Henry Drummond, who warned Christians against building God's existence on the current gaps in science. Classic historical examples include: Newton believed that the stability of planetary orbits required periodic divine intervention to maintain, while Laplace's celestial mechanics later demonstrated that this stability could be entirely explained by natural laws—when Napoleon reportedly asked Laplace why his work made no mention of God, Laplace is said to have replied, "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis."

Bruenig argues that this practice is "a bit ridiculous on its face"—phenomena that cannot be explained today are very likely to be explained by natural laws in the future. When that happens, those who came to faith because of "evidence" will leave because the "evidence has disappeared." This echoes astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's famous formulation: religion is an "ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance"—he called this pattern an "intellectual surrender," seeing it as reflecting not sincere faith in the divine but an abandonment of understanding. Bruenig's position is that this practice "puts training wheels on faith," precisely misunderstanding the nature of faith—faith is faith precisely because you do not possess the kind of evidence that would ordinarily prove facts. Tying the fate of faith to science's temporary ignorance is a gamble doomed to fail.

The Whirlwind at the Bus Stop: A Genuine Divine Experience

The most personal and moving part of the conversation was Bruenig's account of an experience from her college days. It was an ordinary day, and she was alone waiting for a bus on a tree-lined street when suddenly a strong gust of wind swept around the corner, forming a vortex that tossed birch leaves into the air, spiraling upward. She was suddenly struck by a feeling—"something I was looking at was also looking back at me, and there was eye contact between us."

Such experiences fall philosophically within the category of "mystical experience" or "numinous experience." The theologian Rudolf Otto, in his classic 1917 work The Idea of the Holy, defined such experiences as "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans"—a mysterium that is both terrifying and fascinating, a distinctive emotion mixing fear and attraction when confronted with the "Wholly Other." William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had already pointed out that the standard for judging the value of a religious experience should not be its origin but the "fruits" it produces in one's life.

The image of the spiral led her to think of Plato's discourse on the spiral: learning is not a straight line reaching a point, but rather circling around it again and again, drawing closer, treading over the same ground repeatedly until comprehension dawns. After a long internal debate, she ultimately interpreted this experience as "a direct experience of the divine presence."

"I Might Be Wrong"—The Vulnerability Faith Demands

The host pressed further: to accept this as God rather than "brain chemistry" or "pattern recognition," what must one relinquish intellectually? Bruenig admitted that a cynical, contemptuous voice like Christopher Hitchens's echoed in her mind—"smart people are supposed to doubt, to dissolve everything." But on a deeper level, she knew that moment was meaningful, and so this internal debate about "dissolving meaning" began to seem trivial.

It's worth noting that neuroscience offers a possible reductive explanation here: researchers have found that activity in the right temporal lobe cortex is highly correlated with religious experience, and the neurologist Michael Persinger even built a "God Helmet," claiming it could induce similar sensations by stimulating the brain with magnetic fields. However, critics point out that a neural correlate is not equivalent to a reductive explanation: love also has a measurable neural basis in the brain, but this does not "dissolve" the meaning of love itself.

Bruenig offered a key confession: to have faith means "accepting that you might just be naive, or worse—delusional." And accepting the fact that "others have reason to call you naive, foolish, or delusional" is itself part of the sacrifice that faith demands. This vulnerability is part and parcel of what faith means.

Why Does the Same Experience Lead to Different Religious Interpretations?

The host raised a philosophically central question: atheists also have experiences of awe, the sublime, and beauty—they just don't believe these point to the divine. So are believers and atheists having "the same experience with different interpretations," or does faith itself allow one to see something that non-believers cannot?

Bruenig's answer was candid: "I think the experience is the same." She cited the Bible as an example—those who witnessed miracles saw the same thing, yet some concluded "this is the Son of God performing miracles" while others denied it. The same experience, the same people, yet leading to different conclusions. In her view, the sublime, beauty, and awe "are all qualities that most properly belong to God," and when you feel them, you are "locating the traces of the divine presence"—but how to interpret that experience is a personal choice.

Different Religions: Climbing the Same Holy Mountain from Different Sides?

When asked whether the different interpretations of similar experiences across religious traditions shook her convictions, Bruenig said: God exists, and like anything that exists, many different people will "encounter" it. She reads texts from different religions and feels they are all like spirals, circling around some shared core.

This view corresponds academically to the "Perennial Philosophy" (Philosophia Perennis) tradition. The term was coined by Leibniz and later systematically expounded by Aldous Huxley in his 1945 book of the same name: he argued that at the core of the great traditions—Hindu Vedanta, Islamic Sufism, Christian mysticism, Buddhist Zen—there exists a common insight into "the ultimate nature of reality"—namely, that there is a divine ground transcending the material world, with which the human soul shares an origin, and that the purpose of life lies in returning to this state of union. However, this position has also been challenged: the theologian S. Mark Heim, in Salvations, argued that different religions do not pursue the same endpoint, and that their differences are real and profound, not merely superficial cultural packaging.

After the article was published, Bruenig received letters from readers of various religious backgrounds describing similar spiritual experiences. She acknowledged that religious "particularity" has indeed driven people to madness and served as a driver of violence and atrocity. But she firmly believes in a shared commonality: "the world is more than what the eye can see"—this fundamental insight is held in common by the great religious traditions.

The Politicization of Faith: Mixing Ammonia and Bleach

The latter half of the conversation turned to a more concrete and heavier topic: the politicization of American Christianity. In this section, the two interlocutors reached a rare and strong consensus.

Bruenig stated bluntly that this leaves her "extremely frustrated." She criticized the current political manipulation—those "who clearly hold faith in contempt or even disdain" are cynically exploiting the trust of sincere believers. She sharply noted that some Christians compare Trump to "a biblical king who, though a non-believer, treated the Israelites well," but "you only need to look at the fruits of his convictions—massive bloodshed, violence, and appalling things."

The host shared his own personal experience: he grew up in Texas and now lives back in Gulfport, Mississippi. Watching the Christians around him defend Trump in the name of Christianity became the "final straw" for him, and it also reminded him of why he had been repelled by religion in his youth—"the religious people around me were all so smug, with no humility, only certainty. And I think that's dangerous."

When Faith Becomes a Machine for Self-Justification

Bruenig used a vivid chemical metaphor: the combination of religion and politics is like mixing ammonia and bleach—two already unstable substances that, when combined, produce a toxic gas. This metaphor has deep historical grounding. The political scientist Robert Bellah proposed the concept of "Civil Religion" in 1967, describing the systematic appropriation of religious imagery—God, providence, sacrifice—in American political discourse. Such appropriation sanctifies a particular political order, subjecting critics to the moral pressure of "blasphemy." The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in analyzing totalitarianism, pointed out that ideology is dangerous precisely because it can provide a transcendent framework of self-justification for any action. The sociologists of religion Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, in Taking America Back for God (2020), systematically studied contemporary American Christian nationalism and found that its core driving force is not devout faith but white identity politics—which precisely confirms Bruenig's judgment: what is truly being abused is not faith itself, but the shell of faith.

She argues that once faith is institutionalized and becomes a label of cultural identity, it "completely loses itself and degenerates into a machine for justifying its own conduct."

She also criticized the departure from Christianity's core teachings. She quoted the Bible: "If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" What truly makes one a Christian is loving your enemies, loving those who hate you—"and in the Christian right, you cannot find a shred of this."

From Cynicism to Mysticism: A Skeptic's Self-Examination

Toward the end of the conversation, the roles subtly reversed—Bruenig turned the tables and interviewed the host. This self-examination is equally worth recording.

The host confessed that he was "naturally inclined to question and doubt," but as he became a father, he came to feel that "being cynical in front of your children is a kind of dereliction of duty." What does cynicism protect? He said: "It's an excuse not to truly commit, not to take risks. Everything is terrible anyway, so what's the point?"—this self-rationalization gave him an escape hatch for years of inaction.

More interesting still, he mentioned how psychedelic experiences "blew open" his existing model of the world, making him realize that "the world isn't just strange, but far stranger than I could ever imagine," and thus making him "spiritually curious." This experience has in recent years become the subject of serious scientific research. Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London have found that psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) can reliably induce, in controlled settings, what subjects describe as "mystical experiences," characterized by: the dissolution of the sense of time, the melting of self-boundaries, a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, and a "profound sense of reality"—all of which closely match the mystical experiences recorded in various religious traditions. The neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris proposed the "Entropic Brain" hypothesis: psychedelics, by suppressing the brain's default mode network (DMN), temporarily lift the excessive control of self-narrative, returning consciousness to a more primal and open state of perception. This raises a profound philosophical question: if a chemical substance can trigger religious experiences, does that mean such experiences are "nothing more than brain activity"? Or does it merely prove that the brain has an inherent potential to perceive something real that exists—just as the eye is an organ for perceiving light, not the maker of light?

He quoted George Carlin: "Scratch any cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist."

Why We Need to Leave Room for Mystery

The podcast is called The Gray Area, and its purpose is precisely to "stay open to doubt without retreating into certainty." The host said he now leaves more room for mystery, and is grateful for it: "Do you want to live in an enchanted world or a disenchanted one? I've always cared more about questions than answers. A world without questions is, to me, both unimaginable and undesirable."

The only time he ever felt the "being seen, being perceived" experience that Bruenig described was under the influence of psychedelics. And in love—especially at the moment of his children's births—he experienced an emotion "that made language superfluous," which is also why he is grateful for the existence of religious and spiritual language: even when words fall short, it at least resembles poetry, a gestural pointing toward that which lies beyond words.

Conclusion: Sincerity Is the Rarest Mode of Dialogue in Our Age

As he said goodbye, the host uttered a meaningful line: "Sincerity gets punished mercilessly online." What makes this conversation precious is precisely the sincerity of both parties—one a writer who has re-embraced faith, the other a skeptic who still carries the instinct to doubt yet strives to transcend cynicism.

They did not try to persuade each other, nor did they avoid their differences; instead, they jointly presented a more complex and honest picture: faith is not bad science but a worldview orientation; experience belongs to everyone, but the authority to interpret it belongs to the individual; the combination of religion and politics can be toxic, but human wrongdoing has never required God's permission. Perhaps the most important insight is this: whether one believes or not, reserving room for mystery and for questions is more worth pursuing than rushing to arrive at certainty.

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