From Atheism to Faith in God: Part 4 - Atheism 101

My testimony: From convinced Atheism to joyful fellowship with God

Part 4: Atheism 101

I would like to share with you key elements that led me to build a strong atheist foundation during my high school years. Yet, this foundation of my life would later crumble, when I became a Christian.

In France, during my youth and in my personal cultural setting, religion or faith was mostly associated with the Catholic church. If today Islam is much more visible in France, it was not the case then. Christianity was in general identified with Catholicism. It is important to remember that the Protestant faith was forbidden in France for centuries, and still remains in France a small minority among those defining themselves as believers. When I was in primary school I would hear that most of the kids would go to ‘catéchisme’ (catechism, the teaching of the basics of the Catholic faith), not knowing what it was except that I was excluded from it.
At home, we did not have a Bible, and I would not even touch one before being 20 years old. In my teenager years, my parents bought me books on Greek mythology, as well as stories of the Old Testament and the New Testament. I loved Greek mythology. I enjoyed the stories of the Old Testament, probably because of my father’s Jewish origin. Yet, when it came to the New Testament, I found it boring, full of impossible stories of miracles.
The only family moments when faith would be mentioned was for jokes. One of my uncles delighted in the jokes about the priests, making puns with “père” (the title for priests) and other words. I knew that my grand-mother became a Catholic, but she did not speak much or mention it to us, and she was also struggling psychologically, so I naturally associated faith with psychological weakness or folly. My mother would tell me stories of the problems my father and her had with my grandmother, how they struggled, and that was for me a clear deterrent to any interest in faith.


Through my studies at school and through the influence of my family culture, I became, as many in France, a spiritual child of the Enlightenment. Please allow me to present to you what it meant for me, to fully receive the teachings of the Enlightenment, from its roots to its many implications for my worldview and beliefs.
First, it is important to learn about the relationship that existed between the king and the Catholic faith. Then, it is easier to understand the French revolution and its intellectual foundation, the Enlightenment.


In France, the Catholic religion has for centuries been strongly tied to political power, with many associated ambiguities and sad collusions. Starting around 500 AD with the baptism of Clovis, and going up to the French revolution in 1789 or even to Napoleon III, the French state and the Roman Catholic Church were intimately intertwined. In the XIXth century, it would be called ‘l’alliance du trône et de l’autel” (The covenant between the throne and the altar), a way to highlight the agreement between political rulers and catholic bishops or priests. Kings in France understood that to have a strong unity in the country, if they were seen as the spiritual rulers, it then implied that everyone needed to follow the same faith as the king. There was even a ceremony, just after the ‘sacre du roi’ (coronation of a king), to show clearly that the king was ‘roi de droit divine’ (king from divine right). All the persons with a specific disease named ‘écrouelles’ (scrofula) would be touched by the king and were supposed to be healed, highlighting his divine authority through his power to heal.

The Catholic religion was required of all the French subject, with very rare and fragile exceptions. For most of us today, it is hard to understand how important this was. To give you an example, in the Middle-Ages, if someone was excommunicated (rejected officially from the Roman Catholic communion of faith), this meant that the country’s laws did not apply anymore. This implied that anyone could rob them or kill them without the risk of being prosecuted. You can then imagine the fears that a threat of excommunication could trigger, it was in some ways a death sentence. For instance, Jews would need a specific protection from the king in order to avoid this danger, a protection that proved many times to be fickle.
When, in the 16th century, the first generations of protestants tried to convince the king Francis I to support the protestants, they failed (cf. the “Affair of the Placards” of 1534). In the following decades, after much hope of the protestants, the kings stuck to the Catholic faith and to the desire to have all their subjects following them in this religious matter. In 1598, the Edict of Nantes reinstated the civil rights of protestants, but denied them the right to build new temples or to convert anyone from Catholicism to Protestantism. In 1685 came the Revocation of this Edict of Nantes, cancelling the rights of protestants and making their faith illegal in France. Many Protestants from France fled, because of their faith, during this historic period. They were sometimes called the Huguenots.


In 1789, the French revolution changed many things in the domains of state and religion. Because of its so strong ties with the royal power, the Roman Catholic Church became a key target. At one point, the new republic tried to put statues of the goddess reason in the Catholic churches. The motive was to promote the principles of Enlightenment and anticlericalism. They even tried to remove any cultural sign of Christianity by even turning the weeks of seven days (a reminder of the seven days of creation) into periods of ten days, renaming all the months in the process. This did not last for long, and the darling of the French revolution, Napoleon, saw the value of uniting the people behind a single faith. He did not care much for the Catholic Church, but recognized the benefit he could reap, so he made an agreement with the pope - the concordat in 1801, and was later crowned as emperor.
One of the fruits of the French revolution was that Protestants and Jews received a legal status, thus benefitting for the first time of the official protection of French laws.
Some of the most formidable opponents to the king and the Catholics, during the 18th and 19th century, were the persons that came to define themselves as ‘Les lumières’. It was first people like Voltaire or Diderot who, through the propagation of the ideas of the Enlightenment, gave the intellectual foundation that the French revolution would claim.


The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe in the 18th century. It stressed that reason was the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and promoted ideals such as liberty, tolerance, progress, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. In France, the key doctrines of ‘Les lumières’ were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to the absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.
In my opinion, the Enlightenment was a mix of very important scientific discoveries and shrewd methods of self-advertisement.
For their self-promotion, they called themselves ’Les lumières’ (the lights), implicitly stressing that those they were opposing were on the side of darkness or obscurantism. This promotional technique, that has nothing to do with objective or scientific thinking, has all to do with marketing methods. The period before them was then named ‘the dark ages’ in the English-speaking world, highlighting again the opposition light-darkness.
To be able to succeed with such marketing, the ‘Lumières’ were surfing on the wave of scientific discoveries that preceded them.
How did these discoveries develop? We can highlight the importance of the Renaissance and the modern scientific revolution, the foundation on which the Enlightenment would thrive.


The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is often considered as the end of the Middle-Ages and the beginning of Renaissance . You probably notice that I choose to avoid to use the term ‘dark-ages,’ for the sake of scientific objectivity :-). After the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire, many Greek scholars fled to Italy and Western Europe, bringing with them Greek manuscripts, both Christian and pagan.
The Christian manuscripts (Greek New Testament, Greek texts of the Church Fathers) triggered a renewed knowledge for Christianity. This led, thanks to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, to the wide publication of the Bible in Latin, of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus, and the protestant reformation with Luther and others. The pagan manuscripts (Greek mythology, Greek philosophy) helped to awake a sense of perspective and to remember a respected and developed culture that was not Christian.
The Renaissance led, in painting, to the technique of three-dimensional perspective. It was also the time of a new awareness about historical perspective: for instance, scenes of the life of Jesus would no more be painted with the clothes of the the time of the painting, instead the painter would try to figure out what were the clothes worn at the time of Jesus.


The scientific revolution can be directly connected to the Renaissance. Thanks to the Greek manuscripts, and a renewed awareness of the science developed in Greece, many in Europe were encouraged to further develop scientific knowledge. This scientific revolution can be described briefly through the ideas of key proponents: Copernicus, Brahe, Galilei, Kepler and Newton.

Nicholaus Copernicus was a renaissance mathematician and astronomer. He wrote the book “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” in 1543, which presented the heliocentric theory, placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe. This theory and its implications would lead to a change of perspective, impacting many domains.

Decades later, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), a Danish nobleman and astronomist, developed very accurate measures of the position of the different planets, thus exemplifying very well what would become the modern experimental method: precise observations that could lead to scientific discoveries. This inductive method, collecting precise data before developing a theory, was of key importance. If the Greeks did seek natural explanations to physical phenomenons, they did not make precise measurements. They mostly held the view that higher knowledge is passively received rather than actively acquired, something that can be related to Plato and his philosophy.

Following Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) would continue to develop precise measurements, in the process using the newly invented telescope (1608) and improving it. He would be remembered for advocating the copernican theory of heliocentrism, and for his struggle against the Catholic authorities that were still championing Aristotle’s view that the earth was at the center of the universe. In some ways, he would become a perfect example to justify the later enterprise of the Enlightenment: the rejection of the Catholic authority, and the advocacy of a science freed from religious dogmas.

Thanks to Tycho Brahe’s precise measurements, the one who had been his assistant, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), would be able to define and prove the laws on planetary motion (around 1620). With Kepler’s laws, we see a combination of different elements that are key to the modern scientific revolution: precise observation, then the elaboration of a mathematical model to match the collected data, then confirmation through prediction of what the future measurements should be. If Kepler’s laws were impressive, beyond the widespread belief in astrology (Kepler earned a living by reading horoscopes for the rich and powerful), they did not have much impact on the practical life of people.

Isaac Newton, with the publications of Philosopiae Naturals Principia Mathematica (or the shortened title “Principia”) in 1687, presented his hypothesis of what would be called the law of gravitation, with the amazing implications that it would have. He showed that Kepler’s laws could be deduced from his law of gravity. This theory did not relate only to planets but also to all the daily experiences that everyone could make. Scientific discoveries were no more limited to distant planets, it was impacting all the practical life.


I cannot highlight enough the deep implications of this scientific approach. By finding that mathematics described accurately the world around us, it seemed as if mathematics were at the foundation of reality. In turn, this meant that no supernatural explanation was anymore needed for anything happening. What was needed was to know the initial position of all the objects, and then you could conclude how things would evolve in the future.

Newton strongly argued for the existence of God as the masterful creator, and upheld that God still intervened in the world.
Leibniz would push Newton’s ideas one step further, stating that if God made a perfect world, it did not require anymore the intervention of God.
This position would give birth to what would be called deism. Deism is a theological/philosophical position that combines the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge with the conclusion that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a single creator of the universe.
Deism implied that there was no more space for the supernatural in daily life. Therefore, prayer could no more expect an intervention of God, people who thought they could hear God were deluded, and the Bible could no more be a source of authority or revelation.

Toward the end of the 19th century, through the influence of rationalistic philosophers like Schopenhauer, Marx or Nietzsche, the remaining postulate of the existence of God as creator would be discarded, so that for many people deism logically morphed into atheism.
Atheism in its most radical form, is the position or belief that there are no God or gods at all in this world.
It is useful to remember that during the 19th century, and up until the 1930s, most astronomers believed that the universe had no beginning, therefore removing the need to study the origin and the influence of a creator. What was needed was to study the present world, God being clearly out of the picture in this endeavor.


This view of the Enlightenment, that God was not influencing the present world, would become a strong foundation of my worldview. I would also reject any belief in a creator, thus taking strongly the position of radical atheism.
It meant that I would find ridiculous to speak of miracles, and the authority of any Christian belief or of Scriptures was for me at best an illusion, at worst a deception. I would despise the Catholic Church as a structure of the past, doomed to disappear like the French monarchy had vanished away.
If a Christian would try to convince me, and would speak to me of the danger of hell, I would laugh at this preposterous notion. I was ready to die - this was the reality I accepted, despising those who tried to elude death with theories of afterlife. When I would come to speak to a Christian, I would do my best to convince him or her that faith in God was only a crutch for weak people, that science was all they needed in life. Happily, in these days, I was not very skilled at convincing people.


When I was 18 years old, at the end of my high school years, I learned that my sister, who then studied in Versailles in a ‘classe préparatoire’ was preparing to be baptized Catholic. I found it profoundly stupid, so I did my best to deter her from going further, to no avail. The Sunday when she left home to be baptized, all my family accompanied her, although they did not believe in God. All except me, and one of my uncles who stayed with me. We sat on a bench at home, mocking her and letting her go without us.
Years later, when I prepared for baptism, I asked my sister Cécile to become my “marraine” (godmother). She smiled and accepted. Then, she shared with me how hard it had been for her to face my fierce opposition and challenging arguments. Sometimes, she had needed to get away from me,  crying in the secret of her room, because of the pain I was inflicting her.

As you can imagine, it would be quite a journey for me to move from this militant and harsh atheism to faith in the living God of Jesus Christ.