We’re talking today about Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. Tillich was a 20th century German-American Protestant theologian who fled the Nazis, and his 1957 book Dynamics of Faith is about the phenomenon of faith. We talked about it a couple weeks back, looking at what Tillich considers to be the limits of faith, and today we’re talking about a passage on atheism.

In his book, Tillich defines faith as something close to commitment or allegiance. It’s not when you’re temporarily or partly invested in something, he says – it’s “the state of being ultimately concerned.” It’s the big one, the thing that receives your total commitment above everything else. Using Tillich’s language, we might say that you have faith in the principles or values that you build your life around. Those are the things that you’re ultimately concerned with. It could be something very elaborate and articulated, like a philosophical system or ideology, or it could be a sort of gut instinct about being a good person, whatever that means for you. Tillich says that it could also be things like nationalism, where you’re committed to the idea of your country above everything else. That’s maybe a little old-fashioned, maybe not something that many people would straightforwardly identify as their ultimate concern today, but it’s useful as an example of what he’s talking about.

Tillich also talks about God as a symbol of ultimate concern. Whatever your values or ultimate concern, he says, that’s in a sense your god, your deity. It’s the thing you commit yourself to. You have a god, and you have faith in it. You have an ultimate concern, and you’re committed to it. Tillich is almost trying to describe a psychological process here. He’s not concerned with the content of any given faith, he’s more focused on its structure and practice, in a William James kind of way. Gods are gods, in this phrasing, because we put them on a pedestal. They don’t need to be literal divine beings: it’s about what they mean to us, not what they are in themselves.

So we’re pretty far away from any theological or metaphysical claims at this juncture. Tillich isn’t talking about doctrine or how you get to heaven. He’s talking about human behaviour. He’s trying to describe how we enshrine our values, how we create and worship ‘gods’. And he makes an interesting comment, in that context, about atheism. In typical usage, we might say that atheism is the belief that God doesn’t exist. It’s a-theism, no gods. But Tillich has defined gods (in a loose, metaphorical way) as the things that we make our ultimate concern. Atheism, in that context, is having no ultimate concern. It’s being without a ‘god’, being without an ultimate value. He frames it as something closer to apathy: “atheism, consequently, can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence.”

So that’s an interesting framing. It’s probably not something many atheists would agree with – they already spend a lot of time rebuffing these claims that they’re somehow less moral or less value-driven. We can imagine some of their critiques of this argument. But Tillich’s framing is useful because it helps us to articulate this specific observable phenomenon in that community. If you’re an outsider to the community, just on a first glance you might feel like it seems counter-intuitive to believe really strongly that God doesn’t exist. It might feel like going beyond any question of evidence and tipping over into what we might call religious atheism – atheism held as an article of faith, as a belief or doctrine. Tillich’s language offers a very simple explanation for that. He would suggest that it’s possible for rationality or the scientific method to become one’s ultimate concern. An atheist might not believe in literal higher powers, but they have an ultimate concern (a ‘god’, in Tillich’s phrasing) and they have faith in it (that is, they are committed to it, concerned with it). That initial impression, Tillich would say, actually identifies something true about how atheism functions.

Again, you know, we can appreciate that not everybody is going to be happy with that framing. If someone’s invested in overcoming what they see as superstition or dogma, they might not like having their efforts reframed within that same sort of language. For example, discussing arguments against God, Tillich says that “Where there is ultimate concern, God can only be denied in the name of God. One God can deny the other one.” That kind of language might make it seem like Tillich is trying to reabsorb atheism into the framework of religion, showing how it’s really just another version of the thing it’s trying to oppose. But I think there’s also something generative about the idea of atheism as commitment to truth. Obviously there are people out there who feel very strongly about truth and reason, and that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Atheism contains a political claim about what our ultimate concern should (or shouldn’t) look like. It’s very much concerned with what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It is, to use Tillich’s language, as committed to an ultimate concern as any other faith.