Feb. 11, 2026

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By Christopher Beha – The New York Times

My cmnt: This is an article on skepticism especially as it relates to the Christian faith of one man, the author, who spent many years in atheism. This piece is worth the read which is why I posted it. After reading it you may see my response below.

Next week marks the beginning of Lent, the 40-day liturgical season leading up to Holy Thursday. On Ash Wednesday, I’ll join millions throughout the world in fasting, abstaining from meat and receiving ashes on my forehead, along with the reminder that I am dust, and that to dust I will return.

Although a handful of Protestant denominations practice the imposition of ashes, it is generally considered among the most distinctively Roman Catholic traditions. Because it occurs in the middle of a seemingly random winter week, not during a widely recognized holiday season, it tends to sneak up on people outside the faith. It’s the time each year when they are reminded exactly which of their daily acquaintances are practicing Catholics, and it’s often assumed to be a sign of particular devotion.

In reality, however, it is one of the few Catholic rituals that are truly open to anyone. Lapsed or wavering Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, non-Christian theists, and even agnostics and atheists are all welcome. You don’t even have to sit through Mass; many churches simply hand ashes out at the door. The only thing asked of recipients is an awareness of their own fallibility and a desire to repent for their mistakes.

The sense of my own imperfection and my need for help played a large role in my return to the Catholic faith about a decade ago, which is one reason the Lenten season means so much to me. To this end, I have taken since my “reversion” to marking its beginning in another way, by reading T.S. Eliot’s great poem “Ash Wednesday.”

“Because I do not hope to turn again,” the poem begins, insistently. “Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn.”

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Eliot wrote “Ash Wednesday” around the time of his conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927, and I read it at this time each year in part to memorialize my own turnings, from devoted former altar boy to militant atheist and, later, from atheist back to believer. I read it also as a reminder that I might still turn again, however much I hope otherwise. As a reminder to practice what I’ve come to call “skeptical belief.”

To many, this will sound like a bit of a paradox, since skepticism and belief are understood to be in serious tension, if not outright opposition. We are all skeptical at certain times about certain things, but when we refer to someone more generally as a “skeptic,” we tend to mean that this person bases beliefs about the world entirely on the rational examination of objective evidence. More pointedly, we almost always mean that this person does not believe in God. But this is not at all the term’s historical meaning.

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis is often counted as the first philosophical skeptic. His complete doubt about the possibility of any human knowledge extended so far that, according to an ancient, possibly apocryphal account, he refused even to accept the evidence of his senses while walking down the street, “taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not.” (His less skeptical friends followed behind to keep him out of trouble.)

Pyrrho’s first great modern disciple, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, would not even say that he knew nothing, which seemed to express too much certainty. He preferred to put the matter as a question: “What do I know?” Yet Montaigne’s essays contain countless expressions of Christian piety. Precisely because we can’t have knowledge about even the most basic points, he argued, we must inevitably take certain things on faith — at least, if we don’t have friends kind enough to spend their lives guiding us around dogs and carts.

It’s possible to understand the entire modern philosophical tradition as an effort to grapple with the extreme skepticism that Montaigne reintroduced to Western culture without falling, as Montaigne did, back on faith. Four hundred and fifty years later, that project has brought us to a strange point.

Seemingly the worst thing a person can be in our era is “credulous.” We understand ourselves as surrounded on all sides by cons and grifts, and we take great pride in seeing through them all. On the other hand, skepticism as practiced by Pyrrho and Montaigne seems almost entirely absent from our culture. The kind of skepticism we practice today involves seeing through all the pseudo-truths around us to the actual truths they attempt to conceal. The dominant intellectual mode is not unknowing but knowingness. We all have our one great truth, which allows us to pierce the pretensions of others.

In the face of this I attempt — with varying degrees of success at varying times — to take a page from Montaigne’s book and embrace skeptical belief. I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.

What does this mean in practice? Embracing skeptical belief does not mean believing things without “really” believing them. It means understanding your beliefs as limited, contingent and fallible, recognizing that they can’t be proved correct, that someone else’s refusal to come around to them does not indicate stupidity or obstinacy or bad faith.

Similarly, a skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others.

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the “zeal of the convert,” the tendency of those whose minds have been changed to embrace their new position with particular ferocity. I had more than my share of it when I became an atheist, and I found it frankly a bit embarrassing to tell some of the people to whom I’d most stridently expressed my new opinions that I had given them up in turn.

I’d like to think that I now have some of the humility of the re-converted. Like Eliot, I do not hope to turn again, but I try to imagine the conversations that would result if I did. And I try to apply what the great skeptic David Hume called a “tincture of Pyrrhonism” to even my most precious certainties.

That doesn’t mean that I’ve given up arguing on behalf of my beliefs. One of the reasons I love Ash Wednesday is that for one day these beliefs are conspicuous to others without my having to say a word. I think I’m a better person on this day on account of that fact.

To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.

What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend. Then I try, on the next day and the next, to imagine I still have that mark on me, that I am constantly being called to live up to the beliefs I claim to hold, to imagine that this is the best case I can ever make for them. As a skeptic, I’ve come to think this is the only way that beliefs can ever really be proved.

But then, I could be wrong.

Christopher Beha is a memoirist and novelist.

Mr. Beha is the author of the forthcoming book “Why I Am Not an Atheist.”

One of The New York Times’s anticipated books of February!

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

National Book Award–longlisted author Christopher Beha recounts his struggle with these questions while making an earnest appeal for readers to seek out answers of their own

Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell’s classic text Why I Am Not a Christian, he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a godless world.

Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.

Beha’s passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith—particularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part—preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.

This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universal—grounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Beha’s long engagement with the enduring human questions, and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves.

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What does it all mean?

Once you’re old enough and have lived long enough you may start to wonder: What does it all mean? You get up, go to school or work, you get married, have children, see your children grow up and get married and have children, you watch politicians come and go, the seasons come and go, you entertain yourself with TV or books or music, you take an occasional vacation, you work for 40 years, you retire, you get old, you get sick, you die.

And so people, including King Solomon – Israel’s Philosopher King, have asked for thousands of years, “Is that all there is?” For this progression from birth to death is more or less the stages of life Solomon wrote so pessimistically about in Ecclesiastes. If you read the book of Ecclesiastes you’re likely to come away a little depressed. Solomon was the first gloomy philosopher.

But before we get to Solomon and what he discovered about life we need to ask and answer some very fundamental questions.

Philosophy is good at asking questions. It is good at organizing these questions into categories that then help us think meaningfully about the world and about life.

So what are the right questions?

When we get down to brass tacks (brass tacks are what are left after you rip up the old carpet) philosophy does help us ask a few very basic and important questions. It does this under the three main categories of being, knowing and acting.

– Being is called Ontology (the study of existence or being) with the most basic questions of: Why are we here? Where did it all come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did I come from? Is there a God? What can we discern about God from His creation? Is the ultimate reality material and the universe or spiritual and God? What governs the universe, chance and necessity or information and purpose?

– Knowing is called Epistemology (the study of knowledge) with the most basic questions of: How do I know what I know? Can we know anything, truly? What is the best method of knowing? Is the world real or an illusion? Are there rules of logic and reason?

– And how we should act is called Ethics (the study of moral behavior) with the most basic questions of: How should we then live? What is the good? What is the highest good? What is evil? Is morality real or do we just make it up to suit us?

From these questions flow a bunch of other questions, such as: Is rationality important to a good life, what is a good life, why do people disagree so much on ethics and moral rules, why should we be moral, what is death and is there a soul, is man at best a highly evolved animal or at worse a programable machine, is there life after death, does God really exist and if so what is he, she or it like, are there any answers to these questions or do we simply accept them as articles of faith, what is faith, what is the meaning of life, how can a person be happy?

Phew! So many questions and so little time!

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Books upon books have been written about just about everything. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. (Ecclesiastes 12:12b)

The Tables Turned

By William Wordsworth – written 1798

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you’ll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun above the mountain’s head, A freshening lustre mellow through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There’s more of wisdom in it. And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart that watches and receives.

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Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)

I believe Christopher Beha, the author of the NYT piece above, is giving good advice. A healthy skepticism about our own infallibility will keep us from arrogance and forcing our views upon everyone else. Ultimately one must still choose between the two dominant worldviews still standing in the world. And whether you like it not they both come from Western civilization. You either believe, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” – or – “In the beginning were the eternal particle(s).”

We can know a great deal about the Creator from His creation. We can know a great deal about the Creator God Yahweh and his Son Jesus Christ from the scriptures, the bible. But none of us can know everything or anything exhaustively. Hence a little skepticism to leaven the whole loaf. At the end of everything we must seek God by faith and humbly beg that He will make Himself known, through His Spirit and touch our hearts with regenerating forgiveness and newness of birth. Otherwise we remain lost in a sea of impossible depth and magnitude, desperately treading water until we fall beneath the waves and drown.

We can either take the advice of Job’s wife and curse God and die, or we can utter the heartfelt words of the publican and say, “God have mercy upon me a sinner.” (Luke 18:13)