God After Atheism?: A New Account of Reality
New atheism promised clarity. By removing God from the world, it offered an account of reality free from faith and superstition. But in doing so, it left us without an explanation of the universe’s origin, objective morality, or our ultimate purpose.
In response, many have been drawn back to religions they once rejected – traditions that offered meaning and structure, yet continue to face unresolved problems of evil, hiddenness, and dogma.
We are caught between exhausted alternatives. The old stories – of God and atheism – no longer fit the scale and strangeness of the reality we have come to understand.
The difficulty lies with the pictures we have inherited: rigid ways of thinking that force a choice between dirt and divinity. But this is a false choice. Recent work in philosophy suggests more expansive ways of understanding God – ways that do not place divinity outside the world, nor reduce existence to something unexplained and meaningless.
This lecture explores one such framework: a new story of the world where God is not confined to a single universe, but encompasses the full space of what is possible. On this view, reality is far larger than we once imagined. We exist in one of an uncountable number of universes, all unified by a single, fundamental mind.
There is purpose, value, and even an afterlife – not because God stands outside the world, but because God is the world: God of the dirt, encompassed by scientific reality.
PARTICIPANTS
Jack Symes is a philosopher at Durham University His books include Philosophers on Consciousness: Talking about the Mind (2022), Philosophers on God: Talking about Existence (2024), Defeating the Evil-God Challenge: In Defence of God’s Goodness (2024), and Philosophers on How to Live: Talking about Morality (forthcoming). Jack regularly appears on major public platforms, such as BBC Two, The Joe Rogan Experience, Glastonbury Festival, BBC Radio 4, Piers Morgan Uncensored, HowTheLightGetsIn, GB News, PoliticsJoe, The Jordan Peterson Podcast, The Spectator, and LBC. He is also the producer of The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast, one of the UK’s most popular higher education podcasts. He was awarded the BBC New Generation Thinker Prize in 2024.
Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare Magazine. He is also the host of the podcasts Article 13, Writ Large, and Ministry of Ideas. He is the recipient of two John Templeton Foundation grants. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and Harvard Divinity School and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his wife, Mariya and their three children.
SPONSORS