Like all Oundelians, I studied TPR in the Third Form; in September 2022, I began my maiden ascent up the department’s surprisingly steep stairs. I was called into the classroom by a Reverend, passing shelves of bibles on my way to my desk positioned next to a poster of Jesus’ ascension.
There was a prevailing smugness in my attitude back then; I viewed the dedication of a department, teacher, classroom and curriculum to religion as absurd. To me, the upcoming lessons were merely a stepping-stone to more important subjects that I could pursue after discarding TPR the next year.
I was expecting another insipid recount of ‘The Good Samaritan’ but our teacher opened with the question of ‘can we prove that God exists?’
In spite of myself, my mind began to surge with argumentative responses. I spent the next fifty minutes carefully formulating questions to challenge the teacher’s and other students’ ideas as the discussion progressed. The lesson was a conversation, unrecognisable from the world of worksheets and bible videos and comprehension questions with which I was so familiar and so frustrated.
Throughout the year, I noticed a peculiar shift in my reasoning: I began to betray myself. I was no longer arguing solely for atheism but equally for religious faiths and their legitimacy. At this point it felt like my personal beliefs were redundant; it was all about the debate. I craved more: I loved the sciences but the precision of its graphs and theories could never match the excitement generated in me by this depth of thought. Without hesitation, I joined the half of my year that picked TPR GCSE.
A key figure of our Fourth and Fifth Form lessons was Richard Dawkins. He was the ‘go-to’ atheist for quotes and opinions to use in our essays. I vividly remember my pride when being told that he was an Old Oundelian; that this figurehead of atheist philosophy that we learnt about had been to the same school as me. Straight away, I felt a sense of admiration for this man about whom I knew very little.
Dawkins, in fact, disagrees with the very lessons in which he is being discussed. He argues for the abolishment of the study of theology, stating that “a positive case now needs to be made that [theology] has no real content at all, or that it has any place whatsoever in today’s university culture”. He would suggest stripping philosophy of its inherently theological associations. I have found, though, that an entirely secular study of philosophy is tricky and often circles back to science without making any real progress on the question at hand.
Even just a sprinkling of religious ideas makes a philosophical argument far more meaty. Religion allows a multifaceted backbone for us to bounce philosophical ideas off. Philosophy is a tantalising exercise in reasoning, an open-ended puzzle, for those who are not afraid to take a leap into the unknown.
My attraction to the subject was not one to which I had ever become totally reconciled despite choosing to study it for two years and nearly for two more. The revelation actually came when I was revising for my maths GCSE. Reflecting on why I enjoyed maths problems presented a slightly more accessible task than the question of my recent infatuation with theology. Maths gives us a set of rules and facts and asks us to craft results using logic. The rules we choose in the beginning are not critically important – they may even not be representative of the real world – the interest lies in the reasoning rather than the reality. I suggest that an atheist should approach philosophy as they do maths, start with some rules or in this case some teachings and have fun building up a theory.
Theology, to me, is fundamentally valuable and I refuse to condemn a subject that so many other young people also find to be of interest. If theology is so provocative as to evoke this response from Dawkins and others then studying, by definition, is essential. Debate is a stimulating, intellectually progressive part of human existence as I have come to find throughout the last three years. As someone who has dedicated a large part of their life to the discussion of religion, it seems like Dawkins sees theology as pretty interesting too. Our need for discussion could be seen to be part of our human nature, inherent to our unique evolution: part of our biology.
