I’m an atheist but I’ve always thought the problem of evil was the least convincing argument against the existence of God.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to see all arguments for the existence of God as sharing something in common with the problem of evil, though: they all want to make faith easy, when it’s supposed to be hard. They pretend to remove doubt from something that has to have doubt at its core in order to be worthwhile.

Maybe that’s because I’ve come to see “God” as a word that refers, not to a supernatural person, but to a transcendent value, and faith as commitment to that value, rather than belief in something for which there is no evidence.

If I call myself an atheist, it’s not because I don’t have values. I do. But I don’t want people to be confused about where my values come from. They come from study, thought, and experience, and not from belief in a being that commands me to embrace them.