Just as the Bible narrative includes the struggles of individual belief, the actual church contains among its professed and practicing members those who have honest doubts about who, or whether, God is.

I’m wary of generalizations, and I want to be really careful about putting people and their beliefs in categories that take them less than seriously. To the extent theists and atheists alike do this, we come live in a place, as Matthew Arnold wrote, “where ignorant armies clash by night.”

But I do know that many people in the pews are practical atheists. A good friend and mentor, a monk of many years and demonstrable faith, observes that most of us, most days, are “functional atheists.” That is, whatever we profess or practice religiously, we go through our daily tasks as if God didn’t exist. We may inquire into something else, or aspire to faith in a personal God, but we do what works. When daily challenges or quandaries press on us, we often make it up as we go along. I don’t demean that way of coping. Not only may it have great integrity, those very coping mechanisms may give rise to questions. Questions are often what lead to faith.

Speaking for myself (the panelists of "On Faith" don’t have built-in communication among ourselves) the many responses from self-identified atheists to all the questions so far have been notable and have taught me something: I am embarrassingly sheltered, and I tend to talk to my own kind more than I realized. The vehemence of many of these comments has taught me that I need to sharpen my thinking about the faith I profess.

I wonder whether many of the responders are a-religious as much as they are a-theistic. Religion has power for good or ill; an honest and faithful church confesses that truth regularly. Many of us have been hurt by religion, and there’s a reservoir of those hurt feelings that might be fueling atheists’ feelings, if not their thinking.

I would say to my friends who don’t believe in God: Those of us who do believe, know—and honor—more about your position that we or our institutions may say. We should do better. We should be clearer that we include doubt in the life of faith. And, we don’t expect to be free of your hard questions, ever. Yet we believe, and practice, and face life everyday as you do. There’s common ground here, plenty enough to have a productive conversation.