The Great Silence: What Remains After Belief – book review

The Great Silence: What Remains After Belief (2026) by David S. Falls and published by Resource Publications is responded to here by David Warden, editor of Humanistically Speaking.

David Falls is one of our regular writers. He lives in Queen Creek, Arizona, and he is also the author of God’s AI Reckoning: The Final Revelation (2025).

David Falls

David Falls has written a thoughtful, eloquent and deeply personal book. It is clearly the product of many years of reading and reflection, and he wears his scholarship lightly. Philosophy, biblical criticism, psychology, evolutionary biology and history all inform his argument without overwhelming the personal story at its centre. This is not an angry book. It is an honest account of one person’s journey from Christian faith to a secular understanding of the world.

I found myself agreeing with much of it. Like David, I am an ex-Christian, I value scientific enquiry, intellectual integrity, and the willingness to question inherited beliefs. I also share his conviction that goodness, beauty and meaning do not disappear when belief in a supernatural God fades.

Yet as I read, I found myself increasingly in dialogue with the book. David asks what remains after belief in God, and he offers a rich answer: our moral aspirations, our capacity for love, beauty, meaning and community do not disappear when supernatural belief fades. In many respects, I found myself in agreement. But his question prompted another in my own mind. Instead of asking what remains after discarding false beliefs, I began asking whether the deepest problem with religion is not belief itself, but the way religion understands its own language. What if its central mistake is not simply that its claims are false, but that its metaphors have been mistaken for metaphysics?

David's own understanding of God has, of course, moved a long way from the supernatural deity of traditional Christianity. He is not seeking to rescue an all-powerful being who answers prayers or suspends the laws of nature. Instead, he invites us to consider whether words like God, the sacred and transcendence might still point towards aspects of human experience that remain profound even after literal belief has faded. Although I found this an attractive and thoughtful direction of travel, it also prompted me to ask a further question.

Human beings naturally seek agency behind events. When lightning strikes, disease spreads or crops fail, we instinctively ask, “Who did this?” It's easy to see how invisible spirits and gods emerged as explanations of an unpredictable world. But human beings also think through stories, metaphors and personifications. We speak of Mother Nature, Lady Justice and the Grim Reaper. The ancient Greeks understood wisdom through Athena, love through Aphrodite and war through Ares. Over time, these explanatory and symbolic strands became woven together. Gods did not merely explain the world; they also embodied the values, fears and aspirations through which people made sense of it. Reading David's book led me to wonder whether the God of Judaism and Christianity might also be understood in this way. Not as a supernatural person somewhere “out there” explaining natural phenomena, but as a personification of goodness, wisdom, justice and love.

If that were so, then the real difficulty would not be stories, metaphors and personifications. Human beings can scarcely think without symbol and metaphor. No humanist to my knowledge fulminates against terms such as Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper because of their non-existence! The difficulty begins when symbolic language is treated as literal description, when poetry hardens into ontology and personification becomes mistaken for an objectively existing being. In biblical language, one might even call this a form of idolatry. The symbol comes to be treated as an independent supernatural reality rather than as the embodiment of the human values it came to express.

This is where my path begins to diverge somewhat from David's. Much contemporary atheism argues that religious claims fail because they are unsupported by evidence. That is an important argument, and David presents it with clarity and fairness. Yet increasingly I wonder whether both theists and atheists have accepted the same underlying assumption: that the word God is intended to refer to an objectively existing entity whose existence can then be affirmed or denied. Once that assumption is granted, the debate becomes endless. Theists argue that God exists; atheists argue that God does not. But perhaps the more illuminating question is whether the language of God was ever best understood in that realist way. What if, like Mother Nature or Lady Justice, it belongs primarily to the world of symbol and personification?

Some theologians and movements, including the Sea of Faith Network, have explored this symbolic understanding of religious language. It remains, however, a perspective that has received remarkably little attention in mainstream debates between believers and atheists.

Religion has carried some of humanity's highest aspirations. It has expressed our longing for justice, compassion, forgiveness, hope and transcendence. It has also justified oppression, violence and unquestioning authority. The problem is not that religion speaks symbolically. Human beings rely on symbolic language everywhere. We speak not only of God, but of the self, the mind, justice, democracy and countless other abstractions that help us organise experience. The problem arises when symbols are mistaken for independently existing realities and then invested with unquestionable authority. What began as a way of expressing our highest values can become an authority standing over them. When power is attributed to the personification rather than to the values it represents, the symbol becomes an idol.

David himself comes close to this insight in one sentence: “The story of belief was never only about gods. It was about us.” I agree. Throughout The Great Silence, David argues that even after belief in a supernatural God has faded, we continue to seek meaning, belonging, moral purpose and ways of interpreting our lives. Religion, on this view, was never solely about divine beings; it was always a profoundly human enterprise.

My own conclusion, however, is slightly more radical. Religion is only one example of a much wider human tendency. We do not encounter reality directly; we interpret it through concepts, models, stories and metaphors. We speak naturally of the self, human flourishing, autonomy and other abstractions that are indispensable to our thinking, without being objects in the world like mountains or molecules. Humanism, therefore, is not a mirror reflecting reality exactly as it is. It is another human framework through which we interpret experience, cultivate values and orient ourselves in the world. Like every worldview, it should remain open to revision.

David writes warmly about the human task of creating meaning once traditional religious certainties have been left behind. I share that aspiration, although I hesitate slightly over the familiar phrase “making meaning”. To me, meaning seems neither simply invented nor merely discovered. Rather, it is cultivated through the stories, models, metaphors and traditions we inherit and reshape. These are then embodied in our relationships, our communities and our everyday practices. Meaning grows rather than being manufactured.

One of the pleasures of The Great Silence is the quiet beauty with which David writes about wonder, attention and the sacred. He invites us to stop searching for supernatural certainty and instead to attend more closely to the richness of ordinary experience. The silence of his title is not a bleak emptiness but a spaciousness in which love, beauty, compassion and meaning can still be encountered after traditional belief has fallen away.

My own humanism begins from the same attentiveness, but it finds expression less in silence than in conversation. We discover ourselves not only in solitary reflection but in dialogue – with friends, with opponents, and with books such as David's. Conversation is one of humanity's greatest tools for refining our understanding because it continually tests our stories, metaphors and interpretations against those of other people. It is through conversation that our symbolic worlds remain alive and open to revision.