Rowan Williams, being interviewed by Peter Wehner:

…very often the God who’s being attacked and questioned by the Dawkinses and the Graylings and the Pullmans of this world is a God I don’t believe in, either: an individual who sits in the remote parts of the universe and treats the rest of the universe as an intriguing hobby for himself, rather than the God who is much more like the ocean that soaks through everything that is and yet is infinitely beyond it.

I found recently in the work of a 17th-century Welsh Catholic writer, Augustine Baker, a wonderful image: that the soul without God, the soul cut off from God, is like a whale stuck in a pond. It longs for the ocean, he said. It can’t be in the depths where it belongs. Now, I don’t hear very much of that sense in the New Atheists. They come up with all sorts of very neat and, as far as they go, perfectly rational arguments about how difficult it is to believe in some chap out there in midspace.

I want to say, “Well, yeah. I have no interest in a chap out there in outer space, none at all.” But I am quite interested in what the infinite, unconditioned life of generosity is within which I and everything else live. And I have every interest in the story of how that life astonishingly comes to fruition in the middle of our history in the life of Jesus. Now, that’s something I do think I can spend my life thinking and praying about and something that transfigures the horizons in which we live.

So the old chestnut about talking about the existence of God is like saying, “Well, there’s a chocolate teapot infinitely circling the earth, and it happens to be invisible and intangible and incapable of offering any evidence at all for its presence, and I still believe in it.” Well, no. Open a page of St. Augustine or George Herbert or T.S. Eliot or Dostoyevsky, and chocolate teapot doesn’t quite do the work there.