Posted on 06/11/2009 3:52:59 PM PDT by NYer
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Of course you have. Such "conversion" to atheism is supposed to be the story of all modern, thinking people. But imagine it happening the other way around. Moreover, imagine the convert being a well-informed, public intellectual who had long made it his business to argue that faith is irrational?
Just such a conversion has happened to A.N. Wilson, the 58-year-old British biographer, novelist and man of letters. He was once an observant Anglican and, later, a Roman Catholic, but in the 1980s he lost his faith and began skewering the supposed delusions of the faithful. His antifaith stance was expressed in books such as God's Funeral (1999) and Jesus: A Life (1992). A few weeks ago, however, Mr. Wilson confessed that Christ had risen indeed. He attributed this to "the confidence I have gained with age." He now says he believes that atheists are like "people who have no ear for music or who have never been in love."
Mr. Wilson's story matches that of other skeptical authors who became convinced by Christianity, not least in Victorian Britain, when Darwin and various modern ideas shook the foundations of faith among the educated classes. Among the notable examples from Victorian Britain are Thomas Cooper, the most popular free-thinking lecturer in London in the 1850s; George Sexton, the most academically accomplished secularist intellectual of the time; and Joseph Barker, a well-respected leader of the mid-19th-century free-thinking movement. The 20th century also had its share of writers and intellectuals who rediscovered Christianity as mature thinkers, including T.S. Eliot, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, C.S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and W.H. Auden.
Our modern assumption that thought and faith are incompatible can be traced to the Victorian atheists. As one of them snidely remarked when a fellow secularist came to faith: "I find it hard to believe that someone could progress backwards."
For his part, A. N. Wilson had denounced as dishonest every leading Victorian intellectual who maintained a commitment to orthodox Christianity. Indeed, in God's Funeral he did not just go after the usual targets, such as John Henry Newman, but savaged even Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. They were not presented as simply mistaken, but rather as downright "dishonorable."
Secularist leaders were usually raised religious. As clever youths, they would begin to handle the Bible critically. They prided themselves in being "rational" and would decide that Christian beliefs did not meet this standard. They would then go on to find intellectual satisfaction in picking apart the beliefs of others. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, a book beloved by free-thinkers in the 19th century, systematically went through the Bible, gleefully mocking each book in turn.
 George Sexton, for example, decided that Jesus as presented in the Gospels was so compelling and haunting that only a historical original could account for this: "If Christ be simply an ideal picture, the man who sketched it will be as difficult to account for as the Being himself." |
Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of "mere negations."
Having realized that their method was flawed, they then began to reconsider faith. Christianity, they discovered, spoke to the deepest realities of human experience. George Sexton, for example, decided that Jesus as presented in the Gospels was so compelling and haunting that only a historical original could account for this: "If Christ be simply an ideal picture, the man who sketched it will be as difficult to account for as the Being himself."
Their skeptical pasts did leave a permanent stamp on their thought. Joseph Barker believed as a young man that the Bible was error-free. As a free-thinking lecturer he specialized in highlighting problem passages. As a convert, he conceded that the Bible was not perfect but went on to argue that it was perfectly suited to speak to the human condition. The Swiss Alps are not perfect cones, he observed, but this does not detract from their grandeur. Thomas Cooper declared that his newly rediscovered faith did not include a belief in eternal punishment.
As is the case with Mr. Wilson, intellectuals often pursue long, drawn-out love affairs with Christian thought. Next time you hear someone fume that God is the most contemptible being who never existed, keep in mind that you just might be watching the first act of a divine romantic comedy.
Welcome home, Mr. Wilson!
The Scales will fall from thier eyes.
Amen
It requires much more faith to be an Atheist than to simply, humbly believe.
That's biblical, for we are told unbelievers have no ears to hear, are spiritually blind, and do not know Love.
The root. If there is no right and wrong, then I can kill you, take your stuff, and there's no wrong or guilt to it. This is shear foolishness.
Science.
My uncle went from atheist to Born Again Christian while studying for his PHd in geology.
This story is so famliar to me. I was the same until I honestly sought God. And now atheism sounds so foolish. Professing to be wise, I had become a fool.
ML/NJ
Neat!
I attribute these attitudes to education. Recall that Jesus told us we need to be "like children". Education robs us of that simplicity and launches us into the world of 'intelligentia'. Once we imbibe the notion that we are 'smart' or 'wise', we become our own gods.
May our Lord continue to bless you on your journey!
The problem with most scientists that are atheists is not that they know too much science to believe in God but that they know too little.
I agree, there is just too much proof to know that their is definitely something out there. Some day we will understand it all.
Amen!
Thank you!
Happened to my ex-husband. He is a man of great brilliance, superbly educated at a university famed as a breeding farm for atheists. His own knowledge of his brilliance made him arrogant and created in him a contempt for those who believe. His whole life was built around the premise that there is no God, only what we like and what we don’t like.
Surprise! After years of putting up with his deliberate sin, one day God came up and bopped him on the head. The Lord revealed a portion of His love as a sudden religious experience. It was so overwhelming that X could not even try to explain it away as some kind of neurological event. He is a believer now and it has changed the way he lives and interacts with others. It’s been a beautiful thing to see.
I just wish it had happened a dozen years ago, before our divorce.
“In the opening years of the Twenty-First Century, mainstream science had reached its existential crisis. The tools and techniques of the scientific inquiry had improved to the point where the very fundamentals of the universe could be examined; and as, as the structure and nature of the universe became more and more clear, it began to become obvious that Nature as it was simply could not be reconciled with the base assumption of Nineteenth Century materialism. When examined at their root level, the very mathematics that underlay the physical laws of time and space simply ceased to make sense unless one assumed the existence of an intelligent Lawgiver— and this was the great heresy, the one assumption that the proud materialists simply could not accept.
“But they had no choice. As the first decade of the new millennium waned, men and women of science - the deepest thinkers of the race — were one by one forced to come to the same conclusion: that the Universe was an Artifact, and that somewhere beyond it an Artificier existed. In order to be capable of thinking about anything at all, these apostles of Baconian, materialist science had at last no choice but to admit that Reality was neither a Newtonian machine nor an Einsteinian computer, but a work of art — the product of an artist that men had no choice but to call ‘God’.”
— Galactipedia, “The End of the Secular ‘New World Order’ Part IV: The Theophany”, retrieved 2132.06.12
What an amazing story!!! Sometime God needs to hit us over the head with a 2 x 4 to get our attention. Given what you posted, I think you will find this story equally amazing.
I just wish it had happened a dozen years ago, before our divorce. I just wish it had happened a dozen years ago, before our divorce.
I can empathize with you here. I pray for my ex every day, along with all the members of his family.
May I ask a favor of you? Would you please include my father in your prayers? Like your husband, he needs a Damascus Road experience. Thank you!
To quote someone we all admire, You betcha! It took more than half a century of prayer before my X realized the Truth. But please Freepmail me your dad's name so I can keep everybody straight as I pray. God can tell the anonymous people apart, but I can't.
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