In Augustine's Confessions, the first Western autobiography ever written, we discover the probing journey of a brilliant man, traveling through a maze of philosophies before emerging into the light of Christianity. The destination brought him to tears for though he sensed Christianity to be true, it was the last place he expected to turn.

Years later, when Oxford professor C.S. Lewis embarked on his own pursuit of truth, he too ended up at Christianity, converting with great hesitancy: "I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

And then there was Jennifer Fulwiler. When Jennifer stood in a Catholic Church on Easter 2007, preparing to become Catholic, there was hardly a more unlikely convert. Born and raised in a skeptical home, which valued Carl Sagan more than Jesus, Jennifer developed an ardent atheism. She rejected God and joyously mocked religion.

But then she met Joe. Joe was brilliant. He had multiple degrees from Ivy League institutions and was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder. Yet, strangely, he identified as a Christian. "How could such a smart man believe something so ridiculous?" Jennifer wondered.

That led her to rigorously examine the claims of Christianity, if only to prove them wrong. She gorged on books. She frequented online comment boxes and discussion boards. She even started a blog which invited Christians to counter her atheism. This painstaking research, combined with difficult questions about meaning, death, and existence, slowly led Jennifer to believe that God existed, and even more that Jesus was God in the flesh. Though obviously troubling, she could have accepted this "mere Christianity" and moved on. But after exploring many Protestant churches, she distressingly realized that the evidence was pushing her toward a far more unsettling destination: the Catholic Church.

Like Augustine and Lewis before her, Jennifer recounts her compelling journey of conversion through a colorful and stirring memoir, Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It (Ignatius Press). The book's deep soul, humor, and addictive readability help explain why Dean Koontz admitted to enjoying the entire book in just one sitting.

I recently sat down with Jennifer to discuss how she moved from atheism to Catholicism, what books influenced her journey, and why she describes her conversion as "a discovery of a long lost home."

Watch or download our interview below:

Video

Watch the video here (10 minutes)
 

Audio

[audio:https://strangenotions.com/wp-content/uploads/Jen-Fulwiler-Interview-SN.mp3]
Download the interview here (10 minutes)
 

Topics Discussed:

1:14 - Were you really an atheist growing up?
2:57 - What was one of the first chinks in your atheist armor?
4:41 - Can you describe your first attempts at prayer?
6:51 - What suggestions would you have for an unconvinced atheist?
 
 
Follow Jennifer's writing at ConversionDiary.com and read her many articles at Strange Notions. Also, be sure to pick up her magnificent new book, Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It.
 

 

If you liked this discussion, subscribe free to Strange Notions via feed reader or email to ensure sure you don't miss future interviews.
 

We'd also like to note that Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

 
As many friends and readers know, I was an atheist for about a decade—roughly the 1990s, give or take. Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism. I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition. A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14. Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time—“That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc.—I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good. Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise—sola scriptura itself—has absolutely nothing to be said for it. Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that. Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends.

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years. Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me. But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second. (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann. Nietzsche, not so much.) Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth. For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself. For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff. And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school. Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth—something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point. Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the “existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of Nietzsche. Naturally I took it for granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago. On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie was the man, and I regarded his book The Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work. I still do. I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things right. (I discuss what he says about Aquinas in Aquinas.) But the book is intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for some books written by the “New Atheists.” Antony Flew’s challenge to the intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated “ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something to it. Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy on issues of morality and religion. Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of arguments. I used to wonder with a little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy, could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine when he’d come to collect the rent, sitting there sort of like a middle finger on the bookshelf behind me. But if so he never raised an eyebrow or said a word about it.

The argument from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the Catholic Church. (Not because the existence of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism—for reasons I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all—but because the role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence is often really quite mysterious.) To be sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily impressed me philosophically. What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed. Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.

I see from a look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of essays written for different courses in 1992. (I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and annoyed that it wasn’t me.) Attempts to sidestep the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and still don’t. My Master’s thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like Plantinga. I haven’t read it in years, but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d still agree with it.

I was also greatly impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics to something as rarefied as the cause of the world. J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a problem I found compelling. Moreover, the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him. Even if something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and evil”—He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.) The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.

Those were, I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes. What is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still find compelling. As I would come to realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed. And as my longtime readers know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable. The fideism that I found (and still find) so appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the mainstream classical theist tradition either. And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion. But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition.

It is this classical tradition—the tradition of Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics—that I had little knowledge of then. To be sure, I had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anselm that pretty much every philosophy student reads—several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium, and so forth. Indeed, I read a lot more than that. I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my undergraduate years. I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God. I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be sure—but also a bit of Gilson. I read all this while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years, and I still didn’t understand the classical tradition.

Why not? Because to read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen—especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing. Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate. You’ll take whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant. “This part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares...” Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong?

Well the answer is very, very far. It took me the better part of a decade to see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my philosophical thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion. The first of them had to do instead with the philosophy of language and logic. Late in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic and language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and what they express. (Propositions? Meanings? Thoughts? That’s the question.) Similar themes would be treated in courses I took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa Barbara. Certain arguments stood out. There was Alonzo Church’s translation argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought”. Outside of class, I discovered Karl Popper’s World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz. The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance. As the arguments sank in over the course of months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good.
 
 
Originally posted at Edward Feser's blog. User with author's permission.
(Image credit: Daemen)

There’s a huge movement that’s sweeping Austin right now called Explore God. If you live in central Texas, you know what I’m talking about. You pull out of your driveway and you see a sign in the yard across the street. You get on the highway and there’s a billboard. You drive past a church to see a big Explore God banner out front, then, on your way home, more signs dot the houses as you drive through your neighborhood.

I was blown away by the saturation level that the people behind this movement managed to achieve, and curious about the campaign’s content. Since it seems to be targeting seekers and non-believers, I pulled up the section of the website that discusses atheism to see whom they got to address this topic. To my shock, I found...

Me.

I vaguely remembered the time a camera crew visited my house when I was 9,000 months pregnant. Evidently that was for this Explore God thing. I had no idea! Well, I had some idea. I mean, they said something about the internet and God and billboards, but I didn’t catch most of it since I was busy trying to find a way to ask if they needed any footage of me taking a three-hour nap.

Anyway, I would have eventually figured out that something was up, since my email and social media accounts have been hit with a new round of feedback from the online atheist world. It’s been a while since I’ve had large numbers of people calling my conversion, my sanity, and my mental coherence into question, and it’s provided me with a good opportunity to take a step back and ask myself, Why did I become a Christian?

I’ve been pondering the question for the past few days as I fold laundry and make lunches, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

On Having Proof

 
The issue that arises over and over again when you talk about atheist-to-Christian conversions is one of proof. We atheists had seen plenty of people concoct nonsensical and internally inconsistent belief systems because they confused “what feels good” with “what is true.” It struck me as a very dangerous path to start assenting to beliefs that cannot be disentangled from the messy world of subjective experience.

Deep down in my heart of hearts, I might feel that the sun revolves around the earth...but before I start announcing this as a truth about the way the universe works, I should go ahead and examine the evidence to see if it is actually true. It is this kind of never-wavering requirement for proof that allows us to have a clear-eyed look at the universe. No area of life should be exempt from this sort of analysis, certainly not religion.

Doesn’t that mean, then, that it’s impossible for any person who holds to this way of thinking to be a believer? At most, you could be an agnostic. But since religion cannot be proven in any kind of verifiable way, a person cannot both subscribe to an evidence-based way of evaluating the world and be a believer. One or the other has to go. Right?

For most of my life, I would have said yes. Absolutely, yes. But then, about 10 years ago, I began to reconsider.

Filming for #ExploreGod

I began to consider that many of the pioneers of science believed in God—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Boyle, and Mendel, to name just a few. Almost all the great Greek and Roman thinkers of antiquity believed that supernatural forces were at work in the world. In fact, among people considered to be the greatest minds of history, only a small percentage were atheists.

Realizing that so many bright people believed in God didn’t make me think they were right—after all, there are bright people in every belief system—but it did pique my interest about the issue of proof.

Was I really ready to say that I was a more analytical thinker than my engineer grandfather? Was I seriously going to claim that the monk Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, did not require evidence before believing a theory to be true? Did I honestly think that it never occurred to Galileo to question assumptions?

These questions lingered in the back of my mind as a series of events played out that led me to consider that there might be more to life than the material world alone. I set out on a search for truth about the spiritual realm, which pretty quickly led me to the only lasting world religion whose founder claimed to be God. I came to see that there was a strong case that a person named Jesus of Nazareth did exist. I thought it was interesting that Christianity spread like wildfire through the ancient world, despite the fact that becoming a Christian often meant persecution or even death.

I began reading works by the great Christian thinkers, and was surprised that their arguments in favor of belief were more intriguing than the ones I’d always heard (mainly “Shut up,” and “You’re going to hell”). In fact, this was some of the most reasonable, lucid writing I’d ever encountered.

Yet I still had not seen proof. I was caught in a no-man’s land between finding the case for Christianity extremely compelling, and not being able to take the leap to belief because I could not prove it to be true.

I didn’t know where to turn, so I decided to do an experiment: something rang true about Augustine’s famous statement that you must believe so that you might understand, and so I began to live my life as if God did exist. I prayed, even though I felt like I was talking to myself; I followed the Christian moral code; I read the Bible and honestly tried to understand what it might be trying to teach me. I conformed my life to a God-centered life, even thought I wasn’t sure I believed that God existed.

There was no big thunder-and-lightning encounter with Jesus, and, frankly, I only rarely “felt” God’s presence. But once I began this experiment, it was as if some hidden, tremendously powerful magnet had been activated within me that began pulling me in one direction. One odd “coincidence” after another formed a breadcrumb trail to lead me to God, and it sure did seem like some external force was acting in my life in a real way.

But the most interesting part was this:

The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me; the more human history made sense to me; the more I started to make sense to me. The picture of human life that I’d formed based on science alone now seemed incomplete. I still believed everything I’d learned through the lens of science, but I now saw a whole other dimension to the world around me. It was like the difference between looking at a picture of a double-fudge chocolate cake and having one in front of me to smell, touch, and taste: everything I knew before was still there, but I was now experiencing it in a much more intense and vivid way.

I’d considered my life before this God experiment to be good, and it was in many ways, but it now seemed disordered, confused, and flat compared to the life I had now. Little lingering issues faded away; parts of life that had seemed overwhelming were diffused and put in their proper place; I saw that certain actions that had seem innocuous in my atheist worldview had caused great harm to me and to others. I was finally able to put a name to the deep stirrings within my soul I’d experience when listening to a profound piece of music or hearing about an act of evil; I understood why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, what drove the efforts to build the great cathedrals. For the first time I felt the depth of my potential as a human, a woman, and a mother.

When I considered this experience in light of the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth, the improbable spread of early Christianity, and the seamless and perfectly, internally-consistent traditional Christian moral code that has stood strong for two thousand years, something clicked. To borrow from an analogy I once heard someone else use, it was like finding the box top that made all the puzzle pieces come together. Atheism allowed me to complete a few sections, but its box top had me constantly jamming pieces together in a way that didn’t work. With Christianity, everything snapped into place.

Finally, I had found my proof—though it wasn’t the type of proof that I’d originally been looking for.

What I came to see is that there are different kinds of proof in the world. The process for proving that the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years from earth is different than the process for proving that the bad guy committed the crime, and the process for proving that God exists is more different still.

And so, to the folks who want to know what kind of proof I have to offer for my Christian beliefs, I would say this:

I can show you lots of evidence, and, if you’re willing to consider it with an open mind, I think I can make the case that this belief system is at least worth a second look. But I cannot prove its truth to you in the way I can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. The human soul is a necessary component of the God experiment, and the laboratory in which it takes place is the individual human heart. Yes, there is compelling, verifiable evidence for the truths of this belief system, but an analysis of evidence will not—cannot—get you all the way there.

If you are standing back and waiting for the data alone to convince you that God exists, that’s like holding a piece of litmus paper above a solution but never dipping it in. You can have a complete understanding of how the hydrogen atoms in the liquid would potentially interact with the dye on the paper, but until the paper has contact with the solution, the experiment is not complete.

And guess what: in the God experiment, your entire life is the litmus paper.

So no, you absolutely do not have to check your analytical, evidence-based way of evaluating the world at the door when you step into the waters of spirituality. Just understand that when you begin to explore God, you’re looking for an entirely different kind of proof.
 
 
Originally posted at Conversion Diary. Used with author's permission.

Let me get this straight: you, a presumably rational individual who writes science fiction stories for a living, sincerely believes that the creator of our 13.7 billion year-old universe of 70 sextillion stars magically impregnated a human female about 2000 years ago—a woman who then gave birth to a son named Jesus who performed miracles, rose from the dead, and served as the creator’s messenger to humanity?
 
This might make for a mildly interesting, if outlandish, science fiction story, but the source of your belief system? If you’re going to base your life philosophy on absurd myths, why not choose something a bit more interesting? Why not master the Dark Side of the Force or the Golden Path, becoming a Sith Lord or a God-Emperor and strive to rule a Galaxy? Why choose something as ridiculous and wretched as Christianity? I must admit I am rather perplexed.

 
I get these sorts of emails fairly often, and here's what I said in reply:

I am more than a presumably rational individual. I was a champion of atheism who gave arguments in favor of atheism so convincing that three of my friends gave up their religious belief due to my persuasive reasoning powers, and my father stopped going to church.

Upon concluding through a torturous and decades-long and remorseless process of logic that all my fellow atheists were horribly, comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics, and logic, and my hated enemies the Christians were right, I wondered how this could be. The data did not match the model.

Being a philosopher and not a poseur, I put the matter to an empirical test. For the first time in my life, I prayed, and said:
 

“Dear God. There is no logical way you could possibly exist, and even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination. So I can think of no possible way, no matter what the evidence and no matter how clear it was, that you could prove your existence to me. But the Christians claim you are benevolent, and that my failure to believe in you inevitably will damn me. If, as they claim, you care whether or not I am damned, and if, as they claim, you are all wise and all powerful, you can prove to me that you exist even though I am confident such a thing is logically impossible. Thanking you in advance for your cooperation in this matter, John C. Wright.”

 
And then my mind was at rest. I had done all I needed to do honestly to maintain my stature as someone not who claimed to be logical, objective, and openminded, but who was logical, objective, and openminded.

Three days later, with no warning, I had a heart attack, and was lying on the floor, screaming and dying.

Then I was saved from certain death by faith-healing, after which–

1) I felt the Holy Spirit enter my body, after which–

2) I became immediately aware of my soul, a part of myself which, until that time, I reasoned and thought did not exist-

3) I was visited by the Virgin Mary, her son, and His Father-

4) Not to mention various other spirits and ghosts over a period of several days–

5) Including periods of divine ecstasy, and an awareness of the mystical oneness of the universe, and-

6) A week or so after that I had a religious experience where I entered the mind of God and saw the indescribable simplicity and complexity, love, humor, and majesty of His thought, and I understood the joy beyond understanding and comprehended the underlying unity of all things, and the paradox of determinism and free will was made clear to me, as was the symphonic nature of prophecy. I was shown the structure of time and space.

7) And then Christ in a vision told me that He would be my judge, and that God judges no man. I mentioned this event to my wife. Then about a month later, when I was reading the Bible for the first time beyond the unavoidable minimum assigned in school, I came across the passage in the book of John, a passage I had never seen before, and to which no Christian in my hearing had ever made reference, which said the same thing in the same words:
 

"For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes. Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to his Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father." — John 5:21-22

 
8) And then I have had perhaps a couple dozen prayers miraculously answered, so much so that I now regard it as a normal routine rather than some extraordinary act of faith.

So I would say that my snide little prayer was answered with much more than I had asked, and I was given not just evidence, and not just overwhelming evidence, but joy unspeakable and life eternal.

(I also regard this overwhelming deluge of evidence to be shameful before my fellow Christian, since the saying told to Doubting Thomas—"Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed"—is a blessing denied me. In hindsight, if only I had not been so arrogant,  I could have glanced around at the earth and sky, and seen the intricacy, wonder, and beauty of nature, regarded the unanswerable authority of the conscience within me, and known that I was a created being inside a created cosmos, not a random sandheap blown for a season into a meaningless shape by blind winds. Any child can see it, and all children do.)

To me, the universe was death row, and I was a condemned prisoner who believed everything outside death row was delusion and wishful nonsense. But then I got a call from the governor of the universe, commuting my sentence. I will live forever, as will we all. This was my repayment for a life spent in blasphemy and hatred and slander against God. Instead of smiting me as I damned well deserved, He spared me, and exulted me, and showered me with grace.

I was converted.

I was prepared to say adieu to logic and reason and just take things on faith, when I then found out that the only people who think you have to say adieu to logic and reason in order to take things on faith are crackpots both Christian and atheistic.

Every non-crackpot thinks faith is that on which you rely when unreasonable fears tempt you to disbelieve that to which your reason has consented. If your father says you can dive off the high dive with no risk of death, and he has never lied in the past, and your reason tells you to trust him, it is rational to take his word on faith and jump, and it is irrational to let your eyes overestimate the danger poised by the height.

I then discovered that the Christian world view makes sense of much that the atheistic or agnostic worldview cannot make sense of. I found that even on its own philosophical terms, Christianity is a more robust explanation of the cosmos and man’s place in it, answering many questions successfully that atheists both claim cannot be answered, and then, without admitting it, act in their lives as if the question were answered, such as how to account for the rational faculties of man, the universality of moral principles, the order of the cosmos, how best to live, etc.

Turning to my atheist friends, I then discovered none of them, not one, could give me even so reasonable an argument as I was expert in giving in favor of atheism.

They reasoned as follows: “God cannot possibly exist. Therefore any evidence that you encountered that God exists must be hallucination, mis-perception, faulty memory, self-deception, coincidence, or anything else no matter how farfetched and absurd. Since any evidence that you encountered that God exists must be hallucination, mis-perception, faulty memory, self-deception, coincidence, or anything else no matter how farfetched and absurd, therefore none of your evidence proves God exists.”

No matter what they saw, no matter what they heard, no matter how the world was against them, they would go to the lions rather than look at the evidence, lest their faith in their faithlessness be shaken.

When I pointed out that this was circular reasoning, they called me bad names.

One skeptic, in a bit of a lapse of his vaunted presumably rational character, told me solemnly that I could not possibly have had Jesus tell me something from a book in the Bible I had never read before. He said that I had read it afterward, and developed the previously undiscovered ability to edit and rewrite my memories, which I then used on myself, so that I only thought I remembered Jesus telling me about the nonjudgmentalism of God. The memory was created after I read the passage, and then back-dated. Then I used this power again to make myself forget that I had the power to make myself forget things.

I asked him if I also had the power to rewrite my wife’s memory, since she remembers me telling her about the passage before I read it. He then tried to cut the conversation off, while accusing me of being irrational.

Another atheist told me I induced a heart attack in myself with my previously undiscovered heart-attack inducing power. And then cured the heart pain with my previously undiscovered heart-attack-curing power. I did both things in order to convince myself falsely of a doctrine I did not believe and had no interest in believing, but, unbeknownst to myself, my secret desire to believe was so great that it overwhelmed my sanity and seized control of my subconscious biological and cardiovascular processes. When I questioned him about such things as whether he was familiar with my medical record, or when I asked to see the evidence supporting this theory, he called me names.

I did not get the opportunity to ask him by what means he discovered the hidden workings of my secret unspoken desires, since he had never spoken to me, and he was not within normal mind-reading range. I did not get a chance to ask him whether this strange ability to harm and heal myself at will was something all people had, or whether he thought I had a superpower due to being bitten by a radioactive spider or something of the sort.

Another atheist told me that that heart failure was a coincidence, not a direct result of my prayer tempting God Almighty, and if that had not happened, something else like a car accident would have happened. Since I am irrational, he said, I would have drawn an improperpost hoc ergo propter hoc conclusion no matter what happened, on the grounds that God cannot exist no matter what the evidence says, nor how obvious it is, and so anyone who draws the obvious conclusions from the evidence MUST be irrational.

He, at least, did not call me names, aside from claiminh that I would have made an irrational lapse in judgment no matter what had happened after praying my one experimental prayer to a God in which I had no particle of belief, in order to sustain and support my (nonexistent, at that time) belief.

He continues to suffer the false-to-facts belief that he can read my mind back through time and see the internal workings of my psychology during events where he was not present.

I tried gently to point out the logical error in trying to use reason to persuade me that he, a stranger to me, knew that I suffered from a mental illness that prevented me from reasoning, whereas I, who have access to things like my past history and my medical records and the contents of my thinking, have more authority to speak to the issue than he does, until and unless I am impeached as a witness.

In general, the argument that I am impeached as a witness on the grounds that my testimony did not confirm the prejudices and assumptions of a third party is not one likely to prevail in a court of law, or as a debate among sober philosophers, scientists, nor anyone trained in rigorous reasoning.

I used to be one of you, my dear atheists, and I was good at my job. But enough about me!

My question for you is this: if science discovered tomorrow that the universe was half its apparent age, and estimated the stars as half their current number, would the belief in God somehow be twice as credible in your eyes?

If so, why so?

If not, then, logically, the age of the universe and the number of stars has no bearing on the credibility of belief in God or in the Incarnation.

Again, if you are attempting to persuade me that I should not believe in unusual events, or unheard-of or hard-to-believe events, on the grounds that no unusual nor unheard-of nor hard-to-believe events ever happen, simple logic shows that this cannot be the case:

Logically, every ordinary event is unheard-of before we hear of it. Even the first example of repeated events is unusual until the second example occurs; and events are hard-to-believe when and only when our expectations and our experience does not match: therefore every novelty is as incredible as the platypus when first encountered. Therefore not only do incredible events happen, they must happen, for if they did not, the concept of credibility could not exist.

If, on the other hand, you are arguing that I ought not believe reports of miracles on that grounds that miracles do not exist, and that we know miracles do not exist on the grounds that no believable reports of them are heard, you are arguing in a circle.

You are also implying that the human race, almost all of whom believe in gods, ghosts, magic and miracles of one sort or another, except for that tiny minority of persons who are consistent atheists, just so happened to have all made the same lapse of judgment in the matter of paramount and foundational importance in their lives. And that they continue to do so, some of whom would go to the lions rather than re-examine the aforesaid lapse of judgment. While it is possible that everyone during the parade is out of step except the fond mother’s son in the old joke, this would seem to be as unusual, unheard-of and hard-to-believe as a Virgin birth, if not more so.

The argument that miracles are unbelievable because they are unbelievable, even if it were not circular, is less persuasive than may at first appear, when proffered to a juror who is himself a skeptical eyewitness to several miracles, answered prayers, visions, religious experiences, knowledge of events before they happened, et cetera.

Obviously, I who have seen miracles ex postiori, cannot adopt the a priori assumption that miracles cannot exist and retain my integrity as a philosopher, or my honor as a man. There is simply no going back.
 
 
Originally published at Sci Fi Wright. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Family Wings)

Last Easter, when I was just beginning to explore the possibility that, despite what I had previously believed and been brought up to believe, there might be something to the Catholic faith, I read Letters to a Young Catholic by George Weigel. One passage in particular struck me.

Talking of the New Testament miracles and the meaning of faith, Weigel writes: “In the Catholic view of things, walking on water is an entirely sensible thing to do. It’s staying in the boat, hanging tightly to our own sad little securities, that’s rather mad.”

In the following months, that life outside the boat—the life of faith—would come to make increasing sense to me, until eventually I could no longer justify staying put. Last weekend I was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church.

Of course, this wasn't supposed to happen. Faith is something my generation is meant to be casting aside, not taking up. I was raised without any religion and was eight when 9/11 took place. Religion was irrelevant in my personal life and had provided my formative years with a rolling-news backdrop of violence and extremism. I avidly read Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, whose ideas were sufficiently similar to mine that I could push any uncertainties I had to the back of my mind. After all, what alternative was there to atheism?

As a teenager, I realized that I needed to read beyond my staple polemicists, as well as start researching the ideas of the most egregious enemies of reason, such as Catholics, to properly defend my world view. It was here, ironically, that the problems began.

I started by reading Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address, aware that it had generated controversy at the time and was some sort of attempt—futile, of course—to reconcile faith and reason. I also read the shortest book of his I could find, On Conscience. I expected—and wanted—to find bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism. Instead, I was presented with a God who was the Logos: not a supernatural dictator crushing human reason, but the self-expressing standard of goodness and objective truth towards which our reason is oriented, and in which it is fulfilled, an entity that does not robotically control our morality, but is rather the source of our capacity for moral perception, a perception that requires development and formation through the conscientious exercise of free will.

It was a far more subtle, humane, and, yes, credible perception of faith than I had expected. It didn't lead to any dramatic spiritual epiphany, but did spur me to look further into Catholicism, and to re-examine some of the problems I had with atheism with a more critical eye.

First, morality. Non-theistic morality, to my mind, tended towards two equally problematic camps: either it was subjective to the point of meaninglessness or, when followed logically, entailed intuitively repulsive outcomes, such as Sam Harris’s stance on torture. But the most appealing theories which could circumvent these problems, like virtue ethics, often did so by presupposing the existence of God. Before, with my caricatured understanding of theism, I’d considered that nonsensical. Now, with the more detailed understanding I was starting to develop, I wasn’t so sure.

Next, metaphysics. I soon realised that relying on the New Atheists for my counter-arguments to the existence of God had been a mistake: Dawkins, for instance, gives a disingenuously cursory treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas in The God Delusion, engaging only with the summary of Aquinas’s proofs in the Five Ways—and misunderstanding those summarized proofs to boot. Acquainting myself fully with Thomistic-Aristotelian ideas, I found them to be a valid explanation of the natural world, and one on which atheist philosophers had failed to make a coherent assault.

What I still did not understand was how a theology that operated in harmony with human reason could simultaneously be, in Benedict XVI’s words, “a theology grounded in biblical faith”. I’d always assumed that sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), with its evident shortcomings and fallacies, was how all consistent, believing Christians read the Bible. So I was surprised to discover that this view could be refuted just as robustly from a Catholic standpoint—reading the Bible through the Church and its history, in light of Tradition—as from an atheist one.

I looked for absurdities and inconsistencies in the Catholic faith that would derail my thoughts from the unnerving conclusion I was heading towards, but the infuriating thing about Catholicism is its coherency: once you accept the basic conceptual structure, things fall into place with terrifying speed. “The Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole,” wrote philosopher Edith Stein in The Science of the Cross: “If we become immersed in one, we are led to all the others.” The beauty and authenticity of even the most ostensibly difficult parts of Catholicism, such as the sexual ethics, became clear once they were viewed not as a decontextualised list of prohibitions, but as essential components in the intricate body of the Church’s teaching.

There was one remaining problem, however: my lack of familiarity with faith as something lived. To me, the whole practice and vernacular of religion—prayer, hymns, Mass—was something wholly alien, which I was reluctant to step into.

My friendships with practicing Catholics finally convinced me that I had to make a decision. Faith, after all, isn’t merely an intellectual exercise, an assent to certain propositions; it’s a radical act of the will, one that engenders a change of the whole person. Books had taken me to Catholicism as a plausible conjecture, but Catholicism as a living truth I came to understand only through observing those already serving the Church within that life of grace.

I grew up in a culture that has largely turned its back on faith. It’s why I was able to drift through life with my ill-conceived atheism going unchallenged, and at least partially explains the sheer extent of the popular support for the New Atheists: for every considerate and well-informed atheist, there will be others with no personal experience of religion and no interest in the arguments who are simply drifting with the cultural tide.

As the popularity of belligerent, all-the-answers atheism wanes, however, thoughtful Christians able to explain and defend their faith will become an increasingly vital presence in the public square. I hope I, in a small way, am an example of the appeal that Catholicism can still hold in an age that at times appears intractably opposed to it.

 
 
Originally posted at The Catholic Herald. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

Maybe you're an atheist who has been reading and commenting here for a while. Or perhaps this is your first visit to Strange Notions. Whatever the case, the question remains: what should you do if Catholicism begins making sense? Leah Libresco faced that question head on in June 2012 when, after months of wrestling with her lifelong atheism, she decided to enter the Catholic Church. In this article, Leah offers advice for those in the same boat today:
 

So you think you might be a Catholic?

Maybe you’re a former atheist who plans to convert to Catholicism, or maybe you’re still an atheist but are a little uncomfortable with how plausible Catholicism seems as an alternative hypothesis. Either way, you want to spend a little time exploring Catholicism and figuring out how and whether to convert. This article is for you.
 

But I don’t know what to decide!

Luckily, you don’t have to decide. Catholicism is either true or not, before and after you change your mind. Gravity doesn’t fluctuate between true and false depending on your beliefs, and neither does the Church. So your job isn’t so much about deciding as it is learning about and recognizing the world you already live in.

Recognition does carry certain responsibilities. If you try to ignore gravity, you’ll quickly find yourself bruised or worse. If Catholicism seems to be true, but you choose to ignore it, you deny yourself opportunities for healing and strength in the face of Man’s broken nature. So, if you think Catholicism might be true, due diligence calls for at least some further investigation.
 

Ok, what then? How do I investigate?

Sites like Strange Notions will certainly help, but you may also want to join a Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) class. Contact a nearby parish and ask to be connected with the RCIA teacher (the priest or office staff should be able to help.) If you’re looking on the parish website, you probably want to email the Director of Religious Education (DRE). RCIA classes are meant to help you understand Catholicism, so you can figure out whether you accept it. When you say ‘Amen,’ we want to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into, and are consenting with a willing and joyful heart. RCIA classes cover basic Catholic theology and help you get a handle on how your new faith is lived.
 

But what if I’m not sure?

Enrolling in RCIA classes isn’t a promise to convert. The first time I attended RCIA classes, I didn’t plan to convert; I just wanted to learn about Catholicism directly from the Catholic Church. And I was still unconvinced by the time Advent rolled around. The other students in the class were making a public declaration of their intention to convert, so I dropped out of the class. The next year, after a bit more reading, arguing, and thinking, I enrolled again, this time meaning to stay to the end.
 

What should I tell my parents/friends/coworkers/cat?

It’s fine to take a little time before discussing your thoughts with friends and family. You’ll want to speak to them eventually, but you’re allowed a little time to come to peace with your decision before you wade into fights or discussions. Remember, there’s a lot of philosophical diversity among atheists, so the points that were convincing to you may not be compelling to someone who starts with very different assumptions. I find it helpful to approach stressful discussion not as debates, but as explanations. At the end of the conversation, I want my friend to understand what my reasoning was even if she may still disagree with.
 

But what if a friend brings up a question I don’t know the answer to?

It’s alright not to have answers to every question you get asked. If your friend says something like, “But isn’t the translation of the third word in the second Epistle contested?” It’s fine to say, “I don’t know. But that word isn’t really what my conversion hinged on. So I might be curious about looking it up, but I don’t know the answer now, and that’s not what changed my mind.” It can also be helpful, for you and your friend, to table a disagreement until you speak to an expert or consult a reference. If you weren’t already an expert in Church history or other specialized topics, you should expect to encounter a lot of questions you don’t know the answers to offhand. Your friend’s questions may help spur your interest, but you shouldn’t treat them as a high-stakes pop quiz.
 

What if my strained interactions are with the Catholics I’m newly meeting, not the atheists I already knew?

The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, but that saying is a lot more comforting when we’re thinking about how we’ll be welcomed and healed, instead of about who we’re likely to encounter in the waiting room. The Church is small-c catholic—it’s for everyone—so you’re at least as likely to run into some people who rub you the wrong way as you are at a dinner party.

The Church is different, not because it promised that everyone you meet will be well suited to you or kind, but because it informs you that you have a familial relationship to all these strange, abrasive people, and they to you. Catholics across the world are brothers and sisters in Christ, and we sometimes struggle to live together as a family, but we always desire it.

When you enter the Church, you may find it easier to receive patience or to know how to love your less-than-neighborly neighbor when you can ask Christ for grace and light through the sacraments. For now, ask for help in prayer, and ask other people or priests for help navigating a difficult relationship.
 

What will happen after I convert?

I would say that the terrifying and wonderful thing is that you’re in direct, personal contact with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Every moment of wonder you’ve experienced as the resolution chord booms in a symphony, every moment of humble awe as a stranger or friend went out of their way to show you love (or every moment of surprise as you discovered the depths of love you were capable of giving), and every moment you felt the sudden relief of pieces falling into place (whether doing a puzzle, writing a math proof, or reaching the denouement of a mystery novel) were all shadows and images that were trying to point you toward God, the Person they resembled.

Think of what you would do if you were trying to teach someone a new language. First you’d point to objects and declare the nouns that corresponded. You might be able to act out verbs. And, after a while, your student might begin to pick up grammar by trial and error.

God shares himself with us through these glimpses of the transcendent. He meets us where we are, and tutors us in the language we speak. But, as you cleave to Him and His Church, you begin to have the opportunity to speak back and learn what was always meant to be your natural language.