"My own return to faith has surprised no one more than myself."

The well-known British author A.N. Wilson recently announced in the pages of The Daily Mail that he, after years of running from the Hound of Heaven, has come back to the Christian faith:

For much of my life, I, too, have been one of those who did not believe. It was in my young manhood that I began to wonder how much of the Easter story I accepted, and in my 30s I lost any religious belief whatsoever.

Like many people who lost faith, I felt anger with myself for having been 'conned' by such a story. I began to rail against Christianity, and wrote a book, entitled Jesus, which endeavoured to establish that he had been no more than a messianic prophet who had well and truly failed, and died.

Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?

Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

<snip>

For ten or 15 of my middle years, I, too, was one of the mockers. But, as time passed, I found myself going back to church, although at first only as a fellow traveller with the believers, not as one who shared the faith that Jesus had truly risen from the grave. Some time over the past five or six years - I could not tell you exactly when - I found that I had changed.

And this, from another piece, "Why I Believe Again," published in The New Statesman:

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations” for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: “It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names.”

This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.

<snip>

My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God “a category mistake”. Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”

It reminds me of what Walker Percy once wrote about his rejection of secular humanism:

"This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and infinite delight; i.e., God." ("Questions They Never Asked Me")

Percy's remark has long resonated with me because he so pithily nails an essential issue: reality is too big, mysterious, strange, and surprising for a merely materialistic explanation. It is far more unreasonable, for example, to rail about evils in the world while denying the metaphysical moorings that make it possible to talk about "good" and "evil" than it is to accept that evil does, in fact, exist in a world created by a good God who endowed man with the ability to make truly free and moral choices. Perhaps not surprisingly, both Wilson and Percy also emphasize the mysteries of language and communication, which are so commonplace we rarely consider how strange and stunning it is that we are able to discuss, explain, describe, question, and otherwise carry on with words and symbols about everything from food to quantum physics to love to moral theology. There is indeed so much that materialism will never explain, including the inability of materialism to fully satisfy the human mind, heart, and soul.

Comments

[M. L. Hearing]

I came across Percy's remark a while back, and it struck a not with me too.

I've also always like this about Percy. Someone once asked him why he was a Catholic, and after a brief pause, he gave this seemingly glib reply: "Well, what else is there?" Exactly. What else is there?

M. L. Hearing