Posted on 12/15/2015 8:00:41 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Atheism is cool. At least, that's the popular perception of a worldview that's enjoyed a rebrand and a renaissance in the last couple of decades. Authors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have issued forceful public challenges to the claims of the major faiths and the rights they've traditionally been granted, while well-respected and high-profile public figures have lent vocal support to their ideas. When Stephen Fry outlined an atheist (or even anti-theist) position on an Irish talk show, the interview went viral in hours, while comedian Ricky Gervais frequently uses his substantial platform to attack and undermine religion in film and stand-up.
Christians can naturally feel a little threatened by this kind of activity. Witness the scores of 'response articles' which appeared within days of Fry's "capricious, mean-minded God" outburst. If we do feel worried or undermined in our faith, it should probably prompt some serious self-examination; a belief that is truly practiced in everyday life should be strong enough and have enough evidence to withstand a few specious celebrity soundbites. In fact, there are reasons to feel strangely positive about the atheist pronouncements of public figures. Not only are there countless people who have found themselves in church, or on an Alpha course, precisely because the arguments of Dawkins and others left them dissatisfied, but there are also many stories of formerly high-profile atheists who ended up losing their surety, and in many cases converting to the Christian faith.
Below are just five of those stories, of former atheists who found that their belief in nothing ultimately led them nowhere.
1. C.S. Lewis
Before he wrote the Narnia saga, some divisive sci-fi and the popular theology books that led to thousands of rational conversions (mine included), Clive Staples Lewis was a professed atheist. He spoke of a "blandly Christian childhood", but wrote in his biographical work Surprised by Joy of his "seemingly firm belief in the inexistence of God", which was later shattered by a combination of reading GK Chesterton and developing a friendship with JRR Tolkien. In perhaps the most famous passage from that book, he writes:
"You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
2. Peter Hitchens
The younger brother of noted atheist writer Christopher Hitchens once shared his late sibling's worldview. A journalist, author and conservative political commentator, he infamously set fire to his copy of the King James Bible as a 15-year-old at boarding school. He and Christopher shared a tempestuous relationship over 50 years, exchanging their youthful arguments over toys for debates about the existence of God in later life.
He describes coming to an awareness of his own sin, writing that "my large catalogue of misdeeds replayed themselves rapidly in my head... I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned." Getting married in church, and swearing oaths before a God whom he'd previously rejected, further unsettled him, and he slowly found himself professing a Christian faith. After his brother famously published God is not Great in 2007, Peter wrote his own book, The Rage Against God in response, critiquing the new atheist movement among which Christopher was so prominent.
3. A.N. Wilson
The British author and journalist writes that in his 30s he "lost any religious belief whatsoever," and went on to write a book -- entitled simply "Jesus" -- which poured scorn on the idea that the gospels contained historically accurate information on a man who he simply regarded as a prominent Jewish leader. However, after spending "five or six years" quietly attending church, he says he discovered that he had come to adopt the faith preached there.
Wilson is now one of modern atheism's most outspoken critics, riled particularly by the assertion that faith is the pursuit of the weak-minded. In a famous article for the Daily Mail, Wilson broke cover as a Christian convert and took aim at celebrity atheists, or what he called "all the liberal clever-clogs on the block", while in another Christmas Day article for The Telegraph, he wrote of his now utter conviction that "the Gospel would still be true even if no-one believed it."
4. Anthony Flew
His name may not be familiar, but Flew was one of the most significant atheist thinkers of the pre-Dawkins era. He was a prominent critic of religion, suggesting that atheism should be the default position until evidence for God could be produced; that the burden of proof should be on the faiths, not on the faithless. He carried these beliefs late into life, even signing 2003's Third Humanist Manifesto. However, just a year later, he announced that he had dramatically changed his philosophical allegiance.
Flew hadn't converted to the Christian faith, but he had embraced deism -- the belief in God. So convinced was he, that in 2007 he published his final book, "There is a God: How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind".
It has been discredited by atheists ever since who claim that Flew's change of position was due to his declining mental health, and that the book was mainly the work of his co-writer. However, before his death in 2010, Flew lucidly and specifically addressed this in one of his final articles, itself a rebuttal of Dawkin's references to him in The God Delusion.
5. Alister McGrath
Today he's one of Christianity's fiercest and most respected defenders, but Alister McGrath had to undergo a Pauline conversion before he got there. Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, McGrath writes that he "came to the view that God was an infantile illusion, suitable for the elderly, the intellectually feeble, and the fraudulently religious... It was the received wisdom of the day that religion was on its way out, and that a glorious, godless dawn was just around the corner." As a young intellectual with an aptitude for science and specialisms in quantum theory and then biology, McGrath's rationalist worldview had little patience for theories of blind faith.
However, his deep engagement with science was -- perhaps counter-intuitively -- the very thing that unsettled his unbelief. He writes: "Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain." He became a Christian, and continued his enthusiastic pursuit of science, realising that his growing interest in theology was not in conflict with it; rather the two disciplines illuminated each other. Having at first been a fan of Richard Dawkins' scientific writing (if not his arguments for atheism), he has since become one of his most enduring opponents, both in print (he's the author of The Dawkins Delusion) and in public debate.
What's perhaps most interesting about all of these stories is the diversity among them. One might imagine that famous intellectuals tend to arrive at a conclusion of Christian belief by means of rational argument, yet that's by no means the only reason given. Conviction of sin, the observation of transformation, and the sense that God was simply pursuing them all contributed to these widely-varying testimonies. McGrath realised the rational argument for God was stronger than that against him, but Wilson based his decision mainly on what he saw in the behaviour of Christians.
Surely this contains one of the strongest rationales for faith. Belief in God isn't blindly based on acceptance of the Bible as truth, or simply because the argument makes sense, but because when we begin to truly look for him, we begin to find him everywhere. In nature, in science, in supernatural experience, and perhaps most compellingly of all in the transformed lives of the people who have already believed in him. The journeys of these five men are not unusual. They are simply five high-profile examples of what can happen when closed minds open to the possibility that they might just be wrong.
Jeeves? Isn't he also rather gay?
“Rather”? More like “enormously.”
Atheism the new Islam
“Atheism” has always been the home of a lot of pompous jerks that weren’t so much Atheists, but just people that hate Christians with the fervor that they claim Christianity is “forced” upon them.
But what has happened is that Atheism today has been invaded by social justice warriors, promoting this thing called “atheism plus”. Laden with Islam apologists, 3rd wave feminists, and eco nut, that many right-leaning, liberal or apolitical ones have come under attack. There have been many on YouTube, because of their anti-feminist and anti-Islam videos, that have had attempts to get their channels pulled, and to get them fired.
I feel bad for those people, but I dont feel sorry for them as they now understand how the Christians they bashed felt when they are mocked. At least a number of my favorites openly admit that despite not liking organized religion, that Jews and Christians are not truly a threat to their freedom like Islam and progressives are.
Whatever his failings, I miss Christopher Hitchens.
I wish Mr. Hitchens would have found God, because it would have been a pleasure to read Mr. Hitchens as he wrote about faith.
One of the very few leftist intellectuals I have some respect for and one who really knew how to write.
This is what irks me about people who say they have "spiritual gifts," when they are just doing what they did before they were converted (music, speaking, etc.)
I once believed I was an atheist. I could not reject all the the Judao-Christian values that I felt, because they were the foundation for the civilized world in which I enjoyed. Also, atheists are some of the most loathsome individuals you will ever meet.
This is the same understanding of normal philosophy that our Founders.
Chapter 11, page 90-93, Section 1 "Proofs of the existence of God."
(Excerpt)
It has been noticed that innumerable individual beings which make up the universe are subject to change, and that the change of anything whatsoever takes place by means of the action of some being other than itself. The setting in motion of a process demands a starting point. This absolute beginning is possible only on the condition that a Being exists who is beyond all change, - in whom nothing can 'become,' and is therefore immutable.
This being is God. Now, God cannot set into motion the series of changes constituted by actuality and potentiality except by an impulse which leaves free and undisturbed His own impassability. For, if this initial impulse were to involve a modification, however slight, in the Primary Being, such modification would constitute a change, and require the internet ion of a still higher Being. Thus the process would be endless unless God were the 'prime mover, himself unmoved.' (Summa Theol. 1a, q.2, art. 3. Prima via)
Let us suppose that one decides to build a house, and he wants it to have solid supports. To this end he must lay deep foundations which are to support the building. He must continue to dig until he obtains a base of absolute fixity and security. But obviously he must finally call a halt in the work of excavation, if the building is to be commenced at all. We may therefore conclude that the builder did in fact halt at some point in the earth, if de facto if the building is there before our eyes.
The same applies to the scholastic argument which we are considering. Change exists as a fact, even as the house in question exists as a fact. Change stares us in the face: it is found everywhere in the universe. But if there were no staring point in the chain of causation, the change itself would not exist. We are not in a position to deny the existence of change in the universe so we must account for it. To suppose an endless regressus in the casual series possible would be like imagining that one can suspend a weight from the end of a chain whose other end simply does not exist, since link is added to link to infinity.
Change is a certain indication of contingency or non necessity, and this leads Thomas to a second proof of the existence of God, intimately related to the preceding; the existence of non-necessary beings demands the existence of a necessary Being. As soon as a non-necessary being is represented as existing, it ought to be referred to an influence external to itself, and here again a regression to infinity would not explain existing reality. One must stop at an absolutely necessary Being, whose very essence it is to exist, and which finds its own necessity in itself. Such a Being is God.
It all comes to this: if any given thing is real, the sum total of all other things, without which the reality of the fact would be inexplicable, must be no less real. From the standpoint of metaphysics, God exists because the existence of the Universe demands Him.
So? God knows who will and won't be converted. Who's to say God doesn't give spiritual gifts to those not yet converted so the gift will be practiced and refined for use on the day of their conversion, all to the benefit of the Church?
Are you serious? Spiritual gifts are dispensed proactively?
probiotically
God, otherwise known as awareness itself. Not consciousness, which varies by differentiation of the organism and incidentals like age, health and effort. But "simple" awareness, the experience of existence itself. The "I" behind "I."
Materialists insist this awareness comes from the brain, but their arguments are the exact same as claiming there's a symphony orchestra in your radio. Awareness is aware of the workings of the brain - or the non-workings of the brain.
Awareness is even beyond what we call "life." Awareness is aware of life. Awareness is trivialized, taken for granted, seen as impotent. But it is the essence of everything. In the East it is seen as beyond creation, unified, deathless, birthless, untouchable, eternal, God.
In the West, it is seen as the result of neuron complexity by people who fail to differentiate between it and sensory activity. They claim it goes away with lack of sensation, rather than it merely being aware OF no sensation.
But why wouldn't God be present everywhere, in all things at all times, including in us? What can exist without God? And if awareness is unchanging and eternal, limitless and not created by biology, how is it not God?
Who is it that says, "I," in someone with amnesia, or when we first wake up and haven't yet remembered our lives? It is not us, not our little egos, not our small collection of personal knowledge, learning and history. It is BEFORE all of that.
I love to watch Nature and Nova on PBS. But, it really irritates me when about 3/4s of the way through the program they explain that the bird in question with the longer beak actually willed itself to grow that beak. How could a dumb animal decide one day to change itself and its mode of getting food by its own brain power? If every animal had that power there would no longer be any order in the universe.
It makes no sense at all and yet they insist that there is no Creator capable of doing what the animal with "specialized" brain power can do on its own.
Actually what they invoke is the concept of "complexity." They use it because it supports their collectivism theory. Real complexity, however, is not what they describe. They more describe "critical mass" from nuclear physics - get enough fissile material in one place and it starts to react with itself. Whereas complexity theory describes statistical indetermination. But hey, liberal just need fashionable concepts. Being wrong doesn't bother them a bit. So, basically, they believe if a collective of whatever - bees, neurons, ants, people, dirt - gets big enough, it will "spontaneously generate" awareness. Like a radio will spontaneously generate Mozart, if it gets complex enough. And this from our supposedly best thinkers.
And the whole global climate stuff. As if we really could overpower the sun.
I’m serious as a heart attack. But only for those who will be saved. Or phrased another way, the spiritual gifts a saved person received are an enhancement of an ability the person already had which God was preparing for the day when they would be saved. There is certainly nothing contrary to scripture in this. It’s certainly a possibility that God chooses to enhance abilities a person already had for use in service to the Church.
I disagree, but it is not a deal breaker for fellowship.
Good article.
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