Why I believe again: A Former Atheist Tells His Story: Bach Strikes Again
A.N. Wilson, an English academic who specialized in skeptical books about famous Christians, like C.S. Lewis, has announced that he has started to believe again, and offers a perceptive and interesting perspective on his “conversion” to atheism. Here is the newspaper article.
The paper also offers a Q/A with Wilson, and I was struck by this exchange, during the Q/A session:
What’s the worst thing about being faithless? The worst thing about being faithless? When I thought I was an atheist I would listen to the music of Bach and realize that his perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than my own. Ditto when I read the lives of great men and women who were religious. Reading Northrop Frye and Blake made me realize that their world-view (above all their ability to see the world in mythological terms) is so much more INTERESTING than some of the alternative ways of looking at life.
Here is an excerpt from the newspaper article:
“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.
“Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”
Interesting that the gift of name is given even to animals. The anecdote is striking on many levels.
I'm always impressed with people who are prepared to re-evaluate their position on something which it is non-trivial to do. But I've never, not once, read a single "when I was an atheist" article which convinced me that the person in describing themselves in that way, truly summate what a life free of blind faith really feels like.
When he says, "materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do", for example, I can't think of a single free thinker, myself included, who hasn't approached this subject with trepidation, only to realise with relative ease that our acceptance of the material truth and our emotional liking of it are two very different things.
How you shift from that logical and open position to one in which you flatly assert, upon no greater evidence than you had before, that in fact there is not only "something more", but that this something is best described in Yahweh, seems like the perfect example of non sequitur apologetics, which anyone, regardless of the label atheism they might decide to put on their mindset, or world-view, would immediately stop themselves from falling into the moment it occurred to them to so much as use it as an excuse, much less use it to rewrite their previously made assertions.
What I think most people who describe themselves as having become Christian having once thought of themselves as atheist are actually doing, is being rather unfair (although perhaps not deliberately) with definitions and meanings. Semantic values placed upon certain words in certain societies carry a lot more weight than they do in others. For example the word 'socialism' has a much more biased political weight to it in American politics than it does in British European dialogue.
Similarly with the word atheism, I think many Christian authors use it as a short cut to describing who they were before they were "born again", rather than how I would use the word—in the same way I would describe myself as being a non-astrologist. It's a word to describe someone for what they are not—which is fundamentally misleading, in my view.
If there has to be a word for "it", better that it is not "their" word for "us". I personally prefer "awake", in the short form, or "secular humanist", if you want to get all Guardian reader about it.
Thanks for sharing this. It really hits close to home for me because I've got a friend who was once a Christian and has now rejected the faith. I'm looking forward to reading the full article.
Testing.
Language is a very simple thing to evolve. Why do you think the human language is so vastly different even among tribes that are 100 miles away from each other? Some twins create their own language to speak to each other when they are still just toddlers. There are animals that communicate vocally with each other. There is an interesting group of primates that live high up on a mountain plateau that constantly 'chatter' while they graze on grass, which helps build bonds between them, since they rarely spend time grooming each other. What about the chirps of prairie dogs? They have different calls for things. But you seems to think Humans are special because animals don't say "HI BOB".
Don't you guys ever watch nature or nova, or simply listen? Some animals do not have a 'voice box' which makes vocalization impossible and they are only able to hiss. Some animals can mimic human voices. To say that as Humans we are special because we can mimic sounds that another person makes is absurd. Sounds like more of the same bananacanolgy to me…
Toddlers are human beings. That makes it a whole different ball game. I think the opening chapters of "The Everlasting Man" by G.K. Chesterton are great on this.
Language is special, and it is particular to man, angels, and God. The only time anything else has spoken is when God appropriated the mouth of an ass for a few lines.
Words are the means by which the universe was created. Wondering at them seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable road back to the faith.
"To say that as Humans we are special because we can mimic sounds that another person makes is absurd."
I believe you just made an error. Humans don't just mimic sounds that another person makes. We take sounds, words, shapes, etc. and manipulate them into the best possible solution for whatever message we want to send. In short, mimicry does not nuance.
Mimicry cannot explain the development of the written word nor can it explain the differences in phonetic languages versus pictorial. Mimicry doesn't just sit down one day and start writing things on stone tablets or works on developing paper. These developments didn't just happen one day and from then on all the wacky humans of yore thought it was a novel thing to do in order to be like those other "talking" humans down the block.
Human language is one of the key reasons we're who we are. We teach, believe, share, join together, tear apart, etc. based all on this gift. To reduce it to "well, prairie dogs chirp (although they technically bark) so we're like the animals" is ridiculous on a logical as well as a developmental basis. Regardless of whether or not we all shared a "universal grunt" at some point–the development of that "grunt" into the plethora we see today something to consider and behold. Animals do not have this privilege, however. Species separated by space do not develop their own dialect and eventually their own language–a cat that lives in England versus a cat that lives in France will not speak different languages (in spite of what Disney cartoons tell us). Dogs don't start drawing pictures of the food they like to hunt so that other dogs can see it and marvel at their desires. Toads don't keep libraries of their recorded knowledge (although I'd like to believe that they do). I'm sorry man, but if you don't see the sheer amount of awe in the development of the civilized and uncivilized world because something like language and our ability to use it then I don't know what to do.
I mean, the very fact that we're writing right now in order to "debate the progress of language" is another proof of concept on the "language doesn't simply evolve" train. In a world of mimicry, there's no need for debate. We'd all be of one mind.
What is nearly miraculous about this story is that a newspaper would report it.
Truly intriguing. I just finished reading the spiritual confession of Anne Rice. She recently returned to traditional Roman Catholic belief. Now her story has much to do with the aesthetics of Christianity. But the one intellectual curiosity that helped drive her to reconsider the faith is the existence of the Jews. She kept asking, where did the Jewish people come from? It lead to an extensive study of history and scripture.
I loved how Anne Rice noticed that she didn't understand why the critical scholars would devote their lives to studying Someone Whom they hated.
Kurt, I'm challenging you to not leap immediately to criticize and attack, but rather to appreciate this story for what it is and the opportunity it provides for us to think about how we best can reach out to a pagan culture. I do not expect Wilson to be an orthodox Lutheran, but I do not think this is the appropriate discussion to tear him down and attack him for what he doesn't say, but rather to rejoice in what he has said. I think we Lutherans can get a tad short-sighted at times when we receive stories like this.