Up from atheism

Warning: lengthy post ahead!

I first became a professed atheist at about age 15; I decided that I had seen through all the illusions of those around me, those unthinking, dogmatic, hypocritical, narrow-minded small-town types I had grown up with. I literally announced to my parents that I would no longer be attending church (I had been baptized in a Reformed congregation and my family had attended both a Presbyterian and a Methodist church at various times during my childhood) and that I didn’t believe all that stuff.

It’s always difficult to really understand why we do anything, I think, and this was no exception. In retrospect I think I was a pretty smart kid who wanted to rebel in some way. Not that I was particularly “rebellious” in any conventional sense: in high school I never drank alcohol or did drugs, and I only had one girlfriend for most of that time. My preferred forms of rebellion were musical (heavy metal, punk rock, angry political rap), sartorial (combat boots, Ramones t-shirt, partly shaved head), and intellectual (atheism, and an adolescent form of general anti-authoritarianism – I remember a friend and I mocking the pro (first) Gulf War propaganda we were fed daily by the in-class “news” program Channel 1). Even “bad” kids – the kind that hung out at the guard rail at the edge of the school parking lot in their Ozzy t-shirts smoking cigarettes – were shocked by open professions of atheism.

What religious formation I’d had was fairly lukewarm. As I mentioned, the churches we attended were mainline Protestant, but of a fairly staid and traditional stripe. I went to Sunday school at Hillside Presbyterian, sat through what seemed to me like interminable sermons, and went to Vacation Bible School in the summers. I have no tales of fundamentalist horrors; it was the kind of innocuous, respectable mainstream Protestantism that seems to be largely disappearing (for better or worse) in our polarized age. Or at least that’s how I remember it. So, this was no grand gesture of rebellion against a stultifying and oppressive upbringing.

Anyway, atheism fit with my overall self-image. I liked to think of myself as being more reflective and critical than my peers. I used to no doubt bore my girlfriend to tears with my pontifications on why religion was bunk (too bad there were no blogs then; the poor girl might’ve been spared). I even got into hot water with her parents for (according to them) turning her against religion! (Ironically, the Lutheran Church her family attended is one I now periodically worship at when visiting home.) In high school English I read Joyce, Thoreau, and Huxley and identified with their nonconformist ethos. By senior year I was proudly brandishing my copy of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ (whether I understood it is another matter). I can only assume that I was pretty insufferable at times.

By the time I got to college at a state university in northwestern Pennsylvania I was confirmed in my atheism. It simply hadn’t ocurred to me at this point that there was really anything to be said for religion: religion weighed people down with guilt and irrational prohibitions on essentially harmless activities, and it was based on an intellectually unsupportable edifice.

My first year of college I majored in art. I had aspirations of being an illustrator, maybe even drawing comic books (I was a comic geek from way back). But by the end of my freshman year I was having second thoughts. I had some really good friends who were English majors, and I flirted with switching over, but I had also taken an intro to philosophy course, and that hooked me. Althought the course focused almost entirely on Marxism(!) I was intrigued by the idea of wrestling with the great problems of meaning and existence. By sophomore year I was enrolled as a philosophy major.

I imagine that many people’s idea of philosophy is that, if anything, it’s likely to turn people against religion. But in my case, as I read Plato, Augustine, the Bhagavad-Gita, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, William James, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Tillich, Miguel de Unamuno, Nikolai Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain, Josiah Royce, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, and a host of others I became less and less convinced that only fools and ignoramuses could believe in a world beyond this one. You may reply that this is a lesson that any normal person would naturally learn as they mature, but I can be a little thick.

I wish I could say I had an “Aha!” moment where I suddenly became convinced that God exists. Or that I had discovered the one knock-down argument that would convince all rational people of the reality of the divine. Alas, no such luck (though, I did for a brief period of time think that Charles Hartshorne’s version of the ontological argument was sound; I still think there’s something to that…). But what now seems just as important was that I came to see religious belief as something far more substantial and worthy of consideration than my condescending adolescent caricatures would’ve led me to believe. What I thought were knock-down objections turned out to be problems that believers had been considering for hundreds of years and had developed sophisticated responses to. And, moreover, materialistic naturalism, I now started to realize, was far from being a problem-free worldview. Was it able to account for mind, purpose, and value? For the existence and order of the universe itself?

I had also been impressed by the tradition that I associate with Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others that emphasizes the limitations of our ability to adequately grasp the truth due to our finitude and sin. This is necessary, I think, to balance an overconfident rationalism or dogmatism. All our worldviews have limitations and it’s not obvious that one is demonstrably superior to all the others. The western theistic tradition at it’s best seems to balance the need for confident assertion with the recognition of mystery.

This is what you might call the “negative” value of philosophy for faith. It can clear away intellectual obstacles to belief, even if it can’t create faith. For me, at least, that was an important step. Though still not a believer, I’d become convinced that the claims of religion were at least worth investigating further.

I should note that during this entire time I hadn’t set foot in a church for any reason except maybe for the odd wedding. The first time I spent any considerable time in church as an adult came during a trip to England and Ireland during the summer before my senior year in college. As someone from a doughty Protestant background, this was really my first exposure to the beauty of traditional Catholicism. In Dublin I saw the Book of Kells on display at Trinity College and visited Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Although I didn’t worship as such, I was moved in a way I didn’t expect and made aware of the experiential and aesthetic aspects of religion that I had previously ignored. This was only a small part of the trip, but it made an impact on me.

By the time I left college I had moved firmly into agnosticism (if you can be firmly agnostic!). After a year of work I pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Purdue University in Indiana. I had at least a vague idea that I was interested in philosophy of religion, but took several courses in historical philosophy, delving more deeply into the medievals and the early moderns in particular, as well as 20th century analytic philosophy.

The kind of philosophy I was being trained in combined analytical rigor with a close attention to historical texts. In other words, I was taught that we can’t dismiss someone just because they lived a long time ago (“the democracy of the dead” in Chesterton’s words) and that we should take their arguments seriously, not just read them as historical curiosities. I struggled with Augustine on free will, St. Thomas on God’s existence, Aristotle and Leibniz on ontology, and Moore and Wittgenstein on knowledge. I was fortunate to be taught by some incredibly sharp people, and, in a few cases, people who were also professing Christians. This challenged me both to become more rigorous in my thinking and to take Christian theism seriously as a live option.

Again without any major ephiphanies I gradually became convinced that something like classical theism was the best metaphysics going. It just seemed (and seems) to me like the most satisfying explanation for the existence and order of the universe, the fact that we have minds and they find the world intelligible, the existence of truth, beauty, and goodness, our moral aspirations, the occurrence of well-attested religious and mystical experience and the holiness of the saints of all traditions. Not that it doesn’t have its problems, but it seems to me to have fewer problems than its main rivals. T.S. Eliot once reputedly said that he embraced Christianity because it was the least false of the options available to him. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely an element of skepticism and, hopefully, humility in my embrace of Christian theism.

This all sounds very intellectualisitic, and I don’t mean to give the impression that I spent every minute of my twenties pondering the imponderables (though I guess as a philosophy student that was part of my job description.). I can’t really say what sort of other things were going on in my life that might’ve affected my thought processes, though undoubtedly personal factors played an important role.

I had experimented with going to church on a couple of occassions in the late 90s, but it never really took. In fact, it wasn’t until shortly before my wedding (in the winter of 2000) that I began to attend church regularly, and this largely out of obligation. At that time I probably would’ve described myself as a kind of theistic Platonist, but not a Christian. But it turned out that, at least in my case, there was something to Pascal’s advice to “Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you – will quiet your proudly critical intellect.” I’d probably put it differently, but the simple discipline of going to church week in and week out gradually had an affect on me.

Sometime in 2001, precipitated in part by a serious medical issue in the life of a friend, I realized that I believed that Jesus is the Son of God and went into a church near the office where I worked and prayed to him. It wasn’t quite the classic “sinner’s prayer” moment, but I would call it a conversion experience, with the caveat that a lot of groundwork had been laid. In some ways I guess it was an explicit acknowledgement of something that had been going on under surface for some time.

Since then my religious life has been pretty much bereft of dramatic incident. I’ve attended various Lutheran churches over the course of the last five years up until this past summer when, having just moved to Boston, my wife and I began attending the Church of the Advent (Episcopal). Lutheranism at its best seems to me to combine catholicity of doctrine and worship with the Augustinian understanding of finitude, sin, and grace that comports so well with my skepticism. In doctrinal matters I’m pretty conventional: I don’t have much of an itch for revisionism in Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity (Chalcedon and Nicea sit just fine with me), Atonement (I think some combination of Anselm and Abelard is probably as close to the truth as we’re likely to get), or other doctrinal matters. If anything, the challenge for me now is to rest in the faith of the church and get down to the business of actually living a Christian life. Thinking about religion, however necessary and important, can be a temptation to neglect things like prayer, service, doing justice and loving mercy, developing the virtues of faith, hope, and charity – those sorts of things.