A LITTLE FURTHER DOWN HITCH'S EVENTUAL PATH:

Look Who's a Believer Now: Have you ever heard the one about the Christian who started to study calculus and ended up losing his faith? (TIMOTHY LARSEN, 5/29/09, The Wall Street Journal)

Just such a conversion has happened to A.N. Wilson, the 58-year-old British biographer, novelist and man of letters. He was once an observant Anglican and, later, a Roman Catholic, but in the 1980s he lost his faith and began skewering the supposed delusions of the faithful. His antifaith stance was expressed in books such as God's Funeral (1999) and Jesus: A Life (1992). A few weeks ago, however, Mr. Wilson confessed that Christ had risen indeed. He attributed this to "the confidence I have gained with age." He now says he believes that atheists are like "people who have no ear for music or who have never been in love." [...]

Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of "mere negations."

Having realized that their method was flawed, they then began to reconsider faith. Christianity, they discovered, spoke to the deepest realities of human experience. George Sexton, for example, decided that Jesus as presented in the Gospels was so compelling and haunting that only a historical original could account for this: "If Christ be simply an ideal picture, the man who sketched it will be as difficult to account for as the Being himself."

Their skeptical pasts did leave a permanent stamp on their thought. Joseph Barker believed as a young man that the Bible was error-free. As a free-thinking lecturer he specialized in highlighting problem passages. As a convert, he conceded that the Bible was not perfect but went on to argue that it was perfectly suited to speak to the human condition. The Swiss Alps are not perfect cones, he observed, but this does not detract from their grandeur. Thomas Cooper declared that his newly rediscovered faith did not include a belief in eternal punishment.

As is the case with Mr. Wilson, intellectuals often pursue long, drawn-out love affairs with Christian thought. Next time you hear someone fume that God is the most contemptible being who never existed, keep in mind that you just might be watching the first act of a divine romantic comedy.

The comedy aspect is the key here. We get to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of these intellectual featherweights boxing with God.

MORE:
A new entry in the God Debate: The author says atheists reject the Christian gospel because it is too radical for them. (John Timpane, 6/07/09, Inquirer)

The God Debate has been so ferocious on all sides that one asks with trembling: So what's wrong with Ditchkins?

Ignorance, to start, says Eagleton. "Rage against fundamentalism is completely understandable," he says, "but Ditchkins really thinks that all religious people are fundamentalists. So it's no longer about religion - they've created a straw man to hit at. It's religious criticism on the cheap. They need that straw man just as fundamentalists need hatred."

Ignorance grows into intolerance, a belief in the innate supremacy of Western culture and the inferiority of non-Western. "Worst of all is Ditchkins' apparent inability to distinguish between a good Muslim and a terrorist," Eagleton says, "as if there were no difference between the Archbishop of Canterbury and a Texas redneck fundamentalist." More than just a mental mistake, it has, he says, terrible implications. He's not alone in this position; many recoiled at Sam Harris' argument that the West would be justified in a nuclear first strike against Islamist targets. Eagleton says: "Such intellectual crudity is a symptom of panic, of intelligent writers who feel under threat."

Throughout the book, Eagleton argues, most surprisingly, that "Ditchkins" has missed the big point. The big point is not the provableness of God. Eagleton says, rather breathtakingly: "Ditchkins thinks he's rejecting it because of science. But I don't think that is the focus. . . . You can say what you like about faith, but let's get it right. It's not about subscribing to some supernatural entity. It's about the image of Jesus in the gospels, a far more radical, subversive image than anybody is willing to accept. The idea is that of transformative love: having the courage to abandon oneself for others, a cause, for justice, in the radical way the New Testament presents Christ as doing. That question doesn't even occur to Ditchkins as the key question. You can say the demand is impossible, utopian, stupid. But you have to get the question right, and I don't even think they get near it."

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 11, 2009 6:15 AM