GO FORTH AND FREELOAD NO MORE:

When Atheists Believe: The confounding attraction of the Christian worldview. (Chuck Colson with Catherine Larson,10/22/2009, Christianity Today)

Well-known scholar Antony Flew was the first, saying he had to go "where the evidence [led]." Evolutionary theory, he concluded, has no reasonable explanation for the origin of life. When I met with Flew in Oxford, he told me that while he had not come to believe in the biblical God, he had concluded that atheism is not logically sustainable.

More recently, A. N. Wilson, once thought to be the next C. S. Lewis who then renounced his faith and spent years mocking Christianity, returned to faith. The reason, he said in an interview with New Statesman, was that atheists "are missing out on some very basic experiences of life." Listening to Bach and reading the works of religious authors, he realized that their worldview or "perception of life was deeper, wiser, and more rounded than my own."

He noticed that the people who insist we are "simply anthropoid apes" cannot account for things as basic as language, love, and music. That, along with the "even stronger argument" of how the "Christian faith transforms individual lives," convinced Wilson that "the religion of the incarnation … is simply true."

Likewise, Matthew Parris, another well-known British atheist, made the mistake of visiting Christian aid workers in Malawi, where he saw the power of the gospel transforming them and others. Concerned with what he saw, he wrote that it "confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God." While Parris is unwilling to follow where his observations lead, he is obviously wrestling with how Christianity makes better sense of the world than other worldviews.
While we can't reason our way to God, I've long believed that Christianity is the most rational explanation of reality.

Could this signal a trend? Well, not yet. But it does illustrate something I have been teaching for years: Faith and reason are not enemies. We are given reason as a gift. And while we can't reason our way to God (only the power of God can transform fallen men—I've seen that in prisons for over 32 years), I have long believed that Christianity is the most rational explanation of reality. And that fact, winsomely explained, can powerfully influence thinking people to consider Christ's claims.

It was the pragmatist Richard Rorty who coined the term freeloading atheists, for those rationalists who wish to believe in morality even though the central dilemma of two thousand years of philosophy is the failure to find any grounding for it in the absence of God. Andrew Delbanco offers a good example of the incoherent knots such decent folk twist themselves into when they believe Reason forces them to reject God despite their desire for Him.

As this essay suggests, while a personal experience of God might make things easier, reason and aesthetics afford quite acceptable paths to Him.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 25, 2009 11:14 PM