AN Wilson's Return to Faith

PDN

Some of you might find this interesting. In the UK about 15 years ago AN Wilson was considered to be one of the more prominent atheists. I remember responding by letter to some of his newspaper articles that attacked Christianity. I see he has recently returned to a position of faith.

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism

kelly1

Good article PDN.

It's a wise man who realizes that you can't attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to properties of atoms.

RossFixxxed

kelly1 wrote: »

Good article PDN.

It's a wise man who realizes that you can't attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to properties of atoms.

Yeah but it's even more logical and wiser in a man that realises these wonders are only created by our limited brains and our easily awe struck minds...

It just does not sit right with me when a 'Wizard did it' to explain something. I can't explain C++ programming, it doesn't make it magical or supernatural. There's such a leap there, and my opening line is deliberatly written, as your view of a smart man is rather smug in being right.

And there's so much more to atoms it's amazing, the complexity and the simplicity together is marvellous. A beautiful sky can easily be explained, but it doesn't make it less wonderful or beautiful. It also doesn't make it magic.

Soul Winner

A N Wilson wrote:

"When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion - prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue."

Brilliant!

Zombrex

PDN wrote: »

Some of you might find this interesting. In the UK about 15 years ago AN Wilson was considered to be one of the more prominent atheists. I remember responding by letter to some of his newspaper articles that attacked Christianity. I see he has recently returned to a position of faith.

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism

Meh, by the sound of it he was never really that convinced of atheism.

Anyway, good for him (natch :pac:), if it makes him happy.

The only slightly annoying thing in all this (I am after all obligated to find the negative!) are his articles on neo-Darwinian evolution that are quite factually inaccurate and very mis-representative of the theory, rolling out the age old Creationist argument that Darwianism promotes racism when in fact tells us that there is no such thing as "superior" races. And anyone who genuinely asks "Do materialists really believe language evolved" as if there is some big mystery about this needs to read up on evolution or is just fishing for a reason to believe in a higher power.

Zombrex

kelly1 wrote: »

It's a wise man who realizes that you can't attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to properties of atoms.

Er, don't Christians also attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to properties of atoms as well, they just think that God originally made the atoms?

Turtwig

Big deal pfftt

Some humans change sides all the time.
Anyhu,
He failed to explain why he chose Christianity?
And why straw man the atheist?
(Unless he was the straw man in which...ahh I better stop there;))

lmaopml

I've made similar journeys with my faith, not quite so extreme, but similar.......just haven't rubbed shoulders with the same people as this guy has. I think he penned his experience perfectly...

It's like a constant tapping on your shoulder that you just can't ignore..It won't go away, and nothing (for me) resolves the inadequacies of mere materialism / naturalism as a representation of ultimate reality better than God. It's a present thing, it's like it's inbuilt or something....



Lovely piece.

Turtwig

lmaopml wrote: »

nothing (for me) resolves the inadequacies of mere materialism / naturalism as a representation of ultimate reality better than God.

Of course it's inadequate if you strawman the materialism.
Sorry, just a little annoyed at how this guy [Wilson btw] who claims he was an atheist is portraying non belief.:mad:

JimiTime

Malty_T wrote: »

Of course it's inadequate if you strawman the materialism.
Sorry, just a little annoyed at how this guy [Wilson btw] who claims he was an atheist is portraying non belief.:mad:

I don't know anything about this guy, and have not read the article yet, but its worth bearing in mind next time someone goes on about some Phelps like loon, to think about this. You feel he does not accurately portray 'non-belief' (whatever that is), so as I said, its worth thinking about that when people start discussing 'The Hazards of Faith'.

Turtwig

JimiTime wrote: »

I don't know anything about this guy, and have not read the article yet, but its worth bearing in mind next time someone goes on about some Phelps like loon, to think about this. You feel he does not accurately portray 'non-belief' (whatever that is), so as I said, its worth thinking about that when people start discussing 'The Hazards of Faith'.

Ahh Jimi,

Fred Phelps, I wouldn't even consider that guy a Christian (do you??).
Non belief is non Christian (Phelps included ), he proceeded to stereotype it with materialism, which as you and I both know, not all non Christians are materialists, heck, not all atheists are materialists for that matter. And heck, his version of materialism is not the same as mine and (I think) the vast majority of materialists. Quite simply, if he was who he claimed to be from that article then he was the straw man....guess they do exist.:)

Things is though Phelps does have a crutch of authority he can lean on (namely the bible and his twisted version of it and God) what can the atheist lean on?

toiletduck

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.

Deaths of near and dear often bring out belief or faith. And hardly surprising that he returned to the faith in which he was brought up... Still whatever makes him happy.

Zombrex

JimiTime wrote: »

You feel he does not accurately portray 'non-belief' (whatever that is)

I would second Jimi's puzzlement to this statement Malty. I think he accurately portrays "non-belief" merely by the fact that he was a non-believer.

You get into a slippy slope when you start arguing whether someone was a good or bad atheist, since atheism (as we keep reminding theists) is merely a rejection of a belief. What ever reason he had Wilson didn't believe.

The reasons he didn't believe (religion wasn't cool seem to be one) and the reasons he went back to religious faith (materialism can't explain things seems to be the main one) seem to be pretty bad poorly thought out reasons, but that doesn't mean he was not accurately portraying non-belief.

In his articles he is inaccurately portraying science and biology, which to mean is annoying, and he committing a number of logical flaws (materialists can't explain language so God did it?!?) but that merely makes him a bad rationalist not a "bad" atheist.

Atheism doesn't teaching anything so there is not thing to misrepresent, unlike Christianity which Chrsitians can argue that someone is or is not accurately representing Christian teaching.

Turtwig

Wicknight wrote: »

I would second Jimi's puzzlement to this statement Malty. I think he accurately portrays "non-belief" merely by the fact that he was a non-believer.

I realise the slope is slippy but as a non believer both you and I always acknowledge that the scope for non belief is far wider than most people assume. Wilson just fed into the narrow part of it and represented it like so. I cannot let him away with that, did he just simply ignore all other atheists and stick to his version as if it were the only one?
It would have been nice if he mentioned in his article something like
"btw, this isn't what every atheist alive today thinks"
Instead he lumped us all in the same category, how nice.

Soul Winner

Malty_T wrote: »

...heck, not all atheists are materialists for that matter...

Depends on how one defines atheism doesn't it? The Oxford English dictionary defines atheism as the belief (positive) that there is no God, not merely the lack of belief in God. So if their definition of atheism is true then by definition all that does exist in a universe without God is materialism, hence all atheists are materialists. To say that atheism is simply the lack of belief in God is to redefine atheism as agnosticism. Agnosticism being defined as not knowing either way. Atheism not only includes the lack of belief in God but it also includes the positive belief that there is no God. If you do not put yourself in this category then you are not really an atheist and maybe A N Wilson never really was either.

Turtwig

AFAIK,

You can still be an atheist and believe in the metaphysical/supernatural - just not a deity.:)

Sam Vimes

Soul Winner wrote: »

Depends on how one defines atheism doesn't it? The Oxford English dictionary defines atheism as the belief (positive) that there is no God, not merely the lack of belief in God. So if their definition of atheism is true then by definition all that does exist in a universe without God is materialism, hence all atheists are materialists. To say that atheism is simply the lack of belief in God is to redefine atheism as agnosticism. Agnosticism being defined as not knowing either way. Atheism not only includes the lack of belief in God but it also includes the positive belief that there is no God. If you do not put yourself in this category then you are not really an atheist and maybe A N Wilson never really was either.

You really need to separate out belief in christianity from belief in god here. If you're talking about some kind of entity or energy that did something to create matter or similar and exists outside the universe then I suppose I'd call myself an agnostic. No one on the planet can confidently say anything about what exists outside our universe or what existed "before" matter and time. All I can say is that I don't think its very likely to be a human like conscious intelligence and is more likely to be some kind of a force or energy and I make that judgement because humans seek agency and purpose and throughout history we have ascribed human characteristics to natural forces because we didn't understand them. We're programmed to find meaning and purpose in things and this instinct is very prone to misfiring, most likely because our primitive ancestors who didn't have the instinct to seek out purpose saw a rock instead of the predator that was about to eat them. In the dark you will mistake a pile of clothes for a burglar but you will never mistake a burglar for a pile of clothes.

Completely separate to that question is whether or not the supernatural events described in the bible are true and the events in every one of the other thousands of holy books are false. At most one branch of one religion is correct which means that the vast majority of the world's population is following a false religion. New supernatural claims and other such things like conspiracy theories pop up every day and many of them attract huge followings of dedicated believers, many of whom are willing to die for their beliefs. People have an amazing ability to see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe which is why independently verifiable evidence is crucial in determining if a claim is true. In the absence of this I see no more reason to accept the claims of the bible over the qu'ran or the Vedas or Dianetics or Joe Coleman or Ronald Weinland and I would call myself an atheist on that issue. As a fallible human being I recognise that I could be wrong so technically I'd be agnostic there too but to quote quote the great Dawkins :P: I am an agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Morbert

Look, if someone has returned to faith then that's great for them. But nonsense like

It's a wise man who realizes that you can't attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to properties of atoms.

is counter-productive. There has been absolutely no reason tendered why one cannot attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to the properties of atoms/particles. What theists normally mean to say is "I don't like the idea of human life emerging solely from nature." which, as I hardly need to point out, is a different matter entirely.

The only slightly annoying thing in all this (I am after all obligated to find the negative!) are his articles on neo-Darwinian evolution that are quite factually inaccurate and very mis-representative of the theory, rolling out the age old Creationist argument that Darwianism promotes racism when in fact tells us that there is no such thing as "superior" races.

This raised a red flag for me. If Wilson was truly genuine about non-belief, then it isn't reflected in his literature.

Sam Vimes

To respond directly to the thread title, comments like

Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi's, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?

Make it look to me like he's picking religion over atheism because religion makes him feel better about himself rather than because he thinks it's more likely to be true. To someone who has logically arrived at atheism, whether one is "better off without a musical (religious) sense" or not is completely irrelevant. A religion could provide a sunshine, lollipops and rainbows type existence for your whole life but that wouldn't make it true and any perceived bleakness of an atheistic viewpoint does not make it false. I see this type of reasoning used when people talk about religious morality versus secular morality. Yes objective morality handed down from an omnipotent and all-loving being would be superior to secular morality but that doesn't mean that's what you're looking at when you read <insert holy book here>

and reading things like this

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?

makes me want to tell him to read some science books because my answer to that question is yes, I do think that language just "evolved" and there are mountains of evidence to support that assertion. The existence of a common language is no more miraculous than the fact that Chinese people have Chinese children. This is essentially an intelligent design argument and we know how us atheists feel about that

liamw

kelly1 wrote: »

Good article PDN.

It's a wise man who realizes that you can't attribute the wonder and complexity of human life to properties of atoms.

It's a wiser man that realizes that attributing feelings like 'wonder' and 'awe' of the world to a higher power is a misfiring of evolved trait.

lmaopml

Sam Vimes wrote: »

makes me want to tell him to read some science books because my answer to that question is yes, I do think that language just "evolved" and there are mountains of evidence to support that assertion. The existence of a common language is no more miraculous than the fact that Chinese people have Chinese children. This is essentially an intelligent design argument and we know how us atheists feel about that

To be fair to the author, I think he was alluding to the philosophy of language in relation to consiousness, and relating to the material world etc ( A huge area of philosophy ) and the simplistic and rather crude analysis of it's development from his comrade at the table at the time- to slot just it in to evolution as a 'we didn't need to name eachother, when we were anthropoids'! ...now lets all smile and have a Darwin party type of thing...

Irregardless of whether language 'evolved' or no the guy probably came across like not much of a 'thinker' to be so eagerly simplistic....about a field that is enormous..

I could be wrong, but then, I think that's what he was alluding to...:)

PDN

Sam Vimes wrote: »

This is essentially an intelligent design argument and we know how us atheists feel about that

Indeed we do, and you have an entire forum of your own in which you can express those feelings.

Zombrex

lmaopml wrote: »

To be fair to the author, I think he was alluding to the philosophy of language in relation to consiousness, and relating to the material world etc ( A huge area of philosophy ) and the simplistic and rather crude analysis of it's development from his comrade at the table at the time- to slot just it in to evolution as a 'we didn't need to name eachother, when we were anthropoids'! ...now lets all smile and have a Darwin party type of thing...

Irregardless of whether language 'evolved' or no the guy probably came across like not much of a 'thinker' to be so eagerly simplistic....about a field that is enormous..

I could be wrong, but then, I think that's what he was alluding to...:)

I don't think so. He says quite clearly

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.

It is just the God of the gaps argument again. He wants to believe we are "more than collections of meat" (what ever that means) and finds something that science can't really explain very well (though language is a bad choice since it is explained pretty well already) and then just says God must have done it because that allows him to think of us as special. God can explain everything, so saying with delight that this fits with the Christian explanation is some what odd, but suggests the motivation here.

Strangely he doesn't conclude that aliens did it, or Zeus. That of course wouldn't fulfil the apparent purpose, to provide an excuse to rationalise his desire for faith, his desire to believe.

Sam Vimes

PDN wrote: »

Indeed we do, and you have an entire forum of your own in which you can express those feelings.

I thought it would be appropriate for an atheist to respond to a thread where someone gave reasons why they stopped being an atheist. My mistake

chozometroid

Sam Vimes wrote: »

In the dark you will mistake a pile of clothes for a burglar but you will never mistake a burglar for a pile of clothes.

Not true, says the ninja.

JimiTime

chozometroid wrote: »

Not true, says the ninja.

Ha ha, good one:D

Fanny Cradock

Completely off topic, but here is an interesting talk between Rowan Williams and Wilson about Dostoevsky. I can't quite remember the details, but I think Wilson very briefly discusses his "re-conversion".

PDN

Sam Vimes wrote: »

I thought it would be appropriate for an atheist to respond to a thread where someone gave reasons why they stopped being an atheist. My mistake

It would be a mistake for any atheist to use this thread as a Trojan Horse to pick arguments on any of the issues raised in Wilson's argument. If anyone has a problem with that then I encourage them to communicate with a mod by PM rather than backseat modding.

My reason for posting the OP was that I found it interesting that Wilson's reasons for returning to his faith were not primarily intellectual or logical. He was not reconverted by some crushing argument. Instead he found that life made more sense, and worked better, within a framework of belief.

I've posted something similar in the Apologetics thread. One of the biggest attractions Christianity has (and sometimes its most repellent feature) is its adherents. If we are rubbing shoulders with people for whom a belief system is evidently working, then that is a powerful incentive for us to explore and eventually share their beliefs. However, if those people are arrogant, domineering and manipulative then they serve to push us away from sharing their views.

AN Wilson once felt strongly enough to write a pamphlet entitled "Against Religion" - responses to it were published, similar to how Christian responses would later be made to The God Delusion. Now he has discovered that faith in God makes more sense to him. I'm happy for him.

dvpower

PDN wrote: »

However, if those people are arrogant, domineering and manipulative then they serve to push us away from sharing their views.

So true.

silent sage

It was a nonsense, together with the idea of a personal God, or a loving God in a suffering universe. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

It was such a relief to discard it all that, for months, I walked on air.

I can really relate to this. There is an incredible feeling of freedom that accompanies the acceptance that what you've been believing is simply not accurate. When it's on the monumental issue of the eternal life of your supposed spirit, it can be such a relief to understand that such concerns are futile. Like waking from a daydream, to see the world as it really is and simply living for the, or pursuit of, joy in life.

as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer.

At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many (most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the western world - that men and women are purely material beings

I'm guessing this is what it's like for most people with newly found atheist views. A sense of arrival, at a position you realise has always been right in front of you. Which makes sense, and is supported by overwhelming evidence and reason.

Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I work in a privileged position where I'm with people often experiencing traumatic issues and circumstances. I find that when I engage with people on a raw level of pure understanding and unconditional positive regard, mainly intense active listening, I often experience things that would indicate there's something more going on. That amidst the shell of daily human behaviour and thought, lies a core where a true self can be revealed and connected with. Maybe only under the right conditions. These said experiences can even be visual, like something out of "The Celestine Prophecy". It's this sense of experiential connection that keeps me wondering.

Would I take it as serious as Wilson and convert back to religion, no. I don't believe in any form of deity expressed in a holy book. I'm curious as to why he chose Christianity.