Former atheist A. N. Wilson has slowly emerged from the closet as a believer - again. The renowned journalist and biographer, who was raised in the church of England and who had once considered himself a believer, had a "conversion" to atheism 20 years ago at age 38 (midlife crisis, anyone?). And it really looked like a conversion. In an article in the April 6 New Statesman (partial text available here), he compares the tremendous sense of relief he felt when he stopped believing to the experience of Christian converts at a Billy Graham Crusade he was covering for the Independent on Sunday:

As a hesitant, doubting, religious man I'd never known how they felt. But, as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in reverse. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens (as I did either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not have to feel out on a limb.

After that conversion, his biographical writing turned to demythologizing gospel stories about Jesus and viewing C. S. Lewis through a Freudian lens. (That effort provoked an outcry among Lewis lovers.)

But Wilson never fully disbelieved, just as before his conversion he never fully believed.

"My doubting temperament ... made me a very unconvincing atheist," he writes in the New Statesman article.

That is why, he says, he should have distrusted the radical sense of relief he felt when he underwent his reverse Damascus Road experience. Now, he chronicles a more gradual conversion back to Christian belief. In last Saturday's Daily Mail, he wrote:

But, as time passed, I found myself going back to church, although at first only as a fellow traveller with the believers, not as one who shared the faith that Jesus had truly risen from the grave. Some time over the past five or six years - I could not tell you exactly when - I found that I had changed.

This gradual transition echoes C. S. Lewis's account of his transition from unbelief to faith. He knew vaguely when it happened, but it was not a blinding, fall-off-the-horse experience. And because of its more gradual nature, Wilson now seems to trust this new experience more.

One more thing worth noting: There is a strong aesthetic dimension to Wilson's return to belief. Unlike many atheists and former believers, Wilson's testimony does not hinge on what empirical science does or does not tell us. He tells us frankly that the arguments provided by atheist friends of a scientific bent were as creedal and stretching as many assertions by Christians.

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: "lt 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?

The aesthetic dimension dominates the empirical for Wilson because there was something about the great Christian artists and writers of past centuries that somehow seemed true to reality. (Wilson opposes J. S. Bach to David Hume and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Gilbert Ryle.)

Because of the gradual nature of Wilson's re-conversion, we trust he will continue to grow in grace and understanding and trust in God - as should we all, whether our conversion happened in a flash or stretched over many years.

* * *

The Victorian era saw many Christians become atheists--and then return to faith, much as A. N. Wilson has done in 2009. Read Timothy Larsen's account of their double conversions in "Victorian Skeptics on the Road to Damascus" from the Christian History website.

Posted by David Neff at April 14, 2009 | Comments (23)

On March 21, William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens were part of a larger, CT-sponsored panel discussion on "Does the God of Christianity Exist, and What Difference Does It Make?" After listing multiple argument's for God's existence that he said Hitchens failed to address, in his closing statement Craig, author of Reasonable Faith and a CT cover story on arguments for God's existence, warned Hitchens, author of God Is not Great, to come better prepared to deal with the arguments at their scheduled debate at Biola University on April 4, on the question, "Does God Exist?"

That Biola debate was indeed held this past weekend, drawing thousands of spectators (confirming a CT report on the popularity of such events). The Evangelical Philosophical Society provides a helpful roundup of the coverage.

Who won? Read the summary transcript and coverage and decide for yourself. Biola prof Doug Geivett had this to say in his snap analysis:

[T]his debate exposed a difference in preparation on the part of these two debaters. This is far more significant than it might seem at first. William Lane Craig has debated this topic dozens of times, without wavering from the same basic pattern of argument. He presents the same arguments in the same form, and presses his opponents in the same way for arguments in defense of their own worldviews. He's consistent. He's predictable. One might think that this is a liability, that it's too risky to face a new opponent who has so much opportunity to review Craig's specific strategy. But tonight's debate proves otherwise. Hitchens can have no excuse for dropping arguments when he knows - or should know - exactly what to expect. Suppose one replies that William Craig is a more experienced debater and a trained philosopher, while Christopher Hitchens is a journalist working outside the Academy. That simply won't do as a defense of Hitchens. First, Hitchens is no stranger to debate. Second, he is clearly a skillful polemicist. Third - and most important - Hitchens published a book, god Is Not Great, in which he makes bold claims against religion in general and Christianity in particular. With his book, he threw down the challenge. To his credit, he rose to meet a skillful challenger. But did he rise to the occasion? Did he acquit himself well? At one point he acknowledged that some of his objections to the designer argument were "layman's" objections. His book, I believe, is also the work of a layman. It appears to have been written for popular consumption and without concern for accountability to Christians whose lives are dedicated to the defense of the Gospel.

UPDATE: CT plans to post podcasts of the five author panel discussions starting later this week.

Posted by Stan Guthrie at April 6, 2009 | Comments (4)

With biblical scholar Darrell Bock and others weighing the evidence, a new, eight-part documentary series offered by Day of Discovery asks the question, "Jesus: Man, Messiah, or More?" The first installment is available now for free; later ones to come next month.

HT: Ed Komoszewski and Justin Taylor.

Posted by Stan Guthrie at February 27, 2009 | Comments (4)

The inaugural gathering of The Jesus Project, a group of biblical scholars and academics in related disciplines embarking on a five-year quest to unearth the historical Jesus, took place in Amherst, N.Y. December 5th through 7th. Historian R. Joseph Hoffman, Chair of The Scientific Committee for the Study of Religion (CSER), the Jesus Project's sponsor, describes the group's intent and operating principles on its website.

The Jesus Project, as CSER has named the new effort, is the first methodologically agnostic approach to the question of Jesus' historical existence. But we are not neutral, let alone willfully ambiguous, about the objectives of the project itself. We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has to tell us. We do not believe the task is to produce a "plausible" portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives and goals of the Gospel writers in telling his story. We think the history and culture of the times provide many significant clues about the character of figures similar to Jesus. We believe the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible. We regard previous attempts to rule the question out of court as vestiges of a time when the Church controlled the boundaries of permissible inquiry into its sacred books. More directly, we regard the question of the historical Jesus as a testable hypothesis, and we are committed to no prior conclusions about the outcome of our inquiry. This is a statement of our principles, and we intend to stick to them.

The project was devised more than two years ago, and officially launched at a January 2007 conference, "Scripture and Skepticism," at the University of California at Davis.

CSER's website provides a list of notable attendees at this December's gathering, as well as a schedule of proceedings, and a follow-up report.

Public radio WBFO 88.7 FM in Buffalo interviewed one scholar involved in the project, Robert M. Price, two days before the event. According to his website bio, Price attended a fundamentalist (his word) Baptist church early in life, was involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship during his time at Montclair State College, and received an MTS degree in New Testament from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the late ''70s. Since this time Price has distanced himself from evangelical Christianity, collected two PhDs, moved in and out of various forms of institutionalized liberal religion, and written numerous books. A 2007 release, Jesus is Dead, argues, according to its back cover, that

(1) not only is there no good reason to think that Jesus ever rose from the dead, (2) there is no good reason to think that he ever lived or died at all.

The publisher also notes that readers of the book

will have ammunition with which to counter the arguments of muscular apologists such as Gary Habermas, N.T. Wright, or William Lane Craig.

Price's inclusion in a study group premised on the belief that "the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible" has not been lost on Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and Executive Director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Blogging at PrimeTimeJesus, Wallace writes:

No one is neutral when it comes to Jesus, and we might as well all admit that fact. It is beyond my comprehension how a man who has explicitly and frequently written that the historical Jesus is a myth could be a part of this project.

The Jesus Project's next conference is tentatively scheduled for May 2009 in Chicago. Papers from the December 2008 conference will be published in 2009 by Prometheus Books under the title Sources of the Jesus Tradition: An Inquiry.

Posted by Derek Keefe at December 17, 2008 | Comments (9)

Indian Christians have been accused of offering illegal inducements for conversion. Some followers of Jesus have paid a high price indeed. An account by Anand Mahadevan, however, talks about a heart that has been strangely warmed.

When I was 19, a Christian friend with whom I used to play cricket invited me to his house for prayer. If he had invited me to a pub, or party, I would have gone too. At his home, he and his sister prayed for me. It was a simple yet delightful conversation with God that lasted all of five minutes. I don't remember it verbatim, but they articulated a prayer of blessing on my life, future, career and family. It was a simple affair - no miracles, no angels visiting. All they did was utter a deep human cry out to the creator God and His only son Jesus Christ. When they said Amen, I felt in my heart a desire to follow Jesus.

Posted by Stan Guthrie at October 31, 2008 | Comments (4)

Expelled, a new documentary that argues the case for Intelligent Design from a Judeo-Christian perspective, has been in the headlines lately, prior to its April 18 theatrical release.

The film, hosted and narrated by Ben Stein, has been screened to invitation-only audiences at churches and for various Christian groups. But several critics have worked their way in to some of the screenings, most notably Roger Moore of The Orlando Sentinel, who recently trashed the movie in his blog.

A critic of another kind "crashed" a screening in Minnesota on Thursday night--Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and arguably the most outspoken critic of Intelligent Design and Creationism. Dawkins himself appears in the documentary--but claims he was duped into believing it was going to be an objective account of Darwinism vs. ID.

Jeffrey Overstreet, a film critic for CT Movies, broke the news on his own blog Thursday night after receiving an e-mail from a college student who was at the screening.

Stuart Blessman, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities student, told Overstreet in the e-mail that Dawkins' appearance "was quite a surprise" to both the audience and associate producer Mark Mathis, who fielded questions afterward.

Blessman reported that Dawkins asked several questions, and complained that "any statement he made in the film was in fact under the assumption that he was being interviewed . . . for a film that was to take an even-handed look at the Intelligent Design/Evolution controversy."

It's not the first time Dawkins and other Darwinian experts say they were duped by the filmmakers. The Guardian reported last fall that Dawkins said, "At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front," he said. And The New York Times quotes Dawkins and other atheists who appeared in the film under a "deceptive invitation."

Blessman also wrote that "the Q&A then proceeded pretty uneventfully, with several of the questions addressed to Dawkins himself. Mathis and Dawkins also clearly had spoken on numerous occasions and appeared to continue an argument that they had started previously."

Blessman also reported that Dawkins complained that a colleague of his was turned away even though he (Dawkins) was admitted to the screening. That colleague, PZ Myers, a biologist and prof at the University of Minnesota-Morris, is actually featured in the film. Myers later blogged his own account of what happened here and here.

Myers wrote that he caught up with Dawkins and friends after the film, "which I hear is not only boring and poorly made, but is ludicrous in its dishonesty. Apparently, a standard tactic is to do lots of fast cuts between biologists like me or Dawkins or Eugenie Scott and shots of Nazi atrocities. It's all very ham-handed. The audience apparently ate it up, though. Figures. Christians have a growing reputation for their appreciation of dishonesty."

Read more about Expelled in earlier editions of Reel News at CT Movies.

3/26 UPDATE: There has been much discussion about the use of the word "crash" to describe how Dawkins got into the screening. Since this story posted, CT has learned that the screening was not an "invitation-only" event, but that attendees had simply signed up on a website--that it was open to anyone who signed up in advance. Tickets were not needed. CT regrets the choice of the word "crash" in the title and in the story, because neither Dawkins nor Myers were trying to "crash" the event, but had legitimately signed up for the screening as did everyone else who attended.

Posted by Mark Moring at March 20, 2008 | Comments (71)

First Things' managing editor interviewed Tim Keller on the occasion of his new book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, which Keller calls "Mere Christianity for Dummies." The table of contents is a list of common doubts about what orthodox Christians believe, which Keller answers in short, accessible arguments.

Keller says his motive in starting to write it was to lay out the big ideas behind what he had been preaching as a resource for members of his church, Redeemer Presbyterian. "And I think probably the other thing was this thing called aging," he told Anthony Sacramone.

While the interview loops back to the significance of denomination and affiliation, it also covers a broad range of topics. Some of the ground they covered:

On how this is different from the world Mere Christianity was broadcast in:

Lewis definitely lived at a time in which people were more certain across the board that empirical, straight-line rationality was the way you decided what truth was, and there's just not as much of a certainty now. Also, when Lewis was writing, people were able to follow sustained arguments that had a number of points that built on one another. I guess I should say we actually have a kind of rationality-attention-deficit disorder now. You can make a reasonable argument, you can use logic, but it really has to be relatively transparent. You have to get to your point pretty quickly.

I don't think they're irrational, they are as rational, but they want something of a mixture of logic and personal appeal.

On why believers should doubt:

Sacramone: You say early on in The Reason for God that a little doubt is necessary to test the integrity of your faith. Does this mean that Christians need to become amateur apologists to some extent, to be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within them?

Keller: I don't mention it in [The Reason for God], but I think there are always doubts that, if you come to grips with them - I think there's doubts that you have, that you always have, that you ought to be more forthright and address them, for two reasons. One is, then you're a better apologist. Because now people are coming shootin' stuff at you in a way they wouldn't when I was growing up.

As I was reading [N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God], I realized I was coming to greater certainty, and that when I closed the book, I said, at a time when it was very important to me to feel this way, I said, "He really really really did rise from the dead." And I said, "Well, didn't I believe that before?" Of course I believed it before - I defended it, and I think before I certainly would have died for that belief. But actually, there were still doubts in there, and the doubts were taken down 50 percent or something. I didn't even know they were there. And it was a wonderful experience It was both an intellectual and emotional experience: You're facing death, you're not sure you're going to get over the cancer. And the rigorous intellectual process of going through all the alternative explanations for how the Christian Church started, except the resurrection - none of them are even tenable. It was quite an experience.

On dealing with creation and evolution:

How could there have been death before Adam and Eve fell? The answer is, I don't know. But all I know is, didn't animals eat bugs? Didn't bugs eat plants? There must have been death. In other words, when you realize, "Oh wait, this is really complicated," then you realize, "I don't have to figure this out before I figure out is Jesus Christ raised from the dead."

Tim Keller is taking the book tour to Veritas forums at various colleges throughout the U.S.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at February 26, 2008 | Comments (0)

A Painful Subject

Two agnostic authors face suffering--and come out at different spots on the faith spectrum.

Katelyn Beaty | February 18, 2008

Controversial biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out, but this time he's not bent on tackling issues of scriptural discrepancies, as he did in his most (in)famous work, Misquoting Jesus (see Books and Culture's review from 2005). This time, Ehrman founds his agnosticism on the Bible's seemingly equivocal answers to the question, How can a loving God allow terrible things to happen to people?

"I realized I couldn't explain any longer why there could be such pain and misery in the world that was supposedly ruled by an all-powerful and loving God," the religion professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told the San Diego Union-Tribune over the weekend. The problem of suffering "put me over the top," says Ehrman. "So, I became an agnostic."

God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer (HarperOne) traces Ehrman's change in convictions about God and Scripture based on his inability to reconcile the goodness of God with the suffering of man. Ehrman explores and ultimately disputes the way suffering is handled in biblical accounts: as punishment for wrongdoing (Genesis), as an outcome of others' wrongdoing (throughout the Psalms), as part of redemption (the Gospels), or as part of the mystery of God (Job).

Ehrman finds these varied explanations problematic, as he does chalking the question of theodicy up to something beyond human knowledge: "If you say it's a mystery, then what you're saying is there's no answer." And having no answer is apparently insufficient for Ehrman.

For other agnostics, though, encountering believers who have profound hope and peace despite suffering is enough to at least crack a window open for belief. This is what happened to John Marks, a former 60 Minutes producer who traces his journey into and out of faith in his new spiritual memoir, Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind (Ecco). In a striking interview in this weekend's Boston Globe, Marks tells of a close friendship with an evangelical couple, the McWhinneys, that emerged from Marks's research for his book:

When I first met the McWhinneys, [I thought] they were almost walking caricatures of the evangelical Christian. They believe in the Rapture, that when the end time comes, people will be taken up into the air, and the nonbelievers will be left behind on earth to suffer. There was a cardboard quality, I thought, to their belief.

When I met them the second time, after we'd done the "60 Minutes" piece, they told me about their bipolar son, roughly my age, who had tried to kill himself [and] had disappeared and was believed to be living in a homeless shelter in Dallas and whom they had decided to commit. They spoke with great sorrow. They didn't say he was possessed by the devil. They resented that characterization - and remember, these are Christians who believe there is a living Satan. We agreed I would join them for church [the following] Sunday.

Five hours later, their son walked up the onramp of a highway and was killed by a car. On Sunday, I got in the car, we were having a chat, and then Don suddenly told me their son had been killed. [He said] his son was not gone - he was walking the streets of the heavenly city, and we know from Revelations that that city has walls made of pure jasper - describing this world that, for nonbelievers, is just pure fantasy. I became aware of the way this sense that God is real, that there is this heavenly kingdom - it is not window-dressing. In moments of grief and deep sorrow, people like the McWhinneys do reach for this, and it is the consolation.

While believers may not be able to give a thoroughly coherent reason for why God allows his followers to suffer - and debates about theodicy will likely continue among theologians until Judgment Day - we may at least be able to provide a glimpse into "the peace that passes all understanding" as we respond to crises in our own lives and come out praising the Creator for his unbounded goodness.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at February 18, 2008 | Comments (8)

Doubting Antony Flew

The New York Times questions the competency of the world's most famous ex-atheist.

David Neff | November 5, 2007

Over the weekend, the New York Times magazine was busy sowing the seeds of doubt about a potentially bestselling book by philosopher Antony Flew. Flew's books aren't normally bestsellers, but There Is a God is different:

? It's published by HarperOne, a publisher with marketing muscle.
? It is "written in simple language for a mass audience."
? It tells the story of the famous atheist's late in life turn toward belief in God (first reported in 2004).

That's a winning formula for creating a wide readership.

In "The Turning of an Atheist," Mark Oppenheimer raises questions galore without actually proving any of his points. He questions the degree of Flew's involvement in writing the book, the credibility of scientists whose perspective Flew adopted, and even Flew's mental competence at the advanced age of 84. (Oppenheimer suggests that Flew may be "a senescent scholar possibly being exploited by his associates" and raises the possibility that his "memory [is] failing" and that "his powers [are] in decline.")

If Oppenheimer's piece creates enough of a furore, I'm sure HarperOne will see it as publicity they couldn't have purchased at any price.

It would be nearly impossible to answer all of Oppenheimer's questions, especially since direct conversation with Flew (in Oppenheimer's terms) "confuses more than it clarifies."

You'll probably have to bracket Oppenheimer's questions until God's kingdom comes, but in the meantime here are two other articles you may want to read:

"Thinking Straighter" (CT, April 2005). James A. Beverley interviews Antony Flew for Christianity Today.

"Victorian Skeptics on the Road to Damascus" (Christian History and Biography newsletter, 2005). Timothy Larsen recounts other famous atheists who returned to faith late in life.

Posted by David Neff at November 5, 2007 | Comments (18)