yesterday about how Alan Roebuck’s rational arguments for belief in God and Christianity had helped lead him from atheism to Christian belief, Sage McLaughlin writes:
Please allow me to add this to your discussion on the place of formal reasoning in religious conversion.
It is obviously true that religious assent is not a matter of pure, disembodied rationality. It is a fully human thing, perhaps the only fully human thing. It requires the action of the rational mind, the pre-rational senses, and the dark movements of what we call “the heart.” What we know of the invisible world and of transcendent truth comes to us full-wrought, so to speak. We see it with our whole selves—our senses, our minds eye, our intuition, our reason. Religion counts as “data” all things that form the human experience, and uses all the tools of “seeing” which come to us by nature.
For this reason, religion is the default way of understanding the world as we find it, and it is atheism which has struck most men, through the ages, as counterintuitive and in need of defending. Objections to atheism are of myriad kinds, drawing from our reason, our aesthetic sense, our moral instincts, and so forth. A man may view atheism as an offense against ordinary rationality, or against aesthetic sentiment, or against moral intuition, or against logic. Arguments for materialist atheism, the denial of the transcendent, and the rejection of God are of a single type, and must by necessity discount not merely some, but most of what makes us human. It is a purely negative system of thought which systematically discounts much of what we, as people, actually are. (I’m reminded again of Chesterton, who said that a materialist does not disbelieve in miracles because his freedom and liberality of thought permit him to do so; he disbelieves in them because his unyielding materialist dogma does not permit him to believe in them.)
Conversions to Christianity is not a matter of mere intellectual assent, it is said. This is true enough as far as it goes, I think, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. For many people, including me, conversion to Christianity requires a kind of intellectual winnowing. The first order of business is to examine the arguments, and to see whether in fact belief in Christ can be reasonable. Is it an open contradiction? If so, then no one ought to assent to it, and speaking for myself, I had first to examine this most basic and obvious question. I was shocked to discover that the Christian theists had the best of the debate.
Once I had discovered, to my surprise and chagrin, that belief in God and in the Christian religion were not logically absurd or contrary to reason, but in fact were more harmonious with both than was atheism, it became possible—not necessary, mind you, only possible—for me to acquire a genuine belief in the Christian revelation. In epistemology, knowledge is usually held to be a justified, true belief. A purely rational argument can tell you whether sufficient justification exists for belief in God. An argument from various kinds of evidence can justify the belief that Christ really existed and that he rose from the dead. And something more, that is neither purely rational nor purely empirical nor purely evidential, is required to move to actual knowledge that Christ was who He said He was. That something is a personal encounter, a “seeing” or an intuition that is not contradicted by rational or empirical evidence, but is not wholly dependent on it either.
So in short, in my case as in many others’, Thomistic reasoning and arguments from historical evidence are necessary in order for Christianity to command our assent. They are a barrier that we must surmount. But in the end, they are insufficient to sustain a lasting conversion of the heart. That is because human beings are made up of more stuff than mere matter, and we also reason by more than Aristotelian logic. We are imperfectly ordered, so that our various ways of understanding often appear to be set at cross purposes. But good faith and a real allegiance to our identity as human beings requires that we set these things—the mind, the heart, our moral faculty, and so on—in harmony. The atheist finds that the reasons for his atheism are insufficient to support what he just knows to be true or, as he might put it, what he really, really wants to be true, about the existence of a real and binding moral law. The Christian believer can account for all his intuitions about the world because his beliefs can actually encompass and explain the whole range of his experience of the world.
For some, it is not reason that is the barrier, but the heart—for example, Theodore Dalrymple once said in a radio interview that he could assent to God in a purely intellectual way as a proposition, but he could never bring his heart into line with that belief, and is therefore not religious. Others feel their hearts drawn to the transcendent, but their rational mind erects obstacles of its own. Mr. Roebuck is right that the Holy Spirit will use rational arguments to bring people to Christ, but this is more a matter of eliminating all the bad and irrational reasons for being an atheist. So it usually goes with formal logic. It is an elegant tool for eliminating falsehood, but it is somewhat less capable of positively establishing Truth.
I hope that my meaning is clear. I know that I conflate some things but, for the purposes of the discussion at hand, I thought that was all right. Thanks for reading.