I am always shocked when I come face to face with a real, well-spoken, committed atheist, like Mr. Adam Gopnik over at the New Yorker.
I guess that after living for so long in a small community of Christian friends, I just begin to suppose that everyone lives and thinks the way that I do! I find it hard to believe that there are people out there that have read the works of Christians like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and have not been moved by their articulate faith and convicting common sense... I find it hard to believe that someone could come face to face with such robust representations of the truth and find the strength to be skeptical, and I have to thank the boys over at lex orandi for reminding me that such people do, in fact, exist!
Of course my experiences with half-hearted agnostics have been far more plentiful than my encounters with such atheiests. The average American seems to have a kind of vague hostility toward serious religion that is based more upon the fear that we might try to take their toys (and tiny pleasures) away from them than on anything else. But every once in a while I meet an atheist that is really committed to being miserable when faced with the alternative, and it slaps me back into an awareness of just how serious our spiritual battle is... and how lightly I have tended to take the plight of the earnest doubter.
There are people out there that have looked at the best evidence and simply refuse to believe that it points to God! It is not so much that the arguments of these "serious" atheists are any more compelling than those of the half-hearted agnostics - both stances ultimately boil down to a kind of preference in the end - but rather that these arguments are very articulate in their slight of hand... they lead a person that is not listening very closely (or doesn't want to listen very closely) into believing that religious people are just "up tight" dreamers who obsinately fight for the truth of a metaphysical reality that works just as well as a personal fantasy. The mystical, they argue, can make people just as happy when they "know" it to be false as when they believe it to be true... so why argue about it?
The hole in this argument is, of course, obvious to any religious person when it is stated in this way! People like C.S. Lewis who, in finding the Faith, have found what they had been searching for their entire lives do not experience their conversion as a kind of compromising wish-fulfilment... the encounter is greater than any other experience before it, and it reveals all of their little hopes and dreams to be mere echoes of their adoration for the true love of their souls. The new convert, likewise, is not fooled into believing that his religious experience is important primarily because it is a fantasy that makes him happy. Such arguments may be plausible to skeptics in their dark caves of isolated thought, but one of the really surprising things about our daily encounters with the average "man on the street" is that the Faith really does ring true to created ears. As many times as I forget this when I flinch at sharing my faith, most people (including myself) are able to put up with very difficult doctrines when they finally come into contact with the solid reality of Christ - and they would never buy the idea that the objective truth of God's existence is an unimportant factor in their belief! To the great consternation and confusion of ardent atheists, our faith is such that we feel it must be obstinately asserted, because the tangible reality of our claim is exactly what matters about it!
So why do these "serious" atheists persist in downplaying our experience, and why do so many people seem to scoff and excuse their way out of dealing with real religious conversion? It is, I fear, not so great a mystery! Each of us have an astounding capacity for enduring misery in the name of maintaining control of our own world. If the skeptical atheist is right about anything, it is this very tendency in human nature to ignore reasonable solutions in favor of clinging to a personal hope. We have all been victims of this kind of pride to some extent or another, and lest we start to point fingers we should be reminded of exactly how widespread this kind of sickness actually is!
How many of us have given up happiness at one point or another in order to settle for a world that we can control? How many have ended a healthy, helpful relationship by trading a friend's offer of forgiveness for the personal control of staying angry? How many have endured addiction and poverty of all kinds rather than submitting to the kind of help that would make us call these things wrong, admit our defeat, and give them up for a better life? We are proud creatures! And as complicated, educated, refined and articulate as our excuses become, we cannot avoid the ultimate reality that our choices are often motivated by this very tendency to reject what is good in favor of what we feel we can control.
So are we right when we say that there is a God? Mr. Gopnik will tell us that we simply like this story because it makes us feel safe, and he will go on to recast every Christian experience in this light. A free mind can choose to compare the wonderful fantasy of C.S. Lewis and the robust faith that he holds and decide that the fantasy is the real part and the faith is just an awkwardly tacked-on fabrication. He can read the wild stories of G.K. Chesterton and smirk in the belief that it was natural human enthusiasm that inspired this joy in spite of his forgivable religious delusion. But what he cannot honestly claim is that this conclusion is any more accurate or less subjective than that of his religious opponents... and in the end it is he, and not the religious person, that the burden of proof falls upon.
An atheist like Gopnik refuses to accept the witness of millions of Christians throughout history, who have all claimed to experience a level of communion with the supernatural. While Christians are able to acknowledge all of the skeptic's experiences of earthly happiness and joy as valid, Gopnik's principles will not allow him to acknowledge the Christian's claims as even possible. Such a dilemma forces the atheist into a tight spot... he must either hold to his personal belief and choose to ignore or explain away experience, or he must give up his personal belief and entertain the idea that the world may not be completely explained and under control - that he may be subject to a being that he cannot overpower and that he may never come to fully understand!
May God have mercy on the souls of us who are faced with this dilemma! We are all capable of extreme denial in such cases, when our pride is on the line. We are all vulnerable to the kind of skepticism that would rather be master of our own small, dead world than except the reality of that which we cannot master. As much as we would like to believe it impossible, there are many, many people (even people who call themselves Christians) that will willingly take hell over Heaven when they realize what it really means for Heaven to require the death of self. If sin is a sickness, it is a sickness that we can learn to love as we love our own being.
The devil originally dwelt in the presence of God, and the demons still know that Christ is king... but all of these beings found it in themselves to choose to turn from this knowledge for a chance at their own kingdom. Whatever ignorance there is in such a decision, we cannot downplay the role that real choice plays.
C.S. Lewis himself writes, at the end of his Narnia chronicles, of such severe skepticism when the dwarves are faced with heavenly realities at the end of time. Like our own Mr. Gopnik, these dwarves sit in the middle of Aslan's country and obstinately deny that they have left the little tent on their own world. Where there is light and beauty they see darkness. Where there is luscious landscape they see canvas walls. All the beauty is, to them, merely tricks of their imagination, and all of the joyful calls of those around them are merely jealous mocking or deluded fantasy. Their presuppositions will not let them see the promised land or the goodness of Aslan, so they are bound forever by their own delusion to sit on the ground and miserably assert that they are great and wise to see through all of the silly talk of "Aslan's country". They are confident that they know all there is to know about the world, and they content themselves with the thought that even if they are not very happy, they are at least very right!
May God save us all from such delusion!
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