Did you see this? AN Wilson is a believer

Scot:

What a great article. I hope many will read it.

Derek

Thanks for this. I have a feeling it will end up in my
sermon Sunday on John 20:19-31. :) Good timing.

This is a better story than the recent case of formerly atheist philosopher Anthony Flew, for at least two reasons:
1) Wilson actually came to Christian faith as opposed to Flew who came to some generic theism.
2) There is not the question of senility as there apparently is with Flew.

The story of Flew has been promoted by some of the Intelligent-Design culture-war crowd; one wonders what the same crowd will do with someone who found God not in biological design but in the person of Jesus and the Body of Christ.

Wilson's s-l-o-w realization that the atheist's sparkling intellectual argument was not wholly fulfilling to him is an encouragement both for those of us who have to look our doubts in the mirror each morning and those of us who are engaged in conversations with friends who have or are in the process of walking away from their faith.

Thank you so much for posting this.

Fascinating.

I read AN Wilson's "God's Funeral" this last summer - a rather disturbing read although he was somewhat ambivalent at times. These articles are interesting and there are points worth discussion.

Helen,

I actually found the last part of the Mail article most interesting.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.

J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.

But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives - the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church tomorrow morning.

I don't give a rip about the "Jesus as personal savior" decision jargon. The key is buying into the story and choosing to follow Jesus and God. For some of us raised in the church it becomes more a decision not to turn away.

phil_style,

I don't see a God of the gaps argument - except in the idea that there is something deeply missing in life if all we are is "animated pieces of meat." Comments on language could be taken that way in the absence of anything else - but I don't think that the argument is "We can't explain language so we must invoke a divine being," which would be a real God of the gaps argument.

It is deeper than this and gets to the reality of things like beauty and morality and purpose and such. Cognition is more than just reductionist materialism if the concepts contemplated have any "real" meaning.