Friends: This is about when atheists laugh ... nervously.  See the column below.  Also, a link to last week's "Finding Genius" podcast is below the column.  Blessings! Bob

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Spirituality Column #901

February 20, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

I See Smart People, Part 2    By Bob Walters

“On its own, the word ‘Jesus’ seems to say both too much and (somehow) too little.” – Christopher Hitchens, from the afterword of his book, God is Not Great (2007)

We are actually focusing our attention on the recently published book, Coming to Faith Through Dawkins, but the late conservative polemicist Christopher Hitchens similarly energized the “New Atheist” movement of two decades ago.

Richard Dawkins, of course, is the noted British genetic biologist / atheist who famously wrote The God Delusion in 2006.  Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath, British Christian scholars and apologists, assembled Coming to Faith with twelve erudite essays from twelve New Atheists whose journeys let them to Christ, not oblivion.

This week and next, we will look at a few of these accomplished but generally non-famous essayists from a variety of countries, cultures, faith histories, generations, and academic interests, who clamped tightly onto atheism at one point or another in their lives.  What the essays give us are a dozen pictures of disciplined, deep-thinking, talented folks who arrived at the Cross – unexpectedly – after previously not believing it was there.

The Hitchens’ quote above, about ‘Jesus,’ drew a welcoming and large giggle from his (presumably) atheist book tour audience in Little Rock, Ark. On his way to the event, Hitchens had seen “an enormous black-and-yellow billboard bearing the single word jesus (sic),” he said, and introduced his talk with the billboard and the above quote.  Ashley Lande, a formerly LSD-taking atheist who grew into a published writer and artist whose work is shown internationally in large-city galleries, commented on Hitchens’ quote:

“I can almost hear that laughter: chattering, light, and adoring … but I also imagine in it a nervous edge. …while some of us can laugh off God, we cannot laugh off Jesus. …we can pshaw at the parting of the Red Sea, or at Noah, a lunatic building a boat ... But … laugh at Jesus, the rogue Jewish preacher condemned to death by torture, the fully human man with the spit of contempt mingling with sweat on his destroyed brow …?

“No … even the unbelievers, can’t laugh.”

Lande, a California girl who declared her teenaged atheism loudly to her Christian parents, is, like all the book’s atheist-turned-lucidly-Christian essayists, a life-long, deeply curious thinker about life’s purpose, spiritual reality, and the nature of truth.  I came to faith late, myself, but never recall the same lifelong, intentional, spiritual questions about God and religion as these essayists.  I didn’t think about God any more than I thought about accounting or Antarctica; I knew they existed but had neither interest nor questions.

Coming to Faith made me recognize my own lack of spiritual curiosity prior to finding Christ.  The book would have had no effect on me 30 years ago because I gave no serious thought to any religion.  Now I appreciate the book’s armory of rationally and spiritually arrived-at truth.  We all have family and friends who are too smart for Jesus, and we all want to share.

Case in point is the non-believing, adult godson of my church buddy Dave, a retired urologist who the past several years has taught our Adult Bible Fellowship (Sunday school) “Logos” class.  Dave sent a note early last week about his successful adult godson, educated at Princeton and Harvard, who announced to his Catholic family that he was an atheist.

Dave sent Coming to Faith to him, noting the essay by Judith Babarsky, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., who describes her road to Catholic faith heavily quoting G.K. Chesterton (one of my favorites), and Joseph Ratzinger’s (later Pope Benedict XVI), Jesus of Nazareth.

She notes, “Atheism is an emptiness, a belief in nothing beyond the observable, [We too often] root ourselves in a timeline, in our own age, [rather than attaching ourselves] to a wisdom that is eternal.”  Dave’s godson is in his 40s, like I was when I found faith. I hope he does too.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) often notes his own surprise that upon first attending church at age 47 (OK, he was Episcopalian as a child) and growing into Bible study and Christian life, he found truth that was expansively intellectual and freeing, not a strait-jacketed prison.

PODCAST LINK: Discussing Paul The Apostle With Bob Walters