Sunday, A Former Atheist and Academic Continues Her Journey To Faith

LAST WEEK'S POST

TODAY I CONTINUE EXCERPTING from Holly Ordway's book Not God's Type, published in 2010 by Moody Publishers:

THE DIFFICULTY WAS NOT A LACK of opportunity to hear about God. The problem lay deeper: in my very concept of what faith was. I thought faith was by definition irrational, that it meant believing some assertion to be true for no reason. It has never occurred to me that there could be a path to faith through reason, that there were arguments for the existence of God, and evidence for the claims of Christianity.

I thought you had to just have faith!---and the very idea baffled and horrified me.

And yet, there was something about the idea of faith that made it stick with me. I didn't have faith. I didn't want faith, but I felt compelled to have a good reason why not. I constructed an elaborate analogy for myself, one that I felt gave a satisfying explanation of why 'faith' was impossible.

I set it up like this: imagine that you tell me, ' If you believe there's an invisible pink unicorn in the sky, I'll give you a new BMW.'....If I can believe what you want me to believe, the new car is mine. Cool! But it's a waste of time: I know there's no unicorn. No matter how much I want that car, I am incapable of believing something contrary to reason in order to get it.

Believing something irrational on demand to get a prize: that is what the evangelical invitation to 'come to Jesus and get eternal life!' sounded like to me.

Sure, if I thought I could benefit by it, I could pretend to believe, and say so: 'Oh yes, I believe in Jesus!' But I'd know I was lying, which would make this so-called faith into deliberate, repellent falsehood.

The only other option for faith, as I understood it, would be to try to convince myself that I believed. Indeed I might be able to work myself up into such a pitch of desire for the product offered that I could for a time, believe what I believed. But it wouldn't be the same thing as really believing---and the idea that I ought to make the effort seemed disgusting and immoral.

As I understood it then, faith was at best a delusion and at worst total hypocrisy.

To me, this was the decisive argument against faith. I could not believe, no matter how much I might want to. If God did exist and would punish me for no believing, I was stuck with being punished. I thought 'faith' was a meaningless word, that so-called believers were either hypocrites or self-deluded fools, and that it was a waste of time to consider any claim a Christian made about the truth.

If I had inquired, I would have found out the Bible was nothing like I thought it was. I would have found Paul's (the erstwhile Pharisee who persecuted Christians before his conversion) forthright declaration that Christianity is based on the historical, witnessed events of Christ's death and resurrection. I would have found that theology and philosophy offered real answers to my questions, not an appeal to blind faith.

I would have found that the history of the church did not conform to my image of the Christian faith as a self-serving, politically useful fiction. But I thought I knew exactly what faith w as, so I declined to look further....

Or perhaps I was afraid that there was more to it than I was willing to credit---but I didn't want to deal with that. Easier by far to read only books by atheists that told me what I wanted to hear: that I was much smarter and intellectually honest and morally superior than those poor, deluded Christians.

I had built myself a fortress of atheism, secure against any attack by irrational faith. And I lived in it alone.

Holly Ordway, Not God's Type, A Rational Academic Finds A Radical Faith