Whole Reason

Andrew Nor­man Wil­son (b1950), is an Eng­lish teacher and award win­ning writer.  His biog­ra­phy of Tol­stoy won the Whit­bread Award (now the Costa Book Awards) for best biog­ra­phy in 1988.

Wil­son entered Oxford on the path of ordi­na­tion in the Angli­can Church, but quit after the first year, and in the 1980’s came out as an athe­ist.  In 1991 he pub­lished a pam­phlet enti­tled Against Reli­gion, and wrote other his­tor­i­cal and fic­tion books crit­i­cal of reli­gion, includ­ing God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (2000), his 2004 Jesus: A Life, which is crit­i­cal of the his­toric­ity of the gospels, and his fic­tional piece My Name is Legion, a satire attack­ing both the British Press and the Angli­can Church.  But it seems that all those opin­ions may now be his FORMER posi­tions on such matters.

How­ever, in Why I Believe Again (April 2, 2009 edi­tion of The New States­man), Wil­son dis­cusses how he became an athe­ist and his “slow and doubt­ing” return to faith.  Regard­ing his ini­tial loss of faith:

He dis­cusses his ela­tion at leav­ing a doubt­ing, hes­i­tant faith for the ‘sure­ness’ and ‘fel­low­ship’ of intel­lec­tual anti-theists, and his new found cama­raderie with Dawkins and Hitchens:

But his doubt­ing nature soon got him doubt­ing athe­ism itself.  In fact, the creed that fails to take reli­gion seri­ously seemed dis­hon­est to him as well:

In an argu­ment that seems to echo the Moral Argu­ment for God, Wil­son dis­cusses the real­iza­tion that athe­ism is bleak, and those he admired most from his­tory, like Gandhi, Bach, and Beethoven, were men of faith:

Inter­est­ingly, while the prob­lem of suf­fer­ing had caused him to leave faith, the death of his mother and some close friends made him recon­sider faith, since the mate­ri­al­ist athe­ist view did not seem to address the com­plex­ity of exis­tence and human sit­u­a­tion at all:

But what really seems to have bro­ken his athe­ist stance was not intel­lec­tual argu­men­ta­tion, but the com­mon sense real­iza­tion that the human intel­lect, lan­guage, and the beauty of music, just could NOT have evolved — nor could mere ‘col­lec­tions of meat’ cre­ate all of this logic and beauty by chance evo­lu­tion.  He con­cluded that we ARE spir­i­tual beings, and such beings had to be created.

are very much more than col­lec­tions of meat.

Again, though his thought process is some­what heuris­tic and emo­tional, it mim­ics the clas­sic intel­lec­tual philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments for the exis­tence of God, as well as the claim by Paul the Apos­tle that all men should real­ize there is a God, just by look­ing at creation:

His sum­ma­tion of athe­ism is unique and inter­est­ing, stat­ing that athe­ists’ root mis­take is not in its assump­tions about God, but about man.

My depar­ture from the Faith was like a con­ver­sion on the road to
Dam­as­cus. My return was slow, hes­i­tant, doubt­ing. So it will always be;
but I know I shall never make the same mis­take again. Gilbert Ryle,

cat­e­gory mis­take made by athe­ists is not about God, but about human

first chap­ter of Gen­e­sis with­out prej­u­dice and you will be con­vinced at

Awe­some.