Christian Dreams (Part I)

Towards a rational faith

L: Steve Meyer; R: Paul Kingsnorth

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I have a new short piece just out in World magazine last week. It’s a (not by my choice) much-delayed take on a dialogue that came out a couple months ago on the Hoover Institution’s YouTube channel, featuring Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, and Steve Meyer in conversation. The conversation is only an hour long, because Hoover hasn’t yet gotten the memo that it’s the 2020s now, and the best way to do these sorts of things is to set aside at least two hours for them to unfold properly. Still, the way Peter Robinson heroically tries to organize an hour’s worth of three-way dialogue around such trifling questions as “Does God exist?” “How did the West lose its faith?” or “Is Christianity rational?” is rather endearing to watch. And Tom, Douglas and Steve each bring something distinctive that keeps the conversation fresh. This is the first time I recall seeing someone in Meyer’s particular sphere engage publicly with “New New Atheists”—my admittedly unoriginal label for the current crop of Christian-friendly public intellectuals who don’t profess Christianity themselves.

To make this more fun for me, Meyer actually shares a long-standing professional connection with my parents, through their convergent interests in the philosophy of science and intelligent design. Strictly speaking, he’s never been a “Christian apologist,” but it’s inevitable that when one is making the public case for design, the “God question” is going to make an appearance. That question could be asked seriously (“Doesn’t all this naturally lead you to conclude that God, or a god-like being, is the best explanation for your evidence?”) or unseriously (“Why don’t you all just admit you’re a bunch of pseudo-scientific right-wing Christianist wackadoodles already?”) Meyer is a seasoned veteran of the latter sort of “conversation,” but he’s clearly happy to be having the more serious kind now, especially since he’s chosen to cross the streams between philosophy of science and philosophy of religion in his 2020 book Return of the God Hypothesis.

Some might see Meyer as the Christian counterpart of a figure like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss—i.e., a figure whose popularity peaked in an earlier “phase” of the conversation around science, religion, and faith. Meyer versus Krauss, or Dawkins versus John Lennox, were yesterday’s entertainment. Today, debates are out, and open-ended dialogue is in. You can sense this in a recent small podcast with Tom Holland and noted Eastern Orthodox convert Paul Kingsnorth. Holland and Kingsnorth aren’t trying to convince each other with arguments. Rather, they’re having a conversation about the psychology of belief itself. “Becoming a Christian” is considered less as a reasoned choice based on evidence and more as a leap into the waves, an act of radical trust that somehow, against all odds, you won’t drown. The difference between them is simply that one has chosen to take the plunge, and the other hasn’t.

There’s a tendency in some circles to elevate this as the superior approach to faith, implying that as modernism falls out of fashion, we will need more Eastern-style mystical thinkers like Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, or Jonathan Pageau to “reenchant” the West. And as they increase, rational Western philosopher-apologists like Meyer will decrease, becoming irrelevant to all but the handful of pointy-headed nerds who get very excited about Bayes’s Theorem or the fine-tuning argument. At least I think that’s what a lot of people vaguely think.

I should stress that Kingsnorth is far too down-to-earth and modest to puff himself up that way, but he’s occasionally invited to, as when Holland asks him whether he thinks the whole Western Christian tradition may have been “a wrong turn,” historically. Kingsnorth gracefully demurs that he’s no theologian, but very broadly speaking, he likes an old priest friend’s adage that Eastern Christianity tends to be down here [taps heart] while Western Christianity is up here [taps head].

Needless to say, I don’t think Western Christianity was a mistake. It had better not have been, or else I and quite a lot of good friends are in trouble. Though far be it from me to argue with Kingsnorth’s very compelling conversion story, or with the observation that the West desperately needs to be reenchanted. I just don’t think the West is dependent on the East for resources it lacks within its own tradition, including the resources to integrate “heart” and “head.”

But to give Kingsnorth his full due, his own conversion was hardly “irrational.” He doesn’t present as the sort of man who makes decisions based on woolly thinking. Quite the contrary. He comes across as a highly intelligent man, a modern man who chose to play with ancient pagan fire. As he writes about his old job as priest of the witch gods, “My coven used to do its rituals in the woods under the full moon. It was fun, and it made things happen. I discovered that magic is real. It works. Who it works for is another question.”

Well. If we’re talking about “evidence” here, that would seem to qualify as evidence of the supernatural. Not the sort of evidence I recommend people go out and look for, mind you! But definitely evidence!

Of course, as Kingsnorth’s story proves, one can be quite fluent in the supernatural, generally, while also being quite hostile to Christianity, specifically. Kingsnorth’s problem was that it seemed as if Christ still wasn’t leaving him alone. In fact, he had the deeply unsettling sense that Christ was actually “hunting” him. He tells the whole story more excitingly than I can retell it, so I won’t try to do that here. I’ll just note he goes on to say that as he read more, “Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism.” In that sense, he says himself that his conversion wasn’t “irrational.”

That said, he does conclude, “I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true.” By contrast, when he talks about his own “torturous” adult conversion, Steve Meyer can recall no similar single moment when he simply “knew” that Christianity was true. In his conversation with Murray and Holland, he describes it as “anything but a Damascus Road experience.” Unlike Kingsnorth, he would probably tell you that he did “argue himself into” Christianity, in the end. Subsequently, he’s made it his life’s work to integrate his faith with his scholarship, presenting God as the best explanation of all the available evidence.

But Eastern Orthodoxy, where Kingsnorth has settled, has no apologetic tradition. There’s no sense of urgency that one must go out and “make the case” for Christianity. Rather, there’s a sense that either one is going to believe or one isn’t, and arguments one way or the other aren’t likely to be the deciding factor.

I think this can be true. But I also think people are complicated. Arguments can certainly be a deciding factor, if not the deciding factor. And I think they play another important role as well: Whether they actually persuade a man to believe or not, they can leave him without excuse. I go back to what Kingsnorth wrote, that Christianity told a story that “chimed better” with his experience. It provided a better explanation for, well, all this, than materialism. And in that, he and Meyer are actually quite aligned. It’s just that Meyer has more tools with which to make Kingsnorth’s common sense philosophically rigorous. Though he didn’t get a chance to say as much as he could have in dialogue with Murray and Holland, I think their conversation makes this clear, as I’ll unpack more next time.

To be sure, there can be many reasons why someone may not want to be a Christian. There were many reasons why Kingsnorth did not want to be a Christian. Good philosophy will not take away all of those reasons. But it may just take away the rational ones.