She says:
I tried to face down an overwhelming body of evidence, as well as the living God.
OK. Good start. I’m not sure how you “face down” either of those, but I’m game. Let’s check out this fascinating article courtesy of Christianity Today.
First, we meet Joradn Monge who says she was a skeptic from age 4. At age 11 she was harassed at school for being an “atheist.” In ’08 as a freshman at Harvard she started having conversations with someone about conservative politics and eventually religion.
And he did something else: He prodded me on how inconsistent I was as an atheist who nonetheless believed in right and wrong as objective, universal categories. Defenseless, I decided to take a seminar on meta-ethics. After all, atheists had been developing ethical systems for 200-some years. In what I now see as providential, my atheist professor assigned a paper by C. S. Lewis that resolved the Euthyphro dilemma, declaring, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.”
Inconsistent? I don’t get this. How does “I don’t know” or “I don’t believe” evolve into inconsistency? Hmmmm.
Joseph also pushed me on the origins of the universe. I had always believed in the Big Bang. But I was blissfully unaware that the man who first proposed it, Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. And I’d happily ignored the rabbit trail of a problem of what caused the Big Bang, and what caused that cause, and so on.
Yeah, but claiming a deity did it doesn’t exactly eliminate that problem either. Right now, I can’t say I’m impressed with her reasoning. But that’s just me.
But, as the story progresses, this young author became a deist.
I wouldn’t stay a deist for long. A Catholic friend gave me J. Budziszewski’s book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that “love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person.” This theme—of love as sacrifice for true good—struck me. The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love. And Christianity began to look less strangely mythical and more cosmically beautiful.
After that, she was “confronted by sin.” Arrogance, fits of rage, unforgiveness, selfishness, fuzzy sexual boundaries, and failed ethical standards were problems this author had to deal with. However, knowing she could be forgiven all these terrible acts comforted her.
Delving deeper into apologetics, she read the Qur’an, God Delusion, Skeptic’s Annotated Bible as well as Christian rebuttals to each. The Christians evidently trumped the secular authors because…
…the only reasonable course of action was to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Her “head and heart switched places” and while admiring the miracle of nature, became a Christian.
I climbed over branches and under bushes, sometimes going in the opposite direction for a while when the bramble grew too thick. I treaded lightly through marshes only to have the mud swallow my leg up to the knee. After pulling myself out, I started walking through the stream, since I figured I couldn’t get any dirtier, and the ground seemed to be most trustworthy along the middle of the river where the water had worn the path. So I followed it until the last light of day was waning.
I quickly realized that my journey through the briar patch was an apt metaphor. I’m trying to get somewhere, but I’m not sure how to get there. There’s no clear path, so I must proceed by trusting my instincts. I might even go off in the opposite direction for a little while. In the end, I may arrive right back where I started. But that’s okay too, because I’ll get there with a clearer head and everything will be waiting for me when I’m done. It won’t be easy. Sometimes I’ll get mired in the mud, or caught up in thorns. But I’ll make it through, though not without a few cuts.
So there you have it. Even Dawkins’ best arguments couldn’t compete with a briar patch. Hmmmm.
It’s an interesting read.
