My Two Favourite Conversion Stories

What I learned from each

Conversion stories help to illuminate the rational grounds for belief. The Church condemns fideism — the view that unaided human reason cannot reach certitude and, ultimately, human knowledge consists in blind faith, with authority as the supreme criterion of certitude. Instead, we believe because it’s demonstrably true. Faith isn’t a feeling. It’s an assent of the intellect and a submission of the will.

Two conversion stories showed me this powerfully: J. Budzisweski’s ‘Escape from Nihilism’ and Edward Feser’s ‘The road from atheism’. Here are the points that hit me hardest in each and why.

1. J. Budzisweski’s ‘Escape from Nihilism’

I first read Budzisweski’s essay about 15 years ago, and it’s stayed with me since as one of the best articulations of the dead ends intellectuals will pursue to avoid God. It also shows how pride makes people stupid.

As a young professor of political philosophy, he denied free will: ‘Everything we do or think or feel, I thought, is just an effect of prior causes.’ As a result of this, he concluded that ‘good and evil can't make sense.’ If we aren’t responsible for our deeds, we can’t be praised or blamed for them.

And if we aren’t responsible for our thoughts either, we can’t be confident that they will lead us to truth. But if the good can’t be known, he reasoned, then ‘for all practical purposes, there is no good.’ He even believed that, if God existed, He ‘couldn't escape causality either’ and therefore not even God could ‘possess confident knowledge of good and evil.’

As he realised, however, denying free will is self-referentially incoherent:

If my lack of free will made my reasoning unreliable so I couldn't find out which ideas about good and evil are true, then by the same token I shouldn't have been able to find out which ideas about free will are true either. But in that case I had no business denying that I had free will in the first place.

Despite realising this at the time, however, he still persisted.

But why would an intelligent man do that? ‘I was committed to nihilism already, and cooked up the arguments only to rationalize it.’

Modern ethics mistakenly holds, he observes, ‘that we really don't know what's right and wrong and that we are trying to find out.’ Actually, however, the problem is not intellectual but volitional: ‘We do know the basics of right and wrong but wish we didn't, and we are trying, for one reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance.’

To do this, he embraced ‘elaborate nonsense’ for eight reasons:

1. The further he got from God, the further he got from common sense. As Chrysostom put it, ‘When God has left one, then all things are turned upside down.’

2. ‘I had committed certain sins that I didn't want to repent.’ Pascal stressed also stressed this point. People don’t want religion to be true.

3. He’d ‘heard all through school that even the most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society’ and wanted to believed this despite it being empirically false.

4. His college social science teachers had taught him that the atomic weight of sodium was a fact, but the wrong of murder was not.

5. Disbelieving in God was his way of getting back at Him for the various things ‘which predictably went wrong in [his] life after [he’d] lost hold of Him.’

6. He’d come to confuse science with materialism, ‘the view that nothing is real but matter.’ This meant he couldn’t believe in minds, the moral law or God. Eventually, since ‘not even the properties of matter are matter,’ he also found it ‘hard to believe in matter itself.’

7. He had fallen under Nietzsche’s spell. But whereas Nietzsche thought that ‘given the meaninglessness of things, nothing was left but to laugh or be silent,’ he ‘recognized that not even laughter or silence were left. One had no reason to do or not do anything at all.’

8. But the main reason for his nihilism was pride: ‘I didn't want God to be God; I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn't see that then.’

This is rare humility and spiritual wisdom:

There are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all.

Movingly, he also explains the agony of trying to destroy his mind to avoid knowing what ‘we can’t not know’ so long as we have minds:

I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one's will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are in his control?

Finally, after developing ‘an overpowering sense’ that his condition was ‘terribly wrong’, he felt his ‘walls of self-deception’ collapse.

His work now shows that ‘in order to get anywhere at all, the philosophies of denial must always at some point assume the very first principles they deny.’

2. Edward Feser’s ‘The road from atheism’

Philosophy professor Edward Feser was brought up Catholic but lost his faith at 13 or 14 after hearing some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time. That’s a reminder of how important it is to catechise teenagers seriously. Bad apologetics is probably responsible for more people falling away from the Church than strong arguments against the Church are. As Feser says,

Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.

Later, however, what really impressed him was ‘the evidentialist challenge to religious belief.’ Why, he thought, weren’t there any solid arguments for God? He also believed there could be ‘no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes.’

What I find so interesting about Feser’s story is that even now, as a Catholic, he still finds his old arguments compelling. But he now recognises that,

the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed. 

We’re a generation who haven’t been properly educated in our own spiritual and intellectual heritage.

Feser had read a few of the texts in the tradition of classical theism, but ‘to read something is not necessarily to understand it.’  And this is because ‘when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen.

Later, however, when studying the philosophy of language and logic, he came to an important insight:

The propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance. 

Studying Bertrand Russell then showed him that ‘modern science and philosophy had no clear idea of what matter was in the first place,’  so ‘naturalism came to seem mysterious at best.’  He also saw, in ethics especially, that ‘Aristotelian ideas had a certain plausibility.’

These realisations meant that ‘all that was needed was some systematic alternative to naturalism.’ And then teaching a philosophy of religion course then made him realise that there was more to the arguments he’d dismissed than he realised. ‘What caused God?’, for example, is not really a serious objection. And his previous understanding of Aquinas’s Five Ways was ‘laughably off base.’ 

He noticed a strange ignorance of the actual traditional arguments for God among the intellectuals around him. And ‘when most philosophers not only do not accept a certain view, but demonstrate that they don’t even understand what it is, things can start to smell very fishy indeed.’

This reminded me of Budzisweski’s emphasis on pride. As Feser comments, ‘anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people is fooling himself.’ And when Feser properly understood the classical theistic arguments, however, he saw that they were true after all, which was the beginning of his return to the Catholic Church:

If you find yourself intellectually convinced that there is a divine Uncaused Cause who sustains the world and you in being at every instant, and don’t find this conclusion extremely strange and moving, something that leads you to a kind of reverence, then I daresay you haven’t understood it. 

A new mindset

These two conversion stories showed me that religion is not fundamentally about feelings or blind faith but rationality. They also showed me the all-too-human role of pride and intellectual blindness in academia.