How I learned that faith isn’t intellectual suicide

How I Realized Belief Doesn’t Mean I’m Committing Intellectual Suicide

Fifteen years ago, as a French atheist beginning an inquiry into the Christian religion, I strolled inside that Paris church thinking, “If any of my family or friends could see me today, I would die of humiliation.”

Years before that, when I was old enough to tell my parents that I didn’t believe, I had stopped going to Catholic mass and services. My view of religious people darkened in the years that followed. They are not applying their minds. Superstition is ingrained in their culture. In a word, they’re crazy. I couldn’t believe I was wasting my time. I want to keep as far away from religion as possible.

That didn’t really work out, did it?

Unthinkable things have happened to me: It all started with a hitchhiker’s chance encounter with a Christian American model and actress who shared her belief in abstinence before to marriage. To be with her meant challenging her religious convictions so that they could be cast aside and their relationship could flourish. As a result, I started reading the Bible in an attempt to better comprehend it, and eventually, I ended myself in that church to observe the worship service. However, despite the fact that I am an outspoken atheist with no plans to change my beliefs, I still felt a twinge of guilt just for being in the building, as if I were admitting to having intellectually inferior tastes just by being among the pious. Dreadful.

This was in part due to my personal bias towards religion, but it was also influenced by the surrounding French society, in which religion is considered acceptable in a superficial sense but is severely mocked when taken seriously. At the very least, this attitude can be traced back to the Enlightenment, when French thinkers like Baron d’Holbach said things like, “To be a good Christian, it is essential not to have a brain, or at least to have one that’s well and truly shrunk” and “All good Christians must be in a state of sweet simplicity, predisposing them to believe things that are not in the least bit credible without a second thought, on command of their spiritual Contemporary works by French atheist philosopher Michel Onfray, who writes, “I do not dislike believers,” share similar assumptions. I don’t think they’re particularly funny or sad, but he also calls them “naive and dumb” and says they’re “full of neuroses, psychoses, and… aberrations,” saying they have “a personal mental disease… ushering in a wholesale epidemic.”

Eventually, I found a seat and sat down in that church, where I could only hear and feel vague insults. I have a clear recollection of the worship, albeit I must admit that the great music of the current worship band was quite different from the pipe organs of my youth. But I don’t recall a single word of the sermon, maybe because I was preoccupied with the idea that I shouldn’t be there. To this day, all I can remember is thinking, “I have seen enough; let me flee the place before anybody comes to talk with me,” as soon as he finished speaking. And I made my way down the center aisle toward the exit.

But as I took my first steps outside, a shiver ran up my body from my stomach to my chest to my neck. I was almost out the door when I stopped cold, my skin covered with goose bumps. The idea immediately crossed my mind that this was completely absurd. This is something I have to work out. When I was ready to return to the pastor, I turned around, locked the door, and headed back.

I introduced myself abruptly: “Hi, my name is Guillaume.”

The name is “Robert Baxter. ““Nice to meet you,” he said.

“You’re a religious person, huh?”

Yes, he answered, his expression one of mild amusement.

You could ask, “How does it function?”

If I was interested in scheduling a meeting, he said he’d be pleased to chat to me about it.

I was. Then we started having a series of sessions in his office where we spoke about God, Jesus, and the Christian life while I attempted to convince him that Christianity was a kind of intellectual suicide.

The fact that Robert wasn’t a complete moron was the first issue. He spoke calmly and articulately, and his education and experience helped him articulate his thoughts. However, he held fast to his faith in God, the deity of Jesus, and the reality of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Having the opportunity to talk to him, have all my questions answered, and have him explain the Christian perspective was a highlight of my time in college.

When we first met, he handed me a pamphlet he’d created, which had questions on fundamental Christian doctrine along with Bible verses to let people look them up for themselves. I went and did it. The more questions I was able to answer, the more I had. After jotting them down on a scrap of paper here and there, I soon had a stack of papers to go through before my next meeting with Robert.

I had a lot of shifts in perspective after talking with Robert and thinking about our conversations for a while. As an example, Robert painted a more appealing picture of the Christian perspective on marriage and sex. I still didn’t like the idea of abstinence, but I could see that the Christian perspective wasn’t oppressive or bigoted. My primary interest was not in determining whether or not Christianity is beneficial, but rather in determining whether or not it is true. This was another area where I had to let go of preconceived notions.

At first, I thought religious faith couldn’t coexist with science, or, alternatively, that it ought to have scientific backing if it were valid. When I was put in the position of having to defend my lack of faith to a genuine believer, I recognized that nothing I had learned in science class or in my engineering degree coursework ran counter to the idea that God exists. In reality, very little of it was even related to the inquiry. Because of this, I concluded that the presence of God could not be disregarded since it is not confirmed by science, because there were many things I understood that were not obtained from science. As time went on, I learned that there are scientifically sound arguments for God’s existence (such as the so-called Cosmological argument, which argues from the Big Bang to a first cause and creator, and the Fine-tuning of the universe, which argues for the existence of an intelligent designer), but at the time, I simply concluded that scientific proof wasn’t required to believe in God.

My prior level of assurance also underwent a significant metamorphosis in my mind. I assumed that if God existed, we would have absolute certainty. This “blind faith” crap is not acceptable to me. We need to be aware of this and positive in our knowledge. And although I didn’t end up agreeing that religion is blind, I did come to see how ridiculous it was to want such assurance. I knew I was missing something from this ideal total certainty, but it wasn’t hard to see that this criterion was absurd. I knew that there were many things I knew, and that my claims to know them were very acceptable. I was aware of my identity, beginning with my name, birthdate, and parents’ names. My elder brother Nicolas was born through C-section due to an entangled umbilical chord; he was described as being “blue as a Smurf” when he was delivered. I was aware of this even before my own birth. The peak of Mont-Blanc is 4,807 meters high, something I was well aware of. The 14th of July is when the Bastille was stormed, but I could never remember when year it was. I was also aware that China is home to a massive wall, even though I had never set foot on it. Without evidence or 100% assurance, I yet understood all of this to be true. How? I know this to be true in each instance because someone in the know informed me so. Yes, I realized that first-hand accounts are a reliable way to get insight; they may help one “know,” rather than only “believe.”

When I applied this to Christian beliefs, I found that they were supported by history just as I had been told they were true. The four Gospels were revealed to me as what they really were: eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds. Maybe we can put our faith in the four Gospel writers to tell us what happened to Jesus of Nazareth if we can put our faith in our friends to tell us what happened last night when we weren’t there, in our parents to tell us what happened before we were born, and in our history books to tell us what happened a few centuries ago.

Obviously, however, it’s not quite that easy. Untrustworthy witnesses do exist. Also, we don’t want to be naive and believe whatever someone tells us. In order to construct genuine understanding, the testimony used must be credible, whether it be historical or not. As should be obvious, the Gospels’ veracity is often attacked. Christian apologetics (the defense of the Christian faith) was developed in part to address such challenges. It’s an area I’m actively working in, and I’m confident in the authenticity of the manuscripts (their age, the people who wrote them, the details they provide about the past and present), among other things. I didn’t at the time, but I eventually learned an intriguing lesson: you don’t have to know the case for the credibility of a source in order to know anything based on that source’s evidence.

I’ll give you an illustration to help clarify. The Holocaust was a real tragedy, and I am not ignorant to that fact. I have understood this from the moment I was informed the Holocaust really occurred, based on the evidence of reputable historical authorities (mostly my history lecturers back in France).

Is there anybody who doubts this witness testimony? In a word, yes: Holocaust deniers. What’s more, do they counter with their own arguments? Although I haven’t read any of them myself, I have no doubt that they do. However, I can’t comment on their arguments since I haven’t read them. Since this is the case, I have no way of responding to their claims. Though we may not be aware with the justification of the credibility of the historical evidence of the Holocaust, we would never deny that it occurred. For one thing, even if I don’t personally know the sources to be reliable, the fact that they are reliable lends them an air of authority. The credible historical evidence preserved in the Gospels, at the very least, allows me to know the truth about what Jesus said and did, I argue.

And that’s exactly what I did. After hearing the testimonies of people who were there at the time, I came to believe that Jesus was who he said he was: the divine Son of God who came to fulfill the predictions of the Old Testament and who led a sinless life, died on the cross, and was resurrected from the dead three days later.

In a nutshell, this was the epiphanic moment for me in terms of the proofs we need to accept Christianity as real. As it turns out, we don’t need nearly as much as I had anticipated, and we already possess much more resources than I had supposed. I made the decision to believe, and I don’t regret it.

This mental adjustment, however, wasn’t the only factor. Beyond my logical acceptance of God’s existence and Jesus’ resurrection, I also needed to embrace the Christian Gospel — repent of my sin and believe in the rising Jesus for everlasting life — and that required a change of heart as well as a change of mind. However, it was essential for me to have my intellectual needs satisfied, and luckily, this was the case. The 15 years I’ve spent contemplating these issues have only increased my sense of contentment.