Friday, May 01, 2009

A N Wilson 'returns' - albeit slowly

In an honest, first-person article in the New Statesman, A N Wilson, the novelist and biographer, admits that his 'conversion' to atheism was an aberration, which he has spent the last several years leaving behind. I remember reading Wilson's biography of C S Lewis perhaps twenty years ago, and being quite disappointed in his obvious belief that Lewis wasn't really the man everyone thought him to be. Wilson explains why in the article, along with his slow decision to believe in God again, and his realisation that the atheists have got it wrong. A paragraph from the article:

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

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