Christopher Hitchens
I no longer think about my own decisive knowing moment very much, for it took place decades ago, but Hitchens reminded me of its significance through his own story. Mine begins with the Catholic Church. Its religious teaching loomed large in my childhood when at age five I was fed into the Catholic elementary school system a couple blocks from our house in Detroit. Every subject was taught by formidable nuns who demanded our undivided attention and meticulous conformity day after day. Their tasks included our religious education and enforcing our attendance at mass every weekday morning before classes began.
For this child, what amounted to nearly an entire working day every week (Sunday mass added an hour) kneeling in a pew before a priest who was unintelligible to me, and not just because the mass was in Latin, and then that same week, but across the street from the church in school, having to memorize answers from the catechism and be regularly tested on it, and this training went on week after week and month after month for years, well, religion wore me out. By the time I was nine or ten, I had such a yawning belief in God that I might as well have been raised Protestant!. After all, Rome wanted me to accept that none of the Protestant boys and girls I played with everyday in my neighborhood after school were going to heaven when they grew old and died. The notion struck me as inconceivable. After all, they believed in Jesus and attended church on Sundays just like I did.
Then one day a bunch of us were taken to the Detroit Zoo. I don’t think it was a school field trip because I don’t remember any nuns being present, so I’m assuming it was one of those neighborhood, Saturday outings organized by some parents. But I do remember excitedly queuing up at the entrance, which in those days was an imposing concrete archway. Running right the way across the arc of this entryway above our heads some unfamiliar artwork held my attention. I tried to take in its meaning, and then the penny dropped. I was stunned. The Zoo expected me to believe that? No way. I stared in disbelief. The Zoo had got it wrong.
I had encountered for the first time a huge installation of the “ascent of man,” as I later learned was the name of this illustration of human evolution. From out of the biotic soup we rose, up a gently sloping hill in various stages of bent progression until, voila, man upright. But that wasn’t how we had got here. That was suddenly and strongly the silliest thing in the world to me, and here was a trusted institution promoting it. I remember being profoundly disappointed that the Zoo was trying to get me to believe that there was no God.
I also noticed that my belief God suddenly had become sure. Of course I could not have explained how this now-quite-real-to-me God had put the world here and us in it, nor did I seek any theological understanding about this God’s nature or about what had just taken place, for I did not report the experience to my teachers or parents. I kept my decisive knowing moment to myself. Neither did the experience open me to Catholic religious life, which like attrition warfare finally did me in. When, at age fourteen, I was given the choice to enter ninth grade at a public school or switch to another Catholic school, I fled. I had no compact with religion. Religion hadn’t convinced me of God’s existence.I am reminded of the Capaldi and Winwood lyric, “spirit is something that no one destroys.”
Both Hitchens and I at about the same time in our lives (we’re nearly the same age) had moments of decisive intuitive knowing that that we interpreted differently as enlightenment about the nature of ultimate reality, and our beliefs about God have traveled with us down the quite different paths we have trod as a result of that difference. Such decisive knowing moments, however, make believers of the people who have them, whether they call themselves atheists afterward or not. People today typically assume that decisive moments like mine represent a leap of faith but that ones like the one Hitchens describes of himself do not, as if nothing about life’s ultimate nature or meaning is faith-based in a secular worldview. But that is to make a category mistake.
We believers admit that ours is a faith-based assumption, but not in the sense of a blind leap of faith, as is also typically thought today. We believe that faith has it reasons. The atheist’s disbelief in God is also a faith, a faith on the highest kind. It is not a faith in technology (I’ll trust the tensile strength of the steel cable that is hauling me up from street level forty stories in my high-rise). It is not a faith in people (I’ll be able to stand safely on the subway platform after a ten block walk from my high-rise because it’s statistically probable that most people are decent enough). Rather, it is a faith about the big questions: where we came from, who we are, what will occur at death. In other words, who or what we are ultimately answerable to, ourselves, the universe, or God?
It most certainly is true, however, that the initial decisive knowing moment is not the end faith. Atheists and other believers alike will struggle with life’s big questions, both inside their own heads and with adversarial positions from opposing camps. Some may eventually switch camps. Hitchens has not, yet, but throughout god is not Great he discloses many running battles he has had.
Whereas Hitchens traveled into and then out of Marxism, in my late-teens I set myself on a self-imposed course of light reading – the world’s great philosophers. I started from antiquity and finished up with Nietzsche, who tried hard to sponge away the horizon for me but could not. During those years I did find myself becoming the occasional agnostic but never an atheist. Well, how could I? The daily practicum of New Age philosophy that I also had seriously committed myself to had me trying to become God. Years of philosophical eclecticism, however, left me spiritually barren. The hallucinatory effects of the desertification ended when I turned 26.
A major cultural event was taking place throughout America, the celebration of the country’s bicentennial birthday. While everyone from Bar Harbor to Laguna Beach was partying heartily, egged on by politicians, the media, and event hucksters, I was deep into asceticism, living completely alone, oblivious to celebrations of any sort, and the decisive knowing moment at the Detroit Zoo about God appeared to have run its course.
But then over a three-day period, and completely unlooked-for, I had experiences well beyond anything that might be concluded as being about the general existence of God. I say experiences, but it was more like one long experience and it was something quite other than what could be called a decisive knowing moment about a general existence of God. I had a power-encounter with God in which I now knew that the message of the gospel was true. The alphabet of sin that I used to hear about but had concluded was silly had been true all along. I was shocked. I was a sinner who needed saving, and the gospel (it means “good news”) was that saving. Today, more than thirty years later, despite the occasional heavy weather, the reality of Jesus Christ’s forgiving love that broke in on me remains as strong and as relevant to me as day itself. It really was like being born. How may I honestly deny that?
We should not expect Hitchens to deny where he is at, either. “We are reconciled to living only once,” Hitchens writes. Perhaps because atheistic materialism concerns itself only with what is seen, Hitchens has concluded that it requires no faith to believe or to preach. Yet even the very statement “we are reconciled to living only once” is a faith assumption about the ultimate nature and meaning of life.
Atheists may not wish to call their beliefs about life’s big questions a faith, yet still they have not proven – in the way that they would most assuredly like it to be proved – scientifically – that the end of one’s life in this world is the end of one’s life, full stop. I am reminded of the Capaldi and Winwood lyric, “spirit is something that no one destroys.”
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