Following from my exploration of agnosticism (or positively, a methodological naturalism) after leaving organized religion in 2005, things became interesting as I began taking philosophy and logic seriously. What I quickly realized was just how much of my materialist worldview I had simply absorbed without scrutiny—a pattern I find common among those who have not seriously engaged with how logicians and philosophers formulate their positions.
As I began to examine these assumptions more carefully I found some serious philosophical problems with the materialist worldview I had adopted—problems that, once seen, could not easily be unseen. Most pressing among these was the problem of consciousness. There is something it is like to be me—a phenomenal, subjective quality to my experience—that does not seem reducible to the mere arrangement of particles in my brain. Physical science describes the world in terms of mass, charge, spin, and spatiotemporal relations; nowhere in that vocabulary does one find anything like experience, anything like the redness of red or the particular ache of grief. And so the question presses in: how does physical matter give rise to subjective awareness? I found—and still find—that materialism has no satisfying answer.
Thomas Nagel, the philosopher whose work has been so influential on my own thinking about consciousness, argues in Mind and Cosmos that this problem runs even deeper than the standard “hard problem” suggests. Consciousness, rationality, and the normativity of reason cannot be fully explained by physical science either. The thrust of Nagel’s argument can be summarized as follows:
If we want to pursue a unified world picture that encompasses everything—the physical world, life, mind, and all the rest—then the materialist version, and the materialist neo-Darwinian version in particular, is in trouble. Debunking explanations that try to account for the content of our beliefs in terms of their evolutionary role in our behavior cannot be extended to include logic, mathematics, and the evaluation of evidence, for this would defeat us in our efforts to find an evolutionary explanation of our capacities in these areas. Rational thought in general seems difficult to account for in evolutionary terms if we do not want to abandon the normative dimension of such thought. That physics and chemistry together with random mutations and natural selection should have given rise to the kind of minds we have—including the ability to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances—is, if not absurd, at least remarkable. The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order: conscious organisms are higher-level parts of it, and the intelligibility of the natural order is itself part of the deepest explanation of why things are as they are. Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapably real; therefore, if physical science cannot accommodate this reality, then the natural order is not a self-sufficient system of physical causes. If the mental is not itself merely physical, it must be an irreducible part of reality—and this means that materialism is false.
The point Nagel is pressing is this: evolutionary biology, conceived as a purely physical theory, cannot account for consciousness, rationality, or the normativity of reason. And if it cannot account for those, then it cannot account for our knowledge of evolutionary biology itself. At minimum, this constitutes a serious challenge: if one insists on doing philosophy and science within a strictly materialist and reductionist framework, one ends up sawing off the branch on which scientific knowledge itself sits.
Nagel’s conclusion is not “therefore theism is true.” Rather, he argues that our picture of the world must be expanded—that biology and physics alone will not do. There must be more to reality than physical facts and their consequences. Some kind of teleological or mind-involving explanation appears to be required, whether or not that explanation is ultimately theistic. Nagel famously admits that he does not want to accept the theistic option, for reasons that are as much psychological as intellectual. Nevertheless, his argument leaves the door wide open for a view in which mind is fundamental rather than derivative.
The second major influence on my shift away from strict naturalism was the persistent and stubborn appearance of objective moral facts. I do not mean mere sociological facts—”most people in this culture disapprove of torture”—or psychological facts—”I feel strongly that torture is wrong”—but rather the sense that some actions really are wrong, regardless of what anyone thinks or feels about them, and that some goods really are worth pursuing, regardless of whether evolution happens to have wired us to desire them.
During my atheist/agnostic years I flirted with various forms of moral anti-realism and constructivism. Perhaps moral truths are just deeply ingrained social contracts, or perhaps they are useful fictions that help us cooperate. But in practice I could not take that stance seriously across the board. When confronted with clear cases of evil—rape, genocide, the torture of children—it became almost impossible to say, with a straight face, that such things are only “wrong” relative to some contingent set of preferences or norms. They seem wrong, full stop. Likewise, certain goods—love, justice, honesty—seem genuinely good, not merely locally preferred.
If there are objective moral truths, then a purely naturalistic picture of the world has a hard time making sense of them. One can, of course, posit non-natural moral properties that “float free” of the natural world, but that move looks ad hoc. Alternatively, one can insist that moral language is just a complicated way of talking about evolutionary advantage or group survival—but that reduces morality to something quite different from what our moral experience seems to present. It is one thing to say “cooperation helped our ancestors survive,” and another thing entirely to say “it is wrong to betray your friend.”
Gradually, I came to see that if there is a moral order that is genuinely objective, it sits much more naturally within a theistic framework than within a starkly naturalistic one. Theism, in the broad sense, posits a moral lawgiver—or at least a morally good source of reality—whereas naturalism must construct moral normativity out of wholly non-moral facts. There are many sophisticated attempts to do this, and I do not wish to caricature them, but none were ultimately convincing to me.
A third strand in my journey back to belief was the question of meaning and purpose. As an atheist, I tried hard to embrace a kind of noble nihilism: the universe does not care, there is no ultimate meaning, but we can create our own purposes and live authentically within that framework. For a time this seemed liberating—no cosmic judge, no final reckoning, just the stark beauty of a cold, indifferent universe in which we carve out our own significance.
Over time, however, this stance began to feel less like liberation and more like a thin veneer over despair. If everything ends in heat death—if every love and every joy and every sacrifice is swallowed up in oblivion—then the claim that “we can create our own meaning” starts to look like wishful thinking. We can, of course, have local and subjective meanings: projects, relationships, goals. But the question of whether anything ultimately matters keeps pressing in. If the answer is “no,” then honesty demands that we face that. If the answer is “yes,” then reality must be deeper and richer than the naturalist story allows.
All of these threads—consciousness, rationality, morality, meaning—wove together over several years. There was no single lightning-bolt moment. Instead, there was a slow accumulation of pressures on my naturalism. Each time I tried to shore up the view, to accommodate one more recalcitrant datum, the system became more contrived. Eventually it seemed simpler, and more intellectually honest, to consider the possibility that the picture itself was wrong—that the materialist, reductionist framework was simply too small to house all that needed to be housed.
The final step back to Christian theism involved not only these general philosophical considerations but also a re-engagement with the historical and textual foundations of Christianity. I had left the faith partly on the basis of what I took to be strong historical and biblical-critical objections. As my studies continued, I discovered that many of those objections were less decisive than I had thought, and that Christian scholars had developed robust responses—alternative accounts that took the evidence seriously. I also found myself drawn again to the person of Jesus as presented in the Gospels: not the simplified figure of Sunday school, but the complex, demanding, disturbing, and compelling figure that emerges from careful exegesis and historical reflection.
I am not going to rehearse all of those arguments here. My aim in this piece is more modest: to sketch the broad contours of the year I began turning back to God. It was years in the making. Reading Nagel and Plantinga and a host of other philosophers who were willing to provide challenges on philosophical grounds; years of wrestling with the nature of mind and morality and meaning; years of re-reading the New Testament with fresh eyes; years of conversations with patient friends who were more interested in truth than in scoring points.
It was also a time of prayer—though I would not have called it that at the time. There were moments, quiet and unremarkable, when I found myself addressing God almost against my will. Not as a hypothesis, not as a projection, but as a person. Those moments were often accompanied by a strange mix of fear and comfort. Fear, because if God is real, then everything changes. Comfort, because if God is real, then perhaps reality is not, in the end, indifferent.
This is not the place for a detailed apologetic. I know full well that many will read what I have written and remain unconvinced. That is fine. My goal is not to tidy up every loose end or pre-empt every objection. It is simply to bear witness to a small piece of the path I have walked and to say, as clearly as I can, that I have found theism—specifically Christian theism—to be intellectually and existentially satisfying in a way that naturalism, for all its initial appeal, ultimately was not.
The year I finally turned back to God was not a year of sudden certainty or emotional revival. It was the culmination of slow, sometimes painful, reconsideration; seeing the cracks in my old worldview grow wider; and discovering that the Christian faith I had rejected in my youth was, at its best, far more profound and resilient than the caricatures I had taken for granted. I am still learning, still doubting, still arguing—but I can say now that I have never been more convinced theism is true.
I have not found any of the non-Christian theisms convincing. They either collapse into something like deism—which leaves the world largely untouched by God’s presence and action—or they present conceptions of deity that, upon closer examination, turn out to be philosophically indefensible or internally incoherent. Christianity, with all of its mysteries and difficulties, nevertheless offers a vision of God and the world that makes deep sense of fundamental features of reality: consciousness, reason, morality, and history.