Is the end of the world drawing nigh? This is the question at the heart of Christopher Beha’s 2020 blockbuster novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts. A deranged-looking street preacher appears at the beginning of the novel, predicting the end times, setting a concrete date to the end of it all. At one level, he is a joke, a court jester who stands for what no one in the novel really believes—yet the joke haunts the characters’ lives as they gradually fall apart through no one else’s fault but their own. It turns out that no biblical Apocalypse is needed to lead one family of sinners to utter destruction. No deus ex machina is at hand to proffer a rescue. What if the real end of the world involves no horsemen, the novel’s conclusion suggests, but is just what we already carry within?
There is such a banality to this modern visions of the end times—no grand Revelation, just small, messy revelations everywhere, an unveiling of individual sins in the modern world. People simply go about their lives lying, cheating, stealing, pretending, until the truth comes out, as it is liable to do. Then marriages fall apart, family fortunes are ruined, and jail sentences beckon.
And yet what if there were a god—or rather, God—a higher power that is greater than us and is able to save us not only from evils all around but also from ourselves? That is the question Beha has found himself pondering for nearly three decades. His pursuit of possible answers inspires his new spiritual memoir cum philosophy survey, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.
The beginning and the end of the book lean to conventional memoir. Growing up Catholic—although, he notes, not trad-level—he took his faith for granted. It was quietly integrated into his large family’s life, a pillar holding up the proverbial roof but never too obnoxious or loudly proclaimed. Then a horrific accident almost ended his twin brother’s life during their freshman year of college. The experience shook him profoundly, leading him to quietly walk away from church, feeling ambivalent about what might actually be happening at the cosmic level. Was it prayer that saved his brother’s life? But then, if prayer worked this good outcome, why was he injured to begin with? Did God ordain that suffering, and if so, what does that say about God?
One summer not long after, in the Long Island home of his devout Catholic grandmother, who also had a remarkable library, Beha came across the philosopher Betrand Russell’s book Why I Am Not a Christian. For a college student unsure of so much, the book proved formative—“the sum total changed my life,” he reflects. Perhaps most convincing for him was the book’s exhortation to keep searching for answers instead of settling for any that do not seem ironclad:
The lasting impact of Russell’s book on me came from his insistence that we must respond to our fear not by dogmatically accepting the creeds handed down to us by tradition and authority but by “look[ing] the world frankly in the face” with a “fearless outlook and a free intellect.” Russell’s words suggested less a particular set of beliefs than an approach to knowledge about the world. He very rarely uses the word atheist, preferring such terms as freethinker, skeptic, and rationalist.
Perhaps Russell simply didn’t want to commit to anything in particular. So for a while Beha didn’t either. Except skepticism left him feeling unsettled. The plethora of literature by New Atheists did little to resolve his skepticism about everything into something to hang on to. Instead, he kept reading, going back to earlier skeptics and finding another tradition of atheism among such romantic idealist philosophers as Nietzsche and Heidegger. There is, after all, more than one way to be an atheist: “Romantic idealism arose in the post-Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition as much to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as to religious authority. The two atheist traditions have been hostile to each other ever since, often more hostile than they are to their common foe.”
The result? Beha spent his 20s and 30s writing himself into a successful career in New York City, a place admittedly friendlier to atheists than believers. Yet living with doubt left him unconvinced of anything—including the value of his own life, which he had contemplated taking on occasion. In his mid-30s, he returned more earnestly to his study of the question of God’s existence. This second foray proved more conclusive and led to his decision to write this book, a chronicle of his “passage into and out of atheist belief by telling the story of the books I read along the way and the worldviews that I worked my way through.” The reading list that informs the rest of the book is impressive, ranging from Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Descartes, Locke and Bacon, and Bentham and Spinoza to Kant and Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, and many more. The book reads, in a way, as an introductory philosophy textbook on steroids, but infinitely more enjoyable, as Beha considers each philosopher’s belief system and its influences on others.
But at the heart of the quest is the question, What is life for? For many atheists, the answer is predictably materialistic: “From Hume to Mill to Russell to Dawkins, the mainline atheist tradition teaches that life’s everyday pleasures—food and drink and sex, conviviality and companionship—are the only real human goods.” Religion, by contrast, draws adherents into an imaginary world, distracting them from the goods here and now. The materialists found this possibility understandably upsetting.
This near-endless pursuit of answers to the great questions of life proved increasingly frustrating for Beha. Skepticism “has a largely positive connotation” today, he notes, but in his case it was anxiety-provoking because it could not provide meaning. Furthermore, while atheists have historically criticized believers for taking certain unprovable matters on faith, skeptics, too, must take some things on faith. This left Beha disconcerted. Questions, questions everywhere, but not an answer to be found. Beha finally realized that “atheists do indeed have beliefs, that they must, because we all must. In doing so, I want[ed] to shift the conversation to the atheists’ own ground, subjecting atheistic beliefs to some of the scrutiny that atheists apply to religious beliefs.”
So after decades of pursuing grand philosophical questions without finding specific answers, Beha began exploring the idea of human flourishing instead. He fell in love, and realized that God is love (and much more). In the process, he notes, he reentered the Catholic Church of his childhood, now sufficiently convinced to rejoice in his faith. I will leave readers to discover for themselves more specifics, which offer a delightful and hopeful conclusion to the book.
But books, like their authors, do not exist in a vacuum. While the aughts were the heyday of the New Atheists, the present decade seems to be the zenith of thoughtful apologetics, but of a new kind. Instead of intellectuals like C.S. Lewis, who wrote apologetics alongside other spiritually (and academically) oriented fare, the current apologetics bestsellers include books by NYT columnist Ross Douthat and conservative social scientist Charles Murray. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat, a devout Catholic, advocates for the general benefits of religion for human flourishing and general happiness. Despite his own convictions, he treads a more pluralistic path in the book, not expressly advocating for Catholicism or even Christianity but for the benefit of belief itself. Meanwhile, Murray tells of his own tale of skepticism—and gradual departure out of it—in Taking Religion Seriously.
And yet there is a limit to what these authors, brilliant writers and thinkers yet amateur theologians and philosophers, can discover for themselves. Autodidacts are an admirable lot, but sometimes getting someone else to weigh in on one’s reading list can be helpful. In the case of Beha, I found his list to be somewhat one-sided, skewing to skepticism as if this were the only option for examining the good life. As it happens, flourishing right alongside frustrated skeptic philosophers over the past few centuries and into the present has been a no less robust tradition of intellectual and philosophical apologetics for Christian belief. This tradition forms the subject of Daniel K. Williams’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith (disclosure note: Williams is my husband). Up until the early 20th century, many American colleges and universities even offered courses in reconciling science and religion for their students, equipping them to answer theological questions beyond merely inviting skepticism.
Perhaps we’ve become more comfortable with asking questions than finding answers, but this is not good for our overall well-being. Yet for many people, a point in time arrives when an apocalypse of an ordinary kind is at hand: a moment of truth when one’s weaknesses, frailties, and limitations are laid bare, and the end of a previous life of self-assurance is clear. For Beha, such a moment in mid-life occasioned a conviction that exploring was no longer enough, and a committed answer was essential. For me, the year I turned 30, it was an upheaval that concluded with my own exploration of God—and a conversion to Christianity from secular Judaism.
When I read conversion memoirs, I am on the lookout for these same “aha” moments in others’ spiritual journeys that I remember in my own life. But the point is that our spiritual lives aren’t scripted. Conversion stories are deeply personal and difficult to explain to anyone else. The best way I have been able to explain my own is as a true out-of-body experience—yes, it happened to me, but it felt utterly incredible. In some ways, 14 years later, it still does. There is something at work outside ourselves in conversion, and sometimes the call to believe is at last the only one that makes sense—in the 2020s and not merely in centuries past.
