At the Dissident Dialogues conference in May of 2024, renowned evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins questioned author Ayaan Hirsi Ali about her recent conversion to Christianity. During the discussion Ali admitted, with surprising candor, that her newfound faith is not based on empirical evidence but a conscious choice. Having been deeply moved by the Christian story, she simply decided to believe it. For Dawkins and many modernists like him, such willful belief represents a brazen disregard of epistemic duty, the intellectual equivalent of the unpardonable sin. But is it always “madness” to believe something on insufficient evidence, as the modern maxim dictates?
The Will to Believe
The nature of belief is such that its creation is not within our immediate control. Similar to how we blush when encountering sufficient embarrassment, we believe only when the threshold of proof has been met. Yet some beliefs are stubborn and require a movement of the will to embrace regardless of a person’s diligence in deliberating them. This is particularly true of consequential credences like “Jesus is Lord.” Becoming a Christian often requires the choice to believe because evidence is not enough to compel belief.
Managing Epistemic Expectations
Until a seeker becomes a believer, the true nature of regeneration remains a mystery to him. Just as the beauty of stained glass is hidden when viewed from a building’s exterior, the splendor of the Lord’s temple must be experienced from within. Christian discipleship is not a casual commitment like a gym membership that can be tried for a month and then abandoned. The King of kings demands perfect fealty upfront and readiness to renounce everything for the promise of eternal life.
Therefore, when a seeker contemplates embracing the faith, he faces a decision for which he seems to lack sufficient evidence. How can he adequately compare the two possibilities—becoming a Christian or remaining an unbeliever—when one path involves a complete metaphysical change that can only be fully appreciated once the choice has been made and (at least according to much Protestant theology) cannot be undone?
Philosopher Laurie Paul provocatively illustrates the nature of this dilemma by comparing it with the choice to become a vampire.1 Imagine your life forever changed in a single bite, a permanent metamorphosis that brings forth a plethora of new, revelatory experiences as well as a physical preferment to unparalleled strength, speed, and agility. This “enhancement,” however, also bears the cost of having to consume blood and shun sunlight for survival.
Given the incomparability of the two possibilities (i.e., becoming a creature of the night or remaining mortal), how should one adjudicate such a choice? For even if his confidants, who have already made the transition, were to testify to the superiority of vampirism, such attestation seems rather insufficient evidence, especially given that those bearing witness are no longer human.
It is commonly thought that rationality requires choosing a course of action only when its expected value exceeds alternatives. Such prospective judgments, however, are often unavailable when it comes to consequential beliefs. Therefore, if a choice is to be made, the decision must be motivated by something other than ordinary, instrumental reasoning.
The Primacy of Beauty
A growing number of philosophers believe that aspiration is what bridges this analytic gap. The splendor of vampirism’s eudaemonic vision inspires an inquirer to take the leap into it. Reasonable objections to Christianity must be addressed, for a person may not choose to become a member of the undead if it means having to hunt humans for nourishment. However, in the end it’s not the push of reason that proves decisive but the pull of delight or, at least, the aspiration of delight. In the realm of consequential beliefs, beauty takes precedence over reason.
But, how can a person be sure that the beauty of the Christian symphony is not a siren song luring him into shipwreck? that it is the Son of God who beckons and not the Son of Perdition dressed as an angel of light? The truth is that he can’t be sure; therefore, the decision to believe always involves risk. A bet on beauty that can seem a long shot in an increasingly suspicious age where truth comes only in the uncovering of deceit and corruption, the exposing of the man behind the curtain. In late modernity, truth is always a negation: the unearthing of a grand conspiracy or great cabal. It is a cynical age when even the sublimity of eminent cultural achievements like Michelangelo’s La Pieta must be soured by some scandalous disclosure such as divulging the contemptible labor conditions of those who quarried its stone. The ultimate end of such negation is to spread incredulity toward glad tidings as such, to deceive the world into believing that if something sounds too good to be true, it is.
Faith Favors the Bold
But, there are good reasons to be suspicious of such suspicion, not the least of which is its incoherence. For if everything is a cabal, then nothing is. The only way to truly free oneself from modernity’s acute cynicism, however, is to restore one’s faith in beauty itself. Confirmatory signs and wonders will come, but one must first be willing to take the leap of delight.
Bradley Helgerson is pastor of The Church on the Square in Georgetown, TX.
[1] L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 30–51.
- L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 30–51. ↩︎