Remember, not everyone is an atheist for intellectual reasons, or at least not intellectual reasons alone. This is where personal testimony can offer a powerful evangelization tool. We need to connect not just with people’s heads, but also their hearts. Because of this, sharing conversion stories of people who’ve escaped skepticism to become Catholic can provide that extra little nudge a person needs to begin considering the claims of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps you have your own story. If you have never considered yourself to be a religious skeptic, perhaps you’ve had times when you’ve struggled with, or questioned, your religious beliefs. Consider writing down these experiences and developing a two or three minute witness of how you overcame these difficulties and eventually came to a greater belief in—and stronger relation with—God, because of them. To offer some inspiration, allow me to share a few testimonies now. I’ll begin with my own.
I first had my religious beliefs challenged in the sixth grade when my science teacher began outlining the origins of the universe. I remember feeling confused—and even somewhat betrayed—when trying to imagine how the Big Bang theory could be reconciled with what I was taught in Sunday School. These seeds of doubt eventually caused me to abandon religion entirely, especially after becoming acquainted with some of the writings of the existentialists and atheists of old, who I’d discovered in high school. By college, I considered myself an atheist.
Eventually, I suffered a crisis within the atheistic worldview. Through a continued study of philosophy, I came to realize that human experience – everything from free-will, consciousness, and, above all, love – could not possibly be reduced to a mere haphazard collection of fundamental particles. This was not just a problem of discoveries yet unmade, but with a reductionist worldview entirely incompatible with certain fundamental realities. Such is why many atheistic philosophers are called eliminativists: since they can’t explain the existence of things like consciousness, meaning, and morality in the language of physics or chemistry, they either deny such realities exist in the first place or resign them to the realm of illusion. I simply couldn’t accept that, nor did I see any good reason to! The atheistic worldview was simply too restricted and shallow.
Because of this, I wanted to take a deeper look at religious thinkers and theistic philosophers. So, I began studying philosophical arguments for the existence of God, starting back with ancient Greek thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, and working my way up through the likes of Boethius, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Eventually I came into a more robust conception of God; which I’m sure I would have eventually encountered as a Catholic, if only I weren’t so quick to abandon my faith at the earliest challenge!
In short, I came to see that belief in God was not arbitrary and archaic, but it was the best and possibly the only ultimate explanation for the wide range of human experience, including:
- Why anything exists instead of nothing;
- Why the universe began to exist (the big-bang, ironically!);
- The fine-tuning of physics for the emergence of intelligent life;
- Our perception of objective moral values and duties;
- The irreducibility of consciousness to physical processes alone;
- Religious experiences, mystical experiences, and near death experiences;
- The general order, stability, and intelligibility of the cosmos.
And, finally, though perhaps most importantly, I came to see God as the best explanation for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, along with the unexpected rise of Christian belief in first century Judea. Ultimately, once I saw independent evidence for believing in God – whether philosophical or scientific – the Christian account began to make incredible sense. Faith and reason began to coincide. And whereas philosophy revealed the “what” of God, Christianity revealed the “who.”