An Atheist Converts to Christianity: Logic Flows Both Ways

The storyline you read is usually the opposite: people walking away from the church and shedding the beliefs of traditional Christianity for a more general approach to spirituality. Sometimes they become atheists altogether.

It's not everyday that you read stories like the one involving Leah Libresco. Until recently she was an atheist blogger. Now she's converting to Catholicism.

 

Ironically, it was logic that moved her towards belief. 

Following the line of thinking from many non-believers, logic is at the root of their views on the non-existence of God. They ask, "Why would we believe in something that has no evidence of existence? Why would we believe in the scientifically impossible?" Atheists conclude that the soundest, most logical belief that one can come up with is that God is a made up fairy tale.

Furthermore, any honest believer will tell you that they have moments of doubt, often from asking themselves those exact same questions. How can you not have moments of doubt when the evidence so often goes against belief?

But logic really does flow both ways, and just as logic forces believers have to confront uncomfortable realities, non-believers aren't immune.

What non-believers don't seem to like to talk about is that if God isn't real, then we're all just one big accident.  A common refrain from non-believers is that we don't need God to have a purpose in life, or to recognize goodness and morality.  

Without God, however, your life really doesn't have purpose; we're just one big random chemical reaction. The end-game for your legacy is that even if it's passed down for generations it will have no meaning once the sun consumes the earth in a few billion years.  Goodness and morality mean nothing; they are simply natural selection defense mechanisms. To subscribe them any meaning beyond that is, in itself, just a made-up human fairy tale. 

It was ultimately a combination of logic, and no doubt gut, about morality that finally brought Libresco to conversion.  Morality, she deduced, was something that we have a duty to, and when push came to shove, she couldn't let go of the belief that morality is external from us.

When you can't shake the belief that there's good versus evil, right versus wrong, and that your life has a higher purpose, it is not an illogical choice for your quest for spiritual truth to point you towards the existence of God. Indeed, logic really does flow both ways.

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