Megan Hodder, a Millennial, was raised as an atheist in Britain, and one day picked up a copy of a book by Pope Benedict XVI, hoping to understand the enemy better. And then:

It was a far more subtle, humane and, yes, credible perception of faith than I had expected. It didn’t lead to any dramatic spiritual epiphany, but did spur me to look further into Catholicism, and to re-examine some of the problems I had with atheism with a more critical eye.

First, morality. Non-theistic morality, to my mind, tended towards two equally problematic camps: either it was subjective to the point of meaninglessness or, when followed logically, entailed intuitively repulsive outcomes, such as Sam Harris’s stance on torture. But the most appealing theories which could circumvent these problems, like virtue ethics, often did so by presupposing the existence of God. Before, with my caricatured understanding of theism, I’d considered that nonsensical. Now, with the more detailed understanding I was starting to develop, I wasn’t so sure.

Next, metaphysics. I soon realised that relying on the New Atheists for my counter-arguments to the existence of God had been a mistake: Dawkins, for instance, gives a disingenuously cursory treatment of St Thomas Aquinas in The God Delusion, engaging only with the summary of Aquinas’s proofs in the Five Ways – and misunderstanding those summarised proofs to boot. Acquainting myself fully with Thomistic-Aristotelian ideas, I found them to be a valid explanation of the natural world, and one on which atheist philosophers had failed to make a coherent assault.

What I still did not understand was how a theology that operated in harmony with human reason could simultaneously be, in Benedict XVI’s words, “a theology grounded in biblical faith”. I’d always assumed that sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), with its evident shortcomings and fallacies, was how all consistent, believing Christians read the Bible. So I was surprised to discover that this view could be refuted just as robustly from a Catholic standpoint – reading the Bible through the Church and its history, in light of Tradition – as from an atheist one.

The other day, when I posted enthusiastically about Terry Pratchett’s novels The Bromeliad Trilogy, one reader said he’s hesitated to read them to his young children because their critique of religion is so strong. The reader didn’t want to undermine his children’s faith; presumably he will hold out on exposing them to the book until they’re better formed in their faith. The further I get into the first volume with my kids, the more I understand this concern.

But that’s not the only way to read Pratchett’s message in this book, I think. It seems to me that Pratchett satirizes ways of knowing that are so dogmatic they cannot accept new information. One of the most amusing things about this book is the way the nome tribe from inside the Store “reads” the world around them, makes plausible but incorrect interpretations of what they see — and absolutizes them as dogma. People who challenge these dogmas are taken as threats because they have the potential for undermining the social order, and the metaphysical confidence of individuals. The priestly caste in Pratchett’s story are not wrong to fear the new information the Outside nomes bring, because it really does reveal that the Store nomes cosmology and religion is based on a faulty and radically incomplete view of reality — and, as we see, their epistemological blindness has real and serious consequences (e.g., it stands to get them all killed).

This strikes me as a helpful critique not only of religion, but of all ways of knowing. Epistemic humility is no vice. I believe that Christianity is true, but can never be a complete way of knowing. It discloses God’s ways to humankind, and shows us how to know Him, primarily “know” in the sense of “exist in relationship to” Him. The Bible is not, for example, a science textbook, nor does Scripture or Tradition disclose all that can be known about God, who is infinite, and therefore must always be mysterious, to some degree, to our finite minds.

To be a Christian — indeed, to be religious at all — one must be comfortable with mystery.  In fact, I would say that to be human at all, one must be comfortable with mystery, especially the mystery of the human person. A system of knowing that purports to be total is a blueprint for totalitarianism. To say that does not make one a relativist, but it does caution one against intellectual pride.

Megan Hodder took atheist dogma for true, but then, upon investigation, realized that the New Atheists knew less than they thought they did about Christianity, and about the way the world works. As Hodder says, we are accustomed to stories about people doubting their way out of religious faith, but we should also remember that the process sometimes works the other way.

[Via First Things.]

UPDATE: Alan Jacobs says that Terry Pratchett might not like it, but The Bromeliad Trilogy can easily be read as a critique of stringent atheism, given that the Store nomes hold to a religion that only believes in the existence of what they can see and experience.