A Change of Heart: Why I became an Orthodox Christian

Over my many years as an atheist, my respect for religion as a useful and maybe necessary tool for civilisation grew. It particularly grew due to questions surrounding morality and the realisation it can’t be derived purely rationally. Despite this, ultimately I always thought: “Well it seems useful, but I can’t believe this stuff as being literally true. Maybe dark age peasants could, but from where I stand it’s clearly made up!” How arrogant and close minded I was.

What I think I failed to understand was that believing in God isn’t delving into the irrational, rather it’s embracing a different picture or understanding of reality. This understanding of reality comes before rationality comes into the equation. It’s a re-framing of how the world is experienced.

I think the pickle many people get into when thinking about ideas like this, is that people struggle to leave their presuppositions behind. Considering that this is a discussion of presuppositions, it is absolutely vital that we don’t ‘disprove’ a presupposition by wielding a presupposition. I hear you begging for an example of what I’m talking about:

Is our existence and our consciousness an accident or are we here for a reason?

This is a question that will be debated until the end of the age, and I don’t hold the absolute proof of one answer over the other (although later in this post, I hope to demonstrate that one answer has better explanatory power). A ‘rational’ atheist will answer the question with something along the lines of:

“1. There’s no evidence that we’re here for a reason, 2. And all of our observed phenomena can be explained naturally.”

The presupposition embedded in the first argument is that we should adopt scepticism wholesale (or more realistically just when discussing religion). Considering in most people’s lives we don’t adopt scepticism wholesale - we don’t commit psychotic acts for instance because ‘there’s no evidence we should act morally’- I don’t think we should automatically think scepticism is appropriate when tackling the above question. Given this, I think it is entirely valid to believe there is a purpose to our existence; the adoption of scepticism here is arbitrary in my view.

The second argument is missing the point, and although I’m perhaps being unfair by putting this in the mouth of a fictional atheist, I do think it is a widely shared sentiment. Explaining the natural world scientifically, the ‘what’ of the world, doesn’t explain the ‘why’. The ‘why’ will always remain outside of science. At best, the ‘what’ can inform the ‘why’.

I’m not sure how convincingly I’ve argued my case here - what I wasn’t trying to do is say scepticism is wrong, but rather there’s no inherent reason to adopt it here. Next I will outline three things that, in my mind, make a theistic interpretation much more satisfactory, and with better explanatory power than an atheistic, sceptical interpretation.

Firstly: Being, Existence.

This one is quite simple: why is there anything?!?! There’s an absolute unnecessity to existence, and yet we’re here. The natural world, a beautiful and marvellous thing, more complex than we’ll ever know, cannot account for itself. This is the premise of a widely-known theological argument entitled the cosmological argument. I don’t fancy reiterating it entirely, but it essentially boils down to the first cause of things: what caused the Big bang? What causes the laws of physics? What causes atoms to stay in existence in each moment? Now you might have answers to each of these questions (maybe atoms are caused by quarks, and something happened before the Big Bang) but then you must ask yourself that same question of your answer. Do this until you reach rock bottom - what is the cause of all things?

In a theistic interpretation, the existence of the universe makes sense as we identify that which brings the universe into existence as God. I’m not entirely sure how I would have explained it in my atheist days - I probably would have said that we can’t use our brains to understand such things - but that’s really just an admission of defeat considering I’d proudly use my intellect whenever possible and wouldn’t use this refrain in other situations. Others might say that what brought existence about is unidentified; I would say this is essentially inline with the theistic argument, just instead of unidentified we’d use the word God.

Secondly: Consciousness.

In many ways consciousness is an even bigger mystery than existence, although they’re deeply connected, because without consciousness there would be nothing there to witness existence.

One thing I want to make clear is when I refer to consciousness, I’m referring to subjective experience, to qualia rather than intellect. This is extremely important because I think people fail to appreciate how truly strange it is that ‘there’s something there’ which experiences things. We don’t just take in input from the outside world, process it and then move some muscles like a zombie. We experience all of our senses, and our thoughts in each moment of consciousness. One could imagine a very good reason for us to develop intellect from an evolutionary perspective, as being able to make tools and improve technology is very advantageous in helping our abilities to survive and thrive. But experiencing all this? Not only does it seem we are unable to give a good reason for it, but the very mechanism by which it exists is mysterious.

Maybe matter has an inherent ability to produce the experience of consciousness, but here again we’re explaining the ‘what’ but we’re truly not explaining the ‘why’. Why does matter have this amazing ability???????? To be clear I’m not affirming that consciousness is reducible to matter, maybe it has another explanation - this is not the hill I’m dying on. If it is reducible to matter though, it would increase the amazingness of it if nothing else. The fact that from the multiplicity of neurons inside and all the cells outside my brain, a single, coherent, intelligible conscious experience is just amazing.

In the theistic, and specifically Orthodox Christian interpretation, we believe in the Logos (translated into English as ‘Word’, but with a much deeper meaning; it can be thought of as the Divine Wisdom, or Divine Principle behind all things), this gives the ‘why’ of how matter comes together to form the coherent consciousness that we all (presumably) experience.

In the atheist interpretation, there’s just a massive question mark over everything. Some are so bold as to say consciousness is an illusion, which in my opinion doesn’t really hold any water as consciousness is the most fundamental of all of our experiences and knowledge. The idea I used to hold was that it was an evolved facility, but just saying this doesn’t exactly explain away how consciousness can come into being if the context is just dumb, mindless matter. How can the mechanical causality of atoms moving around in my brain produce subjective experience? How can electrical signals moving between neurons in my brain translate into thoughts and experiences rather than just physical outputs?

Thirdly: Intelligibility.

This third one is closely tied with our experience of consciousness and also the idea of Logos, and that is what seems to be the intelligibility of creation. How is it our facilities which evolved to thrive as hunter-gatherers could then be applied to studying atoms, astronomy, mathematics, etc.?

Well the answer is surely that there are some actual patterns or principles the universe is governed by, and so if we can comprehend reality at one level, then we can implicitly understand it at another level, because the levels are governed by the same grammar or Logos. If there was no inherent intelligibility to creation, and all the pattern spotting we do as humans is just an abstraction on total chaos and unintelligibility, then I don’t see how we could have achieved what we have achieved. Through our evolution, we’ve optimised ourselves for dominating the immediate natural world on Earth, not for discovering the quark or calculus.

Why Orthodoxy?

Given the arguments I’ve outlined above argue towards a more general theistic view rather a commitment to specific dogma, I can absolutely understand the hesitation to make the jump from a general notion of theism to a specific tradition such as Orthodox Christianity.

What originally drew me in was its integration and appreciation for classical Greek philosophy - the Logos for instance was something I was already familiar with as a fan of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius. Then the contemplative side with hesychasm was also very appealing to me as someone who meditated and was interested in mindfulness and exploring consciousness. While the two are not the same, I think the act of being still, and quiet, and focusing on the words “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me a sinner” can bring about a similar appreciation of our consciousness and of existence and ultimately of the Creator of both of those things.

One important realisation I had at some point was that I stopped thinking that ancient people were less intelligent than us, they just had a different lens through which they interpreted reality. This isn’t to deny scientific breakthroughs we’ve had since then - when it comes to physics we should definitely take our current knowledge over past knowledge - but when in the case of metaphysics it’s not so clear we have a better grasp than the ancients.

This developed a humility in me and a thirst to learn. I started praying, reading, and attending Church. The more I learned about the faith, the more beautiful it became and the more it resonated with me in many ways: The Orthodox notion of sins for instance, not as being a legalistic tally of all the bad things compared to all the good things we’ve done, but as that which darkens our heart and severs our connection to God. Or the notion of Theosis, which is our ultimate reason for existence, to become like God. The big bonus is this isn’t just some theoretical thing on the internet, but rather a real thing with real communities of people, with active discussion and exploration of the faith, and a thirst for the transcendent.

I could have realistically had an ‘analysis paralysis’ indefinitely. Just crawling around the internet, studying various ways of thinking for the rest of my days; seeing these things purely abstractly and for my own indulgence. In Orthodoxy however, there’s a great deal of emphasis placed on participation and practice, “the theologian is one who prays”, and I wanted in.