Sarah Irving-Stonebraker: From Atheism to Christianity Through Dawkins

Hi, I'm Sarah Irving-Stonebraker.

I'm an academic historian and a contributor to this book,

Coming to Faith Through

Dawkins. My journey from atheism to Christianity

took place in the fairly

unlikely context of some elite universities,

through the University of Cambridge

and then Oxford. And far from being led blind into the

Christian faith, I

actually had to explicitly engage with atheist philosophy.

I'd always believed in the innate equality of all human beings, all people, black

or white, male or female, able-bodied or disabled.

I assumed that this was something that all reasonable people simply agreed

upon,

and moreover, that it was something that my atheism could ground.

But when I read the work of a number of atheists, including Richard Dawkins, it

became clear to me that atheism simply cannot ground

that belief.

In River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins argued that there

are no objective moral

values, including therefore, the idea of human equality, because the

universe is a giant cosmic accident.

What I discovered was that atheism couldn't provide adequate

answers to any of

life's most important questions, and that it couldn't make sense of what I

saw as an academic historian and experienced of the human predicament.

Moreover, it was becoming clear to me that all the concepts

and the categories that

I'd used to make sense of life were actually ultimately grounded on

biblical truths, just like the conviction of the inherent

equality and dignity of

all human beings. I'd always believed, for example, that human beings

are yearning

for some ultimate good which this world simply can't satisfy,

that the condition of the world is not as it ought to be, that

truth would liberate us from ignorance, and that there must be some ultimate

purpose to human life and history.

And yet as an atheist, I couldn't ground any of it.

And yet when I finally opened my mind and my eyes to the Bible, opening out in

front of me was a biblical story which made profound but

confronting sense.

That condition of humanity, that existential longing,

was actually a longing for

God. The terrible brokenness I saw in human

civilization throughout history,

that was sin, and sin made sense of my own failings,

my own selfishness, my

own brokenness. I remember reading in John's Gospel,

"The truth will set

you free." There is indeed a truth that liberates, but that is not an

ideological truth. No, truth is a person.

Truth is Christ, God who became flesh, who came to dwell

with his people, to bring those who are far off near, to

seek and to save the lost, to set the captives free, he says.

This is Jesus who ate with the most marginalized of people, who held the

weeping limbs of lepers, and whose invitation to follow him

and to be

reconciled to God is open to every human being.

Jesus was tortured and crucified.

He suffered death in our place and thereby conquered death, and he

rose again in bodily form, and he promises to come again to

judge the living and the dead and to make all things new.

And this is the culmination of all human history.

So on the twentieth anniversary of The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins, I wonder,

do you find anything beautiful, anything compelling about

Christianity? In John's Gospel, Jesus says that anyone who comes to

him, he will never cast out. And so, Professor Dawkins,

will you come to him?