Slow Return to Faith

The English journalist and essayist A.N. Wilson, who abandoned the Christian faith some twenty years ago, reports that he has found his way back to Christianity.  In a recent essay for the New Statesman he writes:

"My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God 'a category mistake'. Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- 'Read the frist chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once. . . The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life'.' And then Coleridge adds: 'And man became a living soul.' Materialism will never explain those last words."