Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Conversion to Christ Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome back to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. It’s Kevin Harris. We are going to pick up right where we left off last time with this amazing testimony from Ayaan Hirsi Ali.^[1] Let’s pick up right where we left off last time.

Next she talks about the antisemitism that was fostered in her.

The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. . . .

You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.

Certainly a lot more fun than the Muslim Brotherhood and their horribly oppressive rules.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I don't know. I think that meaninglessness and despair really threaten the New Atheists’ fun. Once you realize the implications of an atheist worldview, I think it's really impossible to live consistently and happily within such a framework.

KEVIN HARRIS: It does tend to put a damper on all the fun reflecting on it, as the great atheists have. She continues. She writes,

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

So there's her big three.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: China / Russia, Islamism, and woke ideology.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I'm not sure that people today are sufficiently aware of the second threat – the threat of Islam to the West. Europe is being slowly Islamicized through declining birth rates and immigration. I fear what Europe will look like in another 100 to 200 years. It's already too late in France. Given the declining birth rates in France and the surge of immigration from Muslim countries, France is on its way toward becoming a Muslim nation. Frankly, secular societies do not have the spiritual resources to respond to Islam. So the reaction of the secular government to the threat of Islam is to resort to power in order to suppress religious liberties. So you’ll find in these secular societies a repression of Islam. But then along with them also the religious liberties of Christians. Really, the best hope for the West in terms of meeting the threat of Islamization, I think, is Christian revival. We need to win as many of these immigrants to Christ as we can and to propagate the Gospel among our fellow countrymen and try to bring about a Christian revival in the West that will then have the spiritual resources to withstand these threats that she speaks of.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing, she writes:

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Wow. Several things there, but “the rules-based liberal international order” got my attention. The left decries the oppressive rules of Islamism while ignoring that they have their own increasingly oppressive rules.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly. It's a great paradox. For example, in these secular liberal societies there will be efforts to ban the wearing of the hijab because this is indicative of Islamization, but then by the same right you should also ban the wearing of the crucifix by Catholic Christians. So in the name of liberalism the secular government begins to deny religious liberties and to suppress the population. This is really interesting in China. When we were in China, prior to Xi Jinping's clampdown and reversion to the old Communist order, Chinese intellectuals at the university were realizing the futility of Marxism and atheism. They told us that Marxism has proved unable to provide a sound societal fabric for contemporary Chinese societies. Confucianism is dead and no longer able to do so as well. Therefore these intellectuals were increasingly turning to Christianity. They noted that Christianity is not an imposition from the West. It is, in fact, an indigenous Chinese religion that goes back to the first few centuries after Christ through the church of the East as the Gospel was carried into China. So Chinese intellectuals, when we were there, were saying exactly the same thing that Ayaan is saying – that Christianity will provide a sound social fabric for maintaining the kind of society that allows for freedom and religious liberty. But without it it's hard to see how this can happen. You may recall in Reasonable Faith I quote from Professor Loyal Rue in a remarkable address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science where he says the lesson of the last two hundred years has been that moral relativism is profoundly the case. And he said there are only two options to solving this problem that he could see. One was what he called the Mad House option where everyone just pursues his own individual personal values at the expense of social cohesion. On the other hand there was the totalitarian option where moral and social values are imposed by the government to maintain social cohesion at the expense of personal liberty. And Rue said that if we're to avoid either the Mad House option or the totalitarian option, he said we need to adopt some “noble lie” – some fiction – that will trick us into freely sacrificing self-interest in the interests of social cohesion voluntarily. This was the option that the secularist had to offer – just a noble lie to live in self-deception, otherwise you degenerate into these kinds of unacceptable options that Ayaan is talking about. What she's saying is that there's a different option, namely Christian theism, that could provide an objective foundation for a free society that is cohesive.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next she makes a strong point. She says how easy it was for Russell to stand before an audience and critique Christianity. Then she writes,

Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Anyone who wants to get rid of or diminish Western civilization should think twice.

DR. CRAIG: Really, that's true. But I think honesty compels us to say that these freedoms that she speaks of are as much due to the Enlightenment as they are to Christianity. Prior to the Enlightenment, Roman Catholicism could be extremely repressive. As you know, heretics were burnt at the stake on occasion. The Protestant Reformers were somewhat better in allowing for freedom of conscience and not having state coercion, but still even in the Reformation that union of church and state could be very oppressive. The great philosopher Alvin Plantinga once remarked to me that the separation of church and state (or, as he puts it, politics and religion) was the one good idea that the Enlightenment had. And I think that this is good not only for the state but it's also good for the church. When we were recently in Ireland on a speaking tour we saw this vividly displayed. In Ireland the Catholic church had been so closely aligned with the state and with the educational apparatus there that it was very oppressive to not only Protestants but also to atheists, and there was tremendous backlash against the Catholic church in Ireland – a backlash that continues today as more and more Irish people desert the Catholic church for secularism. So I think for the health of the church itself this separation of politics and religion is something that must be preserved.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's what she writes next.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Bill, I hope she has an opportunity to read your work on this, if she hasn't. In fact, she could benefit a lot from Reasonable Faith.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you. I think that here we have existential questions concerning meaning, value, and purpose in life that are right at the heart of the Christian faith. This now is not adopting Christianity for political reasons. Up to this point, everything she said has been about the need for the Christian worldview because of its power in the political contest for preserving civilization and freedom. But now she's talking about very personal existential questions, and I am convinced that this does give very good grounds for believing in God because only if God exists can there be objective, ultimate meaning, value, and purpose in human life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's look at the remaining few paragraphs in this essay. She writes,

Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

She looked into the vacuum and does not like what she sees.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think when she talks about virtue signaling theater on behalf of a victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet, she's probably expressing skepticism about climate change and other programs and social justice that are championed by the left. Without wanting to make any pronouncement on the scientific merits of climate change, I think what we can say is that when these movements become quasi-religious as they sometimes seem to do, then indeed they are guilty of what Chesterton says: that people have turned away from believing in God and now they become capable of just believing in anything. And they make climate change or social justice into a sort of quasi-religious movement. I think that that is quite misplaced.

KEVIN HARRIS: She continues,

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy.

It's one of my main concerns, this woke ideology and the left in general. It probably thinks that by destroying our foundations we'll have more freedom, and actually the opposite is true. Yet it also looks to me like woke people don't care if an oppressive regime were to take us over because they thrive on victimhood, as she said, and oppression and it would give them a chance to be morally outraged that our freedoms have been taken away and virtue signal from their prison camps. Ayaan says that we need to convince the population that they're messing in their own nest basically.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I suppose that a great many people really do hate the West and hate the United States and want to see the demise of the West. So I suspect that there's a lot of truth in what you're saying – that they really do want to bring down this system. So this is a real fight for the preservation of our society.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's how she concludes the essay.

And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

Comment on that, Bill, and then we'll look at a brief clip from Michael Shermer.

DR. CRAIG: Isn't that wonderful? I'm so encouraged that Sunday by Sunday as she attends church she's learning more about her newfound faith. I wish her all the best in this spiritual journey and that she'll continue to grow in her relationship with Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: Real quick here. There have been multiple responses to this essay online. Here's a clip from atheist Michael Shermer. Check this out.

MICHAEL SHERMER: Nothing Ayaan has written in her essay changes my evaluation of her as a heroic figure. I simply think she's mistaken. We all are about a great many things, and maybe I'm wrong here and she's right, but I think reason and history prove otherwise. Let me explain in the spirit of respect for what is on the line here. Starting with the subtitle of Ayaan’s essay, “Atheism can't equip us for civilizational war.” She's right, but not in the way she thinks. Atheism per se can't equip anyone for anything because it's not a belief system or a worldview. Atheism just designates a lack of belief in God, full stop. It is a purely negative statement – an indicator that someone does not believe. A lack of belief can never be the basis of a belief system. I'm an atheist in the same sense that I'm an a-supernaturalist or an a-paranormalist. There's no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. These descriptors are just linguistic placeholders for mysteries we have yet to explain. Once explained, they move into the realm of the natural and the normal.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, I don't think Shermer has been listening to our podcast, Bill. You've talked about the definition of atheism many times. You can address that, but also – isn't she talking about the philosophical and cultural ramifications of secularism and atheism?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that Shermer's response is faulty on several levels. First of all, there's this tired old misdefinition of atheism as simply an absence of God-belief. That is to confuse atheism with nontheism, and nontheism can be either atheism (that there is no God) or agnosticism (there may or may not be a God) or acognitivism (that the question of God's existence is meaningless). So he's simply misdefining the term. Now, what's really funny though about this (and I don't know if you noticed this) – did you notice that after he says “I'm an atheist in the same sense that I'm an a-supernaturalist and an a-paranormalist” he says in the next sentence “There's no such thing as the supernatural. There's no such thing as the paranormal.” Well, the parallel statement to that would be there is no such thing as God, and that is traditional atheism! That's not just the absence of God-belief. He is affirming the traditional atheistic view: “There is no such thing as God.” In any case, in talking with someone like Ayaan he has to use her definition of atheism if he's to engage with her point. She's talking about atheism as the belief that God does not exist and saying that that worldview does not have substance to preserve Western society and the civilizational struggle nor to provide meaning and purpose in life. If he's going to engage her point rather than just talk past her, he has to use her definition of the term. Finally, the irony of this whole clip is that he admits that atheism (as he defines it) cannot supply the resources needed in the civilizational conflict. He says atheism, since it's not a view, can't do anything. So really he concedes her point! On his own definition of atheism, it cannot supply the resources needed in the civilizational conflict. So I found his response to her article to be just multiply flawed.^[2]