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The Call of the Logos to an Atheist
At this stage in my life, I hesitate to utter the phrase “I will never,” though I am tempted to say I will never utter it again. There was a time, early in my academic journey, when the world felt neatly divided between truth and falsehood.
Freshly unmoored from the Christianity of my upbringing, I was sure that truth lay anywhere but there.
It was a naïve certainty, but an intoxicating one. I had escaped the faith I believed had marred my childhood and ventured boldly into the world of reason, evidence, and critical thought.
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Truth, I told myself, was an empirical affair, reducible to what could be tested, proven, and verified.
What I didn’t see then was how easily I had traded one authority for another. Though I prided myself on resisting cognitive biases, I invoked appeals to authority as liberally as ever — only now it was the authority of science and secular philosophy.
To be clear, I hold the rigor of the scientific method in the highest regard. But what I’m describing is something different: the unexamined reliance on the ideas of “very smart people” without fully grappling with their implications or limitations.
