College socialized me to dismiss religion. It was part of the academic zeitgeist: Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. I became a child of the Enlightenment, a materialist, confident the alternatives amounted to superstition.
I’ve been back-pedaling. Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn’t answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.
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