How reason and doubt helped this novelist find his faith again

When Chris Beha was a teenager, he woke one night unable to move. He was pinned to his bed by an angel of God demanding that he trust the Lord.

It was not a dream — he was very much awake — and the experience, one that repeated for years afterward, was in part terrifying. But more so, he said, those visits, even if he felt he had to keep them secret, made him feel “called to something.”

“They marked me off from others, not in a way that shamed me, but in a way that flattered me,” Beha wrote. “I wanted them for myself.”

Such an experience is perhaps not surprising for someone who, as he wrote in his new book, "Why I am Not an Atheist‚" which came out in February, wasn’t just raised in a Catholic household, but “in a Catholic world.” But, of course, there’s more to it than that.

Beha, the former editor of Harper’s Magazine and a National Book Award-nominated novelist whose book Christopher Scalia named as one of 13 conservatives should read, is from New York City’s Upper East Side. Though that part of the world is not known as a bastion of active religious life, it does have a robust faith community. Approximately 30% of the city identifies as Catholic, and Beha and his family were immersed in that tradition.

His belief changed, however, after being confronted with death at an early age. Beha’s twin brother was hit by a car and nearly died while the two were studying at Princeton. Not long afterward, Beha himself was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma, undergoing intense treatments as a senior not knowing if he’d be alive come graduation.

Both survived but the experiences were harrowing for Beha and had an unexpected impact on his faith.

“The recognition of our finitude and mortality pushes some people towards belief,” Beha wrote. “But it had the opposite effect on me.”

At first, Beha stopped taking the sacrament but still attended services, then he ceased going to church altogether and ultimately came to embrace an almost evangelical level of atheism.

Even if he no longer believed in God per se, he still sought answers to life’s great questions: “How am I to live?” “What do I owe to other people?” “What is the meaning of life?”

The answers he sought weren’t just practical, he wrote, but qualitative. “I wanted a meaningful life.”

Seeking out those answers in a nonreligious context took Beha on a more than 10-year journey. Navigating his 20s, depression and the ups and downs as a novelist, he read his way through the great thinkers of the Western intellectual canon. From the ancient Greeks through the existentialists, Beha was looking for substantial, foundational truths by which to live a good life.

What he found in those texts, however, failed to sufficiently explain or answer for life’s more inexplicable realities nor the principles necessary to live in a meaningful way. After his studies and — really — meeting his wife, he found himself right back where he started. As a practicing Christian.

“I read through basically the entire history of modern Western philosophy, and where I arrived at is that nobody has thought their way to the perfectly satisfactory answer to these questions,” Beha said in an interview with Deseret News. “And that these questions cannot be answered through the intellect.”

Secularism has shortcomings

Throughout his career at Harper’s, Beha wrote a number of pieces for magazines about religion and faith in literature and wanted to publish those together as a collection. Speaking with someone about the idea, he mentioned that he wanted the book to thematically address how art can help people respond to the shortcomings of secularism.

“That person said, ‘Well, what shortcomings do you even mean?’” Beha said. “I had sort of taken it for granted that everybody finds it kind of emotionally dissatisfying to live in the secular world, even if they believe in it.”

In order to answer others who might wonder the same thing, Beha began writing an essay on the topic for the collection. Soon he realized that what he was writing was an entire book.

“From the beginning, it was (that) I want to explain to people what I believe,” Beha said. “I don’t want to convince them. I just want to give them a context.”

That context is both a personal narrative that details some of Beha’s experiences with both losing and finding faith, but — with the patience, scrupulousness and specificity of a graduate philosophy course — it delves into the specific nonreligious world views of western intellectual history.

He spends chapters on Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others. In its own right, the book is an amazing introduction to western philosophy.

As for why he felt so compelled to intellectualize those decisions for himself, Beha said he admires people who can get beyond the intellect and just believe.

“There is in writing and in faith, there is a great role for intuition. There is a great role for the power of emotions, and I do think that over-intellectualizing can be a problem,” Beha said. “In a certain way, what this story is about is getting over the idea that you can think your way or read your way to the right answer on stuff.”

A search for how to live

The book is nearly 400 pages, so any brief explanation of the complex intellectual thought is going to gloss over some of the finer details. With that caveat, Beha found that there are simply parts of human existence that a pure, rational approach to the natural world simply cannot explain. There are parts of existence that we simply cannot know, and that secular thought has not yet offered a comprehensive answer for how to live a good life.

To get there, the book is broken out into two main parts that are intellectual investigations, and those are punctuated with narratives from Beha’s life. Those two central parts detailing his arguments against atheism are long, and really dive into the variety of philosophical world views adopted by intellectuals throughout time.

Part one is called “A Universal Science,” and deals with those that argued on behalf of something called “scientific materialism.” In a broad oversimplification, it is an understanding of the world broken free of theistic maxims and deals with physical matter and observable knowledge.

Essentially, it’s the common perspective of a lot of secular folks today and is often mistaken as a product of the Enlightenment. But it’s a system for understanding the world that’s been around for a long time — well older than Christianity.

For Beha, it has yet to fully answer many questions of how humans experience existence. Beha said, too, that some may have come to think that this “materialism” is the natural, intuitive belief, but he does not think that’s necessarily true.

“But in fact, I think people have to be conditioned in a way that our society conditions people to find materialism to be commonsensical,” Beha said. “In reality, if you just tried to start from zero and you had the ‘data of experience,’ it just seems kind of transparently, immediately true that there is this thing that is conscious experience that isn’t itself matter.”

He mentions another atheist thinker named Thomas Nagel who wrote an essay called, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In it, Nagel found the so-called scientific materialist view to be insufficient because we’ll never be able to know what it’s actually like to be someone — or something — else. Said simply, there’s a gap in understanding between the mind and the body.

“Basically (Nagel)’s just saying the mind problem is a really big problem for the scientific worldview,” Beha said. “A way bigger problem than people are willing to allow.”

The second part is called “Absolute Reality,” and Beha is much more sympathetic to what he calls the “romantic idealist” arguments for atheism. These thinkers did not shy away from the fact that there are parts of existence that “transcend human comprehension.”

Those thinkers tended “to treat our subjective experience of reality as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know,” Beha wrote.

In this section, Beha said that much of the book comes together. Those thinkers see the holes in the materialist view of the world, celebrate the role of art and creativity in life and yet, their respective arguments for how to make the most of the life we have are matters of authenticity rather than seeking out qualitative meaning.

That’s not a small missing piece.

“I wanted to look the world frankly in the face, to see things in the light of reason,” Beha wrote in the book’s prelude. “The trouble was that when I took this approach, I could find no obvious or scientific answer to the question that seemed most pressing: How am I to live? (sic)”

With love, doubt and angels

Amid his grappling with these thinkers and worldviews, Beha met the woman that would eventually become his wife. Under a haze of depression, he considered all of those different foundational ideas as conceptual bases for reality — practicality, the ability to think, the will, the absurd — but had not yet tried the one that might have been pretty obvious to a Christian.

“So I told myself, Suppose you start with love (sic)," Beha wrote. “What would it mean to start there? ... If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?”

It did not mean he returned to church right away. But slowly, he did start to go again. At first it was to an Episcopalian church in his neighborhood, but he then found his way back to a Catholic church. And, after meeting with a priest, he unexpectedly found himself giving his first confession in many years.

Today, he has a foundational understanding of the world that has answers for those great questions, and has specific instruction for how to live a meaningful life.

But that doesn’t mean he lives without doubt or skepticism. Those notions may present themselves while he is going to Mass, saying his prayers or just while participating as a member of his faith community. But not always. Those same actions, though, keep him centered even on days where he does not strongly feel his beliefs.

“An important element, for me, is being part of a faith community and one that has a set of ingrained practices that have been going on for a long time and allows you to navigate your doubt,” Beha said.

Catholics say the Nicene Creed at Mass, Beha said, pointing out that the word “creed” has its origins in the same word as “heart.”

“To believe something is to take it to heart, and I say the creed every Sunday,” Beha said. “There may be Sundays when I don’t entirely believe it, but by saying it in this room with these other people, (I am) committing to taking it to heart and committing to aspire to it. And then there are times where I ‘m saying it because I absolutely do believe it. But I think it’s good for the community itself to be open to its members having that kind of vacillation over time, which is just naturally what will happen.”

But what about those apparitions at night? The ones that came to Beha with such terror but such clear direction?

It turns out that there’s a known, and not uncommon, form of sleep paralysis where people are awake, unable to move and prone to hallucination. He found out about it while listening to NPR during the early years of his doubt and rupture from the church. At that time, learning his night visitations were likely the result of a known medical issue only seemed to emphasize his atheism. There was a rational explanation for what he experienced, but Beha thinks there may be another one.

Because what was the scientific explanation for the form of an angel that his sleep paralysis took? What physical causes from the material world dictated the medium and substance of the message?

For Beha, while there’s an explanation for what he experienced through science that makes sense, the bare facts of what he was told and by whom were simply not events that could be reconciled necessarily with the natural, physical order of things.

In his faith, there’s a word for the moments he experienced. They’re called miracles.