Atheism Bumps Into Reality: a Conversion Story
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ATHEISM BUMPS INTO REALITY: A CONVERSION STORY Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. 1 To My Parents and my Dominican Family 2 CONTENTS FOREWORD: This is the first volume of a three-volume autobiography, 1952-1981. The whole is entitled A Begging Friar’s Journey. Vol. I is entitled Atheism Bumps into Reality: A Conversion Story, 1815-1952. Vol. III is entitled, Keeping Vigil: The Spirituality of Aging.1981- 2010. CHAPTER I: POETIC EMPIRICISK 5 CHAPTER II: INSECURITY 26 CHAPTER III: GREY TOWERS: BLUE LAKE 50 CHAPTER IV: CREATIVITY 74 CHAPTER V: POLITICAL DIALECICS 105 CHAPTER VI: OPENING TO GOD 114 CHAPTER VII: GOLDEN DOME 163 CHAPTER: ENTERING THE CLOISTER 184 CHAPTER IX: LIFE-SENTENCE 203 NOTES: 240-246 FOREWORD This is the first volume of a three-volume autobiography. The whole is entitled A Begging Friar’s Journey. Vol. II is entitled Completing Vatican II on Science, Education, and Vol. III, Keeping Vigil: The Spirituality of Aging. 3 4 CHAPTER I: POETIC EMPIRICISM The “God Delusion” The “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennet, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger, among others, 1 confirms St. Thomas Aquinas’ view that atheism, whenever it historically erupts, always presents two fundamental objections to God’s existence: (1) that the universe is self-explanatory and (2) that it is filled with too many evils to have a good Creator. The first of these is the more fundamental, since the second presupposes that there is some reason to think God exists; while the first implies that theism is simply unintelligible. Yet a careful reading of these currently popular authors shows that it is this argument from evil that concretely motivates most atheists’ absolute convictions. But why are they so blind to the classical arguments for God’s existence? Elsewhere I have responded to this new wave of atheism in abstract philosophical or scientific terms, 2 but when any of us comes to the absolute convictions on which his or her whole life depends we must also face up to the concrete experience of reality that each of us has as a unique person. The term “empiricism” is from the Greek for “experience” and in the broad sense refers not only external sensation, but also to the work of our internal senses and our affects (“feelings”) best expressed in fine literature and especially in poetry. Modern scientists, however, are often by their scientific education cut off form reality by their habits of abstract mathematical modeling. Thus paradoxically their mathematicism, which for Plato and Neo- Platonism poetically led upward to the spiritual world of the Ideas centered on the Idea of the One or Good, that is, on God, blinds them to the Design Argument for his existence. 5 Hence in this book I have, with considerable embarrassment and only with the urging of my religious superior decided to relate the story of my own conversion to the Catholic faith as a concrete example of how poetry and science can support each other. My purpose is to encourage the reader to review her or his own personal choice of a “worldview and value system” and see if it is really and honestly the truest available. I call this “poetic empiricism” because poetry by its emphasis on “experience” keeps us in touch with reality better than does the telescope, the tube, and the computer. When my superior urged me to write this memoir he suggested I start it with a reference to something he had once heard me say, namely, "According to family tradition my great-great grandfather on my mother’s side was burned at the stake by Native Americans and his wife scalped and left for dead." I cannot verify this family tradition, but often dreamed as a child of being similarly taken captive and thus felt both the fire and the knife. At 94, however, and a member of the religious Order of Preachers, once notorious as Inquisitors who sent heretics to the stake, I also felt its fires when my Provincial asked me to write a memoir. Reviewing one’s life can burn deep. As I have written I have been concerned in talking about myself to show atheists why the All Merciful God is indeed the source of all reality. My only sibling, six years my elder, was Richard Moore Ashley born March 13, 1909. I was born May 3, 1915 in Neodesha (Osage for Smoky-With-Mud-Water), a town of about 3,000 located in southeastern Kansas at the confluence of the Fall and Verdigris Rivers. 3 Native American lore has always formed my mental landscape and Neodesha for me is associated with two images, the burial Mound of Little Bear, the Osage chief who died in 1867, and the wild persimmons I picked as a boy on Joe Kammerer (my uncle) ’s, farm near the Mound. So sweet, those orange persimmons, but, if not quite ripe, how they puckered your lips! 6 My mother had hoped to pair her son Richard with a daughter whom she planned to name "Alicia," but when I also turned out male she named me "Winston" after Winston Churchill (not the British statesman but the St. Louis novelist then famous) and "Norman" for my grandfather. When I eventually I became a Catholic for a baptismal name I took "Joseph" and when I became a Dominican friar as my "religious name" I took "Benedict Mary," which I have retained, though to take a religious name, and especially a feminine, devotional one, has, since Vatican II in the Catholic Church, become politically incorrect. I was told that the doctor who delivered me used forceps so that I came from the womb with my head strangely pulled out, like the statues of King Tut. My mother recollected how the doctor patted it back into shape. Then, because I was rather slow to begin talking, my mother used to cry, fearing I would prove idiotic. I soon made up for lost time, as the loquacity of this book will testify. My parents used to tell this story on me. One day my eight-year-old brother came home without me. When my parents anxiously required where he had left Wint, he replied, "I chained him in the sewer with my dog-chain." Dick had indeed chained me in a large sewer pipe that workmen had been laying in an open trench in the street. When to tease me my parents told this story the punch line was always, "And when we rushed down to unchain you, you cried and cried. You preferred the sewer to home!" I myself do not remember that friendly sewer, but I seem to remember another very early event. I was told that when I was about two I jumped off the front porch, but landed unharmed. This crash-landing came back to me later in dreams as an attempt to fly. In the dreams I saw under the porch where I took off a wooden latticework, a feature of no house in which we later lived. Not till I was ten did we again visit that house in Neodesha and behold I immediately 7 recognized that porch with its latticework! Furthermore, that house was somehow connected in my mind with a dream I had repeatedly when six or seven. I dreamt that I was sitting at the window in its parlor when a wagon drew up before the house with two strange Indians, a man and a woman. It seemed they were coming to take me away. I screamed for my mother, feeling she had abandoned me. It was a scene of sheer terror until each time I awoke. When I was two and a half we moved to Blackwell, Oklahoma, a town of 10,000 4 where my father had a new job as the chief accountant of the Blackwell Zinc Smelter. Blackwell was just another farm town in wheat country, but the Smelter had been built there to exploit the abundant natural gas from nearby wells in refining the ores mined in the Tri-State area of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. My Dad always claimed that it was the biggest smelter in the whole world exclusively for zinc, with twin hundred feet smokestacks spewing out yellow smoke over the wheat-fields, poisoning crops and cattle. For a time we lived at the west edge of town and in full view of the Smelter, so that the view of those two smoke stacks raised in the western sky with their clouds of pollution adding to the colors of the sunsets, already spectacular in the Plains, is one of the most deeply impressed images in my brain. Yet Blackwell was a pleasant, friendly, if rather bleak, town in the Cherokee Strip, once part of an Indian reservation, until it was opened to white settlement in the famous Cherokee Run of 1893. I like small towns, as later I was to love Dubuque, Iowa, although one of my Dominican confreres said, "If I had only six months to live, I would move to Dubuque, so that it would seem like six years." In an early poem of mine I tried to capture this landscape: HARVEST NOON The wheat harvest is whirling in yellow hot hours, 8 the dense grain is falling in hot yellow showers, at field fences yellow sunflowers twirl and bend to the west. The round stubble is shining in yellow new lanes, the grain left is rippled in dense hot plains, and bends to the whirl of the binder's vanes bundled in even rows. Standing grain falls in an even rain that slows when the binder slows, slows and turns.