A cursory reading of the biographies of eleven leading
contemporary philosophers in Kelly James Clark (ed.) *Philosophers
Who Believe* (IVP, Illinois, 1993), tells a different story.

I’ve posted this in three stages (this is the third), to make it
easier to read/ digest/respond.

Rowland Croucher

In my view of the matter, I had no religious upbringing. My
parents may have thought otherwise. In my preadolescent years, I
was taken by my mother and my maternal grandmother to religious
services in a Reform synagogue on Saturday mornings, but without
any effect on my mind or soul…

[In preparation for my] bar mitzvah… I do not recall the rabbi’s
ever asking me whether I believed in God… In my adolescent
years… I ceased to have anything to do with the Jewish
religion…

In 1979, when I wrote *How To Think About God*, I was not yet a
Christian. I wrote that book as a pagan for pagans… The argument
therein for God’s existence was, for me, the satisfactory
culmination of fifty years of dissatisfaction with the arguments
adapted by Aquinas from Aristotle…

The soundest rational argument for God’s existence [carries] us
only to the edge of the chasm that separates the philosophical
affirmation of God’s existence from the religious belief in God.
What is usually called ‘a leap of faith’ is needed for anyone
across the chasm. But the leap of faith is usually misunderstood
as being a progress from having insufficient reasons for affirming
God’s existence to a state of greater certitude in that
affirmation. That is not the case. The leap of faith consists in
going from the conclusion of a merely philosophical theology to a
religious belief in a God that has revealed himself as a loving,
just, and merciful Creator of the cosmos, a God to be loved,
worshipped and prayed to…

After a trip to Mexico [in 1984]… I fell ill… The illness was
protracted… I suffered a mild depression… When [an episcopal
priest] prayed for my recovery, I choked up and wept. The only
prayer I knew word for word was the Pater Noster. On that day and
in the days after it, I found myself repeating the Lord’s Prayer,
again and again, and meaning every word of it. Quite suddenly,
when I was awake one night, a light dawned on me, and I realized
what had happened… After many years of affirming God’s existence
and trying to give adequate reasons for that affirmation, I found
myself believing in God. (pp. 203, 204, 212, 215, 216).

– Mortimer Adler, director of the Institute for Philosophical
Research, and chairman of the board of editors of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

…I found myself in 1978 asking our parish priest if he could
present me for confirmation. I still find it hard to say what led
to this – what factors in my own thinking and feeling served as
the vehicles of the mercy of God. I cannot look back on any
conversion experience, and feel no kinship with, and at most a
mild envy of, those who do…

There was another reason [for believing God was at work in me]…
Our son died, suddenly and accidentally, a few days before his
nineteenth birthday. His death, needless to say, was a great
trauma for us and for his sister. No parent, especially a
career-minded father, can experience this grief without major
admixture of guilt, and I was deeply conscious of many failures of
love. Praying for the repose of his soul was, and is, the only
thing left to do for him. I do not say I turned back to the church
because of guilt. (Not that this would have been an inadequate
reason.) I say rather that these prayers for the dead were and are
necessities for me, and I could not and cannot believe them to be
unnecessary or unefficacious…

I had all sorts of intellectual difficulties with the faith that I
would go on sorting out, or failing to sort out, forever… On the
day when the bishop confirmed me I remember the nearest thing in
my life to a distinctively and unambiguously religious
experience… All obstacles had been imposed by myself, and… had
melted away when God’s minister had quietly ignored them and not
argued.

– Terence Penelhum, formerly professor and head in the philosophy
department, University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

During my elementary-school years I especially enjoyed reading
lives of the saints. I do not think I have ever had role models or
heroes except for those saints… The experience of knowing holy
people is still the most important evidence to me for the truth of
Christianity…

As philosophers, we usually like to pretend that most of our
philosophical positions are arrived at exclusively through
something called ‘reason’, but I believe that even the most
careful thinker is heavily influenced by qualities of temperament,
and that these qualities unify the pattern of one’s beliefs.
Reason alone underestimates coherence, and it does not give one’s
belief system a style. Religious faith helps to produce such a
style, and that is probably why the minds of the great theistic
philosophers of the past are interesting in a way that is rare
among more arid minds of even the best of nontheists…
Religion… gives one’s beliefs a flavor, a strength and an
intensity lacking in those whose beliefs are merely beliefs…

Having children forces parents to come to terms with their own
beliefs. While our sons were in preschool I had to make up my mind
about what I believed… I decided I had to think about the
connection between faith and reason and my own reasons for leaving
the church. Philosophy makes us yearn for the truth, but it does
not always show us how to find it… I was astonished at the
beauty of the liturgy. It is true that there had been liturgical
changes during my absence, but the primary change was in me…

In my experience everybody loves Plato, but hardly anybody is a
Platonist. Plato was right about one vitally important matter,
though, and that is his understanding of the urge to
self-transcendence, found in numerous places in the dialogues. My
favorite is the analysis of love in the Symposium. There
Socrates defines love as the desire for the perpetual possession
of Beauty, or the Good. Plato’s brilliant way of connecting love
with both the aesthetic and the intellectual urge is one of the
most important of the Greek ideas assimilated by Christianity.
While philosophers and mathematicians are often faulted for being
exceedingly cerebral, both have much in common with artists and
mystics.

– Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, professor of philosophy at Loyola
Marymount University.

[At the Dutch Reformed Church in Begelow, Minnesota] elements of
the liturgy and of Scripture sank their roots so deep into
consciousness that nothing thereafter, short of senility, could
remove them…

Tradition is usually seen as burden, not grace… [but] if you ask
me who I am, I reply: I am one who was bequeathed the Reformed
tradition of Christianity…

[But] the gospel had never been presented to me as best
explanation, most complete account; the tradition had always
encouraged me to live with unanswered questions. Life eternal
doesn’t depend on getting all the questions answered; God is often
as much behind the questions as behind the answers…

Was it grace I experienced when I heard God saying to me, in the
voice of the Palestinians and the South African blacks, you must
speak up for these people? …And was it grace I experienced when
my son was killed?

God is more mysterious than I had thought – the world too. There’s
more to God than grace; or if it’s grace to one, it’s not grace to
the other… And there’s more to being human than being that point
in the cosmos where God’s goodness is meant to find its answer in
gratitude. To be human is also this: to be that point in the
cosmos where the yield of God’s love is suffering.

– Nicholas Wolsterstorff has a joint appointment in the divinity
school and the philosophy and religion departments of Yale
University.

Rowland Croucher