by Harry Howard, Telegraph
A lecture in an A-level politics class transformed my world view and set me on the path to faith
Not even at my lowest ebb, when needles were being threaded into my shrunken veins and my hair was coming out in clumps, did I change my mind. Quite the opposite, in fact. Having been struck down by a brain tumour, 17-year-old me was more convinced than ever of Richard Dawkins’ maxim: that in this cruel world of ours there is nothing but “blind, pitiless indifference”.
The story of Jesus Christ’s ministry, crucifixion, death and resurrection was just that then: a fable with no more truth to it than Grimm’s fairy tales. “You don’t need God to be good,” I would say with teenage zeal. Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 polemic God is Not Great – which I inhaled in a few days while recovering from cancer treatment – made me all the more certain that I would never stray from my strident atheism.
But then, during one otherwise ordinary school day in the summer of my repeated Year 13, my politics teacher – a Muslim with an eye for a waistcoat – shattered my world view in the space of an hour. A fellow student had challenged him to set aside our A-level revision class and instead explain a centuries-old philosophical argument for the existence of God. He couldn’t help but do so with the relish of a devout believer.
That blizzard of logic and reason – about a finite universe needing an ultimate first cause if anything is to make sense – utterly floored me. It would be years before I would declare myself a practising Christian, but I walked out of that lesson with a whole new perspective. Suddenly, having been exposed to a single pillar of so-called apologetics, God’s existence seemed possible.