Why I am not a Deist

One of John C. Wright’s readers asked him why he "flipped from fervent atheist to Christian. Not Deist, but *Christian*." He then goes on to explain this in a wonderful post of his experience with the supernatural and the Holy Trinity. I urge you to read it all, but here are some highlights.

Following Puddleglum, my philosophical soul tells me that that the saints are more sagacious than the sages, the martyrs more stoic than the Stoics, the schoolmen more rational than the Rationalists, the ghostly catechism a good deal more human than the Humanists, not to mention more humane. If this is illusion, why is it the only thing that gives deep meaning to an otherwise dull, dead, paradoxical and futile reality?

But the question of it being a dream is unreasonable. At some level, I am aware of Christ living in me, the way you might be aware of your own heartbeat. You do not really hear it, except in moments of excitement, but you know it is there, in the background.

Is that hallucination? Or it is merely an assumption, an axiom of the empirical epistemology, to place no credit on the testimony of eyewitnesses credible in all other respects.

If you ask me to prove to you God exists, I will ask you to prove to me that your conscience exists. If you cannot prove it, why should I waste my time and effort presenting evidence before a jury which very well might have no conscience? How will I know your verdict will be honest?

And yet surely, surely your conscience is real! If you do have a conscience, tell me by what means you are aware of it: not through the senses, surely. Do you admit immediate perception of a nonphysical reality is possible? If so, perception of other real things, even perception of divine things, is not impossible. It then merely becomes a question of prudence whether all those who claim to have had religious experiences have perceived something by this means. Since this seems to be the only point that all cultures of all the history of mankind has in common, that some sort of spiritual reality exists, it is not prudent to begin the discussion with the assumption that spiritual reality does not exist.
You might think all this was some great privilege or awesome experience.

It was totally humiliating.

So much evidence of the Christian religion was given to me so abundantly that it is an embarrassment to me. Other Christians, who have faith, do not need to be hit over the head with the blunt instrument of obvious supernatural events, one after another after another. I was visited not because I was wise or smart, but because I was foolish and stupid.

His post end with:

So I am not a Deist because Deism is not a satisfactory model for my experience. I did not meet a generic god, the god of the philosophers, or some nondenominational new age Being of Light. I met the three persons of the Trinity, one after another.

And Mary. I spoke with her. I wish I could tell you of her kindness, her simple, unaffected goodness of heart. She is more celebrated now than any queen, and lives where joy lives forever, and bright spirits like votive candles surround her, but I wish I could do something, anything to undo the sorrows she knew in life. Poor woman. Poor, poor woman.

If this was all hallucination, if this was all madness, I tell you truthfully that I would believe it nonetheless, just on the smallest chance I might see her again in heaven, and hold her hand again. Hers was the callused hand of a working woman.