Peter Hitchens was just like you; an atheist like his late brother Christopher Hitchens. He would state he had no sense of God whatsoever and argue much in the same way you do.
Peter Hitchen was an atheist, but he wasn't just like me. He was quite different in a number of ways and below I will talk about one way in which he differed.
AgeofKnowledge said:
The time came; however, that Peter decided to live out the Christian worldview as a Christian...
The world view he returned to was the one of his youth – the Church of England, only one small step removed from Catholicism.
AgeofKnowledge said:
... despite having no internal confirmation whatsoever in his person exactly as you feel.
This is where you go terribly astray when you try to paint all atheists with the same brush. Hitchens, when he converted back to Anglicanism, did not feel exactly as I feel. In fact he felt quite different.
Do you know why Peter Hitchens converted back to Christianity? What you need to understand is that he was one of those atheists who never quite got over their fear of hell. Are you familiar with the Blood, Sweat & Tears song,
And When I Die? One of the lyrics runs like this: “I can swear there ain’t no heaven, but I pray there ain’t no hell.” Some atheists actually feel that way. I know I did; that is until I was sixteen. When I was sixteen I somehow lost that pervasive fear, but Peter Hitchens never did, and as an adult it brought him back to God. On a holiday he viewed Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th-century painting,
Last Judgment. In his book,
The Rage Against God he wrote:
“I had scoffed at its mention in the guidebook, but now I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open, at the naked figures fleeing towards the pit of hell. I had a sudden strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time. My large catalogue of misdeeds replayed themselves rapidly in my head. I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned. Van der Weyden was still earning his fee, nearly 500 years after his death.”
So there you have it. A 15th century painting of the pit of hell rekindled his fear and set him on a quick path back to God. That would not have been possible without this latent fear. Susan Sontag, an American philosopher once wrote that no atheist can rest content until the last dragon is slain, and the dragon she spoke of was the fear of hell. Some years ago on an atheist forum I chatted with a fellow atheist about this very subject. The fear I’ve been speaking of he was still in the grip of, and he was very interested to know how it left me. I didn’t know. I couldn’t really give him a good answer at the time, but I think it comes down to losing all sense that God is real (how that happened is another story). If God is not real then neither is Satan because supposedly it was the former who created the latter.
Another thing you need to know, in connection with this, is that this latent fear – in my experience – is confined to those atheists who were raised within Christianity. Those individuals raised as atheists (like my own children) never acquired this fear in the first place. It is not anything they can relate to and in their minds having this kind of fear sounds very peculiar.
So you have at least three kinds of atheists. Those born to Christianity who i) still possess a latent fear of hell, ii) those who’ve lost this fear, and iii) those who have never possessed it in the first place. I submit that it is most likely only those from the first group who return to belief in God. That at least is my hypothesis, and it is up for debate, but if I am right, it becomes very important for Christians, who wish to convert atheists, to understand which group they are dealing with.