The Strange Return of Belief in God
Why public intellectuals are more openly expressing belief in God
In a recent podcast appearance Stanford neuroscientist and now well known podcaster Andrew Huberman said that he believes in God, that he prays daily, and that he has recently started reading the bible.
As little as a decade or so ago such an admission would have been impossible for a credible public intellectual. Science and atheism for a time became synonymous, and even before the new atheists turned this into an aggressive polemic the general sense that Darwinism and the big bang had expelled the need for more transcendent explanations of what it means to exist still very much prevailed.
Yet today that scene seems to be subtly changing. Besides Huberman there are others who have made the same admission, activist and former politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently wrote that she now identifies as a Christian because of the importance of Christianity to the West, as well as a belief in a transcendent reality, and said that she is attending church. Historian Tom Holland wrote a 2016 article called : “Why I was wrong about Christianity” in which he described coming to realise that all of his values were essentially Christian, and later would call the cross of Christ a “true myth”.
