Aesthetic apologetics

More from ex-atheist A. N. Wilson, in an interview in which he was asked, “What’s the worst thing about being faithless?”

When I thought I was an atheist I would listen to the music of Bach and realize that his perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than my own. Ditto when I read the lives of great men and women who were religious.

Reading Northrop Frye and Blake made me realize that their world-view (above all their ability to see the world in mythological terms) is so much more INTERESTING than some of the alternative ways of looking at life.

Notice the impact on Wilson of music and literature–including Northrop Frye’s literary criticism, no less (works I heartily recommend, especially for those who don’t get the Bible). There is an apologetics of philosophical argumentation, but there is also an apologetics of aesthetics and the imagination.

UPDATE: See Strange Herring for some more provocative quotations from Wilson.