Noah McKay was always “at least slightly” more confident than not that God existed.
The philosophy doctoral student at Princeton University recently announced his conversion to Catholicism, but he told EWTN News that he struggled for years with what he saw as uncertainties related to faith, including the problem of evil and the “problem of divine hiddenness.”
McKay is the second Princeton philosophy scholar this year to convert to the Catholic faith; earlier in the summer Joe Schmid announced his own return to the faith after years of having run an agnostic-themed philosophy channel on YouTube.
“I was never an atheist, and I don’t think I was ever agnostic,” McKay told EWTN News. But he experienced profound uncertainties in high school and graduate school, some of which were also related to what he described as “difficulties with the reliability and interpretation of the Bible.”
While he never fully abandoned belief in God, “what firmly convinced me of theism were, first, design arguments based on the fine-tuning of physics for the emergence of life, and, second, the empirical evidence for contemporary Christian miracles,” he said.
“Arguments from consciousness, moral knowledge, and natural beauty also played a role,” he added.
It is perhaps unsurprising that a philosophy scholar would be drawn into the Church in part by scholarly inquiry. Schmid told EWTN News shortly after his conversion, for instance, that “contingency arguments” helped convince him of God’s existence.
McKay, meanwhile, cited “evidence for vindicatory Catholic miracles” as helping lead him to the Catholic Church specifically.
Those miracles “presuppose distinctive teachings of the Catholic Church,” he pointed out, and the evidence for them, he argued, is “as good or better than the evidence for the more generically Christian miracles” in which McKay himself already believed.
He told EWTN News that out of the necessity of consistency he felt he needed to either accept all of those Catholic miracles or reject all of them. “And the evidence was too strong for rejecting all of them to be reasonable!” he said.
The evidence for those miracles wasn’t the only thing that convinced him of the truth of the Catholic faith, he said, but “it did motivate me to look into the history and theology of the Church more carefully,” and the evidence he found for Catholicism was “very strong.”
He urged those considering Catholicism for the first time, or those who are considering returning to it, to start with researching those miracles.
Speaking to Catholic YouTube apologist Cameron Bertuzzi in a recent interview, McKay argued that “if you already accept that Christianity is true, the inference to Catholicism is irresistible.”
He admitted that his decision to join the Church caused his close friends and family “distress” given his Protestant background.
But “I think Catholicism — if you’re fully informed, if you’re really considering all of the evidence — I think Catholicism is basically going to be irresistible,” he said.
Speaking to EWTN News, he also urged potential converts and reverts: “Pray!”
“I found praying the rosary especially helpful when I was discerning Catholicism,” he said. “Just ask God to help you earnestly seek the truth and make the means of discovering it available. Those who seek Christ, earnestly and prayerfully, will find him.”
“I’m going to ask God to make himself known to everyone who reads this article!” he added.
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