"Freddie became so much nicer after he died," said his wife, "He was not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people." Ayer confessed that for the first time in his life he had begun to notice scenery. He died finally a year later in 1989.

We will never know what the grace of God was accomplishing in his soul but it may have been the change of perspective described by G.K. Chesterton this way: "So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense."

Until his near-death experience, Ayer was too logical, or at least his logic was bound in the shackles of experimental science. His mind was a huge locomotive but a locomotive without side windows and on a circular track. He had no room for wonder: God, good, evil, incarnation, resurrection were all ruled out from the start. There is no experiment to verify these.

It is an act of faith to think that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. Pitting faith against reason is simply silly when one considers that even experimental science is, to this limited sense, 'faith based.'

Ayer was already old fashioned by the time he died. His view that personal experience counts for nothing has been replaced in popular culture with a view that personal experience counts for almost everything. In Ayer's world there was no place for the claims of Christianity; but neither is there place for them in a world where there is no universal truth but only what is true for me. Moreover the bleakness and materialism of Ayer's vision, blinkered as it was by a narrow rationalism, has been replaced by an irrationalism with a vision just as bleak and earth-bound.

This makes it an increasingly inhospitable world for Christianity which, as a revealed religion, is founded on absolutes: "He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary..." "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain."

These absolute and universal claims are themselves mysteries, reasonable but not yet fully understood. Christianity is a mystical religion but its mysticism is made intelligible by its revealed doctrines which need neither justification nor apology. They are matters of faith which we should seek to understand but should not presume to validate. They are like great trees that constitute a sun drenched forest, revealing, illuminating, radiating life, providing a place for God's children to live and fruit for them to grow. Ayer sought to clear-cut the forest but Jehovah slew this epicure with a tiny piece of smoked salmon, and winked.

Anthony Burton
Bishop of Saskatchewan