Re: Deconversion

Mark Goodge wrote:

Well, maybe the Calvinists are correct. I'm a lot less certain that
they're wrong than I am that you are :-) And, of course, if they are
right, then it doesn't matter all that much what the unchosen (or the
chosen prior to their salvation) believe, as it can't affect either
theor own or anyone else's salvation.

That is, of course, possible. I've never had much clue how
Calvinism can be reconciled with divine goodness, and a god
who isn't good doesn't seem to me to be worth worshipping.
And, of course, if it should turn out that the Calvinists
are right and I'm not Elect, then one of the motivations
for wanting not to be an atheist in error goes away. :-)

Even from a free-will position, I don't think it's as bad as you paint
it. Lots of things lead people to reject theism. Mostly, it's for
reasons that are far more to do with their personal circumstances than
for any well-considered rational argument in which the problem of evil
is a factor. People who choose in favour of Christianity for purely
rational, logical reasons may be rare, but the same is true for
atheists - most non-believers in religion are non-believers because it
happens to be the best fit for their own opinions or preferences, not
because they've carefully assessed all the possibilities and concluded
that atheism is the only one which really seems to work[1]. So even if
the problem of evil does lead some people to reject Christianity, it's
still a long way from being the biggest reason why people do.

I don't expect many people think things through as completely
and logically as they can, and then say "OK, the problem of
evil is decisive, so I'll be an atheist". But the prevalence
of evil can (quite reasonably) affect people's opinions and
choices even when they aren't so obsessively rational about it
as I've tried to be. One part of that "best for for their own
opinions or preferences" thing will be an assessment (often
fuzzy and subjective and superficial, perhaps) of what sort
of world we're in and what sort of world they'd expect to be
made and supervised by the god proclaimed by Christianity.

And
there's an argument to be made for the viewpoint that the problem of
evil is left unexplained precisely in order to give us something
pretty major to exercise faith on.

Perhaps there's an argument to be made, but it seems unlikely
to me that it's a very good argument. It would need to presuppose
(or offer some reason to believe) that having "something ...
to exercise faith on" is more important than having health
or food or love or whatever, even when as it turns out the
large majority of people don't in fact end up exercising faith.
(I'm guessing, perhaps wrongly, that you don't consider most
of the world's population to have the sort of "faith" that's
really valuable.)

"Ah, but maybe there's some reason beyond your comprehension
why God might put up with all those people rejecting theism."
Well, yes; and so round the circle we go again. Anything can
be excused in this way.

Indeed it can. But the same is true on the other side of the fence. "I
don't accept that God could have reasons I can't understand". "Why
not?" "Because that wouldn't make sense". The whole thing is not
merely circular, it's spherical - wherever you start, there's a route
back to where you came from that appears to be moving forward at all
intervening points.

Well, I never said *that*, of course.

You must have had one once, though, or this wouldn't be a deconversion
experience.

(It isn't a deconversion *experience*, merely a deconversion.)

I didn't mean to imply anything by the extra word; it's merely the
counterpart to the equivalent usage in "conversion experience". In
both cases, the extra word is tautological from a pedantic point of
view, but it sometimes works better from a literary perspective.

Ah. I tend to prefer accuracy to literary elegance when I have
to choose. This may be a weakness.

Anyway: no, I don't think I ever did have one. I had a fairly
solid belief that Christianity was right, but I was always
rather puzzled about how that belief got there. I don't think
there was any time at which I thought I could give a skeptic
a really convincing amswer. (The persistence of that unsatisfactory
state of affairs was, of course, one of the things that led me
to the wholesale re-examination that's brought us to where we
now are.)

I'm leaving this paragraph unanswered for now, but I may come back to
it later as it's triggered an interesting tangent in my own mind.

OK; I'll look forward to it.

It is if your approach to the problem is essentially to adopt
radical skepticism, yes. But that applies to any problem at all.
The problem of evil is all about good and evil, responsibility,
God, sin, suffering, and other such things that seem to me to
be squarely in the centre of the issues with which many religions
are concerned, Christianity most definitely being one of them.

I don't think it's necessary to go as far as radical scepticism in
order to be able to manage without solving the problem of evil. I was
thinking more about almost the direct opposite: a mystical approach
which is accepting of mysteries and the unknown as a normal part of
life.

I don't think that's the opposite of radical skapticism.

That's what I meant by "other questions which are nothing at all
to do with Christianity" - the divide between a philosophical approach
which insists that all questions can be answered (or, at least, that
answers should be sought) by direct investigation and an approach
which looks towards mysticism and unplanned discovery as tools of
knowledge and wisdom.

I think you're conflating multiple things here. For instance,
I'm very positive about unplanned discovery as a means of
arriving at knowledge and wisdom, but quite skeptical about
mysticism for that purpose. (It might have other purposes.)

some things I'd thought at the
outset would be arguments for Christianity turned out on
closer inspection to go the other way.

Can you give some examples?

1. I used to think that Christianity's account of human nature
was one of its strengths: that the combination of divine
origin and fallenness offers a good explanation for the
curious combination of goodness and badness, with flashes
of saintliness and lapses into devilry, that characterizes us.

After looking a bit further, though, it now seems to me that
Christianity doesn't so much *explain* these things as *state*
them in different language. It's very unclear what is meant by
saying we were "made in God's image", and certainly not clear
enough to explain much; a traditional account of the Fall is
riddled with historical and theological problems (the human
race is older than a literal approach to early-Genesis suggests;
according to the story as it stands, God told A&E a lie and
the snake correctly called him on it); a "liberal" account
again reduces explanation to mere restatement. Whereas a
more "rationalist" approach, while it certainly doesn't
have the immediate appeal of the Genesis story and still
has plenty of holes and handwaving, comes nearer to offering
an actual explanation that really explains, at least a bit,
why we are the way we are.

2. I used to think that the excellence of Christian ethics
was a good (though not particularly forceful) argument in
favour of Christianity.

I still think Christian ethics are (is?) pretty good, but
I now think it falls short of what we ought to expect from
a divine revelation. Of course there's a certain element
of presumption here, to which I'm not blind :-).

I did a little
(deliberately crude and naive) calculation of the overall
strength of evidence I'd found for atheism over Christianity,
and it came out at something like 50,000 : 1 in favour of
atheism.

What were the things that remained in the 1?

(First, a pedantic note: by saying "50,000:1" I don't mean
"50,000 times the volume of evidence on one side as on the
other"; typically, doubling the volume of (independent)
evidence for something would *square* that ratio, not
double it. So it's not really a matter of "things that
remained in the 1". But I know what you mean...)

I think the "trilemma" has some force. As I've remarked
elsewhere, I think the amount of force it can have is limited
by the fact that "the authors of the gospels made him out to
have said more outrageous things than he really did" is a
somewhat plausible explanation of the facts. (As, on the
other side of that coin, is the possibility that they
also made him out to be better and wiser than he really
was.) I ended up reckoning that as 4:1 in favour of
Christianity over atheism, though I think that may be
a little generous.

I also think that what limited documentary evidence we have
is in favour of the Resurrection rather than against it.
Again, I don't think this evidence nearly as strong as
some apologists appear to, and for a similar reason: all
we have is some words, and it's always possible that some
of what they say is wrong. Indeed, we *know* that a lot
of what they say is wrong because the gospels' accounts
of the Resurrection differ wildly. But, still, the best
explanation when you have a document saying "X happened"
is that X happened, and some of the arguments used by
those apologists aren't entirely bankrupt. I reckoned
this one 3:1 in favour of Christianity over atheism, again
trying to be a little generous.

The fact of religious experience -- considered from the
outside, which is the only way I can consider it, having
had none worth mentioning -- is evidence for *something*.
In view of the way that such things seem to happen in
all religions and to get treated by followers of each
as evidence for the beliefs they (or those around them)
already hold, I think it's evidence *against* any position
that claims that (1) religious experiences are encounters
with God and (2) God cares a lot about what we believe,
and that would on the whole include Christianity. But
it's more evidence against atheism than it is against
Christianity, and considering that particular pair of
possibilities I reckoned it about 3:2 in favour of
Christianity over atheism.

There were others, including some where I can't actually
see how any argument can really work but where I reckoned
some evidence for Christianity over atheism on the grounds
that it's always possible I've missed something. (For
instance, the sorts of "argument from ethics" that Peter
Rodda's been deploying, or the "argument from reason"
Mike Davis quotes Victor Reppert quoting C S Lewis as
using :-).)

Some things I conspicuously *didn't* do:
[snip]
- Seeking out emotionally manipulative situations in which
"religious experiences" seem to happen more often, in the
hope of having one that would convince me.

What about non-manipulative emotional "religious experiences"? Or
don't you believe they exist?

Oh, it seems fairly clear that they exist, but there doesn't
seem to be much I could do to seek them out. (Other than
keeping an open mind and asking God to reveal himself to me
if he's there, both of which I have done plenty of.)

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.