Category: deconversion

In which I help deconvert someone, and on what works

February 23, 2015 • 12:15 pm

I’ve always said that the definition of “success” in mentoring graduate students is “producing a student who can replace you.” And though I’ve had very few students, I’ve replaced myself in that sense at least three times, so I’m quite happy.

And I consider the definition of “success” as an anti-theist to be “turning at least one person away from the delusions of faith and towards the virtues of reason.”  After all, if theists can boast about bringing people to Jesus, why can’t atheists take pride in helping people go in the reverse direction?

Now I can’t claim full credit for doing that to any one person, but I claim partial credit for helping quite a few—or so they tell me. And I’ll add those partial successes up to assert that N > 1.

The latest partial convert is Bruce Gerencser, a former Christian minister, who explains on his website what led to his leaving the church. As is nearly always true for the deconversion of ministers (or anyone else, for that matter), it is a long, tortuous, and complex process involving many inputs. In his post, “Why I stopped believing,” he lists some of them:

I decided I would go back to the Bible, study it again, and determine what it was I REALLY believed. During this time, I began reading books by authors such as Robert Wright,  Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman, These three authors, along with several others,  attacked the foundation of my Evangelical belief in the inerrant, inspired word of God. Their assault on this foundation brought my Evangelical house tumbling down. I desperately tried to find some semblance of the Christianity I once believed, but I came to realize that my faith was gone.

I tried, for a time, to convince myself that I could find some sort of Christianity that would work for me. Polly and I visited numerous liberal or progressive Christian churches, but I found that these expressions of faith would not do for me. My faith was gone. Later, Polly [his wife] would come to the same conclusion.

I turned to the internet to find help. I came upon sites like exchristian.net and Debunking Christianity. I found these sites to be quite helpful as I tried to make sense of what was going on in my life. I began reading the books of authors like John Loftus, Hector Avalos, Robert M. Price, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins.

The four books that made the biggest impression on me were:

But read Gerenser’s whole piece (it’s short), because he traces the roots of his apostasy back to the very virtues instilled in him by his religious parents, including a love of reading and having the courage of one’s convictions.

The other point this makes is that it’s better, if you want to advance reason, to write and publish (if you have that privilege) rather than to give lectures and have debates. That is because in the quietude of authorship, you can polish and fully express your views, and people can read them at leisure and compare them with contrary views. In a public talk, I often find that the audience comprises people who are already on my side, and have come out of curiosity or to seek affirmation. Those are both fine reasons, and, after all, we all need affirmation (except perhaps Christopher Hitchens!), but in truth I’d prefer a higher titer of opponents when I speak. But again, I prefer to write, and that’s why I wrote The Albatross (soon to be available in fine bookstores everywhere).

Debates, I think, are almost useless at changing people’s minds—at least about evolution. It’s an exercise in rhetoric, the atmosphere is not right for reasoned consideration of arguments, and one can’t go into the evidence very deeply in half an hour or so. And that’s why I wrote Why Evolution is True (already available at fine bookstores everywhere). I’ve had only one debate with a creationist in my life: Hugh Ross, an old-earth creationist. That was in front of the annual meeting of the Alaska Bar Association (don’t ask me why they wanted me, but I got a free trip to a great state), and I have no idea how the audience reacted.

The only debates that might change peoples’ minds, I think, are when atheists debate theists about religion. There the issues don’t involve much consideration of evidence, because there simply isn’t any for God. And it’s not science, so people are less likely to get confused about complex issues. All you have to do is say, “What is your evidence?”, and the theist is stymied, or at least will disgorge a torrent of theobabble that won’t fool anyone who’s savvy or not already in the asylum. I did such a debate once—with John Haught in Kentucky—and was fairly successful at whomping him, though I don’t know how many people’s minds were changed. I had another debate with a Lutheran theologian in Charleston, South Carolina, but it was about the compatibility of religion and science, and the format was not optimal for allowing a real clash of ideas.

Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens seem to be quite good at changing people’s minds in debates, or so I remember from votes taken before and after their debates about religion. But how knows how long people remain swayed after the heat of the moment?

What about one-on-one discussions? That’s the procedure that atheist philosopher Peter Boghossian promoted in his popular book A Manual for Creating Atheists, and the evidence is that his “street epistemology” method does indeed make converts (or de-converts). But that’s a lot of work, and also requires a personality that can handle one-on-one confrontations, which I’m not particularly comfortable with.

For me, then, writing is the optimal way to change minds.  And that is why the Internet has been so valuable as a way to promote reason. I won’t say it always does that—look at how Jenny McCarthy, for example, attributes her anti-vaxer opinions to the ‘University of Google”—but it allows people to think about stuff in privacy of their homes, without distraction. If reason can’t work in such a venue, we have no hope.

 

h/t: Amy