Posted by Roger on August 17, 1999 at 17:55:03:
In Reply to: Christians conversions from atheism? posted by Chelonian on August 17, 1999 at 17:00:34:
: O.K. My first post by this title somehow got submitted without a text, but here is what I meant to say. . .
: In pursuit of objectivity (if such a thing can be really accomplished), I would really like to talk to a once-atheistic philosopher, well versed in the arguments of atheism/agnosticism/skepticism who has been converted to evangelical fundamentalism. Certainly there are hoards of persons who claim to have found God after being atheists, but most of those people, in my opinion had not really studied religion/a-religion side by side from an academic view-point by the time of their conversion, though they may have "studied" it seriously afterwards, for the purpose of grinding their evangelical axes. But even if a person well versed in philosophy and skepticism turned to religion after their studies or because of their studies, the brand of Christianity is probably not what would be called fundamentalism but liberal theology.
(Roger): As a child I was introduced, somewhere around the age of 7, to occasional churchgoing and was "christened" in a fundamentalist rural Methodist church in Southern Illinois. By the age of 10 I was finding Sunday School teaching glaringly at odds with what I was learning in popular science magazines. Also, for my 8th birthday I had asked for a book of fairy stories with pictures on a wheel that you turned with a "magic wand" (a small red stick). As a kid I assumed it was a real magic wand and would make me a motorcycle, which I longed for. Guess what? It didn't. A strong disconfirmation of the supernatural in my kid's world-view. Then the next year my parents told me there wasn't any Santa Claus, and I guessed all on my own that the Easter Bunny was not real. By this time the supernatural was having a very hard time convincing me of its reality. My father never went to church, and my mother's view of it was instrumentalist and Arminian in the extreme: you go to church because that is the way to get to heaven, provided you are a good person and kind to other people. The final nail in the coffin of my childhood faith lay in one of the strongest virtues of Methodism, its tolerance. It had a minimalist creed, and most Methodists believed that sincerity and kindness were the main things in getting to heaven and nothing else mattered.
By the age of 13 I was asking hard questions of my Sunday School teacher, such as how it could be necessary to be a Christian when so many billions of people in the present, past, and future, never get the opportunity even to hear of Christianity. Against the instrumentalist background (who get's into heaven?), this question was unanswerable. I threw the whole thing overboard, to the shock of my mother, who said she'd be ashamed not to believe in God. Well, she was a simple and kind person, and shame is one of the strongest socializers I know of. I didn't even attempt to explain to her that shame isn't an argument for the reasonability of the faith.
So, despite my lack of belief, I made an emotional attempt to be a good Methodist around the age of 15. It lasted about a year. Then the church got a Billy Graham-type evangelical preacher who wanted a deeper commitment than just coming to church and trying to be good during the week. He wanted a public confession, which even my mother balked at. I went away to college and enjoyed sleeping on Sundays.
Then came graduate school, and I fell under the influence of a converted Catholic, a former Baptist who found Catholicism to be the truly fundamentalist church he was seeking. He converted me, and I became a fundamentalist Catholic. That lasted about 18 months. I eventually realized that I just didn't believe it.
Then I got married and had two children. My wife and I went on sabbatical leave in Pennsylvania and began attending Quaker meetings with the kids. We didn't become Quakers, but my wife began attending the Episcopal church (which she had grown up in) when we came back home. I started reading CS Lewis, and before I knew it I decided I might be able to believe after all. But I liked the hard-nosed reasonable approach of Lewis, none of your liberal reinterpretations of the text. If the Bible says Jesus healed a blind man, I believed he really did heal a blind man. I accepted the literal truth of Adam and Eve and the patriarchs and the whole story of the Exodus. My rationalization of the archaeological evidence to the contrary was that spiritual events don't leave fossils or marks in the landscape.
But, like all illusions, this one had to be pumped up constantly. I found that Lewis's seemingly elegant arguments were teflon-coated. I just couldn't retain them unless I rehearsed them all the time. Such a contrast to the mean value theorem, which remained equally clear to me, even if I didn't think about it for months. Like so many evangelicals, I found it necessary to read Christian apologetics all the time, listen to Christian radio stations, attend church functions frequently, etc. I now realize this was the sane portion of my brain puncturing the imaginary world I had created. After nearly a decade, my wife realized I was faking it. After another 5 years I told her I couldn't fake it any longer. (Meanwhile she had been ordained a deacon and is now the Episcopal Archdeacon of Vermont.)
So...maybe I'll do??? I'm an atheist who twice converted to a rather fundamentalist version of Christianity (three times, if you count that little episode when I was 15).