Conversion, deconversion and the will to believe

I just listened to a show on Unbelievable with a discussion between Leah Libresco, a former outspoken atheist who recently converted to Catholicism (you can read about that on her blog), and Hemant Mehta, the 'friendly atheist' who once 'sold his soul on eBay' (you can read about that on his blog and book). The conversation was mostly about Leah's conversion and the reasons for it. She was quite unable to give a compelling case to him about why she converted.

Listening to the conversation reminded me of a few thoughts I'd been meaning to work up into a blog post for some time, so here goes.

The main thing that struck me during the show was how the 'friendly atheist' simply could not understand how an intelligent atheist could change her worldview and become a believer in a specific religion. He basically said he could understand it if she had become a deist, but couldn't understand how she could possibly have decided that Catholicism was the way to go.

But why is this surprising? People change their worldviews all the time (that is, I mean, all the time there will be someone changing their world view, not that any individual is constantly changing their views). Christians become atheists, muslims become Christians, hindus become muslims, atheists become Christians, secularists become muslims, agnostics become believers, believers become agnostics, and so on, and so on. Worldview conversions happen all the time and, as far as I can tell, the people involved go from being a real believer in worldview A, to a real believer in worldview B, its not as if they were pretending in the first instance. People who genuinely believe that there is no God can and do come to believe that there is a God. People who genuinely believe that there is a God and they are in a 'personal relationship' with him can and do lose that faith and come to believe that there is no God. It happens. Whatever our worldview, we should not be surprised to find that people who once agreed with us can change their minds and end up disagreeing with us, or vice versa.

Whatever your worldview, be it Christian, atheist, or whatever, the evidence is that some people who share your views will end up rejecting them. It happens. And it doesn't matter which worldview someone starts out from, some people will always reject their former worldview in favour of a different one.

What I take away from this is the conclusion that no worldview is 100% compelling. There are good arguments in favour of most worldviews, there are good arguments against most worldviews. There is no set of evidence for any worldview which is guaranteed to convince any believer in a different worldview to change tracks. None. 

A Christian cannot convince an atheist to convert purely on the basis of evidence or reason. 

An atheist cannot convince a Christian to deconvert purely on the basis of evidence or reason.

One thing is missing. The will to believe.

If you have the will to believe in a certain worldview, you will find the evidence in favour of it more compelling than the evidence against it. But you can't be reasoned into a change in the will to believe. The will to believe, I think, has to come from within and is probably much more to do with relationships and emotions than it ever has to do with reasoning, evidence or reality.

Chances are, if you mix with a group of people with a different worldview from your own, and you find out that they are nice, intelligent and decent people, you will be far more likely to develop the will to believe in their worldview. Relationship and emotion will slowly shift the balance of will, and you might end up agreeing with things that you once found disagreeable or find some arguments compelling which you once found unbelievable.

I know this has happened in my life. Reading between the lines in what Leah Libresco said in the radio show I can see it in her life too. She mixed with catholics, had a catholic boyfriend, found them to be nice and intelligent people, and slowly came around to their way of thinking.

There are some statistics I heard once ^{[citation needed]} which show that most people who change worldview beliefs change them at times of stress or change of circumstances in their lives. Death of a family member, birth of a child, relocation to a new town or country, leaving home for the first time, etc. These are the times when people change worldviews. This is why missional organisations tend to target students - generally away from home, in a new place, under stressful circumstances. Students are far more likely to change their beliefs than people who have been in the same location and job for many years. Looking back over my life I can see this in action - I became a Christian in my first term at university, my first time living away from home. And I began to question the assumptions of my Christian faith following the death of my father. So my experience mirrors these statistics. In other words, emotional change led me to change the emphasis in my will to believe.

What about the 'conversion experience'? I had one of these back in 1988 when I became a Christian. Was that real? If I'm considering letting go of Christianity, how can I deny the reality of the experience?

I can't. It was a real experience. But maybe my interpretation of that experience was all wrong. For several years (yes, years) before I became a Christian there had been tension in my will to believe. Or rather, there were two competing wills to believe in my life, basically one pulling me in a Christian direction, and one pulling me in the other (OK, I don't believe there are only two ways to live, but it seemed like it at the time). When I (finally) decided to become a Christian, the tension was resolved and there was release.

Ask a blues musician about tension and release. The release only works if it follows the tension. The emotional release in conversion only manifests because it follows an emotional tension. The experience is real, but it stems from emotional release, not necessarily the presence of God.

I'm aware that in my life at the moment I have tension in my will to believe once more. I genuinely do want there to be a God and for the major claims of Christianity to be true - I have the will to believe in that. But I also have a strong will to believe the truth and am finding out that Christianity looks less and less true the harder you scrutinise it. Once again, I have two competing wills to believe, and I am sure that whenever I abandon one and wholeheartedly embrace the other, there will be release. It wouldn't surprise me if I have a reconversion experience or a deconversion experience, depending on which way I go.

In closing it looks to me that, most of the time, those of us who change our worldviews do so for emotional changes in our wills to believe. Despite what we think, we don't do it out of rational choice. I once could see really compelling reasons to be a Christian, I now see really compelling reasons not to be one. The evidence hasn't changed, but my will to believe has shifted. The thing is, if it really does boil down to this, then actually that seems pretty good evidence that there is no God behind belief. If the worldview we pick is dependent on our circumstances and external influences, and changes in those can result in changes in our core beliefs, even though the evidence doesn't change, then this suggests to me that the evidence for any particular God is simply not compelling, and there is no good reason to believe any of them, except for the emotional need to connect to like-minded people.

So be careful who you mix with, you will quite probably end up believing the same as them.

Belief and knowledge

I've touched on this subject before, but I'm back at it from a different point of view. What can we claim to have 'knowledge' about and what is only 'belief'?

The distinction I'm making is that I think knowledge is the subset of beliefs which can be validated by experience or logical deduction, whereas non-knowledge beliefs are those which is is not (currently) possible to validate or verify.

Unfortunately, for the Christian, I think that the balance is something kind of like this:

That is, the stuff we can know about God by experience is heavily dominated by the stuff that is belief by deduction (and our logic may be wrong, of course) and belief by doctrine (i.e. what comes directly from the Bible or what we're taught in Church, but which is impossible to test).

For example, I think that it is possible to know that:

Prayers are sometimes answered.

And from that, with some piled up experience we can deduce that:

God (sometimes) answers prayer.

But to go beyond that and say that the God who answered your prayer is the same God who created the world, is to go into the unverifiable realm of doctrine.

As I see it, only things that relate to the present can be experienced and hence verified, anything relating to the past (creation, events in biblical times, etc.) is mere belief, as is anything relating to the future, in particular anything relating to the 'age to come' (heaven, hell, eternal life, etc.).

Importantly, I don't see any way in which experiences in the present can validate beliefs about the past or the future, although Christianity (and presumably other faiths) more or less relies upon the assumption that the one can validate the other. The common reasoning seems to go like this: Christianity asserts N things, you can have experiences that validate M of them (where M << N), but because M are validated, then we can assume that the remaining N-M assertions are also validated. Sorry, I just can't accept that anymore.

Often we insert false correlations into our deductions. Such as we make the logical jump from:

God speaks to me through the bible

to

The bible must be the Word of God.

But I'm not sure that logically follows. Maybe God speaks to you through the bible simply because that's the book through which you expect him to talk. Maybe he could speak through the morning newspaper, but you're not looking for guidance there, so its easier to speak through the place you're looking in.

I just read through the 'statement of faith' of the church that I attend. Well over 90% of the statements in it fall into the (unverifiable) belief category, and the few remaining statements are all deductions (relating to the Holy Spirit) which may be partially tested based on experience.

As you can no doubt tell, I'm having a big problem at the moment justifying (to myself) making life choices that are based entirely on unjustified and untestable doctrine. Especially when some of the doctrinal assertions appear to be flawed or simply false. If some are false, my confidence in the others is greatly diminished.

I'd like to have a reasonable, rational faith. But it seems to me that in order to get there I need to jettison over 90% of my beliefs and put them into the 'I simply don't know' category.

Did God create the world: I simply don't know...
Is there only one God: I simply don't know...
Was Jesus born of a virgin: I simply don't know...
Was Jesus fully man and fully God: I simply don't know...
Did he have a bodily resurrection: I simply don't know...
Is there life after death: I simply don't know...
Is Christianity the only path to God: I simply don't know...
and so on.