![\"Descartes\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/572\/2015\/11\/Descartes.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nRen\u00e9\u00a0Descartes (1596-1650), the great theistic philosopher; portrait by Frans Hals (c. 1582-1666)<\/span> [public domain \/<\/span> Wikimedia Commons<\/a>]<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n This took place in the combox for my post,\u00a0\u201cFairies, Atheism, God, & Ad Populum Fallacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>The words of the always stimulating and interesting\u00a0JD Eveland\u00a0<\/a>will be in\u00a0blue<\/span>.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n An atheist asked: \u201cHow do you differentiate a trick of a fallible mind from a genuine experience if it cannot be evidenced or corroborated?\u201d I replied:<\/span><\/p>\n By applying the cumulative effect of many different arguments for God<\/a>, including the experiential one.<\/p>\n Each and every one of these classes of arguments has been criticized and sometimes refuted, over the course of centuries. Is it your contention that anyone who doubts the truth of the Christian narrative of the Universe must personally contend with and argue against all of these arguments collectively? I could assemble an equally impressive listing of such counter-arguments. But even if I were able to do that (which at my advanced age am not), would that change anything at all about your faith or the nature of your religious practice?<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cProofs of God\u201d and their counter-arguments seem to me to be largely epiphenomenal \u2013 that is, they comfort and reinforce the already believing, but do little to causally influence those not already in sympathy with them. Are there any committed and reasoning atheists or agnostics out there who have been convinced into the Catholic Church through reading your materials? I ask this not to question your value or your quality of argument; simply as an inquiry. If so, what would be the key to that conversion? And why haven\u2019t you sprung it on me or some of your other dialogue partners of a skeptical bent?<\/span><\/p>\n I agree about arguments. Probably 95% or more of Christians are not convinced because of intellectual arguments. They feel the thing intuitively or subjectively to be true.<\/span><\/p>\n Probably some atheists have become Christians because of my writing. I don\u2019t recall for sure. I know that several hundred people have become Catholics, from letters received.<\/span><\/p>\n As I wrote recently, I think the thing most likely to convert an atheist or agnostic would be a profound act of love towards them, like saving their life. Or, secondly, something that brings them to the end of themselves, so that they surrender and reach out to God (as happened to me in 1977, with a huge clinical depression and existential despair).<\/span><\/p>\n Interesting! I\u2019ve been dealing with clinical depression and despair for some time now, and I can\u2019t say that I\u2019ve ever found that moving me toward religion as a solution. But then, I was raised with a free-thinking (that term is just descriptive, not evaluative in any way) mindset, not a Christian mindset as you were, so vocabulary such as \u201cGod\u201d and \u201csalvation\u201d wouldn\u2019t naturally occur to me. I have a hard time imagining how anything other than myself is going to get me out of a mental state that I\u2019ve systematically generated for myself.<\/span><\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t raised in a \u201cChristian mindset\u201d (by my definition), but rather, a very nominally Methodist mindset. I didn\u2019t know Christian theology from a hole in the ground. So when I converted to evangelicalism in 1977, it was a whole new thing for me, not a \u201crenewal\u201d of a familiar thing.<\/span><\/p>\n At that time, I hadn\u2019t gone to church regularly for ten years. Even after my conversion I went to Bible studies and not church on Sunday, for another three years.<\/span><\/p>\n I should note, though, that my brother had been an evangelical Christian for six years before I was, so he was an influence. But I wasn\u2019t raised in it initially. I was 13 when he converted as part of the \u201cJesus People\u201d movement (long hair, former hippies and druggies, etc.).<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, one might argue that you stuck with what you were raised with all along because of strong conditioning, or \u201cenvironment\u201d (if we want to analyze it in that fashion), whereas I was the nonconformist and followed my own way despite<\/em>\u00a0my upbringing.<\/span><\/p>\n Conversion to Catholicism was even more radical of a move, in 1990. I knew virtually nothing<\/em>\u00a0about Catholicism, and had no background whatever (of any family or friends) in that. Intellectual curiosity was the primary driver in that case.<\/span><\/p>\n No one in their right mind who knew me in those days would have ever predicted in a million years that I would \u201cgo Catholic.\u201d Nor would I have, myslf. But I follow truth wherever I think it leads. That\u2019s the common thread.<\/span><\/p>\n One could make that argument. Of course, since what I have \u201cstuck with\u201d \u2013 free thinking \u2013 isn\u2019t about content of any sort; it\u2019s about process. It had allowed me to explore a number of religious and spiritual paths. Had I found any of them to be convincing to the exclusion of any others, I would have been quite able to stop there; but I didn\u2019t, and I didn\u2019t. I\u2019ve found many of them (including Catholicism) to have ideas of value, but no convincing reason why I should stop there and wrap up my spiritual explorations.<\/span><\/p>\n Had I by some chance been brought up Catholic, there\u2019s a strong probability that I would have joined the priesthood, probably the jesuits whom I\u2019ve always much admired.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n * * *\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And I\u2019ve had my life saved on several occasions (first as a child, by an older child when I was drowning, a couple of other occasions, and most recently a couple of years ago by my partner, from choking). My response has always been profound gratitude to the person involved, but not to any abstraction beyond that.<\/span><\/p>\n I should add, regarding this scenario of saving a life: it would only have \u201ctheological impact\u201d if it was seen as a manifestation of a particularly profound love for others, which the person attributes to the grace of God in his life.<\/span><\/p>\n There was a scene of similar nature in the famous Christian movie and book, The Cross and the Switchblade<\/em>, written by evangelical David Wilkerson. In the book was a guy named Nicky Cruz, who was a gang member. Wilkerson was trying to \u201cget him saved\u201d and was preaching to him and Nicky got so agitated that he said, \u201cI\u2019ll cut you, preacher!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Then Wilkerson said back to him, \u201cyou can cut me in a thousand pieces and each piece will still love you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That cut Cruz to the quick (no pun intended) so profoundly that it led to his conversion to Christ.<\/span><\/p>\n This\u00a0<\/em>is what I mean: an act of love that seems to have an origin in the grace of God and not mere human origin. Why would someone be willing to die for a guy he doesn\u2019t even know, who was being quite mean to him? Well, it\u2019s the love of Jesus, that goes beyond mere human capacity or predisposition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is what Jesus taught His disciples: \u201clove one another as I have loved you.\u201d He laid down His life for them. Thus, that is a profound manifestation of love.<\/span><\/p>\n And that goes far<\/em>\u00a0beyond any argument ever conceived.<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n [A]ny religion is also a human model of some aspects of reality, constructed by human minds to achieve human purposes. But much like any scientific model, any religious model is also always going to be an approximation, within its domain \u2013 never \u201ctrue\u201d or \u201cfalse\u201d in any precise sense, but more or less useful to those who employ it.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course I disagree with your analysis of religion. I believe quite the opposite: not that human beings necessarily<\/em>\u00a0invent all religions (certainly some<\/em> do invent some), but rather, that God put belief in Him inside of us, as innate knowledge (which Newman has described as the illative sense, and Polanyi as tacit knowledge). I suppose this would be a species of Platonic thought rather than the beloved empiricism.<\/span><\/p>\n There is no way of \u201cproving\u201d anything about consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent property of human bodies and nervous systems, that allows us to build up entire worlds of experience on the basis of really quite limited sensory inputs. Quite creative, indeed!<\/span><\/p>\n In fact, there is no way to establish the \u201creality\u201d of anything. Human beings share their experiences of consciousness with each other, on the theory that they might be of use to someone else. I have no way of establishing the reality of any experience you share with me, but it might be useful.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t see \u201cspirituality\u201d as necessarily implying \u201cthe supernatural\u201d. There are varieties of conscious experience that relate to the physical world accessed through the senses, and varieties that relate to purely mental constructions, particularly speculations and experiences about consciousness itself. It\u2019s the latter I\u2019m referring to. There is simply a great deal about being human that we do not currently understand.<\/span><\/p>\n It is entirely possible that various \u201cspiritual\u201d issues and experiences will turn out on more sophisticated investigation to be physical phenomena presently unknown and\/or undetectable. That would neither shock nor surprise me. It\u2019s also possible that some are mere epiphenomena \u2013 random neuron firings of some sort. And I wouldn\u2019t automatically reject the possibility that there are indeed super-natural processes at work in unknown ways.<\/span><\/p>\n The problem is that, contrary to many people\u2019s views (including Dave) the latter is not a very helpful hypothesis for day-to-day living. It encourages dependence, reduces the incentives for inquiry, and in general minimizes human potential. But it\u2019s equally important not to automatically reject experiences and ideas just because we don\u2019t have immediate explanations for them.<\/span><\/p>\n It didn\u2019t do that in the Middle Ages when Christian Europe produced stuff like, um, universities and modern science . . . and the monks preserved classical pagan learning by copying manuscripts.<\/span><\/p>\n The great cathedrals are also monuments to a \u201cminimization\u201d of human [architectural and artistic] potential, ain\u2019t they?<\/span><\/p>\n That damned Christian belief in the supernatural<\/em> ruins everything<\/em>, doesn\u2019t it?<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n We trust our senses for giving us accurate information about the external world. Indeed, all of science is built upon this initial premise.<\/span><\/p>\n We all do that naturally. A baby can do it. Does that mean it\u2019s not valid or trustworthy or \u201cserious\u201d until and unless we can fully explain it? Clearly not.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s only recently, in fact, that we have advanced in neuroscience to the extent that we can actually explain the particular processes that go into sight and storage of such information obtained by sight into our brains.<\/span><\/p>\n But we all had trusted our eyesight (and other senses) all those years before we had technical explanations of it. We had created modern science before we could \u201cprove\u201d all the ins and outs of sensory perception. That kind of proposition is known as a \u201cheuristic\u201d. It\u2019s a working assumption that one can\u2019t \u201cprove\u201d to be true (outside of mathematics and formal logic, there is no way to establish \u201ctruth\u201d, only falsity) but which seem to work. a statement like \u201cthe sun will rise tomorrow\u201d is one such heuristic. We pretty much all believe that one, since it\u2019s consistent with a lot of experience, but there\u2019s no evidence for it apart from that accumulated experience until tomorrow morning actually arrives.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve written a couple of blog columns about the idea of technology we don\u2019t understand being more or less like magic. We\u2019re all applied magicians, since we understand the spells and incantations and potions necessary to make something work, even if we haven\u2019t the vaguest idea of how<\/em>\u00a0it works. We manipulate most of our world through such magic-based heuristics. Check this out on my blog if you\u2019re interested.<\/span><\/p>\n And this is the sort of approach I\u2019ve suggested with you: the thought of Alvin Plantinga (\u201cproperly basic beliefs\u201d<\/a>), Michael Polanyi (tacit knowledge<\/a>), and John Henry Newman (Illative sense<\/a>).<\/p>\n I love this sort of thinking because it meets people where they (some 90%) are at, and it is non-empirical (which atheists love above all) and non-positivistic. Non-intellectuals or folks who may not be able to articulate or explain to the nth degree arrive at many truths, too.<\/p>\n
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