There most certainly are people who made sincere conversions from a state of godlessness to one of devout certainty. This is actually a very interesting process, and I’d like to know more about it, because I can’t imagine myself ever becoming a god-believer. I want to understand what makes for a persuasive argument for patent nonsense.
One example is Holly Ordway, an atheist professor of literature who became a Catholic. She’s got a whole memoir on the subject, which I haven’t read because all the summaries make it sound awful and unbelievable.
For example, Ordway describes her state of atheism:
Dr. Holly Ordway has published a book titled Not God’s Type, telling her personal story. She begins “I had never in my life said a prayer, never been to a church service. Christmas meant presents and Easter meant chocolate bunnies–nothing more.” But her views get hardened: “In college, I absorbed the idea that Christianity was historical curiosity, or a blemish on modern civilization, or perhaps both. My college science classes presented Christians as illiterate anti-intellectuals who, because they didn’t embrace Darwinism, threatened the advancement of knowledge. My history classes omitted or downplayed references to historical figures’ faith.” Still later, “At thirty-one years old, I was an atheist college professor–and I delighted in thinking of myself that way. I got a kick out of being an unbeliever; it was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians.”
Uh, what? I’m probably about as radical and harsh an atheist as you’ll find on any college campus, and am openly hostile to Christianity. But even I don’t teach what she claims: Christianity is a major force in Western civilization. When I teach the history of science, I most certainly do not present Christians as “illiterate anti-intellectuals” — from Augustine to James Clerk Maxwell, the elites who also happened to be Christian were, well, elite. I make a point of bringing up the religious beliefs of scientists, especially among 19th century scientists, where the conflict between science and religion was brought to the fore by the ideas of Charles Darwin…and I also point out that Darwin himself respected religion (it was one of the reasons he personally struggled with releasing his book), that his wife was a sincere Unitarian, and that there were many thinking Christians who did not oppose the theory, such as Asa Gray. A great deal of the modern conflict comes from the fundamentalist creationist yahoos — a major concern of Christianity was to reconcile the facts of geology and biology with their theology, not to simply deny the science.
So I guess Dr Ordway could have been the victim of educational malpractice, but I have to wonder…she’s a professor of English literature. Just how many science classes did she take? And when surveys have been done of college professors (PDF), it’s typical to find that maybe a quarter of them identify as atheists. The reality is always much more complicated than this vision of godless academe constantly oppressing Christian thought, so I’m already dubious.
But then we get to her explanation of how she arrived at an intellectual acceptance of Catholicism, and we get what amounts to the standard unconvincing trope.
The rest of Ordway’s book tells of her meeting a fencing coach that she trusted, a person who she did not discover was a Christian until after she had begun working with him. He and his wife merely answered her questions, not pressing anything religious on her. She is intellectually honest enough to investigate the sources . . . When she asks for reasonable works on the resurrection of Jesus, she is given N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, 740 pages of scholarly examination. She reads Lewis’ Surprised By Joy, and Does God Exist? by Kreeft and Moreland, among others.
Fucking hell. C.S. Lewis? Really? Why is it always C.S. Lewis? I’ve read C.S. Lewis, and Lewis is a glib twit. I know serious philosophers who rag on Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for being superficial, but jebus…Lewis is so shallow and unconvincing and unthinking that I cannot believe that anyone is convinced by him without a prior predisposition. Whenever a convert cites Lewis as a source, I immediately lose all respect for the intellectual honesty of their arguments. I can believe they have an emotional response to his writing — he’s surprisingly popular — but don’t try to tell me you became a believer in the Jesus myth because you thought deeply about C.S. Lewis. You clearly didn’t, or you would have gagged and thrown the book in a fire as soon as you saw the Trilemma.
As for N.T. Wright, you must read Robert Price’s review of that book.
Wright’s massive book on the resurrection is, even for the garrulous bishop, an exercise in prolixity. It is several times longer than it needs to be, as if designed to bludgeon us into belief. One might save a lot of time and money by finding a copy of George Eldon Ladd’s I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1975), which used most of the same arguments at a fraction of the length, and without skimping. The arguments have not gotten any better. They are the same old stale fundamentalist apologetics we got in Ladd, essentially the same old stuff we used to read in Josh McDowell and John Warwick Montgomery. The same hash reslung. Only now it is getting pretty smelly. Perhaps that is why Wright seeks to perfume it, reminiscent of Joseph and Nicodemus attempting to fumigate the decaying corpse of Jesus by encasing it in an extravagant hundred pounds weight of spices (John 19:39). Wright backs up much too far to make a running start at the resurrection, regaling us with unoriginal, superfluous, and tedious exposition of Old Testament and Intertestamental Jewish ideas of afterlife and resurrection, resurrection belief in every known Christian writer up into the early third century, etc., etc. The mountain thus laboring is doomed to bring forth a messianic mouse, alas. All this erudition is perhaps intended to intimidate the reader into accepting Wright’s evangelistic pitch. But it is just a lot of fast talking. In the end, Wright, now Bishop of Durham, is just Josh McDowell in a better suit. His smirking smugness is everywhere evident, especially in his condescension toward the great critics and critical methods of the last two centuries, all of which he strives to counteract. He would lead the hapless seminary student (whom one fears will be assigned this doorstop) backwards into the pre-critical era with empty pretenses of post-modern sophistication, shrugging off the Enlightenment by patently insincere attempts to wrap himself in the flag of post-colonialism. Genuine criticism of the gospels he dismisses as the less advanced, muddled thinking of a previous generation, as if “cutting edge” scholarship like his were not actually pathetic nostalgia for the sparkling Toyland of fundamentalist supernaturalism. It is a familiar bag of tricks, and that is all it is. The tragedy is that many today are falling for it. Witness Wright’s own prominence in the Society of Biblical Literature, to say nothing of his ecclesiastical clout.
The weight of this book’s argument for orthodox traditionalism is to be found, of all places, in the acknowledgements section, where Wright thanks the hosts of the prestigious venues where he first presented bits of this material: Yale Divinity School, South-Western Theological Seminary, Duke Divinity School, Pontifical Gregorian University, St. Michael’s Seminary, etc., etc. Wright is the mouthpiece for institutional orthodoxy, a grinning spin-doctor for the Grand Inquisitor. What credibility his book appears to have is due to the imposing wealth, power, tradition, even architecture, of the social-ecclesiastical world which he serves as chaplain and apologist. It is sickening to read his phony affirmations of the allegedly political and radical import of a literal resurrection (if you can even tell what Wright means by this last). Does Bishop Wright espouse some form of Liberation Theology? No, for, just as he emptily says Jesus redefined messiahship, Wright redefines politics. When he says the early Christians were anti-imperialistic, all he has in mind is the fact that Christians withstood Roman persecution, valiant enough in its way, but hardly the same thing. Like a pathetic Civil War reenactment geek, he is sparring at an enemy safely dead for centuries. In attempting to co-opt and parody the rhetoric of his ideological foes, Wright reminds me of Francis Schaeffer, a hidebound fundamentalist who began as a children’s evangelist working for Carl MacIntyre. Schaeffer, posing as an intellectual and a philosopher, used to stamp the floor speaking at fundamentalist colleges, shouting “We are the true Bolsheviks!” Right.
So I’m still left with the mystery of why — why do people convert to Catholicism? We cannot trust the self-reporting of the victims of this loss of intellectual rigor, because of course they always fall back on the claim of “I am too really smart”, citing bad books with pretentions that have an elevated reputation in the theological community, despite being what Price calls “pseudo-scholarly attempts to pull the wool over the eyes of readers, most of whom will be happy enough for the sedation”.
I have my suspicions, but these true believers will never confess to them, and most likely are even unaware of their motivations. I think a clue is in Price’s comment above: the credibility of the “imposing wealth, power, tradition, even architecture, of the social-ecclesiastical world”. Catholicism in particular is very good at bombing you with the immense weight of its traditions. It’s a kind of tribalism where you choose your tribe not because of a careful assessment of its positions, but because it looks the most powerful.
I am also all too aware that atheism has the same problem. I’ve met too many atheists who despite not understanding science at all, are very rah-rah about the trappings of science, who like to claim the mantle of the Great and Powerful Science for their beliefs. I do believe that science is locked in a mutually interacting relationship with naturalism, which implicitly rejects a role for a deity, but it’s mighty unconvincing when someone pulls the Science Authority argument as the basis of their atheism, who then spews out bad science arguments.
So I’m still unconvinced by these conversion stories. I guess in order to get a believable answer we’re going to have to strap a few of them to a gurney and wheel in the lasers and giant arcing electricity machines.
I’m also fascinated by the conversion stories that start “I was a satanist, and I drank and did drugs and sex and was wild and bad…” I usually start asking sordid details and it’s immediately apparent that they are exaggerating their prior “badness” Why? It seems to be a sort of confirmation bias: look what I gave up, to become a believer. It increases the percieved cost/benefit of the conversion: I must have really really really loved jesus because I gave up the cocaine and Chippendales for him. If I exaggerate it up to that I lived in a palace and did coke from a champagne bucket, then I must really really really really love jesus.
It sure is easy to play one-upmanship about imaginary sins. I was a serial killer until I found jesus – no actually, I’m on the Group W bench for littering.
Marcus,
Oh yes indeed. My Pematcostal brother smoked some weed as teenager, and knew a couple of guys who got into more serious trouble with the law. The worse he did was to accidentally back into a building with our mother’s car ending up with a hit and run conviction.
But that part of his life is now spoken of in hushed tones and euphemisms. Details are never given, but the gravitas when it’s alluded to is so thick that an outsider could well conclude that murder-most-foul was not outside the realm of possibility. I of course end up suppressing my laughter, occasionally to the point of having to flee lest I break the fourth wall of his bad boy theatre piece.
Religions are like sports teams. They’re all pretty much the same and the one you root for is more determined by where you live than any in-depth study of one’s merits vs. the others. But people still go to great lengths to defend their team of choice to convince themselves that their reasoning wasn’t nearly so petty.
I was raised Christian and just took it for granted, and couldn’t understand why people would believe anything else. Then I realized that that was probably just what those people were taught, and they thought the same about what I believed, and I couldn’t come up with any reason that my beliefs were more likely to be true than theirs. Not only that, but when I examined reality to try and find why mine made more sense, I noticed that my religious beliefs were entirely superfluous to observed reality. So I existed for a few years just kind of looking for something where a supernatural explanation was both necessary and sufficient to give me a hint as to who was right, and never found anything. But I didn’t experience any kind of dramatic change in my life due to the conversion, I just stopped expecting magic to happen.
“He would lead the hapless seminary student (whom one fears will be assigned this doorstop) backwards […]”
Why is it that even apparently smart, erudite people like Robert Price can’t resist the lure of “whom”, even though they don’t know how it works? :I The student is not the object of that subordinate clause.
…sorry, I’m done peeving now. It’s an amusing critique of an unpleasant-sounding book.
Interesting it was a fencing coach that started her on the way to belief; all mine did was steal £40k from his Masonic Lodge and then a get convicted of inappropriately massaging a 16 year old student who was staying overnight at his house before a competition the following day. He escaped jail both times.
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/news/paul-romang-escapes-second-jail–a69328/
Holly Ordway does not present herself as a very thoughtful person. Even if we trust her recollection of her college experiences (I don’t) she seems to be openly admitting that she only joined the atheist ‘club’ because it made her one of the cool kids. She’s found a newer, more powerful tribe. Given that incentive, I guess it’s pretty easy to reason your way out of a position that you never reasoned into in the first place.
My fencing coach taught me how to do splits, both front and side. Maybe if I’d asked him about his personal ideology I’d be Russian Orthodox now!
So reading the work of an Anglican bishop made her a Catholic?
I dare say *somebody* failed there.
I always say that C.S. Lewis wrote children’s books…Sure he put big words in some of them to make the kids feel like grownups.
In college I attended a high mass at an abbey as part of my music history class. Stained glass, vaulted ceilings, incense, monks in robes singing plain-chant in a space that has almost three seconds of live echoes. Fan-fucking-tactic.
As the decendent of Europeans growing up in North Vancouver I have very little personal sense of history. Nothing in my immediate environment was much older than thirty years old at that point. Hell, the abby church was only completed a few years before.
Despite that, the mass was almost tailor made for the likes of me. It triggered a deep longing for historical connection, for a sense of belonging that went deeper than the superficial ties I had to pretty much everything. I can totally see it overwhelming me had I been at a low point just then.
Fortunately, I wasn’t. And on the car ride home we heard The Eurythmic’s Sweet Dreams, it too was a year or two old. I ended up defending the song to a car full of Classical music students who were varying degrees of unimpressed. That pulled me back fully back from the medieval miasma that had threatened to overwhelm me.
The Catholic Church has the power of ritual down cold. And like the love-bombing of the Protestants they use it knowingly and cynically to hook people in.
I always assumed most of these “atheists” and “Satanists” were raised in some Christian tradition (however diluted), fell away, got a scare of some kind, and ran back to the fold begging to be sheared. Ordway’s narrative sounds too much like a Chick tract: “I never really knew about Jesus, then my friend told me the Good News and I accepted
Christ as my Lord and Saviorthe Catholic Church as the One True Path.” I suspect there’s something she’s not telling us about, even if it’s only an existential void.Hmh. I’m reminded of John C. Wright’s conversion story (yes, the Puppy). As I understand it, he said “I’m an atheist, so… God, if you’re there, prove it to me. I’ll give you three days.”
and then three days later he had a massive heart attack.
Those conversion stories are unconvincing because they are lies.
fmichell @11:
I suspect that she was a Catholic to begin with but wasn’t particularly devout before becoming a born again holy roller. I’ve encountered numerous Christians of different denominations who seem to think that “atheist” means “person who doesn’t go to church regularly but still knows that it’s all true.”
Or, more cynically, that she made the entire thing up to “prove” her devotion (because seriously, it sounds like the plot of a bad Christian movie).
I don’t believe this at all. She is lying here.
As a biology major, I took a few dozen biology courses. And later taught a few here and there at various universities.
The subject of xianity never once came up!!!
And why should it? The two have nothing in common with each other. Xianity is as irrelevant in a biology classroom as Marxism or The Lord of the Rings.
Teasing out the myriad subconscious effects that might lead an atheist to adopt a religion is likely to be impossible. However, religions have evolved by natural selection, over centuries, to act upon various subconscious tendencies, to convert & maintain belief in their set of dogmas.
True.
When you see C.S. Lewis, you can smile and laugh.
He was world class at logical fallacies and incredibly weak reasons to believe.
No one with a functioning mind could take him seriously unless they desperately wanted to believe in magic Sky Fairies.
I met this N.T. Wright character once. He disproved of me at a garden party. It’s not exactly the greatest ever claim to fame but it’s all I have.
Disapproved, not disproved.
#15: Correct. The one course in which I mention it is an introductory course in the history & philosophy of science, for bio majors.
I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be mentioned at all in a typical non-majors introductory science course.
Never came up in any chemistry class I taught.
I could see an atheist feeling so alone and solitary [as I do frequently] that a group welcoming newcomers would be quite comforting. The group also has an interesting book of stories to read each night and get orated at the weekly get together. Could be quite attractive. Also possible to simply accept the myths all the other members accept as a way to “fit in”, “become part of the group without any dissension”, etc. Being part of a group is a strong motivational factor in human psychology; why tribalism is so hard to overcome. (and I hear, part of the reason, desire for afterlife, is so strong)
The fact that many succumb to such motivation is not a strong argument for everyone to convert. As good an argument as saying “everyone joins the Rotary Club, so you should as well (or I’ll feel sorry for you)”.
I have always felt I had to strongly oppose my own motivations to be part of a larger group, by constructing an imaginary group of my kind of people who also reject the prevailing groups. That’s why I try to be “eccentric” in several aspects, to maintain individuality, etc. [I’m rambling]
so to answer the lede question:
Q: “why are atheist conversion stories by Christians so unconvincing?”
A: on purpose; to keep future conversions as a free choice of the atheist, hoping to “lure” them into their fold [scare quotes used deliberately].
I used to hear from Christians all the time that “you should read “Mere Christianity” it’s brilliant, you’ll really see once you read it”. I was of the attitude, sure, someday, when I get around to it. Then one day I heard it casually mentioned that it was the source of the trilemma. That’s enough to mean I won’t read that one at all.
@latsot #19:
It’d be a much cooler story if he’d disproved you, but then I guess you wouldn’t be around to tell it.
I was about to ask if anyone knew much about what happened with Leah Libresco. Then I did a search and found she has a book too!
And here’s an interview that goes over her conversion. There seems at first to be some social factors, but also her views on morality. She read the stuff Sam Harris wrote about morality, and was disappointed, and she liked the stuff from C.S. Lewis better. I’d recommend Richard Carrier’s writings on the subject instead.
dannysichel #12
If we take that story seriously for a moment, the moral appears to be “don’t tempt god, ‘cos he’s a real douche and he’ll respond to an honest question by trying to murder you.”
But it’s an even cooler story if he’d disproved you and you were still around afterwards!
I feel like there’s a metaphor for religious thought in there somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it…
Yup, smells like halfway between flapdoodle and codswallop. I was an Evolutionary Bio major at one of the three most lefty campuses in the country, bullhorn battles raging from the steps of the great quad, among the CWP, the SDOC, the Trots, and the Sparts. And a lot of us were atheists, or starting to question stuff. But I never heard anybody once, least of all a Leftist science professor ridicule the religious. And we were a snotty bunch. We ridiculed everything, from Rush and Journey to suburbia and corduroys. But lots of the very smartest kids were Jewish — the more yarmulkes you saw in the classroom, the more nervous you got about the grading curve. Almost all the physics and math professors were Jewish. And the Jesuitically trained Irishmen from across the river ran City Hall and the State House, and could debate the, em, Bejesus, out of anybody. Not once, not ever, did I hear even a whisper of the accusation that religious people were dumber. And this would be at one of the handful of schools where that MIGHT be most likely to happen. It didn’t. She’s lying.
Umm. Actually, those people don’t fascinate me at all, well, and more than I am fascinated (but more horrified) by, say the current GOP, and Trump.
They are almost, to a the last single one standing, complete and utter frauds, or posers. They where always Christian of one sort or another. The few that might have honestly dabbled where no more “worshipers of the devil”, than a 4 year old wearing a Disney costume of sleeping beauty is “actually” a long lost princess, who was drugged, raped, and woke up pregnant (never bloody mind the child-safe Disney version of the same). There seem to, in fact, be only two actual groups of these people – 1. The sort that, if it was cosplay, instead of devil worship, would show up dressed as Goku, not because they *liked* the character, or even *anything* at the convention, but purely because it was more interesting than dressing like a butler, or the like, and attending church services. They might have bought a few random books, maybe, at best, but.. honestly, are the functional equivalent of some twit that decides to buy plastic teeth, and douse themselves in glitter, take some pics, then claim they are part of the vampire/goth movement.
2. Those who never where, never would be, and never could be, involved in anything involving what ever silly BS they came up with and claimed was “Satanic”. These people, if Harry Potter had come out in the 80s would have had orgasms for all the ideas it could have given them for making their, “These are the sorts of dark rituals I attended!!”, books, TV appearances, etc. look “authentic”. Well, assuming they actually “saw” one of the movies, even by accident. They would have been terrified to go to a palm reader, never mind a magic shop, and definitely would have never “tainted” themselves by actually learning anything about the subject for real. Nope.. they *invented* the stereotypes themselves, out of whole cloth, while safely in their own homes, then slapped on the magic world equivalent of black face, so they could go out and do the stage play they came up with, about all the horrible things they had personally made up, lied about, pretended they knew was happening, and.. happily promoted as the gods honest truth, instead of stuff they pulled purely out of their own asses.
I suppose, if you wanted to do a study on one of the other sort, or how the, primarily, two sided world of these sorts interact… But.. yeah, personally, I have a lot of annoyance at the frauds, maybe some faint sympathy, in the sense of anyone that needs to get their lives together and stop letting groups define their personalities, but.. otherwise they are no more interesting to me than Elvis impersonators, and generally less entertaining.
#19
I was disproved one time.
I got better.
I think that is a very significant factor in religious affiliation and likely out weighs belief in any specific theological ideas as motivation for faith.
A thought has just occurred that the desire for that kind of connection might be connected to both our nature as a social animal and the appearance of being a self-conscious, self aware mind in a body. That mind awareness can create a perception of disconnection to everything that feeling of separateness. Religious experience and religious belief is what we call that experience of connection with the universe.
religion is not a rational experience at all.
It is not the only way to make that connection real either.
The ritual and theatrical experience of religious worship services and their spaces stimulate emotional responses trying to express that experience of connection with the timeless. they work!
I myself used to long for that connection offered by religion until I was able to really understand deep time now religion seems so pinched so superfluous like the fireworks on the 4th of July compared to the vast sweep of the cosmos .
That connection to the timeless offered by religion unfortunately all to often come with abject subjugation and domination
uncle frogy
This alone caused an immediate eyeroll. Not evolution, not the theory of evolution, ‘Darwinism’. If there’s a louder whistle than that, I don’t know it. It’s a giveaway of a predisposition towards religious belief, a bent towards faith. It’s also a giveaway that a person knew much more about religion than they’d like you to believe.
One is practically forced to the conclusion that it’s because he’s the best they have.
Yes, this is quite difficult to believe. Her site says that she got her BA in English at UMass Amherst, which is a public university. If science teachers were really denigrating Christians or any religious group in this way, it would be unconstitutional, and would surely have become a major scandal. I wonder if Ordway would be willing to name these professors at UMass who allegedly portrayed Christians as “illiterate anti-intellectuals who, because they didn’t embrace Darwinism, threatened the advancement of knowledge” and provide some evidence for her claim.
Bingo! (which is a most apposite interjection in this context). Catholicism benefits enormously from its vaunted primacy. Anyone who espouses Christianity is at risk of examining his or her religion and discovering that Rome got there first. The early history of organized Christianity is mostly Catholic (despite its development into an absurdly more elaborate version of the small Jewish cult that eventually took over the Roman Empire and provided Catholicism’s seed [or perhaps the initial unmetastasized growth]). It can be dispiriting when a Protestant has to look back at antisemitic Martin Luther or sexually incontinent Henry VIII as the religion’s founder. It’s especially acute with Episcopalianism/Anglicanism, which swapped the king into the pope’s role. Look in an Episcopalian prayer book and you’ll find celebrations of certain “Bishops of Rome,” which is a way of honoring Roman Catholic popes without admitting they were Roman Catholic popes. So why be a Protestant when you can be a smug Catholic? If you’re going to topple into Christianity, why not go all the way? Besides, what religion did Mozart and Beethoven compose masses for?
I think that explains Catholicism’s draw on those who want some “old time [Christian] religion.” But the pull is hardly as strong as it used to be (especially thanks to the Church’s errant clergy).
If she actually was a full atheist her whole life before becoming Catholic, that would make her unusual for these types of stories. The vast majority of the time, these are people who grew up in religious households, became atheists or simply apathetic about religion in their teens and twenties, and then came running back to Mother Church* once they started piling up adult stressors such as families, children, health problems, money, uncertainty about the future, etc.
* Not necessarily the same church they grew up in, although it’s usually Christianity in general at least.
Some people do straight out convert, though. I’ve always liked Kevin Drum’s explanation, which is that this is a temperament issue in many ways – you’re more likely to grab on to religious belief if you have a pressing need to have things “nailed down”, if you’re fearful of inevitable death, and so forth.
“I think it’s the hats. The hats convey that solemn look you want in a faith.”
When George Costanza sounds as sincere as you do in your conversion story, well…
In the States, perhaps. But not in, say, the UK. And Ye Pffffft! of All Knowledge points out:
These stories aren’t meant to convert atheists. They’re meant to reassure Christians by telling them that yes, their faith IS obviously true, that the secular world IS actively trying to stamp out Christianity rather than simply discovering things that call the Bible into question, and that there really are good arguments for their position. Sure, these stories are easily debunked with even the slightest bit of research, but Christians have never been ones to choose an unpleasant truth over a reassuring lie.
It’s interesting that the blogger seems to consider this the most important aspect of her conversion story:
She’s trained in evaluating written works who believes the Gospels have the texture of history rather than of story or myth, and this lends her account authority. She doesn’t say, and isn’t asked, in the interview, what elements specifically led her to this evaluation, but it’s really questionable. The Gospels don’t by any means have the texture of history.
I don’t really buy this, either (or her claim that she didn’t know any Christians in college). In this interview, she says she read Lewis as a child, was “spiritual but not religious” in college, studied “the great Christian poets” as an undergrad and was impressed, wrote a dissertation focusing on Tolkien, and included “some of the great Christian poets” on her syllabus when she started teaching. Doesn’t fit with her description of herself as a professor.
Even though I don’t believe her claims about her past attitudes or many of the other conversion-story claims people make about how awful they were in their pre-conversion days – which are meant largely to smear atheists – I do find them amusing. It never seems to occur to people that these descriptions of themselves might inadvertently point to character traits (e.g., authoritarianism, elitism) that made Christianity (or particular forms of it) appealing to them.
The two articles (the one in the OP and the one I linked to above) feature a parade of strawmen and bogus claims:
“portrayals in the media of Christianity as a religion for superstitious, uneducated people”
“How do we explain ‘sin’ to people who’ve grown up in a therapeutic culture where nothing is called right or wrong? ”
“Skeptics tell just-so stories to explain every aspect of our lives in terms of biology.”
humblesmith: “a common theme in popular atheist circles: that ‘thinking people’ will inevitably be atheist, and the only people who are theists are unthinking, uneducated, or have some guilt complex” (I’m not sure where the bit about the guilt complex comes from, since it has nothing to do with intelligence or education, but its inclusion is interesting)
That’s a strange compulsion.
“I had never in my life said a prayer, never been to a church service.”
I learned the Lord’s Prayer when I was 10, have been protestant, catholic, Islamic and hindu services.
I have sung in a RC church choir.
Fortunately I never have been baptized though.
When I decided to call myself an atheist (I considered myself an agnost before) it was so unspecial that I told no one. Now imagine me turning this into a book of 100-150 pages.
Yeah. That’s why I never will by any book on a conversion story.
I couldn’t agree more about C. S. Lewis. I’ve related this before, but when I was a budding young skeptic my parents and the minister at our church suggested I read Lewis. They rather obviously thought that the sheer brilliance of his arguments would bring me back into the fold. I quite enjoyed the snark of The Screwtape Letters, but otherwise I remember thinking, “This is the best they got? Really? REALLY?” There wasn’t a single argument that a reasonably bright (if I do say so myself) teenager couldn’t demolish. The Lord-Liar-Lunatic “trilemma” that is so often cited is particularly easy to destroy. I have no idea how good a literary scholar Lewis was, but his apologetics are terrible, even if elegantly written.
And as others have pointed out, most, if not all, apologetics are not really aimed at converting unbelievers anyway, but at shoring up the beliefs of those who are already believers, but maybe going through a rough patch or experiencing some doubts and looking for some intellectual cover.
I don’t know why people here are hating on the Trilemma. Role the tape!
So I have to reject the idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher? I’m cool with that.
As per C. S. Lewis, so goes G. K. Chesterton. Both were held up to me as examples of brilliant Christian thinkers. Both are undeniably great prose stylists and story-tellers. And both present the most stupid, asinine arguments in defence of their own beliefs with huge dollops of pomposity and arrogance.
man, you are SO close…
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Interesting how this:
… is contrasted with this:
So she was intellectually honest to “fact check” Christianity when her fencing instructor talked it up, but not when she had the chance to verify her teachers and professors? According to her own tale she failed to possess or exhibit intellectual honesty for decades of atheism- conversely it sounds like she was intently and extremely intellectually incurious. With that in mind, why the hell should anyone trust she suddenly devolved a keen flair for both when it came time for her to study the truth claims of religion?
I loved the audiobook version, read by John Cleese.
Snark, voiced by John Cleese, is the best kind.
Marine Todd punching out the evil atheist professor wasn’t able to convince her instead?
OK, what? We’ve already talked about the howling improbability of science classes containing explicitly anti-Christian material. But she was an English major and she came away with the idea that Christianity is unimportant and a “blemish?” Did she not have to read the King James, or Bunyan, or Milton, or Graham Greene? Did no one mention Gutenberg and the printing press to her?
And how the heck could her history classes manage to “omit or downplay references to historical figures’ faith?” What did they do when topics like the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the Great Schism and the Crusades and the Reformation and the Hundred Years’ War and the colonization of the Americas rolled around? Either she was stoned out of her mind for all of her lectures and exams, or she’s lying.
@SC,
Well, that’s because the gospel narratives aren’t folklore, fantasy, legend or myth according to most scholars. But as you say, they’re not history either. They’re biography. And ancient biographies, even those about people far more prominent than Jesus, were neither particularly accurate nor particularly reliant on eyewitness testimony. They sacrificed historical accuracy in order to make the lives of their subjects illustrate various morals and philosophies.
A professor of literature really should be aware of everything you and I just wrote.
My ex used to TA intro biology at Ohio State. The professor was the most mild-mannered guy imaginable; you could probably drive over his foot and he wouldn’t say anything unkind. And he took great pains to explain to the class that evolutionary theory says nothing about God one way or the other, and many religious people accept evolution, but many don’t, and that’s fine, you didn’t have to be converted by this class, you just had to understand the material.
And yet there was one creationist student who would make online complaints about the course, and he just flat-out made stuff up about the professor denying God and mocking Christianity and calling Christians stupid and so forth. And he’d say this about the previous day’s lecture! There were two hundred other students there with him, any of whom could attest that none of what he said was true! It was the most blatant dishonesty imaginable.
So, yeah, Dr. Ordway’s not the only one who likes to fib about her science classes.
@blf,
This actually illustrates Caine’s point. When biologists use the term “Darwinism” at all, they’re almost always speaking historically, about Darwin’s theory in its original form. As opposed to modern evolutionary theory, which is commonly referred to as “neo-Darwinism.”
It is very unlikely that Ordway’s science professors would have encouraged her to accept “Darwinism.”
@williamgeorge,
That would explain the memory loss.
Because it’s a false trilemma (i.e., it’s non-exhaustive), regardless of your views of Jesus as a moral teacher. Someone somewhere pointed out that there are at least three other possibilities: mistaken, misreported, or mythical.
Just a note on this: I’m pretty sure what she is describing is college science classes where they just treat evolution as a fact and teach biology without once mentioning Christian creationists, the Bible or Noah’s Ark and assume an old Earth. That’s how I felt at university: Why are the professors ignoring my religious beliefs! Made me go red a few times because when you treat Christian origins myths as so unimportant and of little interest that they can just be completely ignored, it feels very silly to be sitting in the room there as someone who considers those myths of utmost importance.
There are a few C.S. Lewis books I re-read every so often and find worthwhile. Screwtape Letters for the snark, particularly (as mentioned above) with Cleese reading them. Til We Have Faces is a peculiar, absorbing novel, retelling the myth of Cupid and Psyche with an attention to what was known at the time about ancient Greek culture and narrated by Psyche’s older sister. The first part in particular is very moving to me. A Grief Observed is a raw, honest account of Lewis’ life in the wake of his wife’s death; among other things, it wrestles well with the question “Is there ever a return to normalcy in the wake of such a loss? Does ‘normalcy’ have any meaning when the foundations of your life disappear and cannot return?” He comes to no easy answers, either.
Then there’s the rest of the stuff, of course.
I don’t have a source for this handy at the moment, but I think I recall reading George Orwell commenting on the appeal of Roman Catholicism for British intellectuals converting to Christianity: it offered them an exoticism that can serve a lot of the same functions as high-brow Orientalism. If it wasn’t Orwell, it was some other British writer commenting on the phenomenon sometime in the middle third or so of the 20th century. Presumably the same lure is there for at least some American converts, too.
Nick,
I’m pretty sure that was snark. As per the last line.
Hit Parader magazine, which catered to heavy metal fans, used to run conversion letters that purported to come from former new wave fans. The letters perfectly captured the resentments of many metal fans – the other ones I knew perceived themselves as outsiders and were jealous of the female attention that bands like Duran Duran received. Not surprising if the letters turned out to be ghostwritten by the magazine’s staffers.
Ordway’s screed is so similar that it’s likely she is deliberately caricaturing her college experience just to sell books. How sad if she indeed does remember the experience that way.
Common characteristics of pretty much all these conversion stories (including my own at 15yo) are one or more of:
1) Lack of any sign of critically thinking through the evidential issues.
2) Strong subjective and/or emotional component, e.g. “I felt the presence of Christ” or “There must be some reason we have such a strong sense of Good and Evil” (e.g. Leah Libresco, W.H.Auden)
3) Convert is ignorant of Christianity or holds a straw-man stereotype of it, so when they encounter an intellectualized version of it (and Catholicism certainly is that), along with some nice Christians, they over-correct.
=8)-DX wrote:
Perhaps, but that would mean that her claims of being irreligious in her early life () and an atheist in college are a fabrication.
Marcus Ranum@1: Religious conversion stories aka “testimonies” always do play up both the person’s “badness” before converting, and the miraculousness of the event leading to conversion.
Remember when Ben Carson had to defend against accusations that he *didn’t* stab someone? That was this trope in play. His testimony involved trying to stab someone, then the victim’s belt buckle blocking the blade. Then the secular media got hold of this and called bullshit, as it would be pretty hard for an attempted stabbing to play out that way, plus there was no news of the event from outside sources. Many didn’t realize they were doing the equivalent of telling people the Grand Canyon was not actually dug by a tornado lassoed by Pecos Bill.
I think part of the problem why these kinds of conversion stories are unbelievable (asides from the authors trotting out just plain bad arguments) is that they’re aware of the audience they’re writing for and are trying to cater to the preconceptions their readers have about atheists. Conservative Christians portray universities as bastions of godless liberalism where unsuspecting Christian students lose their faith. A story about a person who was just apathetic towards religion and then converts isn’t very gripping. But a story of a sworn enemy of Christians (eg a liberal professor) seeing the light? That’s like a modern day Saul of Tarsus! Just throw in some references to “darwinism” and liberal academia here and there, and the story will look convincing enough to people predisposed to believe it. The target audience for these stories is believers, so the authors don’t bother trying to make a case that would be more convincing towards people outside their target audience that would be more skeptical.
@0, PZ Myers
@47ish, Ichthyic
Still not quite dead on target, but provides a solidly useful background. Seeming more directly relevant still to this very interesting process is Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s book Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion. It includes a selection of anonymized conversion (and deconversion) stories from a study that did a college-student based statistical sampling, as well as analysis of some patterns spotted; it’s really a must-read book for anyone interested in the question of “why do people convert”, whether converting to religion or converting away. Unfortunately, the AC study work was unable to incorporate the (later) work by Sidanius and Pratto on Social Dominance Orientation, to see whether that factor might shed further light on the process.
I’d also recommend Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh’s “Becoming an Ex” as providing an interesting theoretical framework for such social role changes, though it’s not solely focused on religious changes.