On Having a Productive Religious Argument

Let’s get the obvious stuff (at least for my regular readers) out of the way: I am a former atheist who converted to Catholicism in part because of the work Bishop Barron has done with Word on Fire, who, as it happened, was helpful to me in discerning what Catholics actually believe from what I assumed Catholics believe. There had been some years of confusion on that front, I admit.

(Side note: I am now a somewhat-occasional contributor to Word on Fire. Here’s an article of mine on the moral argument. Here’s another on a more personal note. Finally, my most recent.)

But all that is not the point of this article. The point of this article is that Bishop Barron recently sat down with Ben Shapiro to explain the Catholic position on things. For the first time in a long time, I felt inclined to comment–something I never do when it comes to YouTube, for reasons you can probably guess at–to share my story of moving from atheism to Catholicism, knowing that many people might be looking in who are on the metaphysical fence about the Catholic faith, or belief in God, or what have you. That comment attracted some attention. It said:

“I spent much of my life an atheist, simply ignoring the arguments for religion. At some point, and for some reason–maybe because so many people I had loved died, or because I kept running into the absurd conclusions resulting from atheism–I opened myself up to hearing from the other side.

I began to study natural theology and looked into the historical case for Christ and the Catholic Church. Eventually, because of people like Ed Feser, Bernard Lonergan, Fulton Sheen, and Bishop Barron, I became convinced. I became a Catholic.

The greatest questions in life, as it turns out, and contrary to what I previously assumed, are not how to organize an economy, or how to make more money yourself, or whether or not Donald Trump really believes an F-35 fighter jet is literally invisible.

The greatest questions in life are these: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? How are we to behave? And where, if anywhere, are we going next? In other words: Identity, origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. If there is any significant to these questions at all (I now believe there is) then these are the questions we should be arguing first.

The most important debate, then, is not between religion and secularism, but between religion itself. Between Christianity and Judaism, Islam, etc. Over which religion is true.

Many people these days avoid the religious question because they feel it’s too difficult to answer, or because it doesn’t have an answer. And while it may be too large to settle in just one YouTube comment, as I was converting, I discovered there are only three questions you need to answer to become Catholic: Does God exist? Is Jesus God? Did Christ found the Catholic Church?

Coming from a vehemently anti-religious background, it was to my tremendous and somewhat embarrassing surprise that not only could all of these questions be answered with convincing force by way of reason and evidence, but all of them could be answered yes. I now teach Sunday School, attend near-daily mass, am wrapping up my masters in systematic philosophy, and feel a sense of deep and abiding purpose that my life had previously lacked; even as I published books and grew successful businesses, there was always something missing. That something, I eventually realized, was God.

‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’”

How were the responses? Honestly? For a YouTube video centering on religious conversation? Pretty good. The responses were warm and supportive, largely. My comment also elevated to the top-comment and had something like 800 likes the last I checked. Funny how that can happen.  

Of course, not everyone had something nice to say (What? No?!), nor wanted to “welcome me home”, etc. And though I am just a tad too busy these days to be arguing back in forth on social media threads, I did take the time to get a general idea of how people are responding to what I said, since these remarks often make for conversation starters on my podcast or blog. So, let’s take a look at the some of the objections, and see how one might respond with hopes of having a productive religious argument. 

One objection, if you can even call it that, and, indeed, a fairly typical, and certainly unfortunate response, from some atheists upon hearing of my conversion story, is to assume the role of would-be psychoanalyzer in some weird, speculative attempt to discern whatever could be the matter with me that I’d go on to adopt such a loony position as believing in God. To be certain, the assertions here run the gamut of Freudian-Fallacies. Because look, doc: even if my conversion to Catholicism were caused entirely by some deep-seeded inner turmoil or unresolved childhood complex or whatever, that would do nothing whatever to show that God doesn’t exist, or that Catholicism is false. A person simply cannot explain away the validity of a belief by venturing a series of pseudo-psychological explanations for a how a person arrived at that belief. C.S. Lewis once labeled this ill-conceived argumentative tactic Bulvervism; that is, attempting to explain why a person of wrong, without first showing that a person is wrong.

The natural danger in becoming a Bulverist is that you risk your opponent taking the same approach. Surely I, now being a believer, can just as well lob out possible, psychological explanations for why a person might pick up atheism. Perhaps they were brought up in a household where their father did not show enough attention to them, or was abusive, even. This occasioned in them a heavy disdain for any sort of fatherly figure, including God. And there you go. Atheism is the result of daddy issues. I am now ready to receive my Nobel prize.

The other comment that caught my attention was the person saying I must have never really been an atheist to begin with. I was just never taught religion, he claimed. Well, the last part is certainly true, but the first part is certainly false. I am a trained philosopher, who entered into the discipline with the old atheists and existentialists almost exclusively. Most of my early years of study were with the likes of Nietzsche and Satre and Camus and Russell and so on. Atheism is the claim that no God exists or anything like God. So, to be precise, I wasn’t merely an atheist, I was a metaphysical naturalist. I believed, as most atheists who take the time to think the position through ought to believe, that only physical things exist. So, I am pretty sure I was an atheist. To be somewhat Trumpian about it, I might even say that nobody was more of an atheist than me, OK folks. Nobody!

Either way, this assertion, too, is an all-too-common and unfortunate trope. People who claim to be atheists sometimes, for whatever reason, can’t seem to handle the idea of an atheist de-converting and accepting God and Christ, and especially not the Catholic Church, and so will ignorantly/arrogantly float the assertion that such a person was never really an atheist to start, or must have experienced some sort of serious head injury. Anthony Flew is an example of this. One of the world’s most prominent, academic atheists, upon coming to believe in the existence of God after a life-long career of arguing against Him, was absolutely derided by the atheist community upon this (to them) heretical announcement. Rather than engaging with any of the reasons Flew provided for his change of belief (such as the arguments of Aristotle/Aquinas that he never previously considered, or the integrated complexity found in chemistry/biology) atheists merely claimed that he must have been entering into the late stages of senility, combined with near-death paranoia. Isn’t that something?

Now, even in my time as an atheist, I never much cared of people converting, and certainly I never cared much about people, such as Flew, changing their mind. I often found these cases to be interesting, and eventually became curious about them. Even though I did not believe in God at the time (in retrospect, I think I actually did; my atheism was more a stubborn denial, than an honest, intellectual gear shift, so perhaps the critic has something of a point; though I would argue this has got to be true for every person who calls themselves an atheist since God is, at bottom, one of those things which we can’t not know, but that is an argument for another post…), I also did not hate Him, as seems the case with many who issue such attacks as directed at Flew. See? We can all sit comfortably in the chair of the psychoanalyst. 

Another odd comment was this. Somebody asked what the absurdities resulting from atheism could possibly be, since atheism doesn’t make a claim and isn’t a belief. But this is confusion. Atheism does make a claim and is a belief. Atheism is the claim that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. Atheism is not agnosticism, which says, maybe God exists, maybe God doesn’t exist, I just don’t know. Atheism, like theism, asserts a quite particular, philosophical and metaphysical worldview, and so is under a burden of proof. It needs to offer arguments to advance itself. Now, if somebody wants to reduce their position from atheism to agnostic, fine. Nobody is asking the agnostic to provide an argument for why they don’t know the answer to something. We just take them on their word when they admit to being ignorant. But not so with the atheist. If someone is going to make a claim so big and so bold as the non-existence of God, then we have every right to expect them to support their conclusion. (Also, if you’re genuinely curious about the absurdities resulting from atheism, I’ve got a podcast on that where I examine the question seriously from the standpoint of metaphysical naturalism.)

Finally, somebody asked–perhaps sincerely, perhaps not–just what my reasons were for converting, specifically. Now this is a question I am happy to answer. So, here is the response I began writing up, and will finish now.

“For anybody who happens to be genuinely curious about how this once-atheist wound up as a Catholic.

First, are the philosophical arguments: God as the best explanation for why anything exists at all, for why we perceive an objective realm of moral values and duties,  for why consciousness cannot be reduced to (or explained by) physical processes, for why the universe began to exist (and appears finely-tuned for intelligent life), for why things change, and so on. For me, it wasn’t that any one argument secured my conviction immediately. It  was more the cumulative weight of what I felt was an ever increasing series of some very strong to some pretty good arguments for the existence of God. Weighing those against the arguments for atheism (problem of evil, and God as an unnecessary etiological explanation), I eventually found it far more rational to believe in God.

The next step was the examine the historic basis for Christ’s resurrection. Here I would recommend something like N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It’s a heavy volume, but thorough, and will leave you with a set of historical data points that near to all historians and New Testament scholars accept (of all political and theological persuasions, no less): crucifixion, private burial, empty tomb, belief in post mortem appearances, etc. From there you must try to decide what makes sense of these facts. The ultimate conclusion (at least the one I came to) being that no naturalistic explanation–from hallucination to conspiracy theory, etc–is close to adequate. This provides amply reasonable grounds, especially given the background belief in the existence of God, for accepting the resurrection. This cannot be proved directly, of course; there is still a leap of faith involved. But that leap of faith is from the pad of reason and evidence, not credulity.

Finally, there comes this question: Did Christ leave us with a Bible or a Church? Further, did Christ intend his Church to be visible, hierarchical, and unified? Also, is Christianity a sacramental religion? That is, does God work through “stuff” now, as He did before?

Here one can take two approaches: Biblical, and historical. The Bible, I believe, says yes to all of these. And then history secures the fact. Reading not only into what the earliest Christians believed, such as the real presence of the Eucharist, but also what they practiced, such as the mass as a form of sacrifice, apostolic succession, papal authority, church discipline, etc–all conveniently located in the writings of Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus, and so on–points to the conclusion that Christ did, indeed, found the Catholic Church, and that He did, in fact, institute a visible, hierarchical unity centered around Himself in the Holy Eucharist.  

That, of course, is an all-too-quick summary of a rather complex discussion, of which any one point could merit a book of support. And indeed those books have been written. They’re ultimately what converted me.”

I’ll finish with this. There are well-meaning, well-thought-out objections to virtually any position, religious or otherwise. But if we’re going to have any shot at all toward maintaing productive religious conversation (let alone argument), we must begin by abandoning the sorts of assertions so commonly seen hurled around online–the Freudian-fallacies, the ad hominen attacks,  the gross mischaracterizations and distortions of this or that particular worldview. Of course, the same must also be said with respect to the atheistic worldview and how often that, too, is jumbled up by people of faith (something I felt I was dealing with constantly when I considered myself an atheist); and while I do believe there are many good, and ultimately successful, arguments for the existence of God, for Christ as the Son of God, and for Christ founding the Catholic Church (and here), there are no shortage of rather very bad arguments for each of these that ought to be avoided. God is a great (read: ultimate/ontological) explanation for why anything exists rather than nothing. God is a terrible (read: proximate/etiological) explanation for why lightning strikes.