Do atheists “relapse”? 31 May 2010 Carol Everhart Roper at OpEdNews has an interesting essay “Is there such a thing as an ex-atheist?” and asnwers, anecdotally, no. I tend to agree. While it is a common trope by Christians in particular that they were atheists and converted, in every case with which I am familiar, and every case Roper is familiar, the person was never an atheist, except in the weak sense of not being a devout theist. Instead, they were in a state of what I think of as “nascent theism”. We are not born with beliefs, but we are born with a few dispositions, and one of those, perhaps the strongest peculiarly human one, is to adopt the ideas of those around us as we develop. So while we may not adopt religious views early on, we do adopt the general beliefs and assumptions that licence theistic beliefs later. Here’s an example: C. S. Lewis. While he claimed to be an atheist as a young person, he clearly adopted all kinds of theistic values and beliefs (including the view, which no atheist would actually hold, that God is responsible for the evils of the world), and his eventual “conversion” was more a matter of him ramifying his prior beliefs than changing any deep commitments. He also spent most of his life denigrating and insulting atheists, hardly the view of someone who had been there. The psychology and logic of conversion is a complex subject, but in the main I think it is an interplay of prior beliefs and attitudes, social pressures, and conceptual revision based on certain views they are simply unwilling to abandon. For example, humans tend to assign intention to events and processes, which is known as anthropomorphism or the intentional stance (Dennett’s term), and a hyperactive disposition* to do this means that any view that leads to a more mechanical view of natural processes will be resisted. Our cognitive profile is the outcome of a dynamic system of competing, reinforcing and opposing beliefs and attitudes, in effect being a parliament of mind. Marvin Minsky called it the “society of mind“, and in this, partial beliefs, agents and parts of the brain and the mind generate a consensus that issues forth as “my” belief. It is not, however, a rational process, and given the complexity of of our doxastic states, where a lot of what we believe or tend to believe are tacit or infraconscious (i.e., not held consciously although they certainly exist in the head), there being a simple “worldview” in anyone’s head is unlikely. Conversions tend to be rather rapid, in the nature of a decision, but converts rarely consciously decide to believe – it creeps up upon them until they recognise what they already believe. The parliamentary vote is taken, and now it is public. But were those who convert to a religion atheists, or merely non-believers? I may convert to, say, a belief, but before I do, I merely lack a position or loosely hold some inherited view, I am not necessarily of the opposing view explicitly. Likewise, so-called “atheists who convert” are never likely to be actual atheists. Incidentally, Scientific American has a short report that Asperger’s sufferers tend not to interpret the world in intentional terms, unlike standard atheists who do, but who then discount that tendency. * [The missing footnote] Barrett adopts an evolutionary psychology modularity position. I don’t. There can be species-typical inherited dispositions without there being shallow, adaptively honed, modules or specialised structures in the brain. Epistemology Evolution Philosophy Religion EvolutionPhilosophy
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Well, I went through a number of stages, including a stage of converting from atheism to theism (and later more or less back again). However, I wasn’t an adult at the time and hadn’t acquired mature critical thinking skills.
I was a not-Christian at 15, a Christian at 16 and a not-Christian at 17 (and then a Christian at 20, and an agnostic/atheist at 25), but my transitions were from a general irreligion to a definite religious position, not from a definite atheism to Christian belief, and I suspect so were yours.
I’d say it was stronger than that. I’d say that for a significant part of my pre-Christian period, I was convinced of the non-existence of God.
Does it not also follow from these observations that there is no such thing as a theist becoming an atheist? That strikes me as absurd, and contrary to the sincere personal reports of countless nonbelievers. Can we really defend the idea that all alleged “converts” were really religious beforehand? The only way to do this, it seems to me, is to define “religious” in such a broad way as to make the thesis highly uninteresting. I am not ready to tell Augustine, that his apparently sincere conversion was in fact just a rediscovery of some kind of prior religiosity. There is a vital change here, and I suspect that part of the problem with your analysis is that it conceives this change in terms of acquiring a new set of beliefs about the world. A conversion to a religious worldview is surely far more than that (for starters, it is a comittment to a new form of ethical structure). It is not just an affirmation of a particular “doxastic profile”.
I am not ready to tell Augustine, that his apparently sincere conversion was in fact just a rediscovery of some kind of prior religiosity. Augustinus was a Manichean before his conversion to Christianity and the last time I looked Manicheans were highly religious!
I hold a view similar to the CS Lewis view: that if there were a God, he would be responsible for the evils of the world. Erdos is supposed to have called god “the Supreme Fascist” or “the SF” for short, and I thought he was an atheist too. The actual Lewis version of the view is not one that could be held by an atheist (since it entails very straightforwardly that God exists, and surely belief is closed under that very obvious kind of entailment), but it’s not a million miles off from things an atheist might reasonably say. I agree with Nick Smyth that this post has a little bit of a “no true Scotsman” flavour about it. I have enough social functioning not to count as Aspergers (yeah, yeah, hold your snide remarks), but those credulous dispositions should not disqualify me from counting as an atheist, even if they could, in principle, cause me to reconvert. I mean, we don’t want everybody to come out as a theist.
I can understand the gist of the author’s position, but I do think there are genuine atheist-to-theist conversions. For most of my high school years and into my first year of college, I was explicitly atheist. I read all of the New Atheist books (Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Stenger and Dennett) and a few of the more philosophical ones (Nielsen, Kurtz, and Martin). I founded and ran a freethought club at my high school and was involved with the Center for Inquiry in LA. I had a conversion experience in the middle of my first year of college and now identify as a Christian theist. I’m not a big fan of mainstream evangelicalism or fundamentalism, and I’m still very sympathetic to most of the things atheists have to say, but I like to think that my Christian faith is authentic. I’d agree, however, that the kind of experience that I had is rare.
I’ve got a different tangent to explore: in an evolutionary sense, given John’s sign off about Asperger’s seeing everything in a non-intentional way, what would be the fitness advantage of seeing the world in an intentional sense – the Asperger’s pint indicates that the basis of such ascription is genetic, after all. Here’s my thought: that subscription to an intentional world view is part of causal modeling of our environment. The drive to relate causes to their effects is obviously pro-survival, and lacking tools and knowledge to come to a better explanation, people will fall back on ‘Deus ex machina” arguments.
I think it’s a simple side effect of adapting to the most complex phenomena in the known world: ourselves. We need to be able to predict humans, so we get unintended false positives as a result.
To the contrary; humans are relatively less unpredictable than natural phenomena; although perhaps more dangerous in many ways, that’s usually only after the natural phenomena are dealt with to some extent. Gods are usually invoked to explain that which is not explainable with the currently available technology. People, on the other hand, are people, and more familiar…not chaotic like the weather, for example.
I have a conversation with someone who said they “converted and were new to atheism.” I thought that that was a little fishy too. So you just stopped beliving in any thing?
Not believing in anything = nihilism. A different kettle of fish and probably more to do with depression than seeking explanations.
Count no man an “actual” atheist until he is dead? I think you’re in danger of defining atheism right out of existence. Wasn’t it Sartre who said something like “There is no God and I hate him?”And Neitzsche’s proclamation of the death of God cannot be considered truly atheistic, since that which never existed cannot die. Nietzsche preached of a God-shaped hole, which sounds pretty theistic to me. Like Nick says, there’s no reason not to likewise say that former theists were secret atheists all along, though they struggled with the visible ego-based portion of the “doxastic profile” until they were ready to let go and make the transition. Why should true conversion always be away from theism, except through the lens of a confirmation bias?
“While it is a common trope by Christians in particular that they were atheists and converted, in every case with which I am familiar, and every case Roper is familiar, the person was never an atheist, except in the weak sense of not being a devout theist. Instead, they were in a state of what I think of as ‘nascent theism’.” Before my conversion, I was a full-on denial, explicit atheist. “He also spent most of his life denigrating and insulting atheists, hardly the view of someone who had been there.” I disagree. Indeed, in my experience, the most vigorous ant-tobacco advocates are former smokers, and the most vociferous anti-religionists are former practicioners.
Everybody keeps leaving out the sociology and psychology of all this. When atheism is no more than mere disbelief, even reasoned disbelief,in a proposition one cannot convert from it. Becoming a theist or an atheist is an issue if and only if it creates intra- and interpersonal conflicts. Doubtlessly there are individuals for whom metaphysical concepts are matters of great import, but at a first approximation religious debates are about social relationships, not ideas as witness the enormous difficulty both believers and nonbelievers have in identifying what they do or do not believe in. The celebrated god-shaped hole is a tear in the social fabric, not a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of ultimate reality. You simply can’t have a dramatic conversion experience if your friends and family don’t give a damn about such things.
…although, given how interpersonal relationships go, you might have a dramatic conversion experience because your “friends” and family don’t give a damn… separating the rational and irrational/nonrational components of belief/conversion is pretty fraught, I think.
I’d be surprised if there weren’t, not every atheist is one through reason. And even those who are still fallible. And who knows? Maybe such an experience like an NDE or a particularly harrowing drug trip or even something benign might lead to one having a conversion. Perhaps witnessing something unexplainable? Who knows. It irks me at times to hear the “I was an atheist” paraded about as if nothing more than rhetoric designed to hit at an emotional centre. Is there something to be distinguished between a theological noncognitivist or a “lapsed theist” (one who was brought up into a faith then “rebelled”) and an explicit atheist who came to the conclusion through reason and knowledge?
I’d like to present a neuro-biological point of view: if ‘conversion’ is akin to an epiphany, therefore involving the formation of an extensive network of neurons, once the structure is created, little short of its destruction can un-make the belief so formed: habits are hard to break. So, if someone is a committed atheist, they have had such an epiphany; equally, a committed theist has, also. Someone who is just an (a)theist by accident, by virtue of passive indoctrination, could still swing either way. It would also be possible for enough evidence to accumulate to overturn a previous epiphany, but it’s not an easy process – one that would probably take some years and an awful lot of introspection, so not really an epiphany, more of a long slow grinding out of the network that is being re-linked into a different structure for purposes of causal relationship modeling. I see myself as a committed atheist, because short of a direct experience with a god, there is no way I will admit to the likelihood of any existing. For the purpose of logical argument, I get the point John is making, about agnostics allowing that it is impossible to categorically prove that something does not exist, somewhere at some time. However, I also think that one can take a stand that makes it clear to the less enlightened what one believes in a functional sense: atheists do not practice religion, ever; agnostics might, just in case.