The road from atheism

The author never makes the case for any particular conception of a deity. In fact, his indirect diatribe could just as easily be taken as an argument in favor of theological noncognitivism. He rejects "theistic personalism" (which is the overwhelmingly accepted understanding of God in Western societies and Abrahamic religions) in favor of "classical theism" - that God is pure form, immutable (does not change), impassible (cannot be acted on), existing outside of time, yet also omnipotent and omniscient. Whether or not this God intervenes in human affairs is not stated, so for all I know the author could be arguing a deist position. Yet he seems to accept the Catholic tradition, which would require one to prove a whole additional set of properties beyond an abstract deity, but nonetheless it implies that he does believe in an interventionist God. Actually, classical theism seems to imply this cyclic and self-referential belief of God being omniscient by the mere fact of his existence and that "miracles" and intervention are in fact the result of God being the sustainable cause of ordinary events by default.

Muddled, unfalsifiable, self-abetting sophistry, in my mind. But it's creative, I suppose.

The article takes a different tenor when you consider that is not a story about how the author came to logically prove that theism is more likely than atheism, but it is about how the author come to feel that being a theist is a better life than being atheist. Religion is a powerful idea, not because it is true (that cannot be proven) but because in its best form it is psychologically extremely useful.

I found this account of his intellectual journey from atheism very much like my own. However I am no philosophy Phd. But the early years of dismissing things because you "know" it all already or nobody is taking it serious so why would you. Yeah I think we can all relate to that in various contexts. Then getting deep into something and having it lead you where you never expected. Yeah had that happen a few times too, its amazing how often this does happen when I finally get over my ego and start to really listen and process what I learn, and boy am I better off for it.

It is a long read here is my TLDR;

It took this guy a decade to see through his and the fields biases and weak/uninformed arguments. My favorite bit on this is.

- "Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong? Very, very far. It took me the better part of a decade to see that"

- "the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion. But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition."

Begins to question the nature of what we can know through science.

- "I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good."

- "Physics, which materialists take to be the gold standard of our knowledge of the material world, in fact doesn’t give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter in the first place."

- "The usual materialist theories were not even clearly thought out, much less correct."

- "A complete naturalistic explanation of intentionality is impossible."

- "Introspection, ...gives us direct knowledge of our thoughts and experiences. ...it is matter, and not mind, that is the really problematic side of the mind-body problem"

Takes a serious look at Aquinas and Scholastics, finds it very solid to his surprise

- "The way I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually came to realize, laughably off base."

- "when they did say anything about Aquinas’s arguments at all, most of them showed only that they couldn’t even be bothered to get him right, much less show why he was mistaken."

- "Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!”

- "a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back"

My favorite part of this post is how he really captures what I am certainly guilty of and I am sure so many of us are. Rather than really listen we prepare our argument which is really a way of building up our wall of existing belief. Of course that makes sense if you're feeling challenged you want to see if they can knock it down (hoping they can't) but really we should respect each other a bit more and just listen with an open mind and heart. It would save a lot of time I suspect.

"...to read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen -- especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate."