
The road from atheism - danielam
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html
======
vezzy-fnord
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.

~~~
pravka
Indeed, creativity is the inevitable conclusion I come to when I read
diatribes like this. I could expend countless hours wondering, plotting, and
diagramming any number of potential (non-scientific) explanations for life as
we know it, as well as our eventual, mutual destination.

These explanations would also be _creative_ ; the primary reason I don't do
this is because I have far more interesting and important things with which I
choose to concern myself.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
To be fair, I do respect him for his adeptness at being able to think
abstractly, but his presenting these ideas to scorn on atheists as if they're
somehow in the _absolute_ wrong because of not considering the more esoteric
Aquinas ideas of God, is disingenuous. In all honesty, he would be rightfully
dismissed by most atheists as begging the question.

As I said, theological noncognitivism - it's not worth debating God because
there is no definition of him/her/it. Classical theist, pantheist, pandeist,
panentheist, henotheist, deist, pandeist, maltheist, personal God... at any
given point in a debate people will start backtracking on different
interpretations with radically different consequences if they are valid, yet
still somehow conclude Christianity must be true after all of them.

------
reagency
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.

~~~
Retra
Is it actually useful, though? Sure, people will say it is useful, but what
can they do to demonstrate that?

~~~
dagw
From personal experience, very much so. I really miss the spiritual and mental
calm and resilience that the faith of my youth brought me. I have several
personal examples of where prayer brought me the calm and clarity I needed to
focus my mind to get through tough situations.

Once I realize it wasn't true and stopped believing all that went away, and in
some ways I still mourn that.

~~~
Retra
An anecdote isn't evidence. I was different when I was younger, too. One data
point doesn't make a pattern. A bunch of data points don't make a pattern when
you over-fit your description to match them. I'm asking for objectivity here.

You can't look at a bunch of planes, recognize that there are more dead people
in planes lying on the ground than there are in those flying through the air
and conclude that planes in the air are safer than those on the ground. What
is unsafe here is a rapid transition, not the state of being. You can't ignore
those kinds of possibilities and draw meaningful conclusions.

------
lootsauce
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."

