John C. Wright’s conversion to Christianity

Notice: Christians (and other theists) who do like to have their beliefs challenged should probably not read this post.

—

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently introduced to some Christian blogs. Today’s post is a response John C. Wright’s conversion story, which you can read here. (For background on my own views, you may browse my other posts on religion.)

He begins:

I am more than a presumably rational individual, I [was] a champion of atheism who gave arguments in favor of atheism so convincing that three of my friends gave up their religious belief due to my persuasive reasoning powers, and my father stopped going to church.

Upon concluding through a torturous and decades-long and remorseless process of logic that all my fellow atheists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic, and my hated enemies the Christians were right, I wondered how this could be. The data did not match the model.

Now, the atheists I know do not tend to be “horrible and comically wrong” about “every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic”. It seems to me that Wright has known some especially irrational atheists. (I’d list QualiaSoup as an example of a very rational atheist. There’s also Carl Sagan, among many others.)

Wright continues:

For the first time in my life, I prayed, and said. “Dear God. There is no logical way you could possibly exist, and even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination. So I can think of no possible way, no matter what the evidence and no matter how clear it was, that you could prove your existence to me. But the Christians claim you are benevolent, and that my failure to believe in you inevitably will damn me. If, as they claim, you care whether or not I am damned, and if, as they claim, you are all wise and all powerful, you can prove to me that you exist even though I am confident such a thing is logically impossible. Thanking you in advance for your cooperation in this matter, John C. Wright.”

I decided to replicate Wright’s test. First I said the prayer almost exactly as he said it, attempting to speak to God in the same style as Wright. (I reworded things a bit to fit my views.) Then I got on my knees, closed my eyes and said another prayer, which I made up as I went along. Like Wright, I asked God to show himself to me. I’ll tell you the results at the end of this post.

Wright had a profound experience three few days after the prayer:

Three days later, with no warning, I had a heart attack, and was lying on the floor, screaming and dying.

-Then I was saved from certain death by faith-healing, after which–

-I felt the Holy Spirit enter my body, after which–

-became immediately aware of my soul, a part of myself which, until that time, I reasoned and thought did not exist-

-I was visited by the Virgin Mary, her son, and His Father-

-not to mention various other spirits and ghosts over a period of several days–

-including periods of divine ecstasy, and an awareness of the mystical oneness of the universe-

-And a week or so after that I had a religious experience where I entered the mind of God and saw the indescribable simplicity and complexity, love, humor and majesty of His thought, and I understood the joy beyond understanding and comprehended the underlying unity of all things, and the paradox of determinism and free will was made clear to me, as was the symphonic nature of prophecy. I was shown the structure of time and space.

-And then Christ in a vision told me that He would be my judge, and that God judges no man. I mentioned this event to my wife. Then about a month later, when I was reading the Bible for the first time beyond the unavoidable minimum assigned in school, I came across the passage in the book of John, a passage I had never seen before, and to which no Christian in my hearing had ever made reference, which said the same thing in the same words.

-And then I have had perhaps a dozen or two dozen prayers miraculously answered, so much so that I now regard it as a normal routine rather than some extraordinary act of faith.

Well, that’s quite an experience! The only awkward thing about it is that, overall, the evidence against the existence of the Christian God greatly outweighs the evidence for the existence of the Christian God (I’ll just call him “God” for the rest of this post). And yes, that’s still true after considering Wright’s conversion story. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Small note, Wright says:

Christ in a vision told me that He would be my judge, and that God judges no man

Isn’t Jesus just the incarnation of God? Aren’t they the same person? (Or “three persons, one god” as the vague saying goes.) So if Jesus judges people…how can it be that God does not judge people? But this is a minor point, so let’s move on.

Wright continues:

In hindsight, if only I had not been so arrogant,  I could have glanced around at the earth and sky, and seen the intricacy, wonder, and beauty of nature, regarded the unanswerable authority of the conscience within me, and known that I was a created being inside a created cosmos, not  a random sandheap blown for a season into a meaningless shape by blind winds. Any child can see it, and all children do.

A few points here:

1. I acknowledge the intricacy, wonder and beauty of nature. But just because nature is wonderful doesn’t mean that God designed it. (I’d also like to point out that nature is flawed: In addition to providing us with air, nature has also provided smallpox.)
2. Who’s to say that the human conscience is evidence of God? Isn’t it enough to say that human beings simply observe their surroundings, and can see for themselves that some actions are good and others are bad, that some actions bring happiness and others bring sadness? Isn’t that the basis of morality?
3. If we were created out of randomness, why would that imply that our lives are meaningless? Perhaps there really is a basic Meaning to the world, a basic Law of Right and Wrong, just as there is a Law of Gravity. And happily, we happen to have the basic abilities to pursue Meaning and make the world Better. So we can still potentially have meaningful lives, even if we weren’t consciously designed for that purpose.
4. Even assuming that there is a loving God who created the universe, what makes Wright so sure that Christianity is the one true religion? Well, his religious experience, of course. But I’ll cover that in a bit.

Wright continues:

So I was prepared to say adieu to logic and reason and just take things on faith, when I then found out that the only people who think you have to say adieu to logic and reason in order to take things on faith are crackpots both Christian and atheistic.

Every non-crackpot thinks faith is that on which you rely when unreasonable fears tempt you to disbelieve that to which your reason has consented. If your father says you can dive off the high dive with no risk of death, and he has never lied in the past, and your reason tells you to trust him, it is rational to take his word on faith and jump, and it is irrational to let your eyes overestimate the danger poised by the height.

I think that Wright is confusing three different definitions of the word “faith”. The definitions are:

1. Belief in something
2. Belief in something despite the evidence (or lack of evidence)
3. Belief in something because of the evidence.

When the evidence shows you can jump off the high dive without injury, it requires Faith #3 to make the jump. When the evidence does not show that you can smoke cigarettes all your life and not increase the risk of cancer, in requires Faith #2 to keep smoking and ignore the risk.

Christian belief is largely based on Faith #2. The people who recognize this fact tend to use phrases like “I don’t need evidence; I have faith!” Then someone like Wright comes along and talks about “faith” in the sense of Faith #3, and it tends to confuse everybody. (Perhaps this is a small point, though.  You may ignore it if you like.)

Wright discusses how his atheist friends responded to his conversion experience:

They reasoned as follows: “God cannot possibly exist. Therefore any evidence that you encountered that God exists must be hallucination, mis-perception, faulty memory, self-deception, coincidence, or anything else no matter how farfetched and absurd. Since any evidence that you encountered that God exists must be hallucination, mis-perception, faulty memory, self-deception, coincidence, or anything else no matter how farfetched and absurd, therefore none of your evidence proves God exists.”

I found their perfect, childlike faith touching.

No matter what they saw, no matter what they heard, no matter how the world was against them, they would go to the lions rather than look at the evidence, lest their faith in their faithlessness be shaken.

Now, as I said earlier, it appears that Wright knows some very irrational atheists. According to Wright, these atheists treat the nonexistence of God as an axiom, and dismiss all evidence in favor of God on that basis. This, of course, is a terrible way to approach the subject of God.

You have to start with neutrality. Find the evidence in favor of God, and the evidence against God, and weigh them against each other. If you discover that God very likely does not exist, even after considering Wright’s testimony, then you may conclude that Wright was likely hallucinating or mis-remembering or whatever. But you can’t just start with “There is no God, because I said so.” That’s just stupid.

However, this seems to be a case in which stupid logic has produced a fairly accurate result. (That can happen sometimes, by pure chance.) Because when we actually look at the evidence, we do indeed find that the concept of God simply does not fit the data.

The train of thought should begin with something like this: “If God existed, the universe would look like this. But if God did not exist, the universe would look that that.” Then you take an objective look at the universe and figure out which scenario matches up. Are we living in a God-is-real universe, or a God-is-not-real universe? Where does the evidence take us? Which side wins out, in the end?

So let’s look at this God that Wright is proposing: This God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. (i.e. God is  all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving.) If that God existed, what would we expect to see in the universe? Well obviously, we’d expect to see that nobody suffers, or at least that nobody suffers any more than they properly deserve. Suffering should either be nonexistent, or it should be proportional to personal morality. Whichever of those scenarios you choose, or even if you somehow blend them together, there should be no exceptions whatsoever to the rules. After all, this is a Perfect God. He has no limitations at all (except in the sense that he’s Perfectly Moral and thus does not commit evil.)

Now let’s look at the universe. Is there suffering? YES! There is lots of suffering. For instance, millions of people have starved to death. (All around the world, for countless centuries). Well, that’s a bit odd…

But perhaps the suffering is proportional to personal morality. Perhaps only evil people starve to death, while good people are miraculously given food (like the manna which God allegedly gave to the ancient Hebrews.) Well…no. That doesn’t fit the data either. Innocent people starve to death all the time! Especially poignant are the stories of children who live in poor countries, and there’s a famine or whatever, and the kids starve to death despite being only 5 years old, and completely innocent of any crimes. And this applies to Christian families just as much as anyone else.

Now, considering all that, does it really make sense to believe in an Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent God? Seriously, go look at the websites of some of those hunger charities. Find the pictures of starving children they sometimes show. Look at those children and try to reconcile the idea that there is a Perfect God somewhere who could easily provide these kids with abundant food, at no personal cost or risk to himself. And he knows about the kids, because he knows everything. And he wants to help the kids, because he’s all-loving (or at least he loves innocent people). And he has the ability to help the kids, because he’s all-powerful! And yet….somehow…he doesn’t help the kids…

It just doesn’t make sense. It makes no sense at all.

Christians, of course, try to defend their belief by making excuses for God. “It’s ok,” they say, “because the kids are going to heaven!”. First off, I’d like to have some evidence that heaven actually exists. Secondly, I’d like to point out that you would never make that excuse for anyone else. If an actual human being decided to let the child starve, when he could have easily fed the child at no cost to himself, you would call him a monster. But when God does the exact same thing, it’s ok!

Now tell me, Christians: Are you really being rational about this? Or are you just being biased?

And heck, I’ve only talked about starvation. I could easily go on and on about diseases, droughts, hurricanes, meteors, murderers, or any number of other things that have killed innocent people before. If God really existed, he could have stopped all of these…but he didn’t. You know why he didn’t? There are only two possibilities:

1. There is a God, but he doesn’t have all the qualities that you attribute to him. Maybe he’s all-loving, but he’s not all-powerful. (Or whatever.) A limited God, in other words.
2. There is no God. God does not exist.

In either case, Christian theology is wrong.

You can go on making excuses if you want. You can point to the experience of George Mueller, for instance. He was a devout Christian who ran orphanages. On several occasions they almost ran out of food, but they were saved by last-minute donations. Mueller thought that this was directed by God. The trouble, of course, is that plenty of other orphanages in the world really have run out of food at one time or another, or else they got hit by a tornado or a plague or something, and children died. If God helped Mueller with his orphans…why doesn’t he help all the other orphans? Or hey, here’s an idea: Maybe the last-minute donations were not directed by God. Maybe they were just the actions of good-hearted humans, who had either heard that the kids were running out of food, or they simply showed up at the right time due to coincidence. In light of all the innocents who suffer in the world, the non-God explanation makes a lot more sense to me.

Another excuse is that God works in “mysterious ways”, and therefore somehow it’s ok when he lets innocent children starve to death. I can understand how God might be mysterious, but this excuse is simply nonsense. You’re basically saying that you can’t explain the situation, but you’re sure that God is real because…well, you never really get to that part. It’s Mysterious.

Really, now. Look around you. Are we living in the God-is-real universe, or the God-is-not-real universe? Of the two, the answer is clearly the latter. (If you’d like to propose a limited God, we can have a separate discussion about that. But that’s not what Wright is proposing, so I’m mostly ignoring it for now.)

There are many parts of Christian theology that don’t make sense. But the Problem of Evil is probably the most obvious. It also helps to know that Jesus was likely a myth to begin with, and faith-healing doesn’t seem to work. (Granted, one historian and one study do not automatically settle the debate. But as far as I’ve seen, the overall evidence still leans heavily toward God-does-not-exist.) Also, it’s interesting how various people believe that they’re in direct contact with Jesus (aka God), yet somehow they disagree on what Jesus wants us to do. Are they really all talking to the same divine being? Are they talking to any divine beings?

There are so many things that just don’t add up…

Wright says:

I then discovered that the Christian world view makes sense of much that the atheistic or agnostic worldview cannot make sense of, and even on its own philosophical terms, is a more robust explanation of the cosmos and man’s place in it, answering many questions successfully that atheists both claim cannot be answered, and then, without admitting it, act in their lives as if the question were answered, such as how to account for the rational faculties of man, the universality of moral principles, the order of the cosmos, how best to live, etc.

The Christian worldview actually does not make sense in light of the evidence I just cited. And I don’t see what exactly atheists lack. We have plenty of plausible answers to the Big Questions. Our answers aren’t perfect, I’m sure. But that doesn’t mean that the Christians are any better.

My answers:

1. The cosmos as we know it was created in the Big Bang. (I don’t know why the Big Bang occurred in the first place, but it’s better to admit ignorance that to invent a baseless answer.)
2. Man originally evolved from other forms of life on planet Earth. Our place (as far as I can tell), is to pursue Compassion and Wisdom, while discarding Cruelty and Ignorance. (Again, not perfect. But it’s something.)
3. The rational faculties of man came about through evolution. Originally this was just a method for devising better ways to stay alive and pass on genetic code. Nowadays, we have reached such levels of intelligence that we can ignore those basic goals and pursue other goals if we want to. (In a way, we’ve gone beyond the normal process of evolution.)
4. Universal moral principles exist in the same way that Gravity exists. I don’t know where they came from, but I can perceive that they are real.
5. The order of the cosmos is governed by physical laws. Its meaning is governed by moral laws.
6. It is best to live with compassion and wisdom. We should seek to end needless suffering and to improve human life in general.

Christianity provides other answers to these questions. And in some ways those answers are more appealing than the ones I’ve listed here. Unfortunately, Christian theology simply doesn’t fit the facts. The aesthetic appeal of that theology should not blind us to the truth.

And again, just because I don’t have a perfect explanation for everything doesn’t mean that Christianity is automatically superior. It is better to admit your ignorance than to adopt baseless answers.

Wright continues:

One skeptic, in a bit of a lapse of his vaunted presumably rational character, told me solemnly that I could not possibly have had Jesus tell me something from a book in the Bible I had never read before. He said that I had read it afterward, and developed the previously undiscovered ability to edit and rewrite my memories, which I then used on myself, so that I only thought I remembered Jesus telling me about the nonjudgmentalism of God. The memory was created after I read the passage, and then back-dated. Then I used this power again to make myself forget that I had the power to make myself forget things.

I asked him if I also had the power to rewrite my wife’s memory, since she remembers me telling her about the passage before I read it. He then tried to cut the conversation off, while accusing me of being irrational.

At this point, everything Wright says has to be weighed against the evidence for the nonexistence of God that I’ve already cited. That means that the case for memory alteration is a lot stronger than it would be otherwise.

Memory alteration is a real thing. It’s not a point-and-click process, of course. And it’s not something that you do consciously. But unconsciously, memories can be altered in order to fit your own biases and beliefs. (I recommend a book called Mistakes were made, but not by me. It discusses self-justification and unconscious memory alteration.)

That said, the atheist here is proposing a needlessly complex theory. Here’s a simpler one: Sometime before his deep religious experience, Wright heard about this passage in the Bible. There are over 2 billion Christians in the world, so it’s not too strange to suggest that he heard this passage from someone, at some point. (In fact, he mentions that he had read parts of the Bible in school! Isn’t it possible that this “unavoidable minimum” actually included the Book of John, which he later misremembered as being some other book? So perhaps he had read this passage before, but he didn’t realize it. Or maybe he saw it on a poster, or whatever. Somehow he encountered this passage.) Then he forgot about it, in the perfectly normal way of forgetting. Upon converting, Wright was thinking a lot about God. He remembered this passage, though he didn’t remember where he had first encountered it, and assumed instead that this memory was actually the Voice of God. He mentioned the passage to his wife, telling her that God had told him about it. Then he later discovered that passage in the Bible.

Notice there’s no need for memory alteration in this theory, aside from the normal sense of forgetting something, remembering it again, and mis-attributing the source. And it easily explains what happened with his wife.

Wright continues:

Another atheist told me I induced a heart attack in myself with my previously undiscovered heart-attack inducing power. And then cured the heart pain with my previously undiscovered heart-attack-curing power. I did both things in order to convince myself falsely of a doctrine I did not believe and had no interest in believing, but, unbeknownst to myself, my secret desire to believe was so great that it overwhelmed and sanity and seized control of my subconscious biological and cardiovascular processes. When I questioned him about such things as whether he was familiar with my medical record, or when I asked to see the evidence supporting this theory, he called me names.

I’m guessing that Wright simply had a heart attack for normal reasons. Somehow or other this near-death experience caused his religious experience.

Is that a thorough explanation? No. Is it common for people suffering from heart-attacks to convert to other religions? No. But considering the evidence I cited for the non-existence of God, it’s more plausible that a normal heart attack (and subsequent near-death experience) caused the conversion, as opposed to the idea that God gave Wright a heart-attack and then revealed himself to Wright via divine power.

Also, note how Wright describes his attitude toward Christianity at the outset of the heart attack:

[Christianity was] a doctrine I did not believe and had no interest in believing

That strikes me as being quite odd, because earlier in the post Wright made another description of his pre-heart-attack feelings on Christianity:

Upon concluding through a torturous and decades-long and remorseless process of logic that all my fellow atheists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic, and my hated enemies the Christians were right, I wondered how this could be. The data did not match the model.

So, prior to the heart attack, Wright believed that the “the Christians were right” regarding “every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic”. It sure sounds to me like he was half-converted already! If that was the case, is it really fair for him to describe Christianity as something he “had no interest in believing” at that time? I agree that he was not actually a Christian until after the heart attack, but it certainly seems plausible that he was interested in Christianity. Perhaps we could even say that he wanted to believe, despite his claim that he had “no interest” in it.

It’s something to ponder, anyway.

(No, I’m not saying that Wright probably gave himself a heart attack. But I’ll return to this point about prior-half-conversion later in the post.)

Wright continues:

Another atheist told me that that heart failure was a coincidence, not a direct result of my prayer tempting God Almighty, and if that had not happened, something else like a car accident would have happened, and since I am irrational, I would have drawn an improper post hoc ergo propter hoc conclusion no matter what happened, on the grounds that God cannot exist no matter what the evidence says nor how obvious it is, and so anyone who draws the obvious conclusions from the evidence MUST be irrational.

I’m guessing that if Wright had not experienced near-death soon after his prayer, he would not have converted to Christianity. It’s just a coincidence that he had the heart attack soon after his prayer. (Side note: Why did God decide to wait for three days, anyway?)

And again, I don’t disbelieve in God regardless of the evidence. I disbelieve in God because of the evidence. The atheist he cites seems to be irrational.

Wright continues:

In general, the argument that I am impeached as a witness on the grounds that my testimony did not confirm the prejudices and assumptions of a third party is not one likely to prevail in a court of law, or as a debate among sober philosophers, scientists, nor anyone trained in rigorous reasoning.

Wright, I do not impeach you as a witness because your testimony does not conform to an arbitrary belief. I impeach you as a witness because your testimony does not conform to reality, as measured by objective observation.

And so far not one atheist has approached me with a legitimate argument, such as the Problem of Pain, or the Paradox of Determinism, or any apparent inconsistencies in the Bible.

Again, Wright, you appear to have been talking to irrational atheists. But now that you’ve brought it up…how do you explain the Problem of Pain?

Actually, you don’t explain it. Not in this post, anyway.

(Also, by the way, there are plenty of inconsistencies and errors in the bible.)

Wright continues:

My question for [atheists] is this: if science discovered tomorrow that the universe was half its apparent age, and estimated the stars as half their current number, would the believe in God somehow be twice as credible in your eyes?

If so, why so?

If not, then, logically, the age of the universe and the number of stars has no bearing on the credibility of belief in God or in the Incarnation.

Wright has made an error in his logic. Christian theology consists of several beliefs. Here’s a small sample:

1. The universe was created by God
2. The universe is less than 20,000 years old
3. Jesus Christ was born of a virgin
4. Jesus Christ came back from the dead
5. Good Christians go to heaven after they die

If we discovered tomorrow that the universe was only 7 billion years old (instead of 14 billion), then Belief #2, listed above, would indeed become about twice as plausible than before. (It would still be ridiculously small compared to reality, but it would be less ridiculous.) But Belief #2 is only a small part of Christianity, so the plausibility of Christianity as a whole would only increase by a small amount. And thus, the belief in God would become more plausible by a small amount. A very small amount.

But yes, indeed, our data about the universe really does matter when judging whether God exists.

Wright continues:

Again, if you are attempting to persuade me that I should not believe in unusual events or unheard-of or hard-to-believe on the grounds that no unusual nor unheard-of nor hard-to-believe events never happen, simple logic shows that this cannot be the case:

Logically, every ordinary event is unheard-of before we hear of it; and the first example of even repeated events is unusual until the second example occurs; and events are hard-to-believe when and only when our expectations and our experience does not match: therefore every novelty is as incredible as the platypus when first encountered. Therefore not only do incredible events happen, they must happen, for if they did not, the concept of credibility could not exist.

At one time, there were reports of a newly-discovered creature called a platypus. People said “That’s unheard of! It cannot exist!”. But it was later proven that the reports were true. The platypus really does exist.

Around the same time, there were reports of creatures called mermaids. People said “That’s unheard of! It cannot exist!”. It was later proven that the reports were false. Mermaids do not exist.

So yes, indeed, some things which seem impossible turn out to be true. Other such things turn out to be false. So, what about God? Is God like the platypus, or is he more like the mermaid? How would we know the difference? By checking the evidence, of course. Which I’ve already done, earlier in this post.

If, on the other hand, you are arguing that I ought not believe reports of miracles on that grounds that miracles do not exist, and that we know miracles do not exist on the grounds that no believable reports of them are heard, you are arguing in a circle.

You ought not to believe in miracles, on the basis that countless supposedly miraculous events have been better explained with non-miraculous explanations. (And by “better”, in mean that the theory better fits the evidence, overall.) If you find a specific alleged miracle in which the non-miraculous explanations make less sense, in light of all the evidence, than the miraculous explanation, then you you may believe in that specific miracle. But considering the evidence supporting the non-existence of God, it’s hard to imagine what miracle could be so convincing, and so clearly miraculous, as to be logically considered an actual miracle. (And no, you’re not allowed to jump straight from “I don’t know how this happened” to “God did it!“. You have to be more thorough than that.)

Wright continues:

You are also implying that the human race, all of whom believe in gods, ghosts, magic and miracles of one sort or another, except for that exquisitely tiny minority of persons who are consistent atheists, just so happened to have all made the same lapse of judgment in the matter of paramount and foundational importance in their lives, and continue to do so, some of whom would go to the lions rather than reexamine the aforesaid lapse of judgment. While it is possible that everyone during the parade is out of step except the fond mother’s son in the old joke, this would seem to be as unusual, unheard-of and hard-to-believe as a Virgin birth, if not more so.

Ah, the argument from popularity. There are several responses to this.

First, Wright himself disregards this argument when it comes to most of Christian theology. It is indeed true that the vast majority of people believe in “gods, ghosts, magic and miracles of one sort or another”. But it is also true that the large majority of people disbelieve in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They also disbelieve in the idea that faith in Christ will bring them eternal life.  So I can use Wright’s logic against himself: He is implying that most of the human race, which disbelieves in the resurrection of Christ,  just so happens to have all made the same lapse of judgment in a matter of paramount and foundational importance in their lives, and continue to do so, some of whom would go to the lions rather than reexamine the aforesaid lapse of judgment.

Wright takes popularity as a sign that Christianity is true, except when it comes to those areas in which Christianity is not popular…in which case popularity suddenly doesn’t matter anymore. (This would be ok, if the evidence was still in his favor overall. But it’s not.)

Second, I can use Wright’s logic against him again by citing that earlier bit about things which seem absurd but are later proven true. After all, if the vast majority of people believe in a God, then by definition atheism seems absurd to them. It’s “unheard-of”, or “unthought-of”, to their way of thinking. Thus I can write: Logically, every true idea is unthought-of before we think of it; and the first example of even “obvious” ideas is unusual until the second example occurs; and ideas are hard-to-believe when and only when our pre-existing beliefs and our experience do not match: therefore every novelty is as incredible as the “earth is round” theory when first encountered.

When Christianity seems absurd, Wright says that absurdity is no reason to dismiss it. But when atheism seems absurd (as judged by its popularity), Wright takes this as a sign that atheism is wrong. (This would be ok, if the evidence was still in his favor overall. But it’s not.)

And note how Wright uses the steadfast devotion of certain theists as implicit evidence that theism must be true:

some of [these theists] would go to the lions rather than reexamine the aforesaid lapse of judgment.

But on that note, remember how Wright himself described the irrational atheists earlier on:

No matter what they saw, no matter what they heard, no matter how the world was against them, they would go to the lions rather than look at the evidence, lest their faith in their faithlessness be shaken.

When theists are deeply devoted to their belief in God, Wright appears to take that as a sign that God is real. But when atheists are deeply devoted to their nonbelief in God, Wrights takes that as a sign that the atheists are simply being stubborn and irrational. (Though again, I agree that these particular atheists really were irrational. I’m just pointing out how Wright judges theists and atheists by different standards.)

Wright doesn’t appear to have any solid evidence to support his argument that God exists. Or rather, he doesn’t have so much evidence as to overpower all the signs that God does not exist.

“But what about his experience of God?”, you may ask. “Doesn’t that count as substantial evidence?”

Well no, for the reasons I already mentioned. But here’s one more point: If we decide to believe in God because of Wright’s testimony, we must also believe in alien abductions, due to the testimony of abductees.

There are many people who believe they were abducted by aliens, who fit Wright’s basic mold:

• Previously, they did not believe in alien abductions
• They had no history of mental illness
• Then they had an abduction experience, which they could later recall in great detail
• They formed a deep conviction that this experience was real

There are differences, of course. Alien abduction seems to start with Sleep Paralysis in most cases, and I don’t think Wright had that. It also tends to be furthered by hypnosis, which “reveals” (actually invents) further details about the experience. I don’t think Wright has ever seen a hypnotist. But still, the fact remains that people can have profound fictitious experiences if the circumstances are right.

Fundamentally, I think that’s what happened to him. Somehow, some way, the circumstances were right and he had a vivid hallucination of Jesus etc..

If that still seems far-fetched, let me remind you of two things:

1. As I mentioned earlier, it appears that Wright had already half-converted before his heart attack. He had concluded that the atheists were wrong, and furthermore that the Christians were right, with regards to “every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic”. Considering that this attitude already existed in his mind at the time of his near-death experience, doesn’t that make it plausible that he would suffer pro-Christian delusions?
2. There’s a lot of evidence that the Christian God does not exist. Hence, it would seem that any experience of that God is probably an illusion. (But no, I don’t take the nonexistence of God as an axiom. Review what I said earlier.)

Of course, maybe Wright just knows something I don’t. Maybe he has some noncommunicable evidence. But I doubt it.

I honestly tried to replicate his test: I prayed for God to reveal himself to me. Three days later…nothing happened. No heart attack, no near-death experience, no faith healing, no miracles, no visitations from divine beings, no sudden sense of the oneness of the universe…nothing. Three whole days went by and nothing happened which even slightly demonstrated the existence of God. Nothing whatsoever.

Maybe God’s just biding his time for some reason. If I do have a profound God-based experience sometime soon, I’ll update this post. But I don’t think that will ever happen. (Update: It’s been 3 months now, and nothing has happened. Recently my aunt, who is a very devout Christian, prayed over me with great passion. But I still haven’t received any divine signs or visitations. I remain an atheist, and I’m comfortable with that.)

Some will say that God works in mysterious ways. They’ll say that he heard my prayer and simply decided not to answer. Or maybe he did answer, but in a way I didn’t notice or acknowledge.

But really, considering all the other arguments I’ve put forth, both in this post and in my other posts on the subject, what’s more likely? That the Christian God really exists as advertised, and all the evidence against him is somehow bunk? Or that the Christian God simply doesn’t exist in the first place?

Wright, I’m sure you had a profound experience. I haven’t been through that experience myself, so I won’t pretend to understand what it felt like. Nor will I claim that your Christian beliefs have necessarily degraded your life. For all I know, your conversion was a great change and it helped you to become a better person. I don’t pretend to know things like that, one way or the other.

All I do know is that, to the best of my judgment, the evidence against the existence of your God massively outweighs the evidence in his favor. Your testimony is not enough to outweigh all the contrary evidence. Even the collective testimony of many similar converts still pales in comparison to the anti-God evidence. (Especially when you consider all the people who have had profound experiences which led them to convert to other religions…but I digress.)

I don’t hate you. I’m not angry at you. I’m not laughing at you. I’m not even saying that you’re generally an irrational person. (In fact, you seem like a smart guy!) I’m just saying that I think you’re being irrational on this one particular issue. Your evidence is insufficient.

I remain an atheist. Specifically, a humanist.

But anyway, regardless of what you believe, I wish you well.

—

(Updated 28 April 2013, 31 July 2013)