Common theist argument: "You know, I used to be an atheist myself..."

[Underseer]

It seems like every other Christian that I talk to claims to be a former atheist.

Here's the first problem with that: there can't possibly be that many ex-atheist Christians out there. Anyone who has seen the statistics knows this. Throughout the Western industrialized world, the number of Christians is shrinking and the number of non-theists is growing. The number of Christians who become atheist per year in a given Western society is actually kinda small, and the number of atheists becoming Christian is even smaller. We know this must be true because the number of Christians keeps shrinking while the number of nontheists keeps growing.

I run into so many Christians who claim to be ex-Christians, and I know from the statistics that they must either be confused about what an atheist is or lying.

So why do they do it?

I suspect it is because they don't understand what an appeal to authority fallacy is. I think they believe that if they claim to be former atheists, this will cause their arguments to be more convincing. I think they believe this because everything they believe to be true comes from an appeal to authority fallacy (e.g. the Bible says X is true and the Bible is an authority, therefore X is true; the preacher says Y is true and the preacher is an authority, therefore Y is true). If everything they believe to be true comes from an appeal to authority fallacy, then it is natural that they would expect everyone else to also be convinced by appeal to authority fallacies.

Of course, if they were actually former atheists, they would know that using logical fallacies makes their position less credible, not more, which is especially ironic. An ex-atheist would know that there are no good arguments to use and would certainly not rely on a logical fallacy which would instantly make the person they're talking to more suspicious of their position. An ex-atheist would know that it's best to make purely emotional arguments and hope they caught the atheist at a moment in their lives when everything is going wrong. Most atheists are ex-Christians and most became ex-Christians precisely because they went through a period of intense study and found that all of the apologetics arguments are bad.

 

[Keith&Co.]

"Most atheists are ex-Christians and most became ex-Christians precisely because they went through a period of intense study and found that all of the apologetics arguments are bad. "

That might be a big driver, too. Every so often, I see apologists try to say, "Well, if you were a believer, you'd know..." but they can't speak as the only authority in the room if the atheist used to be a believer. So they try to keep the atheists from being the only authority on atheism in the room, by claiming to have once been a nihilist, too. And describe their atheist time as they think atheists believe and feel...

 

[Bronzeage]

After thinking about this for a few minutes, I can't recall a single Christian who claimed to have once been an Atheist. There are plenty who became Christians after a fairly short life of not giving it a lot of thought, one way or the other.

 

[Politesse]

This claim will be found in any apologetics debate between any two religions, with vayring degrees of veracity.

I think you have a shaky grasp of mathematics, though. A net loss tells you nothing about how many people have been wandering from one tradition to another, only what the overall ratio has been at the end of it.


Let me help you:

Suppose I have ten apples, and you and a friend both have three oranges. I trade you five apples for two of your oranges. Your friend trades me two oranges for one apple. Then you and your friend trade, with you offering two additional apples for one of his oranges, and one of his apples. Finally, I trade with your friend all of the oranges that I have accumulated, in exchange for three of my apples back.

On average, which of those apples or oranges is an exclusive and dichotomous religious identity that you are thinking about in a very fuzzy fashion?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

After thinking about this for a few minutes, I can't recall a single Christian who claimed to have once been an Atheist. There are plenty who became Christians after a fairly short life of not giving it a lot of thought, one way or the other.

Well, I'm sure that there's more than a few. If people are questioning and thinking about theological positions, you're going to have a wide range of things that they go through.

Just so long as they're being honest with themselves about where they are at each stage of their journey, it's all good. Unless they become Mennonites, of course, because those assholes can just wander off and fuck themselves.

 

[James Brown]

After thinking about this for a few minutes, I can't recall a single Christian who claimed to have once been an Atheist.

It's a standard line among outspoken apologists: C. S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, etc.

Notice, by the way, the distinction from another favourite genre:“I used to be an atheist, but . . .” That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, practised by, among many others, C S Lewis, Alister McGrath and Francis Collins. It is designed to gain street cred before the writer starts on about Jesus, and it is amazing how often it works. Look out for it, and be forewarned.

--Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

 

[WAB]

Too many attempts at mind-reading going on, and too much over-simplification and convenient classification.

I was an atheist from my late teens until 2011, when I underwent a conversion, which I now consider to be caused by a mental event or a mental disorder. My conversion is documented on these boards. I was a Christian and talked about Christ being my Lord and King, the whole shebang.

Years of concentrated effort - of introspection and research into religious mania, brain disorders producing religious experience, etc, caused me to come back to myself.

Consequently, I also came back into deep depression. The faith I had or thought I had was exciting and new. It gave me a purpose and rejuvenated me. I may have been crazy, but I was happy.

In a way I miss those feelings.

I am sure, Underseer, that some of those Christians who claim to have been atheists are telling the truth.

No doubt there are also those who say it for the reasons you and Dawkins mention (though there's no reason to think Dawkins was right that the three theists he mentions were/are lying about formerly being atheists. He ought to stick to science and put the crystal ball away).

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In my experience it's some stressful life event that causes a person to convert one way or another. Speaking personally it was simply the stresses of life, raising a family, nothing in particular except the ultimate realization that if there was a god my life would not be so challenging, painful, and stressful. And stupid idiocy such as ostensibly witnessing children die because they have original sin.

So I became convinced that gods were not real.

"Atheist" is certainly a religious word. By definition I am certainly atheist but certainly do not consider myself religious.

I have met many people who stated they were once atheists, usually it's an early/late teen thing, kinda like saying they were once virgins.

 

[Underseer]

After thinking about this for a few minutes, I can't recall a single Christian who claimed to have once been an Atheist. There are plenty who became Christians after a fairly short life of not giving it a lot of thought, one way or the other.

You don't talk to many apologists then.

I can only assume that someone out there is telling Christian apologists that this is a good strategy because I run into so many claiming to be ex-atheists.

- - - Updated - - -

This claim will be found in any apologetics debate between any two religions, with vayring degrees of veracity.

I think you have a shaky grasp of mathematics, though. A net loss tells you nothing about how many people have been wandering from one tradition to another, only what the overall ratio has been at the end of it.


Let me help you:

Suppose I have ten apples, and you and a friend both have three oranges. I trade you five apples for two of your oranges. Your friend trades me two oranges for one apple. Then you and your friend trade, with you offering two additional apples for one of his oranges, and one of his apples. Finally, I trade with your friend all of the oranges that I have accumulated, in exchange for three of my apples back.

On average, which of those apples or oranges is an exclusive and dichotomous religious identity that you are thinking about in a very fuzzy fashion?

The net loss doesn't tell you how many, but the statistics do. The rate of change is relatively small in any given year. You have to look at many years together before you see large changes.

If nearly everyone in society was changing from atheist to theist or the reverse, don't you think society would look very different right now?

 

[Underseer]

In my experience it's some stressful life event that causes a person to convert one way or another. Speaking personally it was simply the stresses of life, raising a family, nothing in particular except the ultimate realization that if there was a god my life would not be so challenging, painful, and stressful. And stupid idiocy such as ostensibly witnessing children die because they have original sin.

So I became convinced that gods were not real.

"Atheist" is certainly a religious word. By definition I am certainly atheist but certainly do not consider myself religious.

I have met many people who stated they were once atheists, usually it's an early/late teen thing, kinda like saying they were once virgins.

I've read scores, possibly hundreds of deconversion stories. I'm fascinated by them because I was raised without religion and don't know if I would have had the courage and intellectual honesty to overcome such emotionally-manipulative indoctrination. Thus, I can say with confidence that most deconversions are not caused by some traumatic life event as Christians imagine.

For most ex-Christian atheists, it is the result of a long and difficult attempt to really find out which side has the better arguments. It often involves study of apologetics, the origins of the Bible, Christian theology, etc. In most cases, it's not caused by some traumatic life event: it's caused by an attempt to genuinely know what's true.

A good example is Matt Dillahunty.

He was thinking about becoming a preacher. He had an atheist roommate. He had trouble countering the atheist roommate's arguments. So he set about really studying apologetics so that he could help his atheist friend see the light once and for all. Because he was confident that Christianity was in fact true and because he was expecting to convince an atheist, he made an honest look at the arguments from both sides. After long study, he came to the conclusion that there were no good arguments on the Christian side, and therefore no good reason to find Christianity true.

Many theology schools need to hire crisis counselors to help students keep their faith despite the things they learn about the origins of the Bible.

Sometimes studies cause doubts. In other cases, doubts cause study. Some people might feel their faith starting to slip and take upon a study of the Bible, apologetics, etc. in an attempt to hold on to their faith. It doesn't matter what causes the study, if they are intellectually honest, they find that there are no good arguments on the Christian side and lots of good arguments against.

The main exception is something I call instant deconversion, and it's usually triggered by an incredibly bad argument from one's own side.

Richard Feynman is probably the most famous example. He was reading the scriptures as a child and thought "Wait. If he died alone, why doesn't the story end with his death?" (I don't think it was Moses, but I don't recall who). He asked his rabbi how that particular account could possibly continue to describe events no one else was around to witness. The answer he got was so bad that he became enraged and deconverted on the spot and was an atheist for the rest of his life.

Aron Ra is another example. He started out life as a wishy-washy Mormon. Went through a period of experimenting with Eastern religions, European paganism, etc., before becoming a born-again Christian. He was really, really excited about the whole born-again experience. So he asked the friend who converted him to evangelicalism how he could tell if the things he was feeling were real, or just imagined. That was when the friend used the classic "fake it 'till you make it" argument. He became so angry that his friend would use such a disingenuous argument that he deconverted on the spot and has been an atheist since.

The third example is a prominent Latino-American atheist activist whose name escapes me. There was a long Hangouts discussion Aron Ra had with a bunch of prominent Latino atheist activists. The most recent deconvert explained that he was an Evangelical who was deconverted by the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate on evolution. His girlfriend was losing grip on her faith, particularly on the topic of evolution (evangelicals insist that if you don't believe in creationism, you can't be Christian, which itself causes no small number of deconversions). He assured her that the Ham-Nye debate was coming up and that Ham would convince her creationism was true. The couple watched the debate together, and needless to say he found the creationist position lacking in that debate. Then the debate reached that infamous point "What would it take to change your mind?" Nye answered "evidence," while Ham answered "Nothing." That made him very angry, and he instantly deconverted on the spot.

In every case, anger is involved, but it's not the anger nor some traumatic life experience that causes this. Rather, the rage is caused by someone on your own side making an incredibly bad argument.

 

[skepticalbip]

After thinking about this for a few minutes, I can't recall a single Christian who claimed to have once been an Atheist. There are plenty who became Christians after a fairly short life of not giving it a lot of thought, one way or the other.

Well, I'm sure that there's more than a few. If people are questioning and thinking about theological positions, you're going to have a wide range of things that they go through.

Just so long as they're being honest with themselves about where they are at each stage of their journey, it's all good. Unless they become Mennonites, of course, because those assholes can just wander off and fuck themselves.

There has gotta be a good story behind this. Why specifically the Mennonites? Did one of those Mennonite rape gangs drag your granny off and read scripture to her?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Yes, but she was dressed like a slut and deserved it, so I don’t hold that against them.

My main problem with them is that I’m just an anti-Mennonite bigot.

 

[Politesse]

The net loss doesn't tell you how many, but the statistics do. The rate of change is relatively small in any given year. You have to look at many years together before you see large changes.

Which in and of itself suggests that either

a. Conversions of any kind are rare

or

b. they go both ways, generally balancing each other out over time, but eventually weighted in favor of a certain direction.​

If nearly everyone in society was changing from atheist to theist or the reverse, don't you think society would look very different right now?

I'm sort of curious as to how you think it would look different? Our society is deeply plurireligious, and we see wild momentary fluctuations in religious identity from poll to poll, forming clear trends only in the aggregate. New religious movements (and "cults") are common-place but usually short-lived. The vast majority of surveyable religions exist within extremely small communities, while a handful of traditions with a lot of literal and cultural capital flourish, and support an ecosystem of smaller subcultures.

Personally, that exactly what I would expect from a society with a relatively flexible perspective on religious identity that allowed for occasional changes of identity or affiliation. Many other world systems are less flexible, and identity proves much more rigid and unchanging in those places. A few are more liberalized or just play by different rules, resulting in different kinds of social profiles.

 

[Lion IRC]

It seems like every other Christian that I talk to claims to be a former atheist.

I know right! It's like they're parroting the ex-Christian atheists,

Here's the first problem with that: there can't possibly be that many ex-atheist Christians out there.

Um...you don't think folks can flip Christian/atheist/Christian?

...I run into so many Christians who claim to be ex-Christians, and I know from the statistics that they must either be confused about what an atheist is or lying.

Christians who claim to be ex-Christians. How can they be both?
I think you are the one who is confused.

...the appeal to authority fallacy,

I don't think admitting that you're a flip-flop, convert/deconvert is meant as an appeal to authority. How is telling an atheist that you rejected atheism going to make you seem more appealing to an atheist. That would be the debating equivalent of fat shaming.

Of course, if they were actually former atheists, they would know that...

Yeah, yeah. If they had really been True Atheists they would never...

...because they went through a period of intense study and found that all of the apologetics arguments are bad.

LOL
You know, the verision of God/religion which anti-theist, atheist proselytisers describe to me is one which I would reject too if I were them.

 

[bilby]

Most atheists are ex-Christians and most became ex-Christians precisely because they went through a period of intense study and found that all of the apologetics arguments are bad.

I would dispute this claim. It may be true of most atheists in the USA, but they are far from being the majority amongst the world's atheists.

Most atheists are Western European, and have been atheists for all of their lives - like their parents, and, increasingly, their grandparents. They think of Christianity rarely; When it is proposed to them, they are no more likely to consider converting to it, than they would consider converting to Ancient Greek Polytheism. It comes across as a slightly weird historical oddity - 'Did you know that in grandad's time, most people truly believed that? How weird'.

Being asked to become a Christian is, to such multi-generational atheists, like being asked to become a wizard by a Harry Potter fan - the response is "What, you mean you actually take that story seriously??"

In Western Europe, the Baby-Boomer generation are largely former Christian atheists. Their parents are the last remaining serious Christians, and practically all regular churchgoers (those who attend services other than for Christmas, Easter, or family events) are septuagenarians or older. People born after about 1965 were mostly raised by ex-Christian atheist parents. People born after about 1985 were almost exclusively raised by atheist parents, most of whom were never Christians. People born in Europe this century mostly have no ancestors in the last three generations who have been to a church service other than a wedding or a funeral.

Demographic lag is the only thing keeping traditional Christianity going in Western Europe. In thirty years time, the established churches will have no congregations at all. They already have to import priests (often from Eastern Europe, Africa and the West indies), as all the Western European born priests are retiring.

 

[Opoponax]

It's clearly possible for one to go from being an atheist to being Whatever religion has struck them dumb. I do think that most of these stories come off as grossly disingenuous though.

But I'm a true non-believer. To my mind, the arguments against any god are so convincing, that I would need equally convincing evidence to believe, and I have never found anything close. So when I think of someone like me going back to religion, it simply doesn't compute. Again though, that's just me, and it's not up to me to define the True Atheist.

 

[skepticalbip]

Depends on which European country is examined. Italy and Ireland are mostly religious and have fewer than 15% atheists - fewer than even the U.S.

 

[bilby]

Depends on which European country is examined. Italy and Ireland are mostly religious and have fewer than 15% atheists - fewer than even the U.S.

Sure. But even in Ireland, religion is now collapsing. It just took a bit longer there.

And these countries have a very strong tradition of belonging, despite very weak observance. In 2016 a study by the Italian social research institute Eurispes, 71.1% of Italians described themselves as Catholic, 5 points down from 2010, but only 25.4% described themselves as 'practicing' - ie more than two thirds of the self-described 'Catholics' don't actually go to church except for weddings, funerals, and maybe Christmas and Easter.

Both Ireland and Italy are particularly monocultural, with Roman Catholicism totally dominating, which may explain its slower demise there than in the rest of Western Europe.

 

[Politesse]

Most atheists are Western European, and have been atheists for all of their lives - like their parents, and, increasingly, their grandparents. They think of Christianity rarely; When it is proposed to them, they are no more likely to consider converting to it, than they would consider converting to Ancient Greek Polytheism. It comes across as a slightly weird historical oddity - 'Did you know that in grandad's time, most people truly believed that? How weird'.

I gather you've never met a Hellenic Reconstructionist.

Bit of a dour bunch, for Pagans anyhow.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In my experience it's some stressful life event that causes a person to convert one way or another. Speaking personally it was simply the stresses of life, raising a family, nothing in particular except the ultimate realization that if there was a god my life would not be so challenging, painful, and stressful. And stupid idiocy such as ostensibly witnessing children die because they have original sin.

So I became convinced that gods were not real.

"Atheist" is certainly a religious word. By definition I am certainly atheist but certainly do not consider myself religious.

I have met many people who stated they were once atheists, usually it's an early/late teen thing, kinda like saying they were once virgins.

I've read scores, possibly hundreds of deconversion stories. I'm fascinated by them because I was raised without religion and don't know if I would have had the courage and intellectual honesty to overcome such emotionally-manipulative indoctrination. Thus, I can say with confidence that most deconversions are not caused by some traumatic life event as Christians imagine.

For most ex-Christian atheists, it is the result of a long and difficult attempt to really find out which side has the better arguments. It often involves study of apologetics, the origins of the Bible, Christian theology, etc. In most cases, it's not caused by some traumatic life event: it's caused by an attempt to genuinely know what's true.

When one is immersed in the religious culture and there is no one, absolutely no one else with which to talk or get a reaction that is not negative, it can have an effect. You would not understand or appreciate that because you did not live it. I can still remember meeting my first actual human being who said, "I don't believe in all that stuff," and that did not occur until I was 40 years old.

So for me there was no other community. As a result the change was gradual and didn't really get any speed until a priest made the claim that Jesus rose from the dead and that this was an "historical event." THAT did not compute in my rational brain and led to the final deconversion after much investigation and discussion. It is hardly like Santa where you ask the question and others say, "That's right, Santa is just pretend, we bought the presents." Religion doesn't happen that way when you NEVER experience anyone with that mindset. If it had for me I would have jettisoned religion at age ten.