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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Many people have taken the route you've described, and their stories are usually the same. They finally found reason (maybe at 8 or 12) and realized all the "obvious, gaping holes and flaws" in Christianity.

But very few people have gone from atheist to Nicene-creed-believing Christian in their adult life, which I did. This seems so backwards, don't you just wonder what their reasoning was? I do.

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Of course I wonder which path you went through, it is the point of this discussion, and for all the rampant no-holds-barred religion bashing HN usually sees, this is still an above-average forum for this kind of discussion.

I would really like to hear about that, with the only rule that neither of us should try and convince anyone else, and all we say is to be taken strictly personally.

I will start by saying that I actually went through the realization that I had no evidence or need for the supernatural about 1 year ago, at 35 and counting, after reading The God Delusion and then starting my own research path across philosophy, theology and science. I feel like I have reached a conclusion, albeit just a personal one.

I was raised somewhere between theist and deist, with only the belief that there is some "God" and if you're good you go to Heaven, otherwise Hell. That was it. Before my digits were yet two, I started reasoning about all of this on my own, and came to my own conclusions on them, which were basically uninformed. In my teenage years, I experimented with atheism and settled on agnosticism.

Just a few years ago in my middle-adulthood, I turned to "God and Jesus" in a desperate attempt to keep sanity during really hard times (my wife and kids and I were in the brink of homelessness, with no job and almost no cash, 9000 miles away from home). I really believed it was a mental coping mechanism, but I didn't care at that point.

Our situation resolved, and I ended up returning back to my agnosticism. But existential panic attacks sent me searching more fervently for an answer. I reached out to a non-denominational (i.e. Protestant) pastor, telling him that I wanted to believe in Christianity, but I couldn't violate my integrity, knowing that it's incompatible with science and history.

He gave me a book called The Reason for God[1] which demonstrated that Christianity doesn't conflict with science, and that the Resurrection of Jesus is historically true and accurate as presented in the Gospels. When I finished reading it, I chose to become a Christian.

Eventually, as I kept researching different denominations, I settled on Catholicism as the most likely to be correct. For other Christians curious how I could come to that conclusion, I would recommend The Catholic Controversy[2] by St. Francis de Sales.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Reason-God-Belief-Skepticism/dp/15...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Catholic-Controversy-Defense-Faith...

How do you "experiment" with atheism? Just saying to yourself "I'm now an atheist" and seeing how that feels? It doesn't sound like you ever had solid rational and empirical reasons for choosing atheism, and indeed that is the only kind of atheist that I've ever heard of turning to the supernatural.

Atheists like me are atheists not because the quality of life it provides, but because there's no empirical evidence that there's any truth to any of the supernatural claims ever made. We understand that faith is a choice of last resort when no other evidence is available, and that faith is a really bad way to come to conclusions. Atheists like me understand our inherent biases, we seek to ask questions in a way that there can be a negative answer. There is no such negating answer to "what would convince me there is no god" and that alone, in the absence of any kind of empirical evidence for the existence of a supernatural entity, should be enough to not be a believer.

The truth is whatever the truth is, and I want to believe reality no matter how it makes me feel. If it feels good to believe in magical things that care about us but those magical things aren't real then I don't want to believe in them.

The litany of Tarski is useful:

If the box contains a diamond,

I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;

If the box does not contain a diamond,

I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;

Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

By "experiment" I mean I started questioning whether or not it was true, debating with my peers about it (either for or against).

I ultimately settled on agnosticism because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If there was a God who chose to never reveal (or even hint at) his existence to humanity, it would be incorrect for a person to be an atheist. Since that's a legitimate possibility, it makes more sense to be agnostic than atheist.

So what evidence did you eventually find to turn to God if it's not a feelings/faith based thing?

If it could be explained in a HN comment, I think there would be many more Christians in the world. That's why there are whole books written on the subject. The only one I still own is The Handbook of Christian Apologetics[1][2] so that's the only one I can recommend.

But it does require some faith, just not blind or unreasoning faith, as most people seem to think.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Christian-Apologetics-Peter-K...

There's no other kind of faith. Faith literally means "belief without evidence."

That's not my definition of faith. But let's not get hung up on semantics and disagreements about definitions.

The point I was making is that there is a good deal of evidence, but it also requires a little belief in something that you can't absolutely prove.

I don't want to debate with you; I've done more than my share of religious debates in my life and no longer find any joy in them. I also completely agree that debating definitions is rarely useful. I will point out, though, that nobody claims to have faith that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that the sky is blue. "Faith" connotes a leap; I understand that as a leap from the evidence to the conclusion, covering a gap that cannot be covered by logical reasoning. It's that leap that I take issue with, regardless of which word you choose to label it with.

You've repeatedly recommended a book of apologetics throughout the thread. If I could make a recommendation in turn: Critique of Religion and Philosophy, by Walter Kaufmann. I think it can give you much to think about, and from a reasonably friendly perspective.

I can't reply to you directly. Why is your faith not blind or unreasoning? Can you give me just one specific example of empirical evidence for God's existence? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm guessing you're going to give me some unverifiable testimony from people who died long ago and expect that to have a person question heaps of contrary empirical evidence. I don't think that works.

And you are resorting to faith because the evidence isn't good enough. The evidence that explain the things that I believe in, like the existence of this computer in front of me, don't require any faith at all.

I've found that you can reply directly by clicking the [link] link, which gives you a reply box.

"The evidence that explain the things that I believe in, like the existence of this computer in front of me, don't require any faith at all."

Not so. You have faith in what your parents told you about the circumstances of your birth. You have no memory of the first year of your life, so it could very well have been made up. But you believe it by faith mixed with reason.

In this case that's not me using faith, that's using a heuristic. A heuristic is a decent substitute for empirical research, but it is not foolproof. We use heuristics to save time. If we had to do empirical research for everything in our lives we would never have time to do anything.

A heuristic is a way to ascertain information quickly. In the case of my birth, there's all kind of evidence to back up my parent's stories including photos, the investment and time spent in raising me. None of this is foolproof evidence, but it's enough to pass my heuristic for this situation. And there are measures I can take to get physical empirical evidence, like a DNA test.

The question of who my parents have can be phrased in this way and have an answer "the people who claim to be my parents are not actually my parents if a DNA test disputes their claims."

Please I encourage you to phrase a question as I have for your belief in God. Something like "I would not believe in God if X were true." Fill in the X.

Following your formula and your DNA example, "I would not believe in God if the New Testament were not true."

That's not right.

Try to the phrase the X with very specific verifiable empirical evidence.

It's a bit ridiculous to make a claim of truth for an entire volume of information. Scientists, for example, don't do this. There are always going to be errors that creep into work. Einstein's has a paper called "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory." Scientists don't say "I would not believe in relativity if Einstein's paper were not true." They give specific evidence. For example, they would say they don't believe in relativity if light from stars didn't bend around the sun. Try something like that.

Here's a good short article on the Resurrection of Jesus[1].

[1]: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12789a.htm

These are all witness accounts from superstitious people who died long ago. Nothing listed is verifiable. This is not good evidence. Witness accounts from dead people should not be enough to discount the mountains of empirical evidence that imply that resurrection after having been dead for three days is not possible.

I disagree. The following document explains my reasoning:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04503a.htm

The explanation given there is sound when it is applied the veracity of historical written records that don't attempt to support the supernatural. It's just about measuring what the more reliable evidence is. Did so and so say such and such to this person and so 500 years ago? Best written records say so, and there are different pieces of records from different people who say so and so we deem it good enough to say it's accurate. That's a totally different ball game than trying to discredit contemporary physical evidence.

You'll find my rebuttal in the books I've mentioned in other comments.

> I'm guessing you're going to give me some unverifiable testimony from people who died long ago and expect that to have a person question heaps of contrary empirical evidence.

Read the related chapter in The Handbook of Christian Apologetics[1] for reasons why the Gospel stories are reliable eyewitness accounts.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Christian-Apologetics-Peter-K...

When it comes to claims that attempt to discount an insurmountable mountain of physical evidence you yourself can verify, there is no such thing as reliable eyewitness accounts, especially not from people who died eons ago. It's obvious you are not applying sound reasoning. Would you say it's sound reasoning to convict a man cleared by DNA tests for murder when there are witness accounts from living people? Think about this maybe. You're applying a wholly uneven standard of importance to one kind of evidence because of faith. And you resort to faith because the evidence is not good enough. You resort to faith because you want to. Given all that we know about the universe, you are clearly making the wrong choice.

I may not convince you, but again, you are exactly what I thought you were, a person who relies on faith to believe in God. Faith is a bad way to come to believe in things. For example Muslims believe Muhammad was the last prophet, Mormons believe Joseph Smith was a prophet. Both rely on faith, but clearly both can not be right. You would not use faith to answer questions in everyday life, because you would not do well.

The book I mentioned refutes this argument you're making. Why don't you read it?

Why don't you provide a short summary. My opinion right now is that if the book claims that things we can physically verify ourselves about the world are wrong because of a handful of dead people it doesn't sound like a very good book.

I can only think of three reasons you're asking me why I believe in Christianity (or Catholicism).

1. You want to learn more about Christianity for yourself to see if its worth believing in.

2. You just want to have a conversation with me.

3. You want to find my reasoning so you can tear it down and show me how I'm wrong.

I don't believe #3 is true, as I believe you're a better person than that. And I don't see why you'd be particularly interested in doing #2. In which case, you probably just want to learn more about it.

Since you probably just want to learn more about it, I think you'll find that those books contain all the same answers I could give, and they do a much better job of it than I could.

But I just don't have the time to devote to rewriting them in the form of HN comments. I'd rather spend my Saturday reading the Julia documentation (so awesome) and playing with my kids and teaching my son programming.

I'm not trying to do anything malicious but intentions are irrelevant when it comes to truth. It's either right or wrong. If someone really had a good reason for believing in God I'd like to know about it. I am also interested in atheists who later turn to God because I don't comprehend how such a thing is possible unless they were never rigorous in their scepticism or had some kind of terrible psychological trauma. The latter is known to ruin minds. For example starvation makes people irrational about eating, war, giving birth, etc all have psychological effects that can't be reasoned away.

Anyway thanks for answering my questions. Enjoy your weekend.

wrong questions you two banging heads for. Before you go for the ultimate, first, pin down a thing (anything) thats not changing (what, why, how, ...until all questions satisfy you/logically-subside). Atleast you will have a REAL thing to anchor/pivot from. As they say, reality(atheist's synonym for god) is real. God is reality. Real reality is not changing; get your mind established on it, the wisdom unfolds.

I think the conversation went fine.

I should also point out that, after my initial conversion to Christianity, "how I feel about it" is basically not a factor in what I believe.

There are many times when I felt miserable and strongly wished I wasn't a Christian anymore. But I couldn't just choose to disbelieve in something that my research had convinced me was objectively true.

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