I just converted to Catholicism. Here's my story.

The announcement

Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord. And he established the Catholic Church. I’m not kidding. I just converted to Catholicism. Well, actually, Joe, you’re just a revert, so that’s technically misleading. My dude, conversion is a change of heart and mind. And that just happened.

For those of you who don’t know me, shame on you. I’m Joe Schmid. I’m a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton University, and I’ve been an agnostic and public critic of theism and Catholicism for quite some time. But earlier this year, that all changed. So today I’m just going to share my personal journey. If you want my hours-long comprehensive case for Catholicism, stay tuned. That’s coming very soon.

Growing up Catholic, and the first wobble

I grew up in a devout Catholic household. I went to private Catholic school from kindergarten through 12th grade. I frequented the sacraments. I prayed all the time. I was totally into Catholicism. Everything was smooth sailing in my faith. In fact, I was really devout until maybe around 7th or 8th grade, when I had the first wobble.

In 7th or 8th grade, my Catholic school taught us evolution. And thankfully, Catholics are totally down with science, so they said: yeah, we can teach you guys evolution, there’s so much scientific evidence for it, and it’s totally compatible with Catholicism. But it did cause me to start wondering how I mesh this with my commitments concerning Adam and Eve in Genesis. How do I make sense of that?

That wobble didn’t last too long, because I came across the work of people like Francis Collins and the BioLogos Institute defending theistic evolution. And I also started appreciating that Genesis, although there are historical elements to it, has a genre that is something like mythopoetry, with theological and historical aspects sprinkled in. And so I was like: okay, I can see accepting evolution together with what Catholicism teaches about Genesis and human origins.

Losing the faith: evolutionary animal suffering

But then, nearing the end of ninth grade, I really started reflecting further on the evolutionary process, and in particular I reflected on the brutality of it. I mean, for hundreds of millions of years animals were just ripping each other to shreds, suffering and languishing. And it was just so hard for me to mesh that with belief in an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God. This problem of evolutionary animal suffering just gnawed at me for quite some time. It really bothered me.

And one thing led to another, and soon enough I was voraciously consuming debates and content online concerning theism versus atheism and Christianity versus non-Christianity. I was watching William Lane Craig debates and watching the new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Those dirty new atheists, right? That was a joke, okay? Karma, karma.

After some time, the problems for theism and Christianity just kept mounting and mounting, and eventually I lost my faith. That happened sometime around 10th grade. I came to conclude that atheism is true, so God does not exist. And I also thought that naturalism is true, so at bottom the world is fundamentally indifferent. There’s no fundamental purpose, there’s no fundamental mindedness. At bottom, as Richard Dawkins says, it’s just blind, pitiless indifference. The natural world is all that there is. At the time, I thought that that was just the best explanation of the data.

Josh Rasmussen and the return to agnosticism

But then, in the summer before senior year, I stumbled across this YouTube channel called Worldview Design. And I was just captivated. I started watching these videos, and I was like: whoa, these are some new arguments for theism that I’ve never come across. And the host behind the channel was just super loving, but also incredibly intellectually rigorous and sophisticated. So I binge-watched all his videos, and whoa, they just opened my eyes to this new world of academic theist philosophy.

The person behind the channel, as I came to discover, was Dr. Josh Rasmussen. He’s a Christian philosopher. And at the time he was publishing a book with Alexander Pruss called Necessary Existence, defending all these new and interesting contingency arguments for God’s existence. And he was just popularizing and publicizing that cutting edge work in his videos.

And so, after I’d been watching these videos I was like: whoa, there’s way more to theism than I thought. There are all these new and interesting arguments that seem really forceful to my mind. But hey, I still got some objections. So I reached out to this mysterious person whom I didn’t know at the time. I was like: dear Dr. Rasmussen, I’ve recently been binge-watching your videos, and I have some objections, can you help me? And so then we just had this extensive email correspondence going all throughout my senior year.

And eventually I was like: yeah, there just is a lot more going for theism than I thought. And also, just being introduced by a professional philosopher who knew a lot more than me, who was just utterly mogging me intellectually, revealed to me that I think I’d prematurely judged the question of whether God exists. And so, as a result of coming across these new arguments and dialoguing with Josh, I was like: okay, I can no longer maintain my confident naturalism. I think I should suspend judgment on the question of whether God exists. So I should neither believe that God exists nor disbelieve. And the evidence at the time just seemed to me maybe roughly counterbalanced. Maybe it’s difficult to tell which way the evidence points. But as a result of all this, I became a kind of settled agnostic, maybe somewhere around the end of 12th grade. And that state of agnosticism just stably persisted all the way up until grad school.

Grad school and the meta-argument for theism

But somewhere around the end of my first year of grad school, or maybe the beginning of my second year, things started to change a bit. I started coming across these new and interesting arguments for theism that seemed to me pretty forceful. And I also started losing some objections that I previously had to theistic arguments that I thought failed. So, over the course of my first one or two years in grad school, I started leaning towards theism.

I started seeing theism, the view that the fundamental nature of reality is just pure limitless perfection, that there’s this perfect being at the foundation of reality with every perfection to an unlimited extent, as a relatively simple, coherent, non-arbitrary, elegant hypothesis. And not just that, but a hypothesis that offers a unifying explanation of a vast and diverse array of otherwise highly striking data. Data that other hypotheses either have to explain piecemeal, or do a very poor job at explaining, or have to take as brute facts. And so this kind of meta argument for theism, that on the one hand it seems to be a relatively simple, elegant, coherent, non-arbitrary hypothesis, and on the other hand it provides this wonderfully unifying explanation of a vast and diverse array of pretty strikingly fortunate data, made me start leaning towards theism.

The data, stacked

And what data are we talking about? Well, there’s too much to explain, and I explained it all in significant depth in my comprehensive case for Catholicism that’s coming out very soon. But just to give you a glimpse into some of the data that really started pulling on me: I already had in the background a decently high confidence that there’s some kind of necessary foundation to reality, some kind of ultimate reality that could not have failed to exist. And I at least leaned toward that view on the basis of the various contingency arguments that I mentioned earlier on from Alexander Pruss and Josh Rasmussen and various other philosophers like Rob Koons. So I already had that in the background, and then the question was: well, what is this being? Maybe let’s examine the character of its effect.

And when we look at the character of its effect, it’s just utterly saturated with extremely fortunate coincidences that had to happen just right for basically anything interesting or valuable to occur in the world. So it’s striking to begin with that there are any laws of physics at all. But let’s suppose there are. Even then, it’s pretty surprising that those laws of physics have constants that have life-permitting ranges to begin with. I mean, after all, we can imagine hordes of different laws, many of which are much simpler than the laws that we actually have, which would preclude basically anything interesting or valuable happening. Basically, like, it is a law that there’s a single particle which just vibes for all of eternity. I couldn’t get anything interesting or particularly valuable in such a world. Instead, the law structures that we have are at least compatible with life.

And not only that, but these law structures, the form of these laws, contain certain constants or fixed values. And those fixed values need to fall within exceedingly narrow ranges in order for life, or basically anything interesting, to develop. So we sort of hit the complete cosmic jackpot there. And then, even then, we weren’t done. In addition to that, the laws of nature actually match the contents of the universe so as to result in temporal evolution.

And then, even when you get temporal evolution, it’s surprising that conscious subjects evolve, because we can imagine a world which is physically just like ours, but where consciousness doesn’t exist. And so it’s actually quite striking that consciousness exists. And not only does consciousness exist, but it’s paired up very fortuitously with the physical world. Our mental lives are strikingly orderly and coherent and intelligible and rational given our physical states, functioning, and behavior. And if you think about the vast horde of conceivable ways of pairing up conscious states with physical states, only an exceedingly tiny portion of those actually lead to consciousness-involving goods like rational agency and meaningful relationships and virtue and enjoyment and aesthetic experience and so on.

And then we have moral knowledge, and it’s really difficult to see how that could be the case under naturalism, because the moral facts don’t explain our moral judgments under naturalism. And then we also have a priori knowledge, and that a bunch of different people are experiencing God, they have religious experiences, and then beauty is just saturating the world. And so I was just reflecting on all these different pieces of data and all the coincidences that I’d have to stack one on top of another in order to remain an atheist, and that was just getting difficult.

The barrier that remained

But I still didn’t go all the way to theism. Why? Well, because I had all these barriers to theism. I had the problem of evil and various other difficulties and arguments against theism that pulled on my mind, and those still just seemed so strong to me.

The evidence for miracles

But then, in my second year of grad school, I started coming across overwhelming evidence for miraculous phenomena. It started with certain people making videos about Our Lady of Zeitoun, this apparition atop a Coptic Orthodox church that literally hundreds of thousands of people saw, in addition to tons of medically documented healing miracles associated with it.

Another thing that kick-started my journey here was that my friend Cameron Bertuzzi was interviewing a bunch of different professional psychiatrists and deliverance ministers and exorcists and various other people who are on the periphery of deliverance ministry, concerning demonic phenomena and manifestations that they’ve witnessed with their own eyes. And here we’re talking about super recent phenomena, in totally perceptually conducive circumstances, with sane people, sometimes in the context of multiple or even dozens of witnesses, things that it seems like it’s really hard to be mistaken about, complex multimodal experiences where the temperature of the room would just instantaneously drop to freezing, such that the person can literally see their breath, and then become scorching hot, such that everyone in the room just starts sweating. People testifying to things like: a few days ago I literally saw with my own eyes, and multiple people present also saw it and they told me afterwards, multiple things just flying across the room of their own accord, and various other instantaneous supernatural changes in facial structure or eyes, and things like levitation.

And I didn’t actually believe these things for the longest time. I thought it was pretty implausible. But Cameron just kept pushing me. He was like: Joe, watch this video, what’s your explanation of this person’s testimony? And I’d give these flailing, implausible naturalistic explanations concerning which I have no independent evidence, and basically I’m having to divine from the armchair that these people are just lying straight through their teeth, and then also that all the other deliverance ministers are in on it, and these various psychiatrists are in on it, and then also that the people who testified to some of these phenomena are just mistaken, and then dozens of other things. I was starting to shift in my seat. I was starting to become uncomfortable.

The caliber of the evidence

And that was just the first of my worries. Because over the course of my second and third year of grad school, I was just utterly inundated with overwhelming evidence for miraculous phenomena. And the caliber of evidence that we’re talking about here is not like “oh, I prayed and my headache got better.” It’s like: okay, Susie, I’m glad your headache got better, but I’m not quite sure that’s a miracle. Instead, we’re talking videos, photographs, blinded laboratory analyses, x-rays, you name it, we got it.

We’ve got blinded laboratory analyses saying: yeah, this is suffering myocardial tissue. And what’s that doing in a host that a Catholic priest just prayed over? If you see that, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do when you see that? It’s like: oh, no.

And for some of these healing miracles, we’ve got documentation of complete, instantaneous, permanent remission of advanced multiple sclerosis, in combination with an uncollapsed lung, redefinition of calf muscles, and instantaneous removal of blindness, at the same time. All in connection, by the way, with a religious experience of a booming voice saying: get up, my child, and walk. That’s the level of evidence that we’re talking about.

And for some of the canonization healing miracles, for which medical documentation is required, we’ve got pictures of the dude beforehand with his severe bilateral congenital clubfoot. We have pictures from his childhood where you can see them. We have testimonies from all of his friends and his teachers to the effect that he’d always have to walk on the sides of his ankles. And we’ve got pictures of him throughout childhood with that. And then he prays to one of these Catholic saints. And afterwards, both of his legs are straight and completely healed. It’s like: okay, this is insane. And we’ve got x-rays afterwards and pictures afterwards. Okay, what’s going on here?

And then you just go through all these other cases and it’s just insane, and I just can’t believe the conspiracy that I would have to posit in order to explain them all away. “It just seems like the universe was conspiring to make it look like God exists.”

Miracles with Catholic vindicatory implications

God is performing certain miracles. And not just miracles, but miracles that seem to vindicate distinctive Catholic doctrines. You’ve got, for instance, very well evidenced Eucharistic miracles. You’ve got extremely well evidenced Marian apparitions like Fatima and Lourdes and Zeitoun, where Mary is granting requests for conversion to Catholicism. She’s saying: get the Holy Father to consecrate Russia, outside of his jurisdiction, by the way, to my Immaculate Heart. Thereby vindicating the Immaculate Conception, which only Catholics dogmatize. And of course she’s granting petitions to convert people to Catholicism. She’s telling people to pray the rosary, thereby advancing a devotion which of course meditates on mysteries like the Assumption and the Coronation of Mary. And of course, it’s Mary herself, the Mother of God, appearing to people. It’s just shot through with Catholic vindicatory implications. And there are all sorts of reasons why naturalistic explanations aren’t good and why demonic explanations aren’t good.

And that’s just Fatima. At Lourdes, you’ve got Mary telling St. Bernadette Soubirous, “Je suis l’Immaculée Conception”. She’s literally saying to St. Bernadette, “I am the Immaculate Conception”. I mean, how much clearer could you possibly get? And then God just goes out of his way to perform the most unprecedented string of concentrated, medically documented healing miracles in all of history at Lourdes. It’s just insane.

And God’s also going out of his way on multiple occasions, on multiple different continents, and in multiple different centuries, to make sure that when a Catholic priest, and it only seems to be Catholic priests, prays over some bread, it turns, and there’s suffering myocardial tissue afterwards. And we’ve got scientific documentation of this in blinded laboratories, with blinded scientists who look at these things. And we also have the pictures of them that we can compare. You can even ask AI to look at the pictures and it’s like: oh yeah, this seems like musculoskeletal or some kind of muscular tissue. And of course, the miracle at hand simulates precisely the ontological change that Catholics believe in.

Padre Pio and the decision

And there are so many other things that I’m leaving out, but finally, in February of this year, I sit down with Ethan Muse for like four hours to talk about the overwhelming evidence behind Saint Padre Pio’s mystical charisms. We have doctors who issue reports immediately afterwards, describing in tremendous detail their observations. One of them is like: yeah, he literally palpated his hands and his feet, and I felt a palpable void in between his hands, and it was separated by thin membranes on both sides. And another doctor on an earlier occasion was like: yeah, I examined it and there was a complete hole going through his entire hand, such that I could literally read things on the other side of the hand if I put his hand up against it.

And then he has these for like five decades long, with a bunch of other people seeing them. We have pictures of them. We have videos of them. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people saw these over the course of those 50 years. And then we’ve got pictures on the day of his death where he has no scars, despite having deep wounds for five decades. And of course, the etiology and the character of these wounds is totally incompatible with various naturalistic explanations that you might proffer.

And then that’s just the stigmata. And then we’ve got so many medically documented healing miracles with him, involving the regeneration of eyes, and also this odor of sanctity, where sometimes it would come in waves, this massive beautiful fragrance that would fill rooms, and it would stay with some of his relics for years on end. And also dozens of times doctors are taking his temperature and it’s giving naturalistically inexplicable readings. On one of the occasions a doctor has a mercury thermometer, takes his temperature under his armpit with a mercury thermometer, and it literally shatters. So then they get a professional bath thermometer and then take his temperature with it, and then it reads 125 degrees. I mean, all your organs would just utterly fail at that point.

I could go on and on, and there are lots of reasons why all of these have Catholic distinctive vindicatory implications, where “it seems like God is going out of his way to put his stamp of approval on distinctive Catholic doctrines”. My broader point is that over the course of my second and third year of grad school, I just started getting inundated with evidence for miracles, firstly, but also miracles that seem to vindicate distinctively Catholic doctrines.

And not just that, but just as theism offered this wonderfully unifying explanation of a vast and diverse array of otherwise pretty striking and coincidental data, I started to see Catholicism in the same light. It started to seem to me that Catholicism just unifyingly explains all this miraculous evidence, the pattern of miracles, the individual miracles, and then it also would make it not particularly surprising that I might be going systematically astray with respect to some of my moral intuitions, or some of my intuitions against hell, or various other things like that. So I started to see Catholicism in much the same way that I saw theism.

Of course, I still had lots of objections to Catholicism. It was so hard to get through all of them. I had objections to hell, and I had objections to the Bible, and I had objections to the moral teachings of the church, and I had magisterial objections and whatnot. But over the course of those two or so years, I just started looking into the objections further, and they just started to wane. So, in addition to reading theology and philosophy and magisteriology, I watched lots of YouTube videos. But also I would just sit down for hours on end with my good friend Ethan Muse, and we would go back and forth on these various objections. And for the most part, he was just systematically coming out on top. So I was like: oh man, what’s going on here? And his responses to my objections were actually quite powerful.

Ultimately it was the four-hour conversation with Ethan Muse on Padre Pio that convinced me intellectually that Catholicism is true. I just said to myself: listen, I can’t imagine, if I died right now and I saw Christ, I can’t imagine having to tell him what I’d have to tell him by my lights as a non-Catholic. “I was just not willing to bet my soul on just like not only a single conspiracy, but just like a conspiracy of conspiracies” conspiring to make it look as though Catholicism is true. And so, the day after that call with Ethan Muse, I did my examination of conscience covering a decade of my life away from the faith. And then the following day, I did my general confession. Praise God.

The change of heart: Saint Maria Goretti

Now, I’ve been giving you the intellectual side of the story, but any conversion not only has intellectual elements, it has personal elements, spiritual elements. Because conversion is not just a change of mind. Conversion is a change of heart. And so, what helped me change my heart? Ultimately it was God. But what changed?

Well, it started with Saint Maria Goretti. I watched this video produced by Gabby After Hours on the story of Saint Maria Goretti. Long story short, she’s this 11-year-old girl whose 20-year-old neighbor takes an impure liking to her. And one day this 20-year-old neighbor, Alessandro Serenelli, comes up to her and says: unless you do what I want you to do, I’m going to kill you. And he’s got this long, sharp object that he’s pointing at her. And she says: no, I’m going to remain pure. And so he stabs her. Ultimately, 14 times.

On her deathbed, the next day, she’s rushed to the hospital. Somehow she survived this, even though he thought he had finished the job. On her deathbed, she’s offering up all of her suffering for the salvation of souls. She’s enduring it patiently, not complaining. And she also says: I forgive Alessandro Serenelli, and I want him with me in paradise.

Alessandro Serenelli is caught. He’s brought to prison. And he’s just this ragingly hateful man. He’s blaming her. He’s full of resentment. He’s being violent with his other inmates. But then, one night, he has a dream. And in that dream, Saint Maria Goretti appears to him. And hands him, one by one, 14 white lilies. Which he, of course, rightly interprets as her forgiving him for each of the 14 times he stabbed her. He wakes up a completely changed man. He calls in a priest. He confesses to having murdered Saint Maria Goretti. And he radically transforms his life, to the point that now there’s a cause for his canonization.

When I reflected on this story, I was like: this is such a profound and beautiful story of radical forgiveness, radical love, radical purity. And it’s like, listen, whatever she’s on, I want some of that. And so this was one step along the path of instilling within me a kind of magnetic attraction to Catholicism. The same thing happened with Saint Maximilian Kolbe. And of course I was already quite affected by the figure of Christ in the Gospels. He speaks with this authority. He’s preaching radical love of neighbor, radical forgiveness, radical self-sacrifice. And that was already quite attractive to me. But the stories of some of these saints, and there are lots of others too, like St. Damien of Molokai, really influenced me.

The call to sainthood and the change of heart

And then in addition to that, I had these quasi-religious experiences where I’d just be sitting in the gym and I would just feel, almost in waves, this sense: “you could be a saint, you could be a saint”. I didn’t actually hear a voice in my head, but I knew that somehow was what’s being communicated to me. I just felt this palpable call to sainthood. And then, as I said, it almost came in waves. And at the same time I was being convicted of my sin. I was just seeing the manifold ways in which I seriously fall short of how I’m supposed to live.

And so God was here just launching a full-frontal assault on me to get me converted. He’s just putting all these overwhelmingly beautiful and inspiring saint stories on my radar. He’s making them have a significant impact on me. He’s giving me these quasi-religious experiences, calling me to sainthood. He’s giving me this weird, almost indescribable magnetic attraction to Catholicism. And his frontal assault succeeded in changing my heart.

At some point in every conversion, someone goes from that reaction that I said earlier, like “oh, no, there’s so much evidence for Catholicism, oh my gosh”, where you look at the miracles and then you get this cognitive dissonance, to “oh man, this is so wonderful, this is so beautiful”. You have a change of heart. And so God effected that within me. And so it was the combination of the head factors and the heart factors that ultimately culminated in that general confession. God is good. So good. Don’t write off who you take to be even the hardest of sinners, because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.

Plans for the channel

Now, I said at the beginning of the video that I’ve got some cool things to share. So one of those is a new channel intro. I don’t know, I love it. My friend Juan put it together. Thank you, Juan.

And then there are a few other very cool things coming up. On Monday, my in-person interview with Matt Fradd is coming out. And then, throughout the rest of next week, there are lots of other mysterious in-person interviews that are going to come out that I’m not going to talk about right now.

Here are some plans for the channel going forward. I’m planning to occasionally produce general philosophy content. There will be a major change though: the major shift is that I’m planning to focus on arguing for Catholicism and theism going forward. I’ll be going through everything I went through in this video in much more depth. It will take a lot of time, but I want to essentially create and compile together the best series of videos in history on arguments for God’s existence and Catholicism. I can’t promise it, but I’d like to do it.

So first I’d like to start with arguments for theism, then systematically respond to arguments for atheism, then comb through the miraculous case for Catholicism, comb through the non-miraculous arguments for Catholicism, respond extensively to all the objections to Catholicism issuing from atheists and generic theists and Protestants and Orthodox, etc. I want to develop an extensive body of videos criticizing other religions. Again, this is all just a dream of mine. I’d like to do that, and we will see where the Lord takes me.

Debates and discussions will be continuing. And I also just ask for patience. Things are getting very busy. And I also ask for your prayers. Know that I will be praying for you. And also, stay tuned very soon for my many-hours-long comprehensive case for Catholicism. I think you’re really going to enjoy it. That’s going to be on my channel.

Our time together has unfortunately come to an end. That’s my conversion story. It’s ultimately a love story. And I hope it’s the beginning of a similar love story on your end. Praise God.