¶1So that section of the internet that happens to be interested in the debate about theism and atheism has been all lit up with the news of a young man named Joe Schmidt who just announced that he's converted or maybe reverted back to the Catholic faith after years of fairly rigorous atheism and agnosticism. Now, I'll admit I I wasn't familiar with him prior to the announcement which is not a dig at him or anything. It's just because I'm not nearly as plugged in to the scene online as I probably should be given at least my professional interests, but I was quickly overwhelmed with how many people were drawing attention to this news and also how many people were denouncing it as either fake or a consequence of intellectual or psychological weakness on Joe's part. >> [singing] >> Now, I'll say that not every, let's say, antagonistic response to the video was little more than a cheap shot, but I I did see enough of that that I thought it would be worth discussing the backlash. The overarching theme seemed to be that Joe's reasons didn't appear to be intellectually honest and and therefore he must be doing this out of emotional weakness or or just a fake conversion.
¶2Now, I want to go through and address a couple specific claims to this effect, but the first thing I found myself asking while while listening to these responses was why why do you care so much? Like this gets leveled at Christianity all the time. Why do you care if someone wants to be another gender? Why do you care if two people of the same sex want to get married and and live monogamously together? It doesn't affect you.
¶3So why do you get so upset about it? Well, unlike those things which actually do affect our culture and society quite a bit since marriage is a public institution and whether or not someone is actually a man or a woman has significant impact on how we organize and reproduce ourselves as a society, someone converting to a partic- particular religion actually doesn't affect you at all. So, why get so stirred up? Why why seethe and sneer online about it? Personally attacking him or attributing false or weak motives to him.
¶4You might say, "Well, he's influential and he's leading people astray by his bad reasoning or his bad example." But, if I were an atheist like like a famous philosopher like A.J. Ayer, then I'd have no business definitively saying someone did something wrong and it ought to be corrected. Ayer famously argued that saying someone acted wrongly in something like stealing money says nothing beyond the fact that he stole because right and wrong merely convey the speaker's own feelings about it. In other words, all we have are the facts that do in fact occur. There's no point in talking about what ought to happen and to try to impose that standard on the rest of the world because that standard is nothing more than your own personal feelings on the matter.
¶5And why should your feelings be given any more weight than anyone else's personal feelings? And Ayer wasn't alone in that. Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell basically argued the same thing saying there's no such thing as moral facts. The events are real, but your perception about whether the events should have occurred or not has no bearing on reality, which means Joe's feelings are just as valid as your feelings. So, again, why do you care enough to try to correct the affair?
¶6To go through all the trouble of denouncing his decision online. If I were an atheist or or especially an agnostic, I'd have absolutely no grounds to try to impose my feelings or desires about the world on anyone else or to try to persuade other people to adopt them as if my feelings were somehow more valid than than someone else's. You might as well insist everyone should prefer chocolate to vanilla because you do, which is insane. But, we what we saw this week was a lot of atheists and even agnostics who clearly do care and think it's wrong and worthy of criticism, which is largely what I personally experienced when I converted to the Catholic Church. I had a lot of friends and family attempt to to convince me of otherwise, to try to talk me out of it.
¶7And when that failed, they moved on to more punitive measures like excluding me from their social circles and events, which is crazy because just about any other personal decision like choosing a major at school or choosing a career path or choosing a pet would never have drawn that kind of consequence from people who had been my friends from the time we could barely walk. Or even if I had chosen a different religion like if I had decided to become a Muslim or a Sikh or a Buddhist, they probably wouldn't have cared at all. In fact, I I'm being serious about this. If I had started studying Buddhism at like a local temple, they probably would have thought it was super cool like I was training to become something like Neo from The Matrix. But Catholic Christianity, no, sorry.
¶8That's That's a bridge too far. At the end of the day, Christianity is the most hated and I would add unfairly hated religion in the world. It's the reason why Christians are the most politically persecuted minority in the entire world. Which Either way, the last time I said that, people were like, "The largest religion in the world isn't a minority." Well, actually, yes. Unless your group is composed of the majority of people in the world, which isn't the same as the largest religion, then yes, you're a minority.
¶9And secondly, it's a well-documented statistical fact that Christians are the most persecuted in the world. And the fact that so many people insist on denying it just goes to show uh how sympathetic they are towards that hatred. So, let's talk about what some of those critiques that were leveled at Joe were. Um and I don't want to draw attention to to one of the videos I watched because I don't want to give them more views, but I will share two of the most popular comments that seemed to catch capture the mood and the sentiment in the room if you will. So, this was the second most popular comment which says, "Hmm, I'm intrigued.
¶10Oh, he was raised Catholic? I'm no longer intrigued." So, if we can steel man this sentiment here cuz it's not really an argument, it's something like "If he were intellectually honest, he wouldn't just immediately return to the creed his parents professed and tried to raise him in. That reeks of of laziness and and compromised motives. And sure, that's one possible reason for why someone would do what he did, but it's the furthest thing from a logical conclusion about it. And and in the form of an argument, it's actually a textbook genetic fallacy which is a logical logical error in which someone rejects an argument or claim based on its origin rather than its logical merit.
¶11So, in this case they're saying none of his arguments for Catholicism are worth considering because he was raised Catholic." That's an embarrassingly bad argument and it's a fallacy for a reason. But in their defense, it's it's actually a very common one. C.S. Lewis gave this specific version of the genetic fallacy the name Bulverism, which is the habit of attributing motive to someone for why they believe what they believe and then dismissing what they believe without ever having to engage with the substance of their arguments or their claims. So, they entirely avoid the arguments and embrace a non sequitur which is that based on very little information, they can read that person's mind and know what their internal motives are.
¶12All I need to do is watch a few minutes of a video of you online and from that, I can psychologize your every motive and thereby presume to know why those motives have have overtaken your better critical judgment. It's hard to believe that people actually find that persuasive, but if you recognize it, you you start to see it just everywhere. And what's more, he's already published hours and hours of content giving his logical reasons for drawing this conclusion. To just wave all of that off because you think you can read minds and motives is a wild wild rash judgment. It would be like a farmer who studies how colors respond to sunlight.
¶13So, he he decides to paint his barn red because it reflects more light and thus protects the structure better. And then, when he tells his farmer friends why he did that, they all just say, "Oh, you only did that because red's your favorite color." >> [snorts] >> Now, even if red is his favorite color, it doesn't disprove his conclusion. But anyone dismissing him on those grounds would be a fool for doing so. Or what if I said the Edmonton Oilers are going to be the best team in the NHL this year? You might say, "Well, you're only saying that because you're from Edmonton." And it's true, I do live in Edmonton.
¶14But just because I live in Edmonton doesn't prove that my statement is false. If you want to disprove that claim, you have to try a little harder than that. You have to at least make an actual argument for why they're not. Maybe maybe showing how some other team is the best or or highlight something critically flawed in the Oilers roster or strategy. So, that was the second most popular comment.
¶15The most popular comment said this, quote, "I'm impressed how he's thoroughly examined every religion and every denomination of every religion and realized that the one he was indoctrinated into as a child is the best fit for him." Now, this this is a variation of the earlier argument, but it adds on this idea that for your choice of religion to be reasonable, you have to thoroughly examine every possible alternative theory and religion. Otherwise, you can't claim this was an intellectual decision. So, if I can abstract that into a like a general argument, it would be something like this. It's unreasonable to choose any particular option unless you've critically exhausted every possible alternative option. Put in those terms, I wonder if most people who hit on or who hit like on that comment would still agree.
¶16Because at the end of the day, nobody ever chooses based on that standard of proof. So, you'd have to either conclude that nobody has ever made a rational choice or that such exhaustive examination is an unnecessary standard for rational choice. It would be like one of your friends saying, "You know, I've been together with my girlfriend for a few years now. She's shown herself to be trustworthy, committed, stable, joyful, good for me and and really a capable partner. So, I've decided I'm going to propose to her." And you say, "Well, hold on.
¶17Have Have you taken a serious look at every possible other woman who might be interested in dating you yet? Because if you haven't, this is a completely unreasonable decision. It seems like you're just motivated by convenience here." Now, which person in that exchange seems more reasonable? I hope you would say the romantic, the bridegroom. Okay, so how about this then?
¶18I need a new car. And I found one within budget, that fits all my needs, and I happen to like it. Would that be reasonable if I bought it? Or is it unreasonable to make that choice until I've tested and examined every possible option within my budget? That's not a reasonable standard for making a choice, and nobody lives their lives like that.
¶19So, to impose it on the question of religion betrays a glaring double standard. Now, you might say, "Well, choosing a religion isn't the same as a car." That's true. All analogies will have some measure of distinction between them. That's what makes it an analogy. But if I find myself convinced by the central claims of Christianity, like the resurrection of Jesus, then I don't need to disprove every other religion that exists or or every possible other religion.
¶20This is how everyone arrives at the truth. Truth isn't assessed by disqualifying every possible wrong answer. It's based on finding the right answer. To prove that 2 + 2 = 4, I don't have to disprove every possible wrong answer, in part because that would actually be impossible. To conclude that a particular person is the culprit in a crime, I don't have to prove everyone else is innocent, just that the evidence to charge him is sufficient.
¶21But I'll also say that when skeptics use this line of argumentation, they they seem to have it in their mind that there are tens of thousands of gods and religions out there that should be weighed against any particular claim of religious supremacy. >> [gasps] >> But that demonstrates a serious ignorance of the spectrum of religion that actually exists. Because you you can categorize the various options into fairly small subsets of possibilities, like pantheism, polytheism, monotheism, dualism, etc. At which point the differences within those categories are only nominal. And once you do that, you're really only between a handful.
¶22And it isn't really hard to break them down from that point. Another extremely helpful clue comes in the fact that truth unites. The truth is always a whole of which the various possible errors are some fragment who have a share of. Again, look at an order of operations math question. The correct answer will have steps that are shared by many of the wrong answers.
¶23But the wrong answers will have less and less in common with the other wrong answers. On the most fundamental question of our origin, our purpose, our relationship to higher being, Catholic Christianity has something in common with all those various options that the atheist tries to highlight as a rival to Christianity. But in reality, it's the atheist who's the furthest from all those other options. Where they affirm the supernatural and the existence of a higher power and ideas like the afterlife, the atheist It "On this most fundamental question, everyone else is wrong and only I am right." What's beautiful about Catholic Christianity is how much you get glimpses of it all in all the other alternative faith traditions. Atheism has no such common ground with anyone who isn't an atheist.
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