In my last post I examined a portion of an article that attempts to help Christians convert atheists, titled, “How to Persuade an Atheist to Become a Christian.” I also pointed out that the page is a Wiki. As a Wiki, it can be edited by anyone and is, therefore, always subject to change. I should have seen this coming, but it appears that since I linked to the article a number of, presumably, atheists have edited and added to the page in such a way that parts of it read like a satire. For example, these little parenthetical expressions were added in a recent edit:

(however, any atheist who has even poked a toe into the blogosphere can find contrary examples)

(However, some atheists will wonder why God bothers to find you a parking space, help your football team win, or set a twenty-dollar bill in your path when people starve to death every day.)

However, note that natural selection is not random and entropy only applies to closed systems.

However, note that amino acids have been found on meteorites, entropy only deals with closed systems, and oxidation contributes to aging.

Do note that the average atheist is well educated in science. Most can come up with an explanation to pretty much anything.

Obviously these are coming from the keyboard of an atheist.

So, this makes it difficult for me to go through and examine the rest of the article because I don’t quite know what material Christians intended to put in there and what might be added by a non-believer. What I can do is pick out parts that, from my experience, match to some extent how some Christians try and approach convincing non-believers. From the ‘Discussions’ section:

Discuss evidence from your life that you feel shows God’s involvement. Many of these pieces of evidence will likely be interpreted as chance. But you may be able to point to enough of them to make the atheist think again about it.

Having communicated with numerous Christians, some face to face, I have noticed this quite a bit. The idea here is that good things that have happened in the Christian’s life after converting must be evidence of God’s intervention. But that’s just a conjecture – not evidence. We also tend to be highly selective when it comes to our own lives. Christians will speak about all of the good things that happened after accepting Jesus but will not mention the less agreeable parts of their lives that chance dicates happens to all of us. This is a form of the confirmation bias. Christians want to believe that evidence of a transformed life is evidence for God’s existence – so they only look for positive evidence and ignore the parts of their lives that were not transformed or are still unhappy.

Discuss the benefits of Christianity. Discuss how having faith in something larger than natural processes can bring extreme peace. Discuss how the support of the church can help in one’s life. Discuss the good that your church has done recently.

This type of reasoning is also, I find, quite common. The fallacy here is simple, however. The practical benefis of believing in Christianity or of a particular church are not evidence for or against the veracity of Christianity’s central claims.

Discuss how self-awareness, self-development and personality all point to highly organized and purposeful traits — not randomness in our mental processes.

As our atheist editor notes in the current revision of the article, nobody is suggesting that mental processes are random. Evolution is quite capable of building highly complex and organized systems.

Discuss how “natural” scientific processes called entropy and chaos do not normally improve things: so how did life “happen” when nature is about dissolution, oxidation, mineral deposits, poison, corrosion, erosion, rot and breaking down “not” about building up

This is where, again, a little research would help. Anyone with a basic understanding of entropy understands how systems can increase in order and complexity without violating the second law of thermodynamics. Essentially, small decrease in entropy (increase in order) in one place requires a greater increase of entropy (decrease of order) in another place, such that the net change in entropy is still positive (ie, still increasing). Read that again a few times and it will make sense.

Discuss the complexity of life, the universe, and everything in it. Discuss biology, electricity, gravity, etc. Many people are so confused by the detail in life, that they are more apt to believe in an even more complex yet abstract thing, i.e. God, as the creator of life.

That last line appears to have been edited, but you get the picture. Here is my advice: don’t try and discuss these things because you are likely to just embarrass yourself.

That is it for the discussion points. How about present to the atheist real, concrete evidence that a god exists? No? Essentially this guide is all about trying to convince a non-believer despite not having any real, concrete evidence that a god exists. Good luck!

Posted in Atheism, Christianity, Religion

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