Although it has been on the web for awhile, I am responding to your October 2002 essay, “My Conversion from Christianity”.  I gather from it that you have debated Christian apologists almost exclusively.   

If your debates are driven by wanting to free up the minds of people mislead, I would expect that any form of belief except atheism would be open for debate.  Perhaps your motivation is different from what I surmise and if so, feel free to explain. 

I'm more interested in my mind than in other people's minds. I'm just a guy who believes that ideas are important and who is always looking to trade in his ideas for better ones. I'm not shy about sharing and testing and defending the best ideas I've found, and that leads me to debate people who disagree with my ideas. Christianity is the most important alternative worldview to humanistic naturalism, and so it is the focus of my debates comparing worldviews.

I believe that your motivation for arriving at atheism is sincere, as is mine for Christianity.  In becoming a Christian a decade ago, I was not interested (and am still not interested) in believing in Christ merely for the sake of believing or taking out a “fire insurance” policy.  I am only interested in belief because the evidence for it is decisively preponderant.

 

From childhood to age 34, I had pretended to believe, living a veneer of nominal Christianity.  But in my early 30s, I began really immersing myself into the considerable circumstantial evidence for the Resurrection and Ascension; and delving into plausibility and consistency between Old and New Testaments.  These things I continue to do to this day.  But it was on August 23, 1994, that I surrendered my will to Christ. 

It's odd that you describe a judgment about evidence as involving a surrendering of your will. Whenever I've changed my mind about a body of evidence, I've considered it an act of will, not an abdication of will.

I confess that, even up to that date, I had not wanted to do so.  But the evidence of His life, the weakness of my own morality, and the presence of internal conflict convinced me that there is one God, one Christ His only begotten Son; and one Holy Spirit which has been particularly active since Pentecost.  

It's also odd that you would consider your own personal moral weakness or internal conflictedness to be evidence about the divine status of a carpenter who lived 2000 years ago in the rural outback of a peripheral province of a regional empire.

Note that surrendering your will to this carpenter may help you avoid certain questions of morality, but it can't answer them.  For the questions, see e.g.   http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/WhatIfGodQuit.html. For the reasons why revelation cannot answer them, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_Dilemma.

I heard no bells that I could point to as a distinctive reminder of such a watershed event.  However, I recall while crying in my car that a calm voice told me inside my head that “the angels in heaven were singing.”

 

My deepest condolences on the loss of your son Blake three years ago.  I recall the loss of my father in a drowning 30 years ago.  Just last year, on July 25, 2003, I thought that I would lose my wife and two sons as their vehicle was struck head-on by a tractor trailer cab. 

 

Fortunately, the MRIs made necessary by the severity of the crash revealed Arnold Chiari malformation in the brain of my 5-year old, which were surgically treated before the symptoms could have killed him or severely hampered his life.  That same night of the accident, while in the emergency room, my father-in-law prayed that this same son’s fractured arm clearly visible in x-rays be healed.  As other x-rays views were taken beyond the first, gone was any evidence of a break. 

 

The impact from the accident caused my 8-year old son’s left eye to cross inward toward his nose.  Doctors believed it might have been from a congenital problem that my son had been able to compensate for until the accident made compensation impossible.  On October 10, about 2 and one half months after the accident, my wife and son prayed while I was out of town that his eye be fully healed.  The next day there was no sign whatsoever of the crossing inward.  We have school photographs of his single crossed eye, as well as photographs since the healing.  I would be happy to send some if you like.

 

My wife suffered a collapsed lung upon impact.  She recalls almost passing through something like a gossamer veil before she heard a gasping sound (her own) as she began breathing again with the good lung.  Like my two boys, her recovery, except for occasional dizziness, has been complete and for that, I praise God.

 

At first I was mad at Him after the accident but life and faith are funny things, Brian.  In a short time, I came to see this tragic event as a way of increasing the faith of my sons, wife, father-in-law, and myself, as well as my reliance upon Him.  In essence, I believe that He took two severe but not readily detectable health problems in my two boys, the brain and eye defects, and used an accident to enable doctors to identify them, healing one through physicians and the other through miracle.  The attendant break of my sons’ arm he also healed by miracle through the prayer of my father-in-law.

 

I do hope that this message finds you and your family well. 

It does, and thank you for your remembrance of Blake. My reactions to your account are as follows.

First, I don't have enough information to evaluate the medical improbability of an eye going uncrossed from a car accident, or of the indications of a fracture disappearing from X-rays taken at an unspecified interval. I don't need to see the before pictures of the crossed eye, but I'd love for you to show before and after X-rays of the fracture to a skeptical radiologist. If the evidence is as you've described it, I would think that a miracle documented by X-rays would have already come to my attention via the news media.

Second, even if you had experienced events that had a verified degree of medical improbability, the next thing to ask about is the poker-hand effect. Improbable events can happen, or else they would be impossible events. Nobody emails me to tell me about medically probable events, so I would need to analyze the size of the relevant set of events from which yours can be considered a random sample. I've heard it calculated that every airline crash probably has one or more people who foresaw it in a dream, and I don't doubt that almost every improbable but favorable medical outcome was prayed for. When the prayers go unanswered, we don't hear about it.

Third, even if the improbability were shown to be unexpected, I don't see how a one such anecdote can constitute strong evidence singling out the Christian version of Yahweh as the cause. Was it specifically prayed that no god(s) should help your family unless it's Yahweh acting in the person of Christ?  The data here seem to radically underdetermine your conclusion.

Fourth, even if the event could be connected to the god of the scriptures you happen to have been raised to believe in, doesn't that mean we can connect improbable unfavorable outcomes to a lack of prayer to your god(s)?  My parents prayed for Blake in his hour of need. Were their prayers phrased incorrectly? Were they overruled by my not praying? (You implied that you didn't join in the praying for the eye-uncrossing miracle.) Was Blake punished for my disbelief?  I don't take Blake's death as evidence either way on this matter, but to be consistent it seems you must -- even though any way you take it only hurts your case.

Fifth, even if you could explain away the non-power of prayer to your god in most other similar situations, why would a benevolent omniscient omnipotent deity choose this course of action in yours?  If Yahweh didn't want the crossed eye or brain defect or broken arm to happen, he could have just caused them never to have happened in the first place. Even if Yahweh really wanted to "increase" the faith of a handful of people through personalized miracles, I can think of lots of less painful and more convincing ways he could have done it. (I also question the morality of Yahweh wanting to increase your "reliance" on him, but that could just be your misinterpretation of his motivation.)

Sixth, even if Yahweh did some custom miracles to increase the faith of a handful of people in your family, why doesn't he plan such custom miracles for everybody?  If you believe in the eternal torment of Hell (which fewer and fewer Christian apologists have the stomach to defend), then how can Yahweh treat people so unevenly when the stakes are so high?  Note that if you deny that the treatment is uneven, and that we all have miracles we could notice if we tried, then that completely negates the weight of your anecdote.

I hope you understand how the above considerations deprive your account of any evidential weight for me. In my view, the crucial evidence is still the historical evidence, and it points decisively toward a naturalistic explanation: http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Christianity.html.

Brian