An Atheist Deconversion: A.S.A. Jones

Brian Holtz    written Jan 2003. Updated Mar 2005.

[Jone's responses to this analysis are answered here.]

A.S.A. Jones' story of conversion from atheism to Christianity makes her a possible member of a rare species: an atheist having long-term experience with both side's arguments who later converted to Christianity purely because of comparing those arguments. Jones' initial conversion to atheism was unremarkable:

I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ and God was never mentioned. [.. B]y the time I was thirteen, I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth. [..]
Jones asserts that she "ended up knowing the Bible inside and out just to be able to debate against it", that she had read "several atheist philosophers", and that "anti-Christian arguments" became an important "diversion" in her life. Jones may have been familiar with anti-Christian arguments, but she seems to have lacked the philosophical knowledge necessary to anchor those arguments.
In the absence of a religious belief to answer life's questions, I turned [..] to science.
Jones' mistake is a common one: as she found out later, life's most important questions are the domain not of science, but of philosophy.
Science had done nothing to answer the questions that raged in my head. Why should I care? How much should I care? Should I care at all? What is my purpose in life? Is there a purpose? How can I love people? Should I love people? Which people should I love? How can I forgive people? Should I forgive people? Have I done what is right? Have I done what is wrong? Is there a right or a wrong?
These questions are all in the domain of axiology (philosophy of value), and can all be given reasonable answers without reference to any god(s).
I turned to philosophy. I started with Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". [..]  I tried several other atheist philosophers who tried to assign meaning to a life created by chance and I decided that they were all full of crap.
Sartre's philosophy, like most Continental philosophy, indeed contains much nonsense. Elsewhere (iidg.org, 2003-06-20), Jones was asked what other "serious philosophers" she had read:

When I was an atheist, I did read books written by those who disagreed with me. I thought that most of these books, written by Christian authors, were a bunch of baloney, with the exception of those written by William Lane Craig. I have kept my admiration for him. As a Christian, I have read books that present views contrary to my faith. The last ones I can recall are as follows: A book by Clarence Darrow which was the equivalent of Norman Geisler's "Why I am a Christian". I consider both as mediocre. Paul Davies, whom I enjoy very much as an author, but with whom I disagree. Paul Kurtz, who put me to sleep every night for 2 weeks as I tried to find motivation to complete reading his book. And the 3 stooges, whom I find completely lacking in any substance of profound thought, Michael Martin, Dan Barker and Carl Sagan. The one atheist philosopher whom I continue to admire is Nietzsche, although I have tremendous respect for Peter Singer.

It's hilarious that Jones can put Martin in a list with Barker and Sagan as "serious philosophers", and can taint Singer by mentioning him in the same breath as Nietzshe.  It would be significant if she had read Martin or Kurtz before she committed to Christianity, but she strongly implies here that she hadn't.
If our life is the result of randomness and chance, it is meaningless, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
"Life is meaningless" is a vague statement. Life indeed has no completely-objective purpose or meaning, but it simply does not follow that all proposed purposes or meanings in life are of equal (or no) value.  Jones' philosophical investigations seem to have been misguided.
I set out to take advantage of moral relativism and effectively destroyed any of my remaining conscience.
This comment suggests the possibility that Jones professed atheism not just as a rational conclusion but perhaps also as an excuse for immoral behavior.
I was secretly envious of the morons who seemed blissfully unaware of their own meaninglessness.
[..]
It wasn't that the information available to me had changed, but that my perception had changed [..]
In conjunction, these two separate admissions suggest that Jones' conversion to Christianity may have been excessively motivated by emotional dissatisfaction with what she believed were the rational implications of atheism.
The worst idiots were the Christians. I hated them [..] Their pretentiousness sickened me [..]
It seems likely that Jones' hatred (and apparent guilt over it) had a confounding influence on her choice of beliefs.
Did they so desperately want there to be a God that they had deluded themselves into thinking that there was one? It was New Year's Day, 1998. I made a resolution to read the entire Bible again, only this time I was going to read it as I would poetry or fiction, and not as a proposal of fact.
In the months that followed, I kept my resolution and I began noticing a change in my way of interpreting the Bible. Intellectually, I found that my mind could logically accept two very different interpretations of almost everything I was reading. One interpretation of any verse or passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense.
Jones' resolution to "make sense" of "nonsense" by reading the Bible as "poetry or fiction, and not as a proposal of fact" gives us little reason not to think that she herself "so desperately want[ed] there to be a God that [she] had deluded [herself] into thinking that there was one".
What was I doing when I condemned this god for commanding Moses to kill? Was I arrogantly making my morality superior to that of the being who allegedly authored all of morality?
Instead of reading Sartre, Jones should have investigated the well-known problems with the Divine Command Theory that she here assumes. The standard criticism is that either 1) God's morality is arbitrary and thus not superior to anyone else's, or 2) God's morality can be evaluated according to principles that are independent of God and thus available for use by non-theists.  Jones' other writings on theodicy show that she continues to lack even the most basic grounding in the philosophical literature on this subject.
Was I condemning the actions of an entire nation, which was trapped in a kill or be killed situation?
If Yahweh is omnipotent, then he is obviously not "trapped" in a situation in which his chosen people need to slaughter captive boys and rape captive women to "carry out the Lord's vengeance" [Num 31]. An omnipotent Yahweh could have just willed the desired state of affairs into existence.
What was it in me that wanted to express outrage at Jesus Christ for telling me that I had to give away everything to be considered worthy to follow him? Was it my own selfishness?
The facile communitarianism and asceticism of Jesus is childishly naive and indicates basic ignorance of  how human relations must be arranged to maximize material well-being. (Wasn't it God's "selfishness" when he in Acts 5 strikes dead the Christian convert couple for not donating enough to Peter? Was it Christian charity that led Peter in Acts 5:9 to taunt the woman that she is to die momentarily?)
It was the truth about human nature and our efforts to rise above it! It was the truth about human spirit being led by divine spirit! It was the truth about each of us, imperfect in our love for one another, needing to be made complete by the perfect love of God!
The "truth about human nature and our efforts to rise above it" are of course the obvious foundation for any value system, including the one I assert. "Human spirit" (whatever that is) can lead itself, and there is simply no credible evidence for the existence of "divine spirit". As for "perfect love", Jones must be thinking of some other god than the barbaric Yahweh of the Old Testament or the Jesus who threatens eternal hellfire.
my own view of moral relativism did not permit a logical defense of the concept of evil.
[..]
The moment I was made aware of my despicable nature, I realized that Jesus had died for me. [..] this man was able to see the horrible nature present in all of humanity. [..] I became aware of my soul and how dirty it was when the light of Christ fell upon it.
If Jones the atheist had utterly no sense of morality, then by what standard did she judge her "nature" to be "despicable" and "horrible" and "dirty"? It sounds as though Jones' prior moral relativism was not as rationally justifiable as she thought, since it obviously was in conflict with her objective human nature as a cooperative social primate. This conflict seems to have created strong feelings of guilt, which she mistakenly took as evidence that her metaphysics was wrong.
In a very real sense, my sinful nature had caused the death of an innocent man. I never believed in hell prior to this, but one of my first thoughts, after seeing how hellish a person that I was, was that I deserved to be in it.
Atheist Jones indeed had a maladaptive morality, but there is (obviously) no human so evil as to deserve eternal torment.
I no longer saw people as a sum of their components or this life as a meaningless exercise, but I now saw both as something more valid than my rational thought had allowed.
The qualification is crucial: Jone's own brand of "rational thought" may not have allowed this perspective, but there is nothing inherently irrational in it.
I had spent most of my years examining life, crouched over and focused on the microscope of logic, incapable of seeing the Big Picture that was going on around me.
Indeed. Philosophy is by definition the "biggest picture", and there is little evidence here that Jones saw its best canvases.
For me, Biblical truth wasn't verified through historical accuracy, inerrancy or reliability of the Gospels, because my initial assumptions didn't include these things. I saw divine inspiration in the actual content of the words attributed to Jesus Christ.
Apparently Jones converted to Christianity because she thinks the few thousand recorded words of Jesus could only have been thusly arranged in print by divine guidance.
The fact that I, or anyone, was capable of understanding spiritual matters became my evidence for the soul.
Jones is surely aware (at some level) of the obvious psychological and neurophysiological explanations for why humans have "spiritual" experiences, so her statement here is presumably an inaccurate summary of her actual "evidence for the soul".
My anti-Christian arguments became my ultimate diversion to a hopeless life
[..]
I have given myself to Him because I am thankful for that which He has given me and hopeful for that which He has promised.
There is a faint hint in the conjunction of these two statements that something like Pascal's fallacious wager played a (perhaps subconscious) role in Jones' conversion. But Jones would probably say her hope was purely a consequence of her conversion rather than a cause.
 
Elsewhere on her site, Jones writes:

the moment that I understood the gospel, I not only realized that I deserved to be in Hell, but that I was currently residing there!

My mind was geared toward the material and the negative;  There were times prior to my conversion that I couldn't fathom handling next week!

I considered death to be final, an end to suffering, but also an admission to the futility of life, and I found myself eagerly anticipating the grave. [..] My atheistic philosophy had failed me. It had sucked all of the life out of my existence

I was psychologically weak. I had no integrity, no enthusiasm for life. But because of my weakness, I was broken by adversity. I was too weak to have faith in myself because I had failed miserably. In my acknowledged weakness, I turned to Christ and I was made strong through Him.

It was because of atheism that I reached a logical conclusion that allowed me to lose my compassion for other people.

No logical argument convinced me of Biblical truths. These are truths that one has to experience and no amount of talk will be an adequate substitute for that revelation. [iidb.org, 2003-06-21]

After asserting that life is meaningless for the atheist, Jones says

The above is not a demonstration of God's existence through an appeal to consequence. In reality, we do think our lives have meaning. We do think that we should all be treated equally, and we do think of some people as special. We do believe in a right and a wrong, even though we may disagree over what is right and wrong. We see all of these matters as realities, yet atheism does not allow us to logically maintain these beliefs as real. God becomes a better model for reality as we know it, than atheism.

Despite her initial protestation, it's clear from Jones' conversion story that her deconversion from atheism to Christianity was motivated primarily by consequentialism. Indeed, Jones seems to say that her initial atheism was itself chosen not for any superior truth-value, but rather because it was easier to defend:

I thought that God belief was illogical and indefensible. Atheism was a safer, but not necessarily more truthful intellectual viewpoint.

Thus Jones' conversion was confounded by at least non-rational factors 7 (emotional dissatisfaction with the logical implications of atheism) and 12 (desire to reform one's morality or behavior), probably 13 (desire for hope in divine reward), and possibly 9 (though nowhere on her site does she elaborate on the "adversity" that "broke" her). Thus she cannot count as an atheist having long-term experience with both sides' arguments who later converted to Christianity primarily because of comparing those arguments.