Apostates assure us that testimonial evidence is unreliable. You can’t trust the eyewitness testimony preserved in the Gospels. You can’t trust the eyewitnesses to the Resurrection. And so on and so forth.
On the other hand, the very same apostates treat us to deconversion testimonies. Bart Ehrman, Dan Barker, Robert Price, and John Loftus make a big deal about their deconversion testimonies. Ed Babinski edited a book of deconversion testimonies. You have whole websites like ExChristian.net devoted to deconversion testimonies. It’s become a rite of passage in apostate circles–like a hazing ritual.
In these deconversion testimonies, apostates bear witness to their religious upbringing. To their childhood and adolescence. To what they saw and heard. To what they said and did. To what others said and did.
Usually there’s no corroboration. No multiple-attestation. And, of course, their accounts are hardly unbiased. They are using their deconversion testimonies as a polemical tool to rationalize their apostasy.
On the one hand, if the Bible contains testimonial evidence, that’s incredible. Only a credulous believer, with his blind faith, could accept that at face value.
On the other hand, if an apostate gives a detailed account of his religious upbringing, or crisis conversion, along with a blow-by-blow account of what experiences led him to lose his faith, then his claims are entitled to our implicit, unquestioning faith. Just take his word of it.
So this generates an awkward dilemma. If testimonial evidence is good enough for deconversion testimonies, then it’s good enough for Scripture. But if testimonial evidence is unreliable, then we should discount every deconversion testimony we see or read.
Only you would think of this! =)
ReplyDeleteComment has been blocked.
Comment has been blocked.
Comment has been blocked.
Dear Steve, I wonder a bit about the context of what you are calling "testimonial evidence". It feels like a court case, where some dead body is around and everyone is sharing what they have seen and heard as a kind of proof about how the murderer is. But I think that testimonies of those who have left Evangelical Christianity are more about sharing their process, about what doubts they struggled with, what their experience really taught them, what feelings that they might have felt the need to repress because of the pressure from a peer group or an external authority, and what they might have finally learned from their own experience about what is real and what is not real for them. I do not think that people leave Evangelical Christianity because of "evidence" being on trial and found wanting. It is more a complex process than this. It has to do with the heart, getting in touch with how one really feels, and finally owning what feels true from one's own personal experience, and choosing to live this inner truth. The thing is that most of those people got convinced that Evangelical Christianity was true because of some arguments and some experiences. There is a point where the experiences are understood better and the arguments no longer feel as convincing. These people did not suddenly decide to turn against their religion and set about disproving it. They, for whatever reason, already believed and gradually changed their views. The testimonies are relevant, because many are undergoing a similar process of doubting and not being satisfied with the answers that they got. It is more of an outgrowing of something than of switching positions in a debate. Sometimes those who cease to be Evangelicals seem to go through a phase which could be considered a kind of "reverse evangelism" but it does not last. Eventually it is accepted that people have their different journeys and some feel okay with their commitment to their evangelical faith. I can share what I learned from my journey into and out of this club. It may or may not convince anyone. I do not feel a need to convince anyone at all. The word itself "convince" means "with conquest" (same root as "invincible" or not able to be conquered). This feels violent to me. I do not think a deep change comes by this kind of argument, especially when it comes to religious truth. It is something that a person must decide for themselves in their heart of hearts and live. I do feel that this process requires our intelligence, our self examination, and our self honesty. In terms of my own journey, no one ever wrote and said, "Your testimony was proof that convinced me my religion was false." But a few did write and say, "I understand what you went through, my own journey went through a lot of similar places and had a lot of similar doubts." It did make it feel like the process was a natural one. It was good, too, to know you are not alone. I have helped a lot of people move through the process. I could tell they were going through it because they had a stricken look on their faces, a kind of agony, they did not want to feel their doubts. They would have rather just believed, but were increasingly unable to do this. Their own experience was teaching them something different. Sometimes just knowing others had gone through is enough to give one the courage to complete the process. Blessings, Will
ReplyDeleteWill said:
ReplyDelete---
The thing is that most of those people got convinced that Evangelical Christianity was true because of some arguments and some experiences.
---
I gotta disagree with you on this. Most "Christians" (scare quotes on purpose) that I've met have never bothered to examine a single argument about Christianity, nor have they generally-speaking had any religious "experiences" so to speak. They are Christians because of family tradition or some such, which explains why A) they live no differently than the pagan world and B) they "fall away" at the first challenge to their "faith" and then become "experts" used by Loftus & Co. to "debunk" Christianity.
There are very few apostates who could even begin to articulate the Gospel. What you get is, like Ed Babinski (for example), a mix of pseudo-Christian pop culture references and proverbs from Poor Richard's Almanac dressed up as if it were the Bible. That's why atheists nearly always read the Bible more "fundamentalistically" than any Christian does.
The fact is that there are very few people who have actually studied Christianity in-depth who have become apostates (by which I mean they were believers and then fell away, not that they were non-believers to begin with and weren't convinced even after careful study). And indeed, when such Christians do become apostates, it's almost always because of some sort of sin (usually sexual in nature) that they prefer over upholding Christian standards. In other words, the vast majority of apostates are not intellectual students of Christianity, and those few that have actually studied the faith have demonstrable moral failings that they do not wish to repent of (and I should note that many of the non-intellectual apostates ALSO have the same moral failings precipitating their denial of Christianity).