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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Religious Transformation

Form

  1. Religious conversion produces profound and lasting change: addicts become sober, criminals reform, the despairing find purpose. The testimonies run from Paul on the Damascus road and Augustine in the garden to John Newton, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the stories told at every evangelical service.
  2. Change of this depth and permanence is not produced by argument or willpower; it is best explained by the real action of God in the person.
  3. Therefore God acts in the world, and the religion through which he acts is true. "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:16).

My Positions

  1. Transformation is real, and it happens in every religion and in none. Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists, Buddhists, Marxists, members of cults, and people in secular recovery and therapy all report and display reformed lives. The doctrines are different and incompatible; the change is the same. So the cause is what they share: a new community, structure, accountability, a new identity, hope, and a reason to get up. That is the same explanatory parity that answers the Experiential Argument. If the change proved the doctrine, it would prove all of them, and the apologist rejects all but one.
  2. Where the comparison has been made, the supernatural component adds nothing. Twelve-step programmes work, and the evidence is that they work through social mechanisms, meeting attendance and sponsorship, with no difference between participants who take the "higher power" literally and those who do not. Religious and secular recovery programmes show comparable outcomes. What predicts success is support, not theology.
  3. The change goes both ways. Deconverts describe relief, honesty, a weight lifted, and a new life, in the same words and with the same tears as converts. Ex-Muslims and former Jehovah's Witnesses leave at real cost and report that they have never been happier. If transformation is evidence of the truth of the belief transformed into, it is evidence for atheism exactly as often (Atheism).
  4. The sample is selected. The people who stand up at the service are those for whom it worked. The backslidden are not invited to speak; the converts who became worse (the zealot, the terrorist, the preacher who defrauds his flock) are declared not to have been real converts (Survivorship Bias, No True Scotsman).
  5. A belief that helps is not thereby true. Placebo heals, and the patient's improvement is not evidence that the sugar pill contained medicine (Appeal to Consequences). That religion can be a very effective placebo I grant freely; it is the explanation for its persistence (The human need for religion).
  6. This argument is honest about one thing. It describes the real reason most people believe: not the Kalam Cosmological Argument but the night everything changed. That is a reason to treat the believer gently and to explore the belief with them (Street Epistemology), not a reason to accept the inference.

Sources

  • James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lectures IX–X, "Conversion"
  • Kelly, J. F. et al., "Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder", Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2020)
  • Paloutzian, R. F., "Religious Conversion and Spiritual Transformation", in Paloutzian and Park (eds), Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (2005)
  • Streib, H. et al., Deconversion: Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research (2009)
  • Zuckerman, P., Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (2012)

Also see