Luke is really being too humble here. Clearly the events up to the atheist realization happened in the first 15 minutes of his existence, given a reasonable allowance for all the sources he read for his articles.
Are there also lots of "undramatic" people like me? Every one of these personal stories I see involves sadness, epiphany, that sort of thing, but is that publication bias or am I unusual?
I think it has to do with the "leaving the tribe" aspect more than anything. Those of us who became devout in one of the more serious religions (that is, religions that view everyone else as a spectrum from "good but deeply flawed" to "hellbound") had that religion encompass most of our social world, and so in order to leave it we had to face the prospect of ostracism from all the people we cared about. The evolutionary pressures to never get ostracized make for a lot of subconscious bias to fight, and a pretty dramatic tale.
If your conversion was undramatic, therefore, I conjecture that you didn't have lots of friends or family who might have abandoned you if you stopped being religious.
I've been an atheist for about a year now, but I still haven't "come out" of the atheist closet with my parents yet. They are southern baptist, and I know it will devastate them - my mom especially.
My own break with Christianity was a light switch moment (more like turning out the last light before leaving the place for good kind of light switch moment) that happened while I was watching the Discovery Channel, of all things. I'd been raised with the hard-line young earth, all-evidence-for-evolution-is-fabricated, fire and brimstone style belief. My faith had been eroding for almost a decade as I tried to rationalize the existence of God, but it didn't really click until I saw a bunch of little Japanese Mudskippers crawling around in the mud with their elongated fins, the very picture of an evolutionary transition species that I had been taught since I was kid could not exist. I just thought "Well, that's it then. I can't honestly believe Christianity any more can I?" I think I actually let out a sigh at some point, but that may just be my mind filling in details for dramatic effect.
Really, my true belief had been gone since probably some time in high school. That was just the last straw that forced me to give up my belief in belief. Sort of like finally letting go of the rope, expecting to fall to your death, and discovering you were only a few inches from solid ground after all.
So I decided I should try to find out who Jesus actually was. I began to study the Historical Jesus. What I learned, even when reading Christian scholars, shocked me.
"Whoso wishes to grasp God with his intellect becomes an atheist." — Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf
It seems you abandoned Christianity for the right reasons. Few are those whose disbelief is the result of extensive studies and advanced knowledge, I'm certainly not one of them.
Though I like Shane Legg's formal explanation, it's not very kind to people without mathematical inclinations. I think starting with Eliezer's post on Occam's Razor and Solomonoff Induction would be a much gentler introduction.
Well, we know that spontaneous remissions on cancers do occur, very rarely, but they do occur. One of the hypothesis is that the immune system finally learns to attack the cancer. With the huge number of people who, faced with a disease that scientific medicine doesn't know how to cure, go to prayer or healers, it's not surprising that, statistically, a few spontaneous remissions do happen just after such a visit. Especially considering the placebo effect, and the non-negligeable links between the efficiency of the immune system and the mental state (it's well known that stress diminish the efficiency of the immune system).
What would be meaningful is not a single case of unexplained spontaneous healing. It's a significant, reproducible, higher-than-placebo, increase in survival rate by a given healer (or a set of healers using a given faith). And that is, as far as I know, not backed by any study (or if it is, please show me the link).
It's a significant, reproducible, higher-than-placebo, increase in survival rate by a given healer (or a set of healers using a given faith). And that is, as far as I know, not backed by any study (or if it is, please show me the link).
That said, if you get the placebo effect from going to a faith healer, do it.
When I read these stories, I always feel guilty. I became non-theist. I simply stopped believing in it; there was no grappling with theological or historical issues, I just stopped believing. A bit flipped one day and I've never been able to believe since; I can't even conceptually access my pre-flip self.
Sometimes I wonder, though, if my version isn't more true. Everyone else could also be subject to the flip but seek to rationalize it. Later I went through many attempts to "find religion" but couldn't. I can't help but womder if lukeprog's research wasn't a similar process of post-flip grappling rather than it's source.
Eventually I realized that millions of people have lived lives of incredible meaning, morality, and happiness without gods. I soon realized I could be more happy and moral without God than I ever was with him.
You sort of glossed over this, but it seems like the bit that a lot of people have trouble with (and have trouble realizing that it's even possible). There are lots of arguments for this position, but I'm just curious if there were any particular things that were "Aha" moments for you here.
ETA: Do you think you could have come to this pos...
Very interesting story. Since I'm born in an atheist family and never believed in God, I lack any similar experience, and somehow, I regret it, because that experience must definitely be of a great help to change your mind about other topics. The closest experience I have to this is the Santa Claus thing, but I was such a young child that I only have confuse memory about how I started to doubt. But the process looks similar : there is nice Santa Claus person that gives me present, I start to doubt it's real and feel bad because I don't want the "magic...
How do we know that designing a better intelligence is not an exponentially difficult task ?
Well, the answer could simply be, "you're right; we don't know that". However, I think there is evidence that an ultraintelligent machine could make itself very intelligent indeed.
The human mind, though better at reasoning than anything else that currently exists, still has a multitude of flaws. We can't symbolically reason at even a millionth the speed of a $15 cell phone (and even if we could, there are still unanswered questions about how to reason), and our intuition is loaded with biases. If you could eliminate all human flaws, you would end up with something more intelligent than the most intelligent human that has ever lived.
Also, I could be mistaken, but I think people who study rationality and mathematics (among other things?) tend to report increasing marginal utility: once they understand a concept, it becomes easier to understand other concepts. A machine capable of understanding trillions of concepts might be able to learn new ones very easily compared to a human.
If you could eliminate all human flaws, you would end up with...
You might end up with nothing. You really have to start over and build an inference machine vastly different from ours.
Would you credit your upbringing with giving you the fervour and energy you now bring to studying rationality? Possibly also the virtue of scholarship? (I don't mean to suggest anything negative by this; just that you attack problems in a very methodical way that surely requires great feats of willpower and I wonder what the source of that is.)
This is such a feel-good tale for atheists. Growing up as one of three Jewish kids in a predominantly Catholic town, I've always known my parent's beliefs are not everyone else's parents beliefs. I think that's made it much, much easier to discard them. When you're placed outside the norm to begin with, it doesn't hurt to switch to a different outside-the-norm belief. But, it wasn't like that for you, and for that I applaud you even more.
Lukeprog: how has this transition affected your relationship with your parents, siblings, and extended family? Have any readers had similar transitions later in life, with spouse and children?
lukeprog - I'm curious about when you 'felt the presence of God'. I'll often have a discussion with someone and they tell me that they can 'feel God' (usually followed by accusing me of being an atheist because I don't want to feel Him.)
While you were a believer, what did it feel like to feel God's presence? What did the tingling feel like (followed by sweating) with the Holy Spirit? Now that you are not a believer, how do you explain what you were feeling back then?
It's an area I would like to comment on when speaking with theists, but I have no frame of reference. I grew up religion-neutral, and became an atheist to find out 'what this whole God thing was about'.
I wonder how much similarity there is, on psychological level (and in terms of the process of deconversion), between religious belief and belief in the Mighty Status Quo that would Deliver Us From Harm...
What is belief in the Mighty Status Quo? Are there people who truly have faith in the status quo like there are some that truly have faith in their religion? (Or do you mean belief in belief in the status quo / religion?)
Well written and thought out. Thanks for sharing. I have a very similar story, for me it has meant a dramatic difference in the way that I approach life. Before my rejection of faith, I was plagued by a feeling of impending doom. I carried the world on my shoulders as if the fate of all these "souls" relied upon my efforts. I was continually depressed and struggling with negative emotions and thoughts. It turns out it can be rather upsetting and extremely difficult for a person who thinks and asks questions to maintain a relationship with a being...
Great article, and by the way, I have been listening to episode after episode of your very interesting podcast for a few days now.
A worry about theism/atheism... thinking and writing about that question is indeed worthwhile, for the sake of helping confused people relinquish their confusion. However, it seems to me that there is a point at which it becomes flat-out epistemically dangerous, in the sense that a person writing and thinking about X all the time, even as a critic of X, is going to have their thinking inadvertently shaped by X. One sees this wit...
Highly agree. My current approach when talking to theists is not to mention atheism at all. I just talk about science and rationality and sociology and so on. If you know enough science and can overcome a few cognitive biases when you're told about them in vivid ways, then theism starts to look ridiculous even when I don't explicitly mention theism. That's a theory, anyway - I haven't tested it carefully.
Luke, I've only just stumbled upon it, and this story is damn near heartbreaking - not in a bad way, no. I've never experienced the entire memeplex of theism from the inside, yet, having found myself bitterly envying the comfort of organized religion during unpleasant times in my life, I feel like I understand what it must've been like for you emotionally.
I must admit that my opinion of your judgment and moral character, shaken by that controversial dating advice post of yours, has now much improved.
This seems to have disappeared from the discussions page? Perhaps some kind of clash between:
Edit: When checking main one must check the 'new' tab.
Warning: sappy personal anecdotes ahead! See also Eliezer's Coming of Age story, SarahC's Reflections on rationality a year out, and Alicorn's Polyhacking.
On January 11, 2007, at age 21, I finally whispered to myself: There is no God.
I felt the world collapse beneath me. I'd been raised to believe that God was necessary for meaning, morality, and purpose. My skin felt cold and my tongue felt like cardboard. This was the beginning of the darkest part of my life, but the seed of my later happiness.
I grew up in Cambridge, Minnesota — a town of 5,000 people and 22 Christian churches (at the time). My father was (and still is) pastor of a small church. My mother volunteered to support Christian missionaries around the world.
I went to church and Bible study every week. I prayed often and earnestly. For 12 years I attended a Christian school that taught Bible classes and creationism. I played in worship bands. As a teenager I made trips to China and England to tell the godless heathens there about Jesus. I witnessed miraculous healings unexplained by medical science.
And I felt the presence of God. Sometimes I would tingle and sweat with the Holy Spirit. Other times I felt led by God to give money to a certain cause, or to pay someone a specific compliment, or to walk to the cross at the front of my church and bow before it during a worship service.
Around age 19 I got depressed. But then I read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, a manual for how to fall in love with God so that following his ways is not a burden but a natural and painless product of loving God. And one day I saw a leaf twirling in the wind and it was so beautiful — like the twirling plastic bag in American Beauty — that I had an epiphany. I realized that everything in nature was a gift from God to me. Grass, lakes, trees, sunsets — all these were gifts of beauty from my Savior to me. That's how I fell in love with God, and he delivered me from my depression.
I moved to Minneapolis for college and was attracted to a Christian group led by Mark van Steenwyk. Mark’s small group of well-educated Jesus-followers are 'missional' Christians: they think that loving and serving others in the way of Jesus is more important than doctrinal truth. That resonated with me, and we lived it out with the poor immigrants of Minneapolis.
By this time I had little interest in church structure or doctrinal disputes. I just wanted to be like Jesus to a lost and hurting world. So I decided I should try to find out who Jesus actually was. I began to study the Historical Jesus.
What I learned, even when reading Christian scholars, shocked me. The gospels were written decades after Jesus' death, by non-eyewitnesses. They are riddled with contradictions, legends, and known lies. Jesus and Paul disagreed on many core issues. And how could I accept miracle claims about Jesus when I outright rejected other ancient miracle claims as superstitious nonsense?
These discoveries scared me. It was not what I had wanted to learn. But now I had to know the truth. I studied the Historical Jesus, the history of Christianity, the Bible, theology, and the philosophy of religion. Almost everything I read — even the books written by conservative Christians — gave me more reason to doubt, not less. What preachers had taught me from the pulpit was not what they had learned in seminary. My discovery of the difference had just the effect on me that conservative Bible scholar Daniel B. Wallace predicted:
The intentional dumbing down of the church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ.
I started to panic. I felt like my best friend — my source of purpose and happiness and comfort — was dying. And worse, I was killing him. If only I could have faith! If only I could unlearn all these things and just believe. I cried out with the words from Mark 9:24, "Lord, help my unbelief!"
I tried. For every atheist book I read, I read five books by the very best Christian philosophers. But the atheists made plain, simple sense, and the Christian philosophers were lost in a fog of big words that tried to hide the weakness of their arguments.
I did everything I could to keep my faith. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t force myself to believe what I knew wasn’t true. So I finally let myself whisper the horrifying truth out loud: There is no God.
I told my dad, and he said I had been led astray because I was arrogant to think I could get to truth by studying — I was "relying too much on my own strength." Humbled and encouraged, I started a new quest to find God. I wrote on my blog:
I’ve been humbled. I was “doing discipleship” in my own strength, because I thought I was smart enough and disciplined enough. [Now] having surrendered my prideful and independent ways to him, I can see how my weakness is God’s strength.
I’ve repented. I was deceived because I did not let the Spirit lead me into truth. Now I ask for God’s guidance in all quests for knowledge and wisdom.
I feel like I’ve been born again, again.
It didn’t last. Every time I reached out for some reason — any reason — to believe, God simply wasn’t there. I tried to believe despite the evidence, but I couldn’t believe a lie. Not anymore.
No matter how much I missed him, I couldn’t bring Jesus back to life.
Eventually I realized that millions of people have lived lives of incredible meaning, morality, and happiness without gods. I soon realized I could be more happy and moral without God than I ever was with him.
In many ways, I regret wasting more than 20 years of my life on Christianity, but there are a few things of value I took from my life as an evangelical Christian. I know what it’s like to be a true believer. I know what it’s like to fall in love with God and serve him with all my heart. I know what’s it like to experience his presence. I know what it’s like to isolate one part of my life from reason or evidence, and I know what it’s like to think that is a virtue. I know what it’s like to be confused by the Trinity, the failure of prayers, or Biblical contradictions but to genuinely embrace them as the mystery of God. I know what it’s like to believe God is so far beyond human reason that we can’t understand him, but at the same time to fiercely believe I know the details of how he wants us to behave.
I can talk to believers with understanding. I've experienced God the same way they have.
Perhaps more important, I have a visceral knowledge that I can experience something personally, and be confident of it, and be completely wrong about it. I also have a gut understanding of how wonderful it can be to just say "oops" already and change your mind.
I suspect this is why it was so easy for me, a bit later, to quickly change my mind about free will, about metaethics, about political libertarianism, and about many other things. It was also why I became so interested in the cognitive science of how our beliefs can get so screwy, which eventually led me to Less Wrong, where I finally encountered that famous paragraph by I.J. Good:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
I remember reading that paragraph and immediately thinking something like: Woah. Umm... yeah... woah. That... yeah, that's probably true. But that's crazy because... that changes fricking everything.
So I thought about it for a week, and looked up the counterarguments, and concluded that given my current understanding, an intelligence explosion was nearly inevitable (conditional on a basic continued progress of science) and that everything else I could spend my life working on was trivial by comparison.
So I mostly stopped blogging about philosophy of religion, read through all of Less Wrong, studied more cognitive science and AI, quit my job in L.A., and moved to Berkeley to become a visiting fellow with Singularity Institute.
My move to Berkeley was a bit like the common tale of the smartest kid in a small town going to Harvard and finding out that he's no longer the smartest person in the room. In L.A., I didn't know anyone as devoted as I was to applying the cognitive science of rationality and cognitive biases to my thinking habits (at least, not until I attended a few Less Wrong meetups shortly before moving to Berkeley). But in Berkeley, I suddenly found myself among the least mature rationalists in my social world.
There is a large and noticeable difference between my level of rationality and the level of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Carl Shulman, Anna Salamon, and several others. Every week I learn new rationality techniques. Friends help me uncover cached beliefs about economics, politics, and utilitarianism. I've begun to use the language of anti-rationalization and Bayesian updates in everyday conversation. In L.A. I had become complacent because my level of rationality looked relatively impressive to me. Now I can see how far above my level humans can go.
I still have a lot to learn, and many habits to improve. Living in a community with rationalist norms is a great way to do those things. But a 4-year journey from evangelical Christian missionary to Singularity Institute researcher writing about rationality and Friendly AI is... not too shabby, I suppose.
And that's why I'm glad some people are writing about atheism and the basics of rationality. Without them, I'd probably still be living for Jesus.