What christians get right about deconversion

I've been following Christian theologian and apologist Randal Rauser's interview series with apologist John Marriott on his book about deconversion and how to prevent it. 

There is quite a lot I'd like to say on the topic, at least in critique of why John's (and purportedly Randal's) solutions are ultimately not good reasons for someone to remain a Christian; but that's not my aim today. 

Here I want to offer some agreement with their assessment of deconversions and one key area of why they happen that they touched on in their final post in the series.

The idea is that of plausibility structures and how Christians need to maintain a plausibility structure through the use of their churches.

Grieving as an Atheist

This post is about grieving as an atheist and the complications caused by doing that while also having to interact with Christians and Christian beliefs.  My father was undergoing cancer treatments for about 3 months before dying a few weeks ago from a massive stroke.  The process of dealing with his diagnosis, treatment, complications, and eventual death has been an emotional journey, to say the least.  My father was a fundamentalist Christian, as is much of my extended family.  This made things harder for me in a variety of ways as I went through the grieving process, though on reflection I’ve been able to learn a lot from those experiences that I hope to share with others.

Three Failed Alleged Paradoxes of Atheism

Yesterday an apologetic article popped up on my feed alleging to expose three paradoxes of atheism by an apologist named Neil Shenvi.  Since I’m not used to hearing theistic challenges refer to paradoxes of atheism, I clicked through for a read.  I ended up finding the article so laughably bad that I decided I wanted to write a response to expose all the problems contained within.

Atheism is preferable to Christianity, Islam, and other religions

I had recently made a tweet about how great it is that major religions like Christianity and Islam are false:

Honestly, it's one of the best facts about life that major religions like Christianity and Islam are false. There is no hell, no billions of people suffering eternal conscious torture. Simple non-existence after death is literally infinitely better.

— Counter Apologist (@CounterApologis) August 2, 2018

This prompted a tweet and blog reply by Christian theologian and apologist Randal Rauser.

Responding to Cameron

Cameron from Capturing Christianity provided a response to my last post, and although it's taken me over a month to be able to write a response (work is rough), I felt Cameron deserved a reply.  While our exchange is certainly strong, I appreciate how civil things have been kept.

Are our Standards Too High for Apologetic Arugments?

Since I'm a contributor to the Real Atheology Facebook group (please give it a like if you haven't already!) I get to see when some other contributors post on apologetics or apologists Facebook posts.  I am generally loathe to reply using my personal Facebook account, so I try to avoid commenting.

Today however, I keep seeing a post pop into my feed and I decided to put a response on my blog to something that was annoyed me in all the wrong ways.

The post comes from the Capturing Christianity account, which I should say is run by quite a nice apologist named Cameron, who seems very sensible even if I think he's dead wrong on a number of topics.

Can testimony be the basis for a ‘properly basic belief?’

Christian apologist and theologian Randal Rauser has an idea regarding warranted Christian belief that I find particularly interesting, but ultimately wrong.  Randal’s idea is to take the Reformed Epistemology of Alvin Plantinga a little bit further, he wants to use testimony as a foundation for a properly basic belief in something like Christian theism.

This is something he has written on in his book with Justin Schieber “An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar” and a bit about on his blog. 

I should point out that Randal prefers using testimony as a basis for properly basic belief in Christianity compared to the traditional appeals to a Sensus Divinitatus, because he considers appealing to a SD to place the theist at a rhetorical disadvantage.

I think Randal’s intuition about being at a rhetorical disadvantage with the Sensus Divinitatus is correct. A mysterious Sensus Divinitatus providing justification for Christian belief in a pre-evidential way is going to sound outlandish to non-believers, and likely would come as a shock to many lay believers in the pews. It’s akin to saying that one’s “Jesus senses are tingling”

In short, I don’t think that this kind of appeal to testimony as a foundation for a properly basic belief in god is going to work.  I think if he is going to go this kind of Reformed Epistemology route, he’s going to have to appeal to a Sensus Divinitatus, ala Alvin Plantinga.