If you’re a non-believer in religion, and you used to be a believer — what changed your mind?

Was there one particular argument or incident or experience? Or was it more of a general softening of the ground, with lots of different factors adding up?

And have you ever convinced a believer, or helped to convince a believer, that they were mistaken? If so, what was it you said or did that convinced them?

I’m asking because of a recent comment in this blog. In response to my Top Ten Reasons I Don’t Believe In God post, Nine commented:

I am often confronted with impatience when I begin to use the words “logic,” “reason,” and “evidence.” Theists argue, “you can’t use reason to explain everything, particularly God!” It’s senseless. It’s so senseless, I am often struck speechless by its senselessness. Lately, however, I stumbled upon this quote:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” –Galileo Gailiei

I feel like I have something to go on now, but how do you respond to this rejection of logic and reason in general?

A fair question, and one that in recent weeks has been much on my mind. How do you debate, or try to convince, or in any way engage in fruitful discussion, with someone who doesn’t value reason and evidence and doesn’t find them convincing?

My usual response is to point out the limitations of irrational intuition; to acknowledge its importance in human experience, but point out that it’s really only valid for matters of opinion and subjective experience, and that logic and evidence are demonstrably better tools for understanding questions of what is or is not objectively true in the real world. (Questions such as — oh, I don’t know, just for one example — God’s existence or lack thereof.)

In other words, when a theist says “you can’t use reason to explain everything, particularly God!”, my response is, “Why not? We use reason and evidence to explain everything else about what is and isn’t true in the real world. Why shouldn’t God be included?” (With the possible addendum that, “The only reason you think your faith shouldn’t have to be supported by reason or evidence is that… well, that it isn’t supported by reason or evidence.” A topic for another day.)

But of course, this point is itself an argument based on reason and evidence. And therefore, it’s not likely to convince someone who already thinks reason and evidence don’t prove anything. And Nine is right — it is completely frustrating to debate someone who knows their belief isn’t rational and just doesn’t care. (Almost as frustrating as it is to debate a believer who’s convinced that their belief really is rational.) I’ve written about this before: religion has at its disposal a large number of powerful defensive tropes, defending it not just against criticism but against the very idea that criticism is legitimate, with circular reasoning that’s very aggravating to an outsider but that at the same time makes it stubbornly resistant to change.

And yet…

Most atheists and other non-believers were, at one time, religious believers.

Including me.

And we got over it.

How did that happen?

How did our armor get penetrated? How did it happen that our rationalizations — either convincing ourselves that we were being reasonable, or that it didn’t matter that we weren’t being reasonable — became visible to us, and no longer acceptable?

One of the reasons I so stubbornly persist in making argument after argument against religion — apart from the fact that I’m having barrels of fun with it — is that I was myself persuaded to abandon my religious beliefs by good, rational arguments. Or at least, I was persuaded to seriously question my religious beliefs by good, rational arguments. So I know that, at least sometimes, it can work. And while I don’t know if my own arguments and debates have ever convinced any particular person I was debating with, I have heard people say — about both my blog and other atheist blogs — that being a lurker on the sidelines of these debates has made them rethink their own beliefs.

So I guess this is my market research, my focus group. I want to know what works and what doesn’t.

So I’ll ask again: If you’re a non-believer in religion, and you used to be a believer — what changed your mind?

And if you’ve ever convinced a believer, or helped to convince a believer, that they were mistaken, what was it you said or did that convinced them?

I’ll get the ball rolling. For me, letting go of my belief in the supernatural was a long process. But it started when, almost by accident, I started reading Skeptical Inquirer magazine. I’d seen arguments against spiritual beliefs before — I was a religion major, for Loki’s sake. But the fact that the S.I. folks took spiritual beliefs and subjected them, not only to argument and logic, but to rigorous, carefully controlled, scientific testing… that was a big deal.

It’s not that they disproved any particular strong belief of mine. I didn’t believe in astrology, or faith healing, or hardly any of the specific beliefs they putting to the test. But their work took religious belief out of the realm of “things you can never be sure about one way or the other, so it’s therefore okay to believe whatever seems to make sense to you” — and put it squarely in the realm of “things that are either true or not true.” And it gave me tools for critical thinking as well: a better idea of what did and didn’t constitute a good argument, and an increasingly improved nose for bullshit.

And it did it over, and over, and over again. Calmly, and reasonably, and relentlessly.

So there was no one argument that de-converted me. But there was definitely a body of argument that softened the ground, made my belief a lot less deep and a lot less certain. And so when I had my big Your Consciousness Is A Product Of Your Brain experience — in my case, going under general anesthesia — I had a whole new context to put the experience in. A context that was a lot more consistent than my spiritual beliefs… and that didn’t require any of the rationalization and evasion and flinching away from the evidence that I’d been doing to support those beliefs.

(This is a fairly quickie summary, btw. If you’re curious and want to read about my deconversion in more detail, you can do so in my How I Became an Atheist, Why I Became an Atheist series.)

So I think this is why I’m so attached to making and pursuing atheist arguments. I don’t know if any one atheist can persuade any one believer during any one argument. But I know that lots of atheists making lots of arguments over a period of time can, at the very least, make a dent. And for me, the very fact of religion and spirituality being explored as questions of fact that can be rationally debated and supported or contradicted by evidence… that made a huge difference.

But that’s just what worked for me.

And so now I’m back to my question:

What worked for you?

If you’re a non-believer in religion, and you used to be a believer — what changed your mind?

And if you’ve ever convinced a believer, or helped to convince a believer, that they were mistaken, what was it you said or did that convinced them?

And if any of my arguments helped any of you change your mind and let go of your religious beliefs… please, for the love of all that is beautiful in this world, will you tell me what they were? I’m dying to know.