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One of the major atheist YouTubers, Joe Schmid, has announced his conversion to Catholicism.
What prepared the ground for him was apparently the cumulative weight of theistic arguments, and what pushed him to Catholicism were miracles.
Scott Alexander has investigated one of them more exhaustively than anyone could expect of him. I looked only into one other so far, the Zeitoun Apparitions, which I found genuinely baffling in a way not explainable by some tricks of the sun. That said, I'm surprised how easily a man I thought of as lucid and careful in his thinking jumped from miracles to theism, and from there to Catholicism.
One problem is miracles that don't support Catholicism. Schmid would need to wage a war against the wrong kind of miracles with the zeal matching any militant atheist. A move absent from atheist arsenal, dismissing some miracle claims as work of demons, is tempting for a Catholic but must be withheld because any competing religions can throw it back at them.
We could also expect Catholics to lead by points when it comes to miracle claims you can't just laugh off, given both their numbers and unique institutionalization of miracle investigation in Catholicism.
An even greater barrier is what you could call Divine Identification Problem.
"Beloved, believe not every spirit..." - Even if you are directly contacted by something higher, there’s no trustworthy way, from mere human perspective, to check its credentials, whether it is God or even genuinely stands for God. God could give you overwhelming evidence of supernatural intelligence and might without giving you overwhelming evidence of divinity.
(That raises the question whether the swamp of skepticism that I personally am growing weary of is escapable even in principle, but let's leave it for another time)
Of course, miracles should shift our priors, though the final credence of specific religion would depend on how inherently plausible we find it. In other words, how strong are our objections to its teachings.
Joe acknowledged some serious challenges, like the problem of evil and the doctrine of eternal damnation. Part of his response here was roughly “yes, it is a challenge, BUT look at evidence I have on the other side of the scale” which I found deeply unsatisfying given how easy this reasoning is to flip. Most disappointingly, he even brings up noetic effects of sin – which in my eyes is a meme-tier argument, uncompelling to the point of unintentional hilarity. Your reason, senses, heart suggest something against the true religion? So much the worse for the former!
Notably, Schmid is a reconvert, after spending a decade in atheism. There appears to be something psychologically interesting happening here. I've read many testimonies, and it seems like many (most, all?) former believers who were brought up in faith carry a permanent trace of it in their minds even after getting thoroughly blasted with atheistic rhetoric. As if a part of them still believes and fears disapproval of the God they turned their backs on. Some report still fearing hell at times. This kind of experience is totally alien to me, so I'll leave it at that.
Since his announcement last week, Schmid has dropped 7 hour "cumulative case for God" and 10 hour "miracles PROVE Catholicism videos, threatening a third one of comparable length today, all of which I will make sure to listen to as background to my Minecraft sessions at a later date, though it might take a while (my tastes are very…singular)
Edit: I guess I might have made the wrong call not putting it to CW thread after all. Though I still think I'd meet raised eyebrows there as well, this kind of drama just doesn't align neatly to our categories.
Meanwhile Schmid did release that third video, and I even watched most of it. Long story short, my emotional gradient steadily shifted from playful excitement to gloom. The farther you go, the more stretched and convoluted the epicycles get. Oh well.
A difficult problem, to be sure. On an unrelated note, do you have any thoughts on whether Jesus Christ came in the flesh, or only in spirit?
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