I've read a good many conversion stories in Alpha News. Of course they are recent events generally and it's impossible to know how long term the conversion is. But a defining feature is that each story involves extremes of suffering and difficulty - addiction, crime, abuse. It's no surprise that Alpha is big in prisons. It also is the closest thing the CofE has these days to a cult - charismatic guru figure, exclusive teaching materials, exclusion of the disapproving etc.
You've just reminded me to post a link to Stephen Butterfield's blog, a long and detailed recounting of his experience of being a respectful, polite but tenacious atheist asking pointed questions at Alpha back in 2008. The blog posts themselves (always long, often
very long) plus comments make this a whole lot of reading, but I enjoyed it hugely - masses of detail, lots of humour, marvelously well written, top stuff:
https://goo.gl/oe7kYaYour point about difficulties in life, suffering generally of all kinds, leading to conversion was raised by a member of the course who said to Mr Butterfield: "Let's hope that nothing terrible in your life happens to you to bring you to an awareness of the reality of God, Stephen." (Something we've all heard before, I'm sure). It's not only a thinly-veiled threat (as noted by Butterfield himself), it seems to me a naked demonstration of what Nietzsche called
ressentiment (resentment - Nietzsche always used the French term). It's part of what he called
Sklaven-moral or slave morality, the bitter, galling resentment by the weaker of the stronger. (This was Nietzsche's theory of the formation of the human moral sense outlined in
On the Genealogy of Morality; to go into detail here would take me too far astray). It's a "You need to suffer to become not only different but better than you are now" type of argument which Nietzsche despised and Christianity with it because he saw Christianity as responsible for inculcating the belief that to be weakened and humbled is good and that suffering bestows wisdom - instead of just being useless, pointless suffering. It's making a virtue of necessity, in other words - can't avoid suffering? OK; impose a higher meaning on it.
It really does strike me as the most extraordinarily feeble argument - as though the likelihood of the existence of a god is somehow increased the day after a terrible tragedy than the day before it. What
is increased is emotional lability; I can't help but think that the theists who advance this "argument" are tacitly, unwittingly agreeing with atheists that god-beliefs spring from emotional needs, drives and desires, not from clear thinking - and I hope most of us can see what the problems are with that. I'm
fairly sure that this is not what they intend to convey, but they do nonetheless.
The existence of gods is no more likely the morning after your child has been diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukaemia than the day before. What has changed is the emotional state of the parent - that makes all the difference to the parent and absolutely none whatever to reality. Everybody experiences loss at some point in their life - myself included - and some people suffer the most wrenching tragedies. Some of these may turn to God; others lose the belief in God that they had before (somebody like Darwin for example); others still (me) start as atheists and remain atheists because that is the only way of looking at the world that makes any sense, and that cannot be altered by the shifting sands of personal feeling. To me the picture of the world presented by theism is patently, manifestly,
crashingly false (in fact, absurd) on its face and no horror, no matter how awful, can change that. In some people it can change their emotional need not just for comfort but a very personal comforter on call 24/7, but the explanations for these differences are to be found in human psychology, in what we know about different personality types, and not in an assumption of the truth of theism.
