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I love this girl! She’s a poster child for Shermer’s belief-dependent realism. When asked, “What happened when you went from being an atheist to…‘now I’m willing to embrace that religion might be for me’” she responded:
It was kind of the same thing, uh, with any scientific theory almost that it had more explanatory power to explain something I was really sure of. I’m really sure that morality is objective, human independent, something we uncover like archeologists, not something we build like architects. And I was having trouble explaining that in my own philosophy, um, and Christianity offered an explanation which I came to find compelling especially because it had done other things that were good predictions or good moral teachings that surprised me but then I came around to.
It had more explanatory power to explain something she was already sure of. Ha ha! She was already sure about the answer, all she wanted was to rationalize it. Religion explained what she was already sure of: that morality is objective. Who knows why she was already really sure that morality is objective? It’s too bad the interviewer didn’t ask her that.
I think most atheists who do take morality as objective fall prey to the same belief-dependent realism. They first believe morality is objective, then rationalize it after the fact. I wonder if this girl is an exception or if objective morality lures a lot of people into religion. Watch out, JeffM!
Does she say when she was an atheist “I saw it coherent but false also.”..?
Maybe it was the “Harry Potter” influence in her life, which turned her on to magical thinking.
Burt : Saw her on CNN. She’ll be following something else in a year or two.
Maybe she met a guy from the Yale Divinity School and they had long talks into the night. I must say, a leap of faith from atheism to Catholicism is quite a distance to cover. Hmmm….look at that broad jump!
I must say, a leap of faith from atheism to Catholicism is quite a distance to cover.
Most of the time, in my experience, when you dig under the surface you find it’s not what it appears. I suspect in this woman’s case it’s all about hooking up with the social group, partly because it was apparently prompted out of a romantic relationship, and partly because that’s just by far the most common motivation for converting and joining a religious group you weren’t born into—probably more so for more popular/mainstream churches/communities, but that’s just a guess.
Well, if I were to make a broad jump, I’d probably leap into Quakerism or maybe become a Unitarian. But…the Catholics have always interested me. I think I might join one of the congregations led by a priest kicked out of the Church for heresy. They are forbidden to preach, but they do so anyway. Someone like Matthew Fox. My best friend the lesbian goes to a church led by an ex-Catholic lesbian. There’s nothing much the diocese can do about it.
I am fairly well aquainted with the US atheist blogging community, but I’ve never heard of this girl.
Something tells me this was a day bereft of much news, if the sages at CNN had to resort to digging up some non-story about a nobody from the lowest bottom of the Internet dungeon.
A real shame though about her lapse of reason as she seems quite fuckable.
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