After more than a decade I still really enjoy stories of conversion to the Catholic Church. \u00a0It is not motivated by a “yeah team” mentality, but I find the differences in paths of conversion quite fascinating \u00a0for each individual. \u00a0There are certainly some commonalities, but often very different starting points. \u00a0I’ve watched pretty much every episode of the The Journey Home program and still enjoy it.<\/p>\n
Here are some recent conversion stories that crossed my path.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite blogs I picked up last year was Edward Feser’s blog. \u00a0He recently wrote a post “The road from atheism<\/a>” which explores the beginnings of his conversion from atheism to the Catholic Church. \u00a0His journey has a very interesting starting point in his years as a graduate student as an Analytic Philosopher and atheist. \u00a0This is a fairly long post as he started from the idea as mental processes being purely just brain activity as is the materialist understanding. \u00a0It was partly his interest in this subject and some serious reading on the subject that allowed him to see some of the flaws in this understanding and looking for answers while remaining a materialist. \u00a0He discusses Aquinas and how he addressed the Five Ways.<\/p>\n The immediate effect was that I found a way to teach the Five Ways without seeming like I was putting fish in a barrel for the students to shoot at.\u00a0 I still didn\u2019t agree with the arguments, but at least teaching them was getting interesting.\u00a0 I recall one class period when, having done my best to try to defend some argument (the First Way, I think) against various objections, I finally stated whatever it was I thought at the time was a difficulty that hadn\u2019t been satisfactorily answered.\u00a0 One of my smartest students expressed relief: She had been worried for a moment that there might be a good argument for God\u2019s existence after all!\u00a0 (Anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people is fooling himself.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One of the things I admire about St. Thomas Aquinas in his arguments is that he always worked to put forward the best arguments for a position he would write against. Understanding is not necessarily agreement, but it is intellectual honesty to try to understand an argument instead of setting up straw men. Further along in his understanding he details.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know exactly when everything clicked. There was no single event, but a gradual transformation. As I taught and thought about the arguments for God\u2019s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking \u201cThese arguments are no good\u201d to thinking \u201cThese arguments are a little better than they are given credit for\u201d and then to \u201cThese arguments are actually kind of interesting.\u201d Eventually it hit me: \u201cOh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!\u201d By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying to argue my wife\u2019s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n