Reddit mentions of Atheist Delusions

Former fedora atheist here. For a long time, I felt like I belonged to the "skeptical, rational, atheist" tribe. But at one point I became disillusioned with the crowd, and realized that I no longer want to be part of it. I started looking for alternatives, groups I'd want to be a part of, and I settled upon Catholicism. I first approached it from a purely secular perspective, as a serious and reliable institution. But I ended up accepting the faith and God as well.

Here's my progression, what drew me in more and more:

I. The intellectual life. I was always fascinated by science. It was interactions with promoters of dishonest creationism (usually evangelicals) that originally pushed me towards rejecting religion and to become a militant atheist.

Then I read a book that changed how I view the relation between Church and science: God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. I now follow @catholiclab and similar profiles on Twitter, which post interesting facts about Catholic scientists. It's simply astounding how this information is completely absent from contemporary popular culture.

II. Just on an emotional level, feeling "closer" to Catholics. It helped that my family is Catholic. On YouTube, I've watched many videos by Bishop Robert Barron, Fr. Mike. They are very lucid and reasonable in addressing contemporary issues. I'm sure there are many others.

I'm also reading biographies of martyrs who died persecuted in modernity by revolutionary ideologies. My TODO reading list includes books by Thomas Merton, Joseph Ratzinger, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

III. The aesthetics. I'm subscribed on Twitter to profiles like @Christian8Pics which post a lot of inspiring imagery. Familiarity breeds liking. I also listen to music on YouTube: liturgy, Medieval chants, Mozart's Requiem, Byzantine chants (usually Eastern Orthodox).

All these sideways might seem very strange to a Catholic convert or someone raised Catholic who stayed Catholic. But if someone is immersed in a materialistic, mechanistic and atheistic worldview, there's no available grammar or impulse to even take God or the life of the Church into consideration.

IV. Actually knowing what theism is all about. The "god" dismissed by popular atheist debaters is a caricature of God as understood by classical theism and the actual tradition of the Church. So is the "god" argued for by Intelligent Design proponents, biblical literalists, fundamentalists.

I read 2 books by Edward Feser (Catholic) and David Bentley Hart (Eastern Orthodox) to finally become comfortable with this very simple point. The books I read are, in order:

By Edward Feser:

• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
  
  
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  By David Bentley Hart:
  
  
• Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
  
  
• [The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss] (https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355)
  
  Each author has his own biases, which might trip the reader up at times (Hart is biased against evolutionary psychology for some reason). But these books produced in me a fresh view of where to begin seeking for God. They gave me the confidence to proceed.
  
  Atheism always addresses "god" as if it's simply one entity among others, part of the natural world, for which one ought to find physical traces and then one simply "believes in the existence of god" (much like you'd believe there's a car parked outside your house, once you look out the window and observe it's there -- meaning it could just as well NOT be there).
  
  Creationists just muddy the waters with "god of the gaps" and "Paley's watch" style theories, which simply postulate "god" as an explanation for why this or that aspect of the natural world is a certain way, a tinkerer god which molds the physical world into shape, or which created it at some point in the past.
  
  This has nothing to do with how God is presented by the authors I quoted, and they go to great lengths to make this point.
  
  I started by understanding that there needs to be an ultimate answer to certain metaphysical questions which, by definition, can't have a physical answer (e.g. "why does there exist a physical world in the first place?"). There's a qualitative difference between physical questions and metaphysical ones, and the gap simply can't be breached by adding more layers of physicality. Hart makes this point very well (he differentiates between the Demiurge that deists, atheists and creationists discuss, and God as the "necessary being" of classical theism).
  
  The ultimate metaphysical cause is "necessary" because it's simply a necessity for the physical world to have a non-physical cause which keeps it in existence. If the only thing that existed was a quantum field that didn't produce any particles, or a single proton that always existed and will always exist, the "necessity" would be exactly the same. Nothing would change even if it turned out our Universe is part of a Multiverse.
  
  Then, through reasoning, one can deduce certain characteristics of this ultimate answer, which ends up forming the classical theistic picture of God as a "necessary being" which continuously creates every aspect of the physical universe. Feser is very good at explaining this part and especially at underlining how tentative and feeble our understanding of the unfathomable is. He also explains why it has to be a "being" rather than an unknown impersonal cause. It's a humbling experience.
  
  But as Bishop Robert Barron stated in his interview on the Rubin Report, philosophy only takes you halfway there. Looking back, the existence of God simply makes sense and is a no-brainer. Faith doesn't have to do with "accepting that God exists with no evidence". Faith is about what you do once you realize that the existence of God is an inescapable conclusion of rational thought. What do you do once you realize that He exists and is conscious of us? You have to go beyond the impersonal, and engage, interact. Here's where prayer, the liturgical life and spiritual exercises come into play.
  
  Unlike conversion, faith isn't a one-time historical event, it's a daily effort on one's part to drive one's thoughts towards the infinite and the ultimate cause of everything. This requires individual effort, but it is not an individual venture. One has the entire tradition and life of the Church to guide you: selfless persons who dedicated their lives to help people like you and me.
  
  Here's how Feser, in his "Last Superstition" book, describes the various ways of conceiving of God:
  
  >To understand what serious religious thinkers do believe, we might usefully distinguish five gradations in one’s conception of God:
  
  >1. God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.
  
  >2. God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours. He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space. Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations. He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.
  
  >3. God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.
  
  >4. God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.
  
  >5. God as Aquinas knows Him now, i.e. as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.
  
  What I've been talking about is at #3. Atheists and creationists are debating #1 and #2. #4 is a gift to be accorded by grace, and is what people strive for in their spiritual life. #5 is the ultimate goal of the Christian life.

First, don't panic. A lot of people go through this as teenagers and return to Christ later in life. I did.

Second, make sure he knows how much you appreciate the fact that he trusted you with this. Continue to relate to him the same way you always have, because obviously you've been doing it right. The fact that he lost his faith isn't your fault. If it was your fault, he wouldn't have come to you with that information.

Third, have another private talk with him (not right away, but maybe in a week or two) where you ask him to tell you the story of how he became an atheist. Don't argue with him or say much of anything in response. Just listen.

Since he mentioned "science and contradictions", it is 99% likely that he fell for the usual atheist arguments that you find online. It is important that you listen to him in order to find out precisely which arguments persuaded him. Do not attempt to answer those arguments right away. Instead, do your research - and take your time with it - to find Christian apologetics that refute the specific atheist arguments which have persuaded him. Make sure you find good counter-arguments. There's a ton of simplistic nonsense out there.

Finally, after some weeks or months, offer him books or other materials (like website and blog links) that directly counter the atheist arguments which have persuaded him. Again, make sure these are high quality.

Off the top of my head, without knowing in advance the specific arguments that persuaded your son, I recommend the following books:

• Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies
  
  
• The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

This is a huge topic that I can't (nor can anyone) rightly do justice to in a reddit post. There's a huge amount that the Church (sometimes particular churches, sometimes the whole of Christianity) has done throughout the ages, both good and bad, though you're right in saying that the modern narrative is quite heavily weighted against it. To give a few examples of the good however:

• Here is a list of Catholic sceintists and their contributions to the body of scientific work. It's a modernist myth to say that the Church is anti science and largely stems from a misunderstanding of the Galileo Trial and Alfred Dickson White's, totally fraudulent, Conflict Thesis. See here for r/AskHistorians FAQ on Christianity and Science.
  
  
• The Crusades, like all of human history, are a great deal more complicated than Hollywood makes them out to be. Initially the Crusades were largely reactions to Muslim aggression in the Balkans, and while later crusades admittedly got off track (the sacking of Constantinople in the 4th Crusade for example) their digression was largely the result of political and economic issues, not theological. In fact, less than 7% of all wars and less than 2% of all wartime casulties are the result of religon. Again, it's a myth that most (or even many) conflicts are religiously driven affairs.
  
  
• The so-called Dark Ages, a term which, for good reason, is almost never used by historians anymore, is also largely a myth. Great advances were being made in philosophy (The Scholastic Traditions which built upon Aristotle and Plato, re-imported to the West from Muslim lands after the Crusades), legal theory, jurisprudence, social theory, and science (see link above). Seeing the Medieval period as a stagnation or regression is, again, the result of modernist interpretations of the past and a great deal of revisionary history.
  
  
• In more modern times the Catholic Church was one of the few opponents to eugenic movements across Europe and the United States. This stems from the fundamental importance placed on the human person in Christian theology. During WWII Pope Pius XII or "Hitler's Pope" was actually involved in a massive effort to undercut Nazi power and save Jewish people from Hitler's pogroms. I can't find it right now but I'll keep looking for a documentary on Pope Pius XII during the war.
  
  If you're really interested in Church history, here are a few recommendations I can offer:
  
  
• Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart. Perhaps the most apologetic work here but DBH does a fair job going through the various myths perpetrated by modern society against the Church throughout history.
  
  
• Christianity: The First 3000 Years by Diarmond McCulloch. A fantastic single volume history of the Christian religion.
  
  
• The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzalaz. A slightly more Evangelical work to accompany McCulloch's work. In two volumes.