Joe Heschmeyer offers practical advice for navigating conversations about faith with a recently deconverted individual. He emphasizes the importance of understanding your interlocutor’s perspective, asking thoughtful questions, and appealing to reason while remaining grounded in Catholic teachings.
Transcript:
So over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to evangelize my older brother, who just in the last year or so, came out of 20-ish years of materialist atheism. Praise be to God.
He still is very hesitant about the idea of a personal transcendent God. He’s much more open to the idea of like, pantheism, or…
In his teenage years and early 20s, he was really into Eastern mysticism, and had at least like, an academic interest in like, Gnosticism.
But I’m trying to meet him where he’s at, and I want to respect his intellectual integrity, and not…
Without going too far and syncretizing the faith, trying to appeal to him. But I want to respect how he got to these ideas he has, without compromising on the faith. Like I want to make the churches teaching palatable to him, without going too far, and I don’t know how to tread that line.
Yeah, I think a good place to start is by asking a lot of questions.
Like the thing you’re wanting to do is good to say, “Here’s how Jesus, here’s how the Catholic Church are answers to the questions on your heart.”
But that’s sort of step two. And step one is really drawing out what the questions on his heart are. And maybe you know this more than I do right now, at least. But figuring out the things that drew him away from atheism to at least something more agnostic, and figuring out like, what is attractive to him in the current system of belief that he has. When appropriate, it can be worth it to point out, “Look, there’s nothing present in the effect that isn’t present, at least in potency, in the sum of the causes.” And that’s a very dorky way of saying a basic reality. But it means that if we see a created thing like personality and intelligence, that can’t come from a lack of personality, a lack of intelligence. If none of the ingredients of personality and intelligence are present in God,
then it doesn’t explain how we would get that as a result in the act of creation. And so some views that reject a personal creator, once you kind of point that out, you can highlight the irrationality of those kind of views. Like, you can’t have a world with rationality and personality without a creator who is rational and personal.
But then other views are going to be a little stickier, like explaining why God is different than the universe. Some of that just experientially, like you kind of know you’re not God, you kind of know you’re not your brother.
And so a view that eliminates those distinctions,
you kind of lean into those and maybe appeal to even something like common sense.
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