What are some good checkmate arguments against religion?

[Confused Ape]

He seems uneducated in the details of atheism if "what do you believe" shook him to his core.

What are the details of atheism which people can be educated in? All that atheism means is a lack of belief in deities. It doesn't mean a lack of irrational beliefs because atheists can believe in dozens of irrational things which don't involve deities.

Not everyone fits the same mold. I suppose it's possible for an adult atheist to convert to a religious belief, but it's unlikely.

It's certainly possible for an adult atheist to convert to a religious belief because some adult atheists do it. I think it all depends on why they were atheists in the first place, though. People who used critical thinking to conclude that religious belief is irrational are unlikely to convert but an atheist who never really thought about it could be susceptible to conversion.

I found An Interview With Francis Collins where he talks about how he ended up as a Christian.

FRANCIS COLLINS: Well, growing up, I was vaguely aware of things that went on in church, because I was in the boys' choir at the local Episcopal church. But I got the clear message that I was supposed to learn music there, and not pay too much attention to the rest of it, and I followed those instructions very carefully. When I got to college and was challenged about what my beliefs were, I realized I had no idea what they were. I listened to others make an argument that religion and beliefs were basically a superstition, and I began to think — Yeah, that's probably what I believe, too.

Then I went off to be a graduate student in quantum mechanics at Yale, where I was very compelled with the notion that everything in the universe can be described in a second-order differential equation. I read a little bit about what Einstein had said about God, and I concluded that, well, if there was a God, it was probably somebody who was off somewhere else in the universe; certainly not a God that would care about me. And I frankly couldn't see why I needed to have any God at all. I was in a very reductionist frame of mind. That's often what science imposes upon your thought process, and it's a good thing when you apply it to the natural world. But I sought to apply it to everything else. Obviously the spiritual world is another entity.

So I concluded that all of this stuff about religion and faith was a carryover from an earlier, irrational time, and now that science had begun to figure out how things really work, we didn't need it any more. I think you wouldn't have enjoyed having lunch with me when I was in that phase. My mission then was to ferret out this squishy thinking on the part of people around me and try to point out to them that they really ought to get over all of that emotional stuff and face up to the fact that there really wasn't anything except what you could measure.

When he became a doctor he saw that some patients seemed to find strength from their religious beliefs. This prompted him to look into religion and he went to see a Methodist Minister.

And he was very tolerant and patient and listened and suggested that, for starters, it might be good if I read a little bit more about what these faiths stood for. And perhaps the Bible would be a good place to start. I wasn't so interested in that at that point. But he also said, "You know, your story reminds me a little bit of somebody else who has written about his experience — that Oxford scholar, C.S. Lewis."

I had no idea, really, who Lewis was. The idea that he was a scholar, though, that appealed to my intellectual pride. Maybe somebody with that kind of a title would be able to write something that I could understand and appreciate.

So this wonderful minister gave me his own copy of Mere Christianity, Lewis's slim tome that outlines the arguments leading to his conclusion that God is not only a possibility, but a plausibility. That the rational man would be more likely, upon studying the facts, to conclude that choosing to believe is the appropriate choice, as opposed to choosing not to believe.

Plus if one is so easily converted by a simple question, I doubt their newfound religious faith will be all that strong either.

Francis Collins was born in 1950 and has been a Christian for around 30+ years.

It's not that he has different views, it's that he's very nearly talking about a different thing: when he discusses the "blind faith" of atheists because god cannot be proved or disproved by science, that's necessarily a claim that only makes sense with a gnostic atheist position of there definitely being no god. I don't think I've ever met an atheist who thinks like that.

I bolded the bit in that interview where he describes what kind of atheist he was. Maybe the atheists he knew were earnest young things who would have classed themselves as a 7 on the Probability Scale.

Anyway, back to the question of good checkmate arguments. My personal view is that there aren't any good ones that will suit all situations. A Christian who goes along with John Shelby Spong's Twelve Points is likely to agree with a lot of the arguements.

Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.