Or rather, I am very skeptical that there is anyone who fits the images that Lee Strobel and people like him have created for themselves. Let me explain.

Vic Reppert is fond of suggesting that while Christians may have emotional motivations for their beliefs, atheists do to. Repperts comments sometimes border on suggesting it’s dishonest to deny that Christians and atheists are anything but mirror-images of each other on this point. Last month, he accused atheists who suggest otherwise of nominating themselves for intellectual sainthood.

Vic doesn’t have any real arguments for thinking this, as far as I can see. His rhetoric tends to fall into the category of “we must believe this because it’s polite to believe it.” And the evidence tends to point in the other direction. There are lots of atheist who can tell you, in detail, how they left religion for intellectual reasons. Emotion usually plays a role, but the opposite of the role that Vic would claim: lots of people who leave Christianity for intellectual reasons describe doing this in spite of a strong emotional desire to go on believing. There’s a strong tendency for the medium-sized names in the atheist community–Dan Barker, John W. Loftus, Lukeprog, and so on–to fall into this category. I definitely fit it: though I hadn’t done anywhere near the reading some people have done before giving up religion, it was nevertheless true that for me, becoming an atheist was a matter of realizing I desperately wanted to believe, because I thought without God the universe would be amoral and meaningless. (Don’t ask me why I believed that. I have no idea.) I also felt extremely isolated immediately after becoming an atheist, a feeling that seems pretty common, given that Hitchens once said that about half the people showing up for his debates were people who, previously, had thought they were the only atheist in town.

Admittedly people like me are probably over-represented in the class of people who invest big chunks of their time in debating religion. Lukeprog has mention going to see the movie Religulous and noticing that almost the entire audience was gay, from which he inferred that they were probably there because they had been hurt, personally, by religion.

What, then, is the significance of the people, possibly in the minority, who leave religion for intellectual reasons, against what they want emotionally? Maybe not very big, but I think it’s significant that such atheists have no clear counterparts in the Christian world. That point brings me back to the post title: some prominent Christian figures–notably Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell–have risen to fame by painting self-portraits in which intellectual considerations dragged them kicking and screaming into belief. Notice what they’re doing: they’re essentially claiming to be Christian versions of Lukeprog et al. But if you look at what Strobel says in his pre-Case for… book Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary, you get a somewhat different picture: Strobel started going to church because his wife wanted him to, found it emotionally moving, and then started reading Christian apologetics to assure himself it was all true. It’s unclear Strobel read any non-Christian books in his “journalist’s investigation.” More on that here, see especially my comments on McDowell’s even more dubious story.

Are there any other good candidates for being Lee Strobel, other than Strobel? In a discussion at Ed Feser’s blog, one commenter suggested Joshua Rasmussen and Trent Doughtery as examples of people became theists because of arguments, but based on scanning online for things Joshua and Trent have written about that, as well as exchanging a few e-mails with them, it’s pretty clear to me their situation wasn’t quite what the commenter made to sound like: both started out as fairly serious believers, wavered towards agnosticism, and report going back for intellectual reasons.

Here’s my tentative conclusion, based on this and other considerations: there are a fair amount of people who, after finding some initial motivation to convert to Christianity, use Christian apologetics to convince themselves. There are also people who are prevented from falling away from Christianity, or get reeled back after brief wavering, by intellectual arguments. However, there seem to be few if any people who can legitimately claim to be Christian counterparts of Lukeprog, who had strong emotional reasons for not wanting to accept Christianity but felt forced to do so because of the arguments.

These sorts of meta-considerations shouldn’t generally be the most important thing we consider in any debate, including atheist-Christian debates. But it at least tells you something about the psychology of religion, and the fact that a lot of people make claims about this subject is reason enough to try to get the facts right.