Online Conversations about Religion Are Almost Never Fruitful
“Okay, so let me get this straight,” you’re thinking. “A guy on a religious blog is about to tell me there’s no point in having religious conversation online … like on a blog.” Close! However, I’m not suggesting that online religious conversations CAN’T be fruitful (I’ve been in a few that were!), but rather that the vast majority of them aren’t. Here are some reasons I think this might be:
MOST PEOPLE BASE THEIR BELIEFS ON THE OPINIONS OF THEIR “EXPERTS”
Here’s the terribly sad truth about the internet and all its promises for knowledge: most people online have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Now, I don’t mean they’re wrong: I mean they don’t personally know what they are talking about. Okay … so what does that mean? Most people who either believe or don’t believe in evolution have not done the science themselves. Instead, they are relying on whatever books, blogs, or articles, they have read. The same goes for theological, philosophical, or historical topics. Most of us genuinely don’t know what we are talking about, but speak with confidence online based on our trust in people we determine to be “experts” on these topics. Again, this isn’t universally true, but I feel like it’s a safe assumption about the average person you are likely to meet online. It’s a terrifying thought, but in our society which emphasizes specialized knowledge (Way to fight back, liberal arts education! Sorry, soap box/side bar …), most of our knowledge is not a result of direct experience or understanding, but rather the product of the faith we put in other people that we decide must know what they are talking about based on whatever criteria we establish for the definition of “expert.”
Of course, none of this would be a huge problem if we had some standard definition for “expert” or if all the “experts” could agree. But they can’t because …
THERE ARE NO UNIVERSAL RULES REGARDING WHAT COUNTS AS “EVIDENCE.”
Now if you’re like me, after that last sentence, you’re fighting hard against the Law & Order flashbacks, but let’s try to keep going! As much as we might like to think so, “evidence” isn’t some objective, obvious, and agreed upon category. The idea of “evidence” is very much tied to our worldviews, especially our epistemologies (what we think we can know, how we think we can know it, etc). When religious and non-religious people (and hear I’m using “religious” to mean belief in some sort of deity, not as a term opposed by “spiritual”) clash online usually neither side is aware that what is really happening is a clash of epistemologies.
So what you read is:
NON-RELIGIOUS PERSON: “There is absolutely no evidence for the existence of a god!”
RELIGIOUS PERSON: “What are you talking about? There’s plenty of evidence!”
What you should read is:
NON-RELIGIOUS PERSON: “Most likely I’m an empiricist and have decided that the only things that can be credibly believed in are those things that can be observed and understood through the five senses. I believe that my five senses are reliable enough for this to work as an epistemology. Furthermore I have enough faith (pun intended!) in the capacities of human reason to understand the universe to such an extent that surely human reason could know if a god existed, and thus is qualified to pass judgment on the issue.”
RELIGIOUS PERSON: “Well, I have no issue believing in what can’t be understood through the five senses. Maybe I consider personal experience or divine revelation to be credible sources of knowledge (and thus of “evidence”), or maybe you and I are looking at the exact same phenomena (e.g. aspects of the physical world, historical events, etc) and disagreeing about whether or not it counts as evidence because of our differing a priori assumptions … which for some reason, neither of us is aware of or maybe just won’t admit.”
These differing rules for evidence are also why conversations that start with “Give me one good reason to believe in God” or “Give me one good reason to not believe in God” almost always devolve into pseudo-intellectual drivel rather quickly. Really, the best you can hope for in an online conversation is to make an honest effort to understand where the other person is coming from. How do they understand the world? How did they come that understanding?
Which leads me to my next point …
THE AVERAGE PERSON’S BELIEFS ARE SUPPORTED, BUT NOT ACTUALLY FORMED BY THE “EVIDENCE”
This is not to say that people aren’t trying to make well-reasoned arguments for or against the existence of God. What I’m suggesting is that most people don’t rely on these arguments until they’ve already made at least a preliminary decision about the issue. “Evidence” can challenge or confirm our beliefs, but it seldom forms them (Again, yes there are people for whom this is the exception.). I can’t recall the vast number of people I know who walked away from or joined a religion because of the behavior of its practitioners. I can’t count the number of people I know who have rejected the gospel because they can’t accept what is says about their sinful condition, or the people who have embraced the gospel because they feel miserable and desperate in their current circumstances. How many people who walk away from or embrace a faith tradition in college do so because they encountered someone they came to respect more (either for reasons of character or “expertise”) than the person(s) who originally taught them to believe or not to believe? These are just a few examples. In other words, “evidence” runs the risk of being a bit of a red herring in trying to understand how a person initially came to or why a person primarily holds to their current beliefs.
I’m not saying that “evidence” isn’t an important part of our beliefs about religious things. In fact, how much weight we put on “evidence” may vary depending on what we encounter in life or what season of life we are in. However, I am convinced that for many of us “evidence” is a secondary (though still important) concern.
What this means is that neither walking a person through your “evidence” or “experts,” nor listening to their “evidence” and “experts” is likely to accomplish much in that one conversation. Ultimately, you need to get to know a person, their experiences, and their deeper reasons for their beliefs. All of these things are exceedingly difficult to accomplish online.
So please, do participate in online conversations about religion, but understand their rather severe limitations. And please comment on the entries in this blog, feeling free to agree, disagree, or just ask further questions. But understand that you’re very unlikely to ever convince someone to completely change the way they see the world in a few blog comments. Also, understand that the way you choose to address other people online — people who often don’t know you and never will — very much affects your credibility and their willingness to consider what you say. Also, remember that dialogue is a two-way street. Be prepared to try to understand how other people see the world, too.
Happy online conversing, people!
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“Ultimately, you need to get to know a person, their experiences, and their deeper reasons for their beliefs.”
Does someone’s personality prove or disprove their assertions? Yes, but only if the assertions are about their personality, or implications of it …) Anything else, and a person’s personality is a distraction to considering their beliefs. If we dislike them, we will be more likely to look askance at them. If we like them or can gain some advantage from liking them, that’s a bias in the other direction. If they happen to have beliefs we share, that’s a worse distraction, because then there are two reasons not to consider the beliefs on their merit: their holding to them, and the fact that we do!
I understand and agree with the concerns you raise here, Larry, but I actually didn’t talk about personality — and for some the reasons you mentioned. I talked about getting to know a person’s experiences and the reason behind the reason for their beliefs, if you will. I think a discussion with another person (especially with someone you don’t like!) has a better chance of being fruitful if you understand where they are coming from, so to speak.
Here’s an example of how I see this playing out: it’s not immediately helpful to address the problem of evil as an intellectual deterrent to faith if the real issue is that someone lost a parent, suffered some horrible accident, etc. All your logical deductions aren’t going to address the anger which feed the doubt more than the surface intellectual objections.
Now you might object that such a scenario as the one above is not a legitimate way for someone to reach beliefs, or something along those lines. Either way, my point is that I think many (most?) people form beliefs for just such reasons and usually don’t do the self-reflection necessary to realize that. Thus, addressing objections to faith as intellectual exercises or dissecting beliefs apart from the believer is almost always a fruitless in my experience.
Certainly in my mind, truth is truth regardless of how many or what sorts of people believe it (and the same goes for what is not true), but this blog entry is discussing the issue of conveying what we believe to be true to others, as well as why attempts to do this online almost always seem fruitless, at least to me.
So to sum up, there is a reason we cling to our beliefs, and it’s seldom intellectual at the core — for religious or non-religious people, in my experience at least.
I don’t know if I addressed your underlying concerns or went off on a wild tangent. Guess we’ll see 🙂
I hope this was not your intent, but this is a very demoralizing post. First, what exactly is wrong about people relying on other experts, and as you continue later, evidence? None of us have personal experience of everything we know. I’ve never been to San Francisco but I know it exists. We must rely on opinion and evidence of others. How we grant credibility to such experts and evidence is the paramount issue, not that we must use them. Which gets to your point about the lack of a standard for experts and evidence.
If you lament the lack of a standard, who would you have set it? How? You could go through all of the methods tried before, but none beats honest and open debate. And this is where the post demoralizes those of us engaging in such debate. By setting the standard of complete conversion success in online conversations, then, you are correct, we are doomed to fail. But complete conversion isn’t the goal in online evangelism. Two other plays come to mind. The first is the audience. In blogging, far fewer comment than read. Yes, you might be comment dueling with an immovable intellect but actually reaching some observer who is silent because he wants to learn. You duel for them. The second is the steps. While some people come to God in a flash of insight, many others come by small steps. An online conversation may not seem fruitful, but you may manage to provide the first chink in someone’s agnostic armor, which they start to remove when they cannot repair it. Or you might provide an independent assist to the one who does know the person’s past, personality, and prejudices. If your point was that it seems fruitless because in these cases we will never see the fruit, well true. But we don’t engage for our own glory.
Your point about engaging well is taken, but I vehemently disagree that the engagement is often pointless, although even that matters little. It is our duty to fight for the Right, regardless of the chances of success.
Hi AH ,
I definitely didn’t want to demoralize anyone, and I’m sorry that was the affect on you. I’ll speak more to why I’m not personally demoralized by these things towards the end.
Ultimately what I said rubbed you in the wrong way because you have some model for online engagement that you see as helpful, biblical, effective, etc. In all seriousness I would LOVE for you to outline what that looks like in any response you might give. Maybe it can encourage me to think differently about some things.
Now, onto your comments. By “fruitful” I didn’t have conversion in mind necessarily, but rather something along the lines of “desired results.” In other words, both religious and nonreligious people often do not see any of their desired results in online conversation about religion, whether that be persuasion, conversion, humiliation through destroying someone else’s beliefs, or just forcing someone else to see their views as legitimate. Of course “fruitful” has a definite connotation in a Christian setting, and this is a Christian blog, so yeah, I probably could have picked a better term. You’re absolutely right in saying that just because a conversation doesn’t lead to a conversion doesn’t mean that it is thus pointless.
I was also trying to express that most conversations about religion are pointless, but not by necessity or nature. They just turn out that way. I don’t know if I was giving off a vibe of “this is always dumb and will never work so why bother,” but I did not mean to. In other words, I’m not saying online conversation will always be fruitless, but rather that it often is for the reasons I gave. If we did something as simple as rethink our “desired results” — had the goal of sharing, mutual understanding, and even giving someone food for thought — then we could have fruitful conversations, indeed! However, I think that’s seldom people’s goal and thus the conversations are “fruitless.”
As to your question about what’s wrong with relying on experts and evidence, the answer is: nothing at all. None of us are going to master the full breadth of available knowledge, and at some point we all have to take someone else’s word for it on more than a few things! What I was trying to communicate is that this relying on experts and evidence often leads to pointless conversation because we end up just throwing our experts and evidence at each other in huge verbal catapults. Many online conversations quickly devolve into random quotes from dead people, various website links posted back and forth, and general name dropping. I’ll see your Richard Dawkins and raise you a Ken Hamm. I’ll see your NT Wright and raise you a John Piper. And of course this is just in the ones that stay civil! Ha!
Thus, it is in some sense silly, I think, for us to be trying to convince people of things that we ourselves only know second hand or maybe even third or fourth hand. But even more to the point, as I tried to demonstrate in my third reason, the experts and the evidence are often red herrings as to why the beliefs really exist. So to your rather daunting question of how we determine standards of expertise and evidence, I quickly plead the 5th (wuss!), then reiterate that I don’t think those are the heart of the issue anyway for most folks, so I’m not all that concerned.
(To be continued …)
(Continuing my response to AH)
As to your more general comments about online evangelism/debate, I will say that I have a pretty low view of what this actually accomplishes. Perhaps you have had different experiences with it than I have. You give some examples of how God could use it. Fine. God can use anything, so to me that’s not really a valid point. (I always tell people in relation to my own attempts at ministry that God has used a talking ass before, and He can do it again …) But again, and I do stand by this, any sharing of ideas — especially about religion — seldom has any of the desired results for believers or nonbelievers outside of a personal relationship or at least some sort of human interaction. Fact and Counter-fact spewing to me just isn’t ministry in any sense of the term, and this is what I see most people doing. Maybe you have a different approach to it? So, I really don’t see the point of trying to convince anyone of anything in cyberspace because I just don’t think it works. Again, God can use anything/do anything, but …
I also think seeing online conversations about religion as part of our duty to stand up for the truth is a little overblown. Just because a dumb idea is floating around out there doesn’t mean we have to engage it. Otherwise we would be waaaay to busy to have this exchange! Ha!
Now you hinted at a related idea, in that you seemed to want to define the interactions between a reader and a piece of writing online or between watchers and talkers in comment sections as “online conversation.” Okay, I definitely see your point. However, what I had in mind was not making information available, but directly engaging other online peeps through chat rooms, comment sections, and the like. I agree that we want to make good information available for people to have access to.
Okay, so now about the demoralization more directly. The reason I don’t write something like this and get depressed afterwords is because of the self-revelatory character of God. Personally, I don’t think there is any way I am going to convince someone to accept my “experts” and reject their own, or accept my “evidence” and reject my own. I just don’t think that belief as a human function works that way. In addition, we may answer a nagging doubt or a curious question here and there (and there is value in that!), but we’re ultimately not addressing the deeper issues and causes of belief. However, convincing is ultimately not my job! Whew! So I can share and testify to what I believe is true, but I have no confidence that I will convince anyone, not only because of the limits of online interactions, but also because of the hardness of the human heart. No one comes to the Father except he is drawn. And the Father is out there drawing people to Himself through the Son by the Spirit. Otherwise why talk about religious things in any context, online or otherwise?
So, to wrap up I would reiterate again that I don’t see fruitlessness as a necessary result, but rather as a frequent result. I hope I haven’t left you even more dissatisfied and demoralized. It seems clear to me that you have a real concern and desire that those without the hope of the gospel hear about it. If you feel that online engagement can accomplish that, go for it. Maybe my comments will serve as a word of caution. Maybe they’re totally worthless. Whatever the result, I pray God’s blessings on you and your ministry — whatever context it may take.
“So, I really don’t see the point of trying to convince anyone of anything in cyberspace because I just don’t think it works.”
Yet you are engaging AH via comments anyway… LOL. Sorry, I don’t disapprove of y’all’s discourse in the slightest, I just found it hilariously ironic…
(plus now you have another comment to your post!) 🙂
🙂
I am sorry that I forgot to tick the comment notification box and so left this hanging for almost 3 weeks. This blog is on my roll, and your latest about fighting for the church made me check in. The reason I wrote my comment here, and my basic response to your reply is your fight post. It is our duty to fight for the Church to the best of our ability.
I concede that we can’t go trolling around the internet looking for every dumb idea and heaping scorn upon it. We must, however, always be ready. We must always be on. We must always be willing. Opportunities present themselves with steady regularity. This goes for every aspect of the Church. Some of us are called to defend. Some are called to break new ground. Others are called to sustain the present body. Our duty is to know what we do well and to do it with vigor.