The Anatomy of a Conversion: Richard Morgan, From Atheist to Christian

I read with some interest Richard Morgan's conversion to Christianity. I wanted to know how deeply committed he was as an atheist and what caused him to change his mind. I'd like to know more about him, but all we have is this article he wrote for a publication called The Monthly Record, beginning on page 8 and highlighted by several Christian websites. Morgan seems to have been a committed atheist, who was a frequent visitor on Richard Dawkin's site forum. There was a Christian guy named David Robertson who also posted there who was kind and thoughtful. And what he said and how he said it had an impact on Morgan, when everyone else there ridiculed this guy. Then for some reason the atheists began to belittle Morgan, perhaps because he was becoming sympathetic to David Robertson and his views. So Morgan defected to a theistic site where he encountered two questions that changed his life, as he tells us:

“Why don’t you believe in God?” and “What could make you believe in God?”

My knee-jerk reaction to the first question was, “That’s a dumb question.”
And to the second, I had two instinctive and spontaneous answers:

1. I don’t know.
2. Certainly not proof and evidence.

At that moment, the words that had always provoked a terrible sensation of longing in me came into my mind: “We can love Him, because He loved us first.”

And my universe exploded. Lights came on, prison doors opened, and scales fell off my eyes, the whole “Amazing Grace” thing.

Now there are lessons here beyond what I'll write about, but his conversion is troubling. Not that it causes me to doubt. It's troubling because Morgan represents who we are as human beings, dumb, most of us, most of the time. I see absolutely no connection with those two questions and the conclusion he came to. You see, skeptics do not have to say what would convince them to believe. God should already know. So why isn't he doing anything to convince us otherwise? I've already written my answer to the second question right here, which also answers the first question, why I don't believe.

Morgan's testimony is that as human beings we respond to warmth and friendship, even online it appears. We gravitate to the beliefs of someone who is kind and gravitate away from the beliefs of people who are unkind.

Damn I wish it weren't so, but it is. My claim is that if this is who we are as human beings then we need a reality check based in the sciences. We cannot simply fumble through our lives adopting the beliefs of the people we like, or beliefs that tell a compelling story of love. We need to demand evidence, cold hard evidence if possible, before we'll believe.

The interesting thing to me is how Christians love these stories because they don't happen very often at all, whereas on sites like ex-Christian.net we read of deconversion stories away from Christianity almost every day.