A while ago, I write a brief piece in which I noted that noted sceptic Michael Shermer's "deconversion" seems to have been more due to social factors than any new evidence for or against the proposition God exists.

Today, I'd like to direct your attention to the life of Ted Turner, noted a while ago (I'm slow, what can I say?) by Rob Dreher at The National Review:

"That's the rap on me, that I'm impious," Turner said. He denied it, saying that he's read the Bible from cover to cover more than once, and that he "was born again seven times, so one of them is bound to take."

Turner really was a deeply religious boy, despite his father's emotional abuse. He intended at one point to become a missionary. Then, when he was a teenager, his younger sister Mary Jane contracted a form of lupus, and suffered terribly before dying a relatively short while later. All his prayers for her recovery — an hour a day, he said — were for naught.

"She used to run around in pain, begging God to let her die," he recalled. "My family broke apart. I thought, 'How could God let my sister suffer so much?'"

These events happened nearly half a century ago, but he speaks of them as if they had occurred last week. Though none of the journalists pressed him on the point, Turner, who has described himself publicly at times as either an atheist or an agnostic, began talking as if he were justifying himself at a tribunal.

"Look at my philanthropy!" he said. "The Bible says it's better to give than receive. I sponsored that religious conference at the United Nations. It cost me $600,000."

What I find interesting is they way such people -- though they actually reject God for what appear to be emotional reasons -- often couch their scepticism in intellectual terms, as though one day they discovered some logical proof or argument which made the almighty disappear.

And perhaps that's true, if you admit the "problem of evil" as an argument. In fact, Dreher's article explicitly makes that point.

Dust in the Light (hat tip) offers a better analysis than mine:

Perhaps it's a result of the route that I took in my often-unwitting search for God, perhaps it's that I've never had such a tragic test of faith, but I've always been intrigued about the Touched by an Angel climaxes during which a character's problem proves to have been anger at God for some perceived wrong. As I've written before, it seems to me that the three predominant reasons for atheists to be outspoken are 1) anger at God for not living up to expectations or hopes, 2) jealousy of those who have the capacity for faith, or 3) desire to be convinced that they are wrong. Of course, elaborate systems of belief can be built upon these underlying emotions. As an atheist, I drifted around with different degrees of 2 and 3. Ted Turner, it seems, falls under the first, which is the only one that requires a preexisting faith to be lost.

Jesus -- who some morons like George Bush and I actually regard as a philosopher -- offered several barriers to continuing faith.

People will reject an existing faith because of (Matt 13:21):

1. An interest in fads and what's fashionable; shallowness.
2. Troubles and sorrows (like those described above).
3. Persecution or social dislike because of with the low status of the gospel.

Others may see a once-vital faith turn into a dead, unproductive belief system because of:

4. Worries and a focus on physical things, rather than serving God.
5. Material comfort, which makes us feel good, but hides our spiritual poverty.

Justin Katz of "Dust in the Light" actually offers a more profound challenge to faith. After a while, the rants of your typical angry atheist can be easy to dismiss: He's been hurt, wants God to play by his rules, and if not, he's taking the gameboard and going home. (In my experience, he ends up on the left side of the political spectrum.) He's not really an atheist, intellectually: you can't be angry at something which doesn't exist.

That's also a point Dreher makes.

But in Katz, and a few others I know who really seem open-minded pose a much more serious counter-argument to faith. They don't have a chip on their shoulder. They'd apparently honestly like to believe. But they say, with no particular reason to doubt them, that they don't see compelling evidence. (And they often end up as political conservatives.)

Speaking as a Christian, I don't have anything neat or glib to say to that. Perhaps God will eventually show them -- perhaps even as they lay dying, who knows -- the missing evidence. Perhaps it's like Abraham, who never mentioned Christ explicitly, but who would surely have been glad to receive him, once he saw with his own eyes. Or perhaps there is, like there was with me, still some subtle mistake going on in the brain, below the level of conscious thought, which is somehow tied up in ego and hides evidence from us. Perhaps a desire for the positive things faith brings -- the effects of faith -- isn't the same as a desire to know God.

And, from the agnostic point of view, one might also suggest perhaps they're right: perhaps God doesn't exist, or there isn't reasonable evidence for that proposition, and they're seeing things more clearly than I.

(I can't share the agnostic point of view with intellectual honesty: of course we're always falible, and any conviction we hold could turn out to be mistaken. But I've seen and experienced things which would make me have to abandon a lot of other convictions -- such as that Shakespeare existed -- before I got around to jettisoning Jesus.)

Perhaps I'll write to him and ask.