I do see a great deal of benefit in your work. Exposure to facts is what caused my deconversion. I wish you the very best.

Yes. At least two (I won’t name them, as they have retired from public life). Both non-Catholic (telling the difference between “mainline Protestant” and “Evangelical” these days is a vexed business I won’t venture). But I rarely debate Catholics. So that won’t be statistically meaningful. And I’ve debated maybe a hundred apologists or so (ballpark), for a rate of around only 2%.

One thing I can say is that they were morally different people even before I met them, far more genuinely (and conspicuously) virtuous than the average apologist. So they already had the gear to escape. My involvement barely mattered.

Conversely, I’ve debated a lot of liberal apologists with that same gear, and while I am not aware of or doubt they’ll go full non-Christian, there is less reason to, as their religion isn’t in the way of their humanity. They are, in terms of behavior and the vote, already rationalists and secular humanists in effect; their supernaturalist beliefs are almost irrelevant, affecting only minor aspects of daily life and mentality.

I still think that’s a problem, but warrants way less resource allocation to debunk than conservative ideology does, being a far less pressing threat. See the first and second halves of my article What’s the Harm for that perspective.

Just curious: Has any Christian apologist you have debated deconverted after your debate with him or her? If yes, were they evangelical, mainline Protestant, or Catholic?

Evangelical Christians will never see the correct interpretation of the historical evidence until they no longer believe an omniscient ghost living inside of them is giving them ultimate knowledge

That’s actually not true though. Christians project this posture, but no one I know who deconverted ever operated this way.

That’s why factual cracks always lead to questioning this Holy Spirit Epistemology. Craig can chest thump about how HSE trumps facts, but that’s just posturing. Hardly any Christian actually believes that, much less takes it seriously. Once they recognize facts call his (and hence the HSE’s) authority into question, appeals to HSE offer them no comfort, because then they realize how circular and feeble that is as an argument. That’s when the crack starts to become a flood.

Anyone so delusional they are immune to that, will be immune to every argument, mine and yours.

I see your point and I respect your many years of experience. However, I have been a counter-apologist for 11 years and in all that time I have only seen one evangelical deconvert due to an examination of the historical evidence: me.

But I am a physician, so objective evidence is very important to me. Most evangelicals do not have a science background. Most of them distrust scientists and science. They believe that their subjective experiences are equal if not better evidence than objective historical evidence. So, if they believe that they can feel/sense Jesus living inside of them, communicating with them in a non-audible voice what is true and what is false, no amount of historical evidence will convince them he is dead and that evangelical Christianity is false.

Evangelical Christians will never see the correct interpretation of the historical evidence until they no longer believe an omniscient ghost living inside of them is giving them ultimate knowledge; knowledge to which you and I as atheists will never have access. Listen to what the leading evangelical apologist in the world says on this subject:

“In point of fact, we can know that Jesus rose from the dead wholly apart from the historical evidence. The simplest Christian, who has neither the opportunity nor wherewithal to conduct an historical investigation of Jesus’ resurrection, can know with assurance that Jesus is risen because God’s Spirit bears unmistakable witness to him that it is so.”

–William Lane Craig, evangelical Christian historian and apologist in his book, The Son Rises, 1981

Your extensive knowledge of the historical evidence can defeat non-evangelical Christian apologists (those who do not believe one can sense the presence of Jesus within them; communicating with them) but you will have a very difficult time getting an evangelical apologist to admit defeat due to his “trump card”: the internal witness of the Holy Spirit (their ghost).

I have forty years of experience. That never happens. You can’t just gainsay a delusion and it have any effect on the delusion. Because they have first-person experience and you don’t, so you lack any credible authority there.

There are only two achievable goals in debating “the resurrection,” one is to get brain worms into those in the audience who already have epistemic values, and thus will be disturbed or angry enough to fact-check you and emotionally allow themselves to realize you were right.

It does not have to be (and to face less emotional resistance should preferably not be) some big, core piece of their belief system (like their “experience” with the Holy Spirit or Presence of Jesus in their heart and so on). It can be some trivial detail but that is secondarily essential, like for example the apologetic that “women weren’t allowed to testify in court and therefore would never be represented as witnesses in the Gospels.” A totally trivial side-fact, that nevertheless becomes a lynchpin domino holding up the whole edifice. The key moment is when they realize their authorities have been lying to them (or never knew what they were talking about but pretended to anyway, which is really just also lying). Once that crack opens, it’s just a matter of time before it becomes a flood.

Once they emotionally allow themselves to admit their authorities are not competent or honest and that their belief might be on shaky ground, they will desperately try to “fix” it with more and more honest research, which leads to discovering more and more of the fallacies and falsities their belief has been based and sold on, until eventually it becomes too much to rationally sustain, and they escape.

You just need one trivial crack. And as long as they bring the empirical values, then comes the flood.

That said, one example of doing this that uses something like your suggestion but more illustrates my point instead: pointing out that this all happened to me—but, with Taoism. I speak about how I was convinced a Holy Spirit talked to me and guided me—but it wasn’t Jesus, it was the vegetable mind of the Tao. This can cause one of those cracks because it creates a real-world example that evokes cognitive dissonance: if I could have been misled by exactly the same first-person experiences to what they regard as a false religion, how do they know they are not also being misled by another false religion exactly as I was?

Once they have that revelation, the crack has formed: that appealing to Holy Spirit epistemology is a fallacy. That will be disturbing, evoking more research in an effort to “fix” it, which will only lead them to more evidence their belief is indeed as false as mine was.

But this comes at them indirectly. Rather than immediately trying to challenge their first person experience with a core belief (which immediately sets up impenetrable emotional shields), I created a suggestion, by making it actually about me and not them. And it’s a thing that, as a believer, they actually believe in (that Taoism is false etc.), so now they have two conflicting beliefs: that Holy Spirit experiences can be false (Taoism) and that Holy Spirit experiences can be relied upon (Christianity). It is very hard to rationally escape that cognitive dissonance without resolving for the first of those beliefs rather than the second.

But they have to get there on their own. That’s why you start with the indirect fact. You don’t try to jump the queue and go right at the core fact itself.

If a skeptic does choose to debate an evangelical Christian regarding the historical evidence for the alleged Resurrection, he should use the Ghost Buster Counter-Apologetic Technique. This (silly sounding but very effective) technique focuses on the evangelical Christian’s real reason for his beliefs: his delusion that he communicates with a ghost living inside his body.

It doesn’t seem in any way connected with actual cognitive science; it’s therefore more like Young Earth Creationism: already refuted by the real science of the subject. I struggle to motivate myself to care about apologetics so divorced from reality that merely learning the subject’s 101 would suffice to defeat it.

So far, I haven’t seen any need to address this ignoramus version of the Argument from Consciousness; my articles on the latter are already sufficient. See, for example, Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism, Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio, and my standard summaries of the failure of the AfC: Positive and Negative.

Maybe if it ever becomes less fringe, and thus debunking it with rolled eyes will be worth a bother. But so far I haven’t seen it gaining anything but laughter.

https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA#:~:text=This%20paper%20develops%20a%20new,another%20in%20strikingly%20fortunate%20ways.

I haven’t. There are hundreds of books like that. Rarely do they say anything new. Any argument in there, probably is already refuted in one or more articles of mine. But if you can point to anything that seems actually new in that book (and worth any bother of reply), please do describe what’s new about it, and cite the page numbers, and I’ll take a look.