The thing about books like The God Delusion is that they activate his mental defense mechanisms to prepare himself for any well-thought out, logical arguments. You need to start with something which isn’t as blatantly screaming “this book wants to destroy everything you care about because it merely happens to be right!” So I’m somewhat surprised people haven’t realized this and gone with the following option:
The brilliant thing about this book is that it subtly changes people’s worldview without them even realizing it to begin with. It doesn’t assert anything which sounds explicitly controversial, and they start digging down the rabbit hole. Because it’s honestly fun.
From there, you can feed him a steady diet of materials which implicitly assert a materialistic view of reality. In some time, he’ll wake up and realize that he has been compromised, and he hasn’t been smote by Zeus or lost all sense of moral direction and purpose either.
It’s so bloody unfair that you’d think Hofstadter was some sort of advanced disciple of the Dark Arts, but it is really just that good.
In retrospect, that was really what did it for me. I held on to various forms of wishful thinking for a long time, because it seemed to me that minds and matter were fundamentally separate things, I couldn’t see how it could be any other way—though I knew at that point that religious claims tended to be laughable, so I had some kind of vaguely half-assed do-it-yourself wishing-makes-it-so I believed in—and that implied the whole universe of dualism. Somehow I came away from it having relinquished that idea, and it, more than any other one book I’d read by that age, set the course for my intellectual journey.
And indeed, I was reading the twentieth anniversary edition, which even warned me up front: “In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?”
(Also, come to think of it, I’d have skipped ahead a long way on the philosophy of uploading if I’d read A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain a few years earlier.)
I haven’t read that book but I up-voted because I like your approach. What is important to show a theist is why they don’t need a god for everything to make sense; and indeed that there isn’t much of anything left for a god to do.
The thing about books like The God Delusion is that they activate his mental defense mechanisms to prepare himself for any well-thought out, logical arguments. You need to start with something which isn’t as blatantly screaming “this book wants to destroy everything you care about because it merely happens to be right!” So I’m somewhat surprised people haven’t realized this and gone with the following option:
Gödel, Escher, Bach (by Douglas Hofstadter)
The brilliant thing about this book is that it subtly changes people’s worldview without them even realizing it to begin with. It doesn’t assert anything which sounds explicitly controversial, and they start digging down the rabbit hole. Because it’s honestly fun.
From there, you can feed him a steady diet of materials which implicitly assert a materialistic view of reality. In some time, he’ll wake up and realize that he has been compromised, and he hasn’t been smote by Zeus or lost all sense of moral direction and purpose either.
It’s so bloody unfair that you’d think Hofstadter was some sort of advanced disciple of the Dark Arts, but it is really just that good.
In retrospect, that was really what did it for me. I held on to various forms of wishful thinking for a long time, because it seemed to me that minds and matter were fundamentally separate things, I couldn’t see how it could be any other way—though I knew at that point that religious claims tended to be laughable, so I had some kind of vaguely half-assed do-it-yourself wishing-makes-it-so I believed in—and that implied the whole universe of dualism. Somehow I came away from it having relinquished that idea, and it, more than any other one book I’d read by that age, set the course for my intellectual journey.
And indeed, I was reading the twentieth anniversary edition, which even warned me up front: “In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?”
(Also, come to think of it, I’d have skipped ahead a long way on the philosophy of uploading if I’d read A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain a few years earlier.)
I haven’t read that book but I up-voted because I like your approach. What is important to show a theist is why they don’t need a god for everything to make sense; and indeed that there isn’t much of anything left for a god to do.