“He later speaks of evidence, but what he takes as evidence is religious visions not further described. Whatever this experience was, on his own account no process of rationality played any role in his conversion.”
I am a theist in the process of (possibly) deconverting, and I wanted to chime in on this point. I obviously can’t speak for John C. Wright, but his evidence sounds quite reasonable to me.
One thing I am doing in my search for truth is praying for recognizable, repeated evidence that God exists. I am testing the hypothesis that God exists and is willing to communicate with me, and I have not ruled out prayer as a means of such communication. I have also given a time frame for this test. The type of evidence John Wright describes, if it actually happens to me within the time frame and happens often enough, will be enough to convince me that God is real. If I do not have any such experiences, I will conclude that either God does not exist or he does not place a high value on my belief in him.
To me, this seems quite rational; those kinds of experiences are far more likely to happen if God exists than if he doesn’t (although they are certainly not impossible if he doesn’t exist), so they will be strong evidence in favor of God’s existence if they actually happen. John Wright’s conversion seems logical to me, given his account of what happened.
I would disagree with this, from personal experience. I am intelligent enough that I could have figured out these things if I thought about it hard enough and long enough, but I had not focused my attention here until I read these articles. Eliezer did a great job of expressing things that I had not thought about yet, in ways that I can understand.
Of course, I’m not a random person on the Internet (literally random, that is), so that is worth taking into account when deciding whether the person you are talking to is likely to understand. Some posts are easier to understand than others, but overall I have been impressed with how accessible the Sequences are.