Religious Conversions

Chuck, all anyone is asking is the most basic of questions: "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?"You've made the claim that there are more occurrences of one thing ("many more," I believe) than another. How do you know that?The best way to obtain knowledge on the relative quantities of anything is simply by counting - count everything up, and compare the numbers. In this case, the numbers are going to be difficult to get ahold of, wouldn't you think? Typically religious demographic information is obtained by census information and the like - but while these numbers can and do show the relative growth or shrinking numbers of specific faiths, they do not specifically show conversions from religion x to religion y.I can think of places where specific conversions are likely to be found. I understand in an anecdotal sense that in American prisons there is a possible tendency for African-American prisoners to convert to Islam; and that while there is also similar anecdotal evidence regarding the incidence of being "born again" in prison, a Christian experiencing a religious revival isn't really much of a conversion if the individual already considered themselves to be Christian beforehand. Since Christianity in its many flavors tends to demographically dominate the US, I would presume that Islamisc conversions would ironically be higher here, with a higher number of Christians to potentially convert, than in say Iraq, where I would expect to potentially find a few Christian converts from the majority Muslims. But I have no idea of the relative worldwide numbers involved of specific conversions.What makes you believe that there are more Islam > Christian conversions than Christian > Islam conversions? I'm rather impartial; I don't honestly know which religion gains more converts than the other, and don't particularly care (since the popularity of an idea isn't tied to its veracity, that being an appeal to popularity, a logical fallacy) more than a basic sense of curiosity. I'd passingly like to know, since the question has been brought up, but I'll need data to be able to tell which conclusion is more likely to reflect reality. After all, without data upon which to base them, all conclusions are naught but speculation.In the absence of data, with nothing but bare speculation, I tend to prefer the answer "I don't know," rather than picking the most personally preferable conclusion as the most likely to be true. My preferences, as my bank account so often reminds me, have little influence on reality.

It's rather difficult for Christianity to make further gains in a region where most people are already Christian. After all, you can't convert a Christian to Christianity - that's just not a conversion.To the unaffiliated and non-Christian persuasions, however, every Christian is a potential convert.It's basic diminishing returns. As you gain a larger and larger percentage of the population, you have fewer and fewer remaining potential converts. And, of course, the reverse is also true.Combine that with the fact that not being Christian is simply becoming more and more socially acceptable in the US, and you can see why there would be a decrease in the numbers of the faithful.I wouldn't for a moment, however, suggest that Christianity is "withering on the vine" in the US. It's still going strong. The vast majority of people (about 75% by the numbers you provided) still self-identify as Christian of one flavor or another. A declining trend doesn't mean you can just carry the line all the way down and predict the extinction of the Christian religion in the US by 20xx. Religious decline and revival has long been a basic fact of history; there may come a day when Christianity is forgotten into the ancient past, but the current trend is extremely unlikely to be the first step.

It depends. Fundamentalist Protestants often don't. But I think even Chuck would agree that the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is much smaller than the difference between either of those and Islam, which is again much smaller than the difference between any of those and Atheism.If I asked a Catholic if they were Christian, they'd say "yes." Self-identification is my general rule. Prevents my from falling for a "no true Scotsman" so easily.

Of course. But you have to remember farther back in the past. We've seen such a Christian decline in the past, many times. Inevitably, it's been followed up by a period of religious revival. The line isn't straight, basically, and I don't have sufficient confidence to suggest that Christianity is likely to become a minority religion in the US any time in the reasonable future. Nothing more than after-the-fact rationalization for their No-True-Scotsman fallacious reasoning, as we all well know. One would have to wonder, then, how one determines a "true" Christian. A decade ago I would have immediately identified myself as a "true" Christian, and likely anyone who knew me would as well; I felt a certainty in my beliefs at the time and was devoted to my faith. If one cannot tell "true" Christians from "false" Christians except in the event of a conversion away from the faith, the distinction is entirely moot - such retroactive reasoning is nothing more than circular reasoning: "they converted because they weren't "true" Christians; we know they weren't "true" Christians because they converted." Post-hoc rationalization, as always. If evidence leads to the possibility that your cherished beliefs are false, shift the goalposts slightly so that you can internally dismiss the discomforting information.Also, yes, middle-eastern food can be quite good. A bit farther off, but have you ever had Ethiopian food? Delicious - there's actually a very good place here in Sacramento, and you reminded me of it because they also eat with their hands, using a scrumptious flatbread that's rather like a cross between sourdough and a pancake in place of implements. Good stuff. Appeal to popularity - the prevalence of a certain belief is irrelevant to the veracity of the belief. Else, the widespread acceptance of the geocentric model or the flat-Earth model a thousand years ago should have been evidence that the Earth was the flat center of the Universe.

Of course. As I said, Chuck is certainly one of those Protestants who doesn't include half of the Christian population as Christians, and therefore gets to feel like a persecuted minority.I just go by self-identification. Mormons self-identify as Christians. Catholics self-identify as Christians. Protestants self-identify as Christians. They're all subdivisions of the broader religion that believes Jesus of Nazareth to be the Son of the Hebrew God who died on a cross in absolution of the world's sins, and rose from the dead some three days later. Excluding a group who believes all that just because they also have a leader with a funny hat, or because they think the story doesn't end there, is like saying dogs aren't vertebrates because they're mammals.

Hi Chuck,I'd rather not get sidetracked off-topic with a years-old POTM. I'm glad you like it, and I'll just say that I don't think you're taking my words quite the way I meant them, though that seems to be nigh-universal around here when the word "faith" enters the picture. I'll just leave it at that so we don't go off-topic.------------------------ That's the problem, Chuck. From appearances, you're using personal anecdotes, selectively chosen, to draw a sweeping conclusion about reality on a global scale. Someone else mentioned that "the plural of anecdote is not data," and that statement could not be more true.If I were to try to examine the frequency of religious conversions, I would not start by looking online to see how many conversion stories I could find; this selects only for those individuals who bother to post a story on the internet, and can easily be skewed by language, my specific search terms, and so on, on top of simply being nothing more than a collection of anecdotes. I would not even look at whether one religion or the other is "true;" people believe things that are known to be false all the time.Instead, I would try to create a survey. The best way would be to convince a government or two to add a little subsection to census data, asking if respondents were previously of a different religion. This way we could get a nice, broad and random sample of conversions to and from all religions and get some real, blind data. Failing that, I would seek a grant to fund a study. I'd create a survey, print out a few hundred thousand copies, and randomly select locations around the globe to send some grad students around to random people for responses. The randomness is important - selecting only a specific area, or a specific income group, or a specific language, or a specific race/national origin, all of these can (and usually do) skew the statistical results. If I wanted to find out the percentage of Republicans vs Democrats int he US, for example, I wouldn't only send my surveys to specifically rich or poor neighborhoods, because the results would be unlikely to represent the whole. Blind, random surveys across the entire spectrum of the population are far, FAR more likely to give us accurate results.Debate isn't "over" because Straggler posted the Guinness results. I'd like to ask the same question of them - where did those results come from?My key point is that you seem to be making a conclusion based on information you cannot possibly have. You don;t know how many Islam > Christian conversions happened last year - you have no way of knowing. Likewise with Christian > Islam conversions. You have a "general sense," more like a "gut feeling" that one is greater than the other; I presume largely because you find one of the competing religions to be more personally gratifying. But like my bank account, our preferences cannot affect reality - your "gut feeling" that the "truth" of Christianity means there will be more Islam > Christianity conversions carries no more weight than my feeling that I "deserve" a larger salary will somehow make my direct deposits larger.The question "which occurs more, conversions from Islam to Christianity, or Christianity to Islam" is a quantitative question, and this means that the only way to answer it is quantitatively.We need numbers. Until we get those numbers, we can make predictions, but we cannot draw conclusions. Our best answer without a good statistical survey is quote simply "I don't know."I'll leave the obvious No True Scotsman debate on who is or isn;t a Christian for a thread where it's more appropriate and on-topic.

Perhaps a different way of saying this is that Chuck has been repeatedly and vigorously explaining that he is convinced, while we continue to ask what information he found so convincing.The questions of the day are "what information does Chuck have that caused him to be so convinced," and "does anyone else find that information convincing, and should in fact Chick find it convincing?"

Of course, but that's why we're largely speaking to the lurkers. And verbalizing the concepts helps me organize my own head, so I think it's a worthwhile exercise, even if we fail to convince our opponents directly. Thinking about thinking is rarely a waste. Of course. Yet epistemology is a fantastically important subject that nearly everyone simply takes for granted. Virtually no one asks themselves what they think they know, and how they think they know it.Exploring that is more important, I think, than the individual conclusions we arrive at. I have different thoughts on the matter. We both know this ties into the classic "RAZD vs Straggler" debates on the subject, and I think we would both agree that RAZD is certainly not incapable of comprehending the subject. I'm reluctant to agree that a discussion along those lines will be "beyond" Chuck.After all, the concept (as it pertains to this specific thread) is not difficult. If I ask if there are more apples or oranges in a basket, you don't ask people for their testimonials on whether they like apples or oranges better. You don;t search online for pictures of apple orchards or orange groves. If the basket is available, you count the oranges and the apples and let the numbers tell you which is larger. If the basket is not available and you can't see it to count, you have no way of knowing, and the best answer is "I don't know."

I'm not sure more specific data is available than the relative populations of each religion and their change over time. Specific x > y and y > x conversions are just more specific than your typical census data recovers. Standard survey types tend to be able to represent only a specific geological area (like a city or a state), not global trends simply because of the scale of effort required. The trend in Washington, DC is likely to be very different from Baghdad, Iraq.

But Chuck, the evidence you've posted is not subjective. That's not the problem at all. Sure, your subjective opinions on the veracity of Christianity caused you to make the prediction that there are more Christian converts than Muslim, but you actually did post some evidence.The problem is simply that it wasn't very useful evidence.You even posted what was very close to quantitative evidence - we can count up the number of conversion testimonials and get a number! Those testimonials aren't subjective. Regardless of the observer, a person saying "I converted to Christianity from Islam" is exactly that.The fatal flaw, the reason your evidence is insufficient to draw a conclusion, is that it's just not thorough - it's statistically insignificant.For an unbiased comparison (and by "bias" I don't only mean yours or mine or anyone else's based on pre-existing opinions; I mean looking only at specific areas, or only at online testimonials, or only at English sources, etc) you need a truly blind, random survey. You need to get a sample that is actually likely to represent the entire global population - and that, of course, is very difficult to do.The evidence is not what's subjective here. What's subjective is the weight you're assigning to evidence that simply doesn't justify it.You quoted my analogy about determining whether there were more apples or oranges in a basket. Imagine, then, that the actual question is "are there more apples or oranges in the entire world?"Now, in that case we might actually have some data. Merchants tend to keep pretty good records, and we can see how many apples and oranges are bought and sold. It won;t be all of them, but it would be a very good sample.But what if I only used the apples and oranges I personally see? I live in California - there are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of orange trees lining the streets of the city where I live, with no apples in sight outside of the grocery store. My personal experience is good at giving me a rough estimate for the area in which I live, but it's no good at all at providing a sample of the entire world.This is a basic bias in the human mind - what we individually observe and hear about through anecdote is given more weight in our animal brains than statistical numbers. And a few thousand years ago, when "the whole world" really was restricted to your own tribe's typical hunting ground, this was just fine.But our awareness of the world has grown far, far beyond what you or I will ever individually experience first or even second-hand. I'll never, ever see every orange grove and apple orchard in the world. I'll never be able to directly observe enough apples and oranges to be able to gain an internal sense of whether there are more of one than the other. Instead I have to rely on data, and ignore the "gut" part of me that says "well, I've seen a lot more oranges than apples..."So too with conversions. As individuals, we won;t even hear about all of the conversions that happen within our own city limits, let alone the world. Our personal, anecdotal experience, even when supplemented by second- and third-hand accounts through the individual experiences of others through magazines and the internet, just isn't enough to get even a fuzzy picture of the global reality. That "gut" part of you says "Christianity is the Truth, so there should be more converts to Christianity," and "I've heard about more Christian conversions than Muslim," and the two "confirm" each other in your brain. Your "gut" feeling is that you've found the answer......even though there is no possible way you could ever use those limited observations as representative of the global whole.That's all this is. Our "gut feelings" are often right in our personal experiences. Our personal experiences help us make snap decisions in the environments we're familiar with. But when dealing with an actually mysterious question, one for which the answer is not known and where we don't even have the right information to figure it out right now, those experiences and our "gut" feelings are actually worse than useless, because they'll make us draw a conclusion before we have any right to.And when we do, those unfounded conclusions are no better than a random guess.

Just a bump for Chuck to see if he'd like to respond.

Hi Chuck,Just to keep this as brief as possible:The problem is that an "educated guess" you could make based solely on a collection of personal anecdotes (second or third-hand) from your immediate acquaintances and what you find on the web will quite simply have an error margin far too large to draw a conclusion from.The closest feasible data we're likely to ever see is the basic census data of people self-reporting their religious convictions, not conversions, and measuring the changing rates over time. You might be able to pull off some clever math to correct for birth- and death rates and get a little closer to a real conversion number (I'm too lazy/busy and insufficiently curious to try), but that's about it.What you're basically saying, Chuck, is this:"I know of xxx Muslim to Cristian conversions, from what I've heard about through my circle of acquaintances and some brief research on the web of Christian sources. I didn't look for Muslim to Christian conversions, but I think they must be lower."This means several things:You "know of" several Muslim to Christian conversions...but some of those could be duplicate or even triplicate reporting of the same conversion reaching you through multiple paths (twice from two different websites, once from your pastor in a sermon, perhaps again from a fellow parishioner, and they could all be referring to the same individual yet be counted by you as four conversions).You'll only "know of" conversions that have immediate access to someone who speaks English and has access to communication. You'll never "know of" the vast, vast majority of conversions (in any direction, to and from any faith) in Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, or Iran, or Egypt, or Somalia, or Niger, or dozens of other countries simply because 1) very few people speak English or know someone who speaks English, and 2) very few people have access to methods of communication that would allow you to ever hear about it regardless of the language.You didn't look for Christian to Muslim conversions to the same degree that you searched for the reverse, because you already thought you knew the answer before doing any looking. You sought information that would confirm what you already believed, you didn't look for information that would tell you if you were wrong.The number of Muslim to Christian conversions you've given us, then, is a highly suspect number of well known statistical insignificance. It's just like only counting the orange trees in my city and predicting that there are more oranges than apples in the entire world. The methodology you used to gather your information simply cannot ever provide useful evidence to suggest even an "educated guess" about anything at all, ever. This is why sociologists and anthropologists don't do their research on the web, unless they're just looking up a book online. A question is mysterious if we genuinely don't know the answer, full stop. We genuinely don't know how many conversions in each direction happen yearly. We don't even know how to find the answer with any degree of certainty. It's a mysterious question.We can talk about abiogenesis or cosmology in another thread. I'd be happy to discuss either with you, in fact - despite your tendency to use light sarcasm (something I'm hardly innocent of myself), debating with you feels more productive and rewarding than with some others I've spoken to regarding similar subjects.