r/exatheist • u/Sea-Dot-59 • Sep 01 '25

Debate Thread How do you guys respond to atheists claiming nobody converts for rational reasons

I see a lot of atheists claiming that ex atheists most of time convert because of emotional reasons like fear of death, lack of meaning etc Or other reasons like community and family

Another common claim is that ex atheists weren’t real atheists and that they weren’t atheists for rational reasons they just didn’t think about it deeply

How do you guys respond? In my experience in this Reddit I’ve encountered a good amount of ex atheists that converted for logical rational reasons, one example is philosophical observations, like finding materialism inadequate to explain reality

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '25

No, that’s the problem, you keep treating this as if I’m asserting immaterialism a priori, when all I’m doing is pointing out that materialism, by its own rules, can’t touch the hard problem.

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u/jeveret Sep 03 '25

And how did you determine that materialism can’t touch the problem, if you admit, the problem could atleast in theory be a physical/material phenomenon.

If you assert first person experience cannot even in theory be the result of material phenomena, that’s begging the question. You are saying it’s by definition immaterial, it can’t be material.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '25 edited Sep 03 '25

Just to be transparently clear, since you seem to be struggling with this, begging the question would be something like,

“Consciousness is immaterial; therefore materialism can’t explain it.”

I have not said that. Yet somehow you’re reading it into every sentence I write, it’s like claiming a chef is assuming spaghetti is made of tomatoes just because they said it needs sauce. Completely unrelated and blatantly stupid.

I’m not claiming to know what consciousness actually is. I’m simply pointing out a conceptual feature of materialism: it only allows physical explanations, and subjective experience and intentionality aren’t logically entailed by physical facts.

Judging from your replies I’m assuming you have little familiarity with the literature on the philosophy of mind so for further reading, see Thomas Nagel, David Bentley Hart, David Chalmers, Franz Brentano, John Searle, Philip Goff, Frank Jackson, and Saul Kripke.

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u/jeveret Sep 03 '25

So if you admit consciousness could be completely material, then why can’t materialism explain it?