What about Those Who Change Their Minds?

Theists have a field day whenever they think a prominent atheist has found God. With glee they point to the last-line reference to God in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, or they take a line from Richard Dawkins out of context, or they recite the suspicious story of Antony Flew's alleged late-in-life, dementia-plagued conversion either to deism or Christianity.

But as far as the God question goes, these story, even if true, do not matter. They have no bearing whatsoever on whether God exists. 

People can have many justifications for calling themselves atheists, some good and some bad, but no reasonable atheist holds his position because someone else, -- someone "special" -- holds it. So an atheist's conversion to theism per se would mean nothing. The only thing that could possibly matter would be the new theist's justification for his conversion. It's the argument, not the person, that counts. I've yet to hear of an atheist-turned-theist who came up with a new argument for God's existence.

Note the asymmetry. While a conversion would be substantially uninteresting to an atheist, the equivalent could be devastating to a theist. If your deepest belief depended on revelation or first-hand or hearsay reports of miracles, then if your sources were to retract their claims, that would be a major blow. Why the difference? Because of the very nature of the case. If a Christian were to learn that the authors of the Gospels left behind materials reliably reporting that they made the whole thing up, where would that leave Christianity? If Paul left behind an authenticated diary confessing that he had not really been visited by the spirit of Jesus -- well there goes that source.

Or look at this way: many religious people believe that the Hebrew Bible was dictated by God to Moses. Divine inspiration is crucial to the belief. Consequently, if a believer were to be persuaded that in fact it was written by many people over a long period with no line to God whatsoever, it would be an unrecoverable blow.  

On the other, hand, take the works of Aristotle. Civilization owes a great debt to Aristotle. I and many others regard ourselves as Aristotelians with respect to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Yet if one day we discovered that no such person ever existed and that the books were compiled by many men over a long period, what different would it make philosophically? None whatsoever! Aristotle's works stand or fall on their merits, and that's it. If other people formulated those arguments, who would really care? The merits would be unchanged. The same can be said for Shakespeare's plays.

But the same cannot be said for the Bible(s).