I thought this was a significant reason for resistance to conversion!
The anticipation of this experience is enough to make people resist becoming atheists. The reality of it is not at all obvious, nor necessary to explain the phenomenon to which you refer.
I don’t think it’s so simple. If you stop believing in God and feel unhappy, this might (quite reasonably) be interpreted as an indication that atheism wasn’t the right belief system for them.
“The right belief system for them” implies that one prefers beliefs for reasons other than their accuracy, which tends not to be true of people who spend any amount of time as converted atheists.
But there are also cases (drawing mostly from fiction, I guess) where people lose their faith and walk around unhappy for a few years and then maybe place their faith again.
This is a powerful motif in fiction, and does get used a lot. It probably even happens in real life sometimes, but I’m inclined to impugn the depth of the initial transition to atheism in those cases. Someone who tries being an atheist, doesn’t like it, and goes back to being a theist may have acknowledged the existence of compelling arguments in atheism’s favor, but they didn’t percolate deeply enough to stick; it seems like this scenario resembles people who say things like “I should eat less chocolate” or “I should be a vegetarian” or “I should give more to charity” and don’t actually do so. They detect sound reasoning in favor of the proposition, but it doesn’t sit right with preferences or other beliefs, and so the reasoning is discarded by means of “faith” or equivalent mechanism of ignoring evidence.
The anticipation of this experience is enough to make people resist becoming atheists. The reality of it is not at all obvious, nor necessary to explain the phenomenon to which you refer.
“The right belief system for them” implies that one prefers beliefs for reasons other than their accuracy, which tends not to be true of people who spend any amount of time as converted atheists.
This is a powerful motif in fiction, and does get used a lot. It probably even happens in real life sometimes, but I’m inclined to impugn the depth of the initial transition to atheism in those cases. Someone who tries being an atheist, doesn’t like it, and goes back to being a theist may have acknowledged the existence of compelling arguments in atheism’s favor, but they didn’t percolate deeply enough to stick; it seems like this scenario resembles people who say things like “I should eat less chocolate” or “I should be a vegetarian” or “I should give more to charity” and don’t actually do so. They detect sound reasoning in favor of the proposition, but it doesn’t sit right with preferences or other beliefs, and so the reasoning is discarded by means of “faith” or equivalent mechanism of ignoring evidence.