Too lazy to address this comment. Luckily Scott Alexander has done so in delightful detail:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/17/the-what-youd-implicitly-heard-before-telling-thing/
Tldr, the idea that Christianity is is more likely to be true because it is old and some of its ideas match our vocabulary and aesthetics is unconvincing because it is the very fact that it is old (and pervasive) that its vocabulary matches some of our ideas and intuitions. Its hard for a system to survive that long being completely wrong on every count. Pointing to things that the belief system got right is not very interesting. (Scott argues this case much better than I just did)
Also too late on the conversion thing, Leah Libresco converted to Catholicism some time ago.
Just to be clear beyond my closing aside that I remain an unbeliever, I am not defending Wright’s (or Lewis’s, or Chesterton’s) argument here against anything but the knockdown that “oh well, something went wrong with his brain”. Nor do I agree with Gwern’s attribution of Wright’s account of his pre-conversion self to hindsight bias, or “hindsight bias” becomes a universal counterargument against every account of past events.
More generally, one person’s priors are not an argument against another’s posteriors.
Too lazy to address this comment. Luckily Scott Alexander has done so in delightful detail: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/17/the-what-youd-implicitly-heard-before-telling-thing/ Tldr, the idea that Christianity is is more likely to be true because it is old and some of its ideas match our vocabulary and aesthetics is unconvincing because it is the very fact that it is old (and pervasive) that its vocabulary matches some of our ideas and intuitions. Its hard for a system to survive that long being completely wrong on every count. Pointing to things that the belief system got right is not very interesting. (Scott argues this case much better than I just did)
Also too late on the conversion thing, Leah Libresco converted to Catholicism some time ago.
Just to be clear beyond my closing aside that I remain an unbeliever, I am not defending Wright’s (or Lewis’s, or Chesterton’s) argument here against anything but the knockdown that “oh well, something went wrong with his brain”. Nor do I agree with Gwern’s attribution of Wright’s account of his pre-conversion self to hindsight bias, or “hindsight bias” becomes a universal counterargument against every account of past events.
More generally, one person’s priors are not an argument against another’s posteriors.