stephdiary wrote yesterday about having been pestered by a ‘God-botherer’, as he put it, while stuck on a broken-down train. It's obviously the weekend for it: this morning I heard beckyc's doorbell ring downstairs, and shortly afterwards my own doorbell rang. On the way to answer it I decided it was most likely Jehovah's Witnesses or similar, since they seemed the most plausible people to be going door-to-door on a Sunday morning; and sure enough, when I looked out of the window above my door, there were two people waving a ‘tract’ (their own word) at me entitled ‘All Suffering Soon To End’.

I get a lot of mileage out of that little window. For those who haven't visited me: I live in a first-floor flat with internal stairs down to my own front door at ground level. One of the hall windows is directly above the front door. So when my doorbell rings and my fifth sense tells me it's an unwelcome door-to-door pesterer of some kind rather than someone I actually want to see, I don't bother going down to the door; I just open that window and ask what they want from up here, saving me the effort of going down and up the stairs and also protecting me from any attempts to get a physical or psychological foot in the door.

That said, I would actually quite have liked to have talked to them on this occasion. Owen's comment yesterday had reminded me of the fundamental curiosity I always feel about proactive religious evangelists of this nature, and I've never yet managed to actually ask one about it. Sadly, when I do encounter one it never quite seems to be the right time; in this case I was half way through my breakfast and it would have gone soggy if I'd left it too long, so I just said ‘no thanks’ and shut the window again.

My fundamental curiosity about evangelists is that they invariably seem to start their reasoning from a premise remarkably close to its conclusion. I've read one or two JW pamphlets, and when you strip out the details of the JW faith in particular, the overall gist goes along the lines of ‘Given that God exists and [has the following nature], hadn't you better start [performing the following acts of acceptance and worship]?’ You occasionally hear echoes of this in mainstream Christianity too, with lots of emphasis on accepting Jesus Christ and not a lot about coming to believe in him.

This argument raises two related questions for me. Firstly, do these evangelists really think that the majority of the unconverted already believe that God exists and has the specified nature, and merely haven't got round to doing anything about it? This seems inconceivable to me; if I believed God existed, I would already be in church[1]! The reason I'm not is because I don't believe it in the first place, which means that arguments of the above form have no effect on me because they start from a premise I already don't believe. I can just about imagine that there might be some people who believed but had hitherto been lazy, but I cannot bring myself to believe that most people fall into this category. Surely the majority of non-churchgoers must be either definite atheists like me, or people whose belief in God is hesitant, tentative or half-hearted? Such people surely need (from the evangelist's point of view) to be convinced of your premise, not reminded of it as if they already knew but had forgotten. So my question to an evangelist, if I ever manage to ask it, is: ‘Do you have a lot of success with this approach?’ In other words, am I completely wrong in my intuition about the demographics of non-churchgoers?

[1] (Well, perhaps not. I've heard it argued by other atheists that if God did exist and was responsible for the current state of the world, he wouldn't be worthy of our worship and the morally right thing to do would be to shun him deliberately. I've no idea whether I'd subscribe to that if I did believe in him, but I'm pretty sure that I'd either be in church or deliberately not be in church; the fundamental point is that I can't imagine that I'd sit around being indecisive and lazy.)

My second question to the evangelist would be: ‘OK, I've heard your argument and am unsatisfied with it because it starts from a premise you have yet to convince me of. What are you going to do about that?’ Part of me suspects they would simply be unable to deal with the concept: that if they tried to construct an argument which convinced an atheist of their God's existence, they would find themselves accidentally assuming the conclusion every few sentences simply because they didn't have any idea how to think from any other starting point. This hypothesis is consistent with the structure of their pamphlets, because it suggests that they're presenting the only part of the argument that they're capable of thinking through clearly. But it is only a hypothesis, and a totally untested one. Other possibilities are that they might actually have such an argument but merely not have to use it very often (which would be consistent with me being completely wrong about the demographics of non-churchgoers), or that they might simply have no good argument and therefore direct their efforts at the few people they can convince rather than wasting their time on people like me. I'm curious to know which, and one day I hope to get round to asking somebody.