I want to try out a thought I am not sure is right.
Here is the observation that prompts it. The classical arguments for the existence of God are in decent repair. The argument from contingency has survived a great deal of scrutiny. And yet I have never met anyone who was argued into the faith the way one is argued into accepting a proof in geometry — reluctantly, by force of the steps. People are moved, over years, by something that includes argument but is not exhausted by it.
The tempting conclusion is that the arguments are therefore bad. I think that conclusion is too quick, and that the interesting question is what kind of thing assent is.
Two ways of holding a proposition
John Henry Newman, in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, draws a distinction I keep returning to: between notional assent, where we accept a proposition as true, and real assent, where the thing assented to has become concrete enough to act on. I can give notional assent to the proposition that a rope bridge will hold my weight. Real assent is stepping onto it.
Newman's point is not that notional assent is worthless. It is that the two are different operations, and that arguments are much better at producing the first than the second. A demonstration can compel me to concede a conclusion while leaving me entirely unchanged. We have all conceded things this way.
If that distinction holds, then the complaint "your argument didn't convince me" is ambiguous in a way that matters. It might mean I found a flaw in it. It might mean I granted every step and remained exactly where I was. Only the first is a defect in the argument.
Where this might go wrong
The obvious danger is that this becomes unfalsifiable — a way of keeping arguments immune from criticism by relocating every failure into the listener. That would be a cheat, and I want to name it rather than dodge it.
I think the protection against the cheat is that real assent has consequences we can look at. Newman's account does not say the arguments are beyond challenge; it says that being convinced is a different event from being unable to object. A person who has really assented prays differently, spends money differently, treats other people differently. If the distinction were doing no work but excusing bad arguments, we would expect the two kinds of assent to come apart only in the apologist's favour. They do not: plenty of us give real assent to things we could not defend for ten minutes, which is embarrassing in the other direction.
The pastoral consequence
What follows practically, if this is right, is that handing someone the contingency argument and expecting conversion is a category error, and that being disappointed in them for it is unjust. The arguments clear ground. They show that the thing is not absurd, that belief is not the abdication of intelligence. That is real work and it is worth doing well.
But the movement from this is not absurd to this is what I will stake my life on runs through something else: liturgy, suffering, the example of someone who is obviously and inconveniently good, a long time of finding that the thing keeps being true when tested. The Church has always known this, which is why she catechises rather than merely debates.
I am aware this can be read as anti-intellectualism dressed up. I do not mean it that way. Aquinas did not write the Summa because arguments are decorative. The claim is narrower: that argument is necessary and not sufficient, and that mistaking necessity for sufficiency makes us both worse apologists and worse company.
I hold this one loosely. It is filed under experimental for a reason.