I am still a fundamentalist on one issue: the resurrection. The resurrection was my last tenuous grasp on faith. I guarded it against attack as if it were … well, a pearl of great price.
I had long since let go of a literal interpretation of the bible. Genesis? Obviously allegorical. Most of the old testament? Historically unlikely at best. The gospels I thought might contain some of Jesus’ teaching and therefore had value. But Mathew’s description of the events during and after the crucifixion, the dead walking the streets? Nope, no zombies for me.
But somehow, I held on to the resurrection. If nothing else were true, but this one thing it would all be worth it.
You know what would be good evidence for god’s existence?
Resurrection.
I took a fundamentalist, literal, take the guy at his word interpretation of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:15-19:
16 So if the dead won’t be raised to life, Christ wasn’t raised to life. 17 Unless Christ was raised to life, your faith is useless, and you are still living in your sins. 18 And those people who died after putting their faith in him are completely lost. 19 If our hope in Christ is good only for this life, we are worse off than anyone else.
I am still a fundamentalist about Paul’s statement. If there is one thing that must be true about Christianity for any of it to be true it is the resurrection as succinctly stated by Paul. If that is not literally true, then the whole of Christianity is not only untrue but a waste of time. Not my opinion, it is Paul’s.
But now I have succumbed to the crushing lack of evidence for the resurrection. I can no longer believe that it occurred. The very moment when I realized that I no longer believed in the resurrection I knew my faith in god was over. There was no going back.
Why I am not a liberal Christian
Here is the thing, there a lots of people who reject fundamentalism and its literal interpretation of the bible but keep some form of faith. The trappings of faith: tradition, ceremony, community and spirituality are useful and meaningful for these people. I just happen to not be one of those people.
Over the years leading up to my deconversion I flirted with various forms of liberal Christianity. I read Sojourners. My politics aligned well and I believed the gospel needed to be a practical love on the streets. I read Rob Bell and Donald Miller. I bandied about the term “emergent church” unironically. I read Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. Was I a mystic? Once in a great while I would visit a church with more of an ecumenical bent and less of an evangelical one. But I never found these things satisfying. There was no power in them. There was no Truth with a capital T.
So when my moment of realization came, I no longer believed the resurrection happened, I knew I was an atheist. There was very little equivocation. It never occurred to me to become a liberal theologian and carry on with the trappings of faith. I walked away clean. Well, that is not entirely true, my family members are all still believers so I am sometimes the atheist in church but that is not by choice and may be the topic of a different post.
These days the new hotness is called deconstruction. That is breaking the connection between fundamentalism and faith, letting go of dogma but crucially keeping some parts of faith. But heavily implied is that reconstruction follows the deconstruction process. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
A very famous example of this is Science Mike, Mike McHargue, who in his book Finding God in the Waves, talks about having faith, losing it and getting it back. Specifically, he comes to understand “God” as the forces of nature that created the universe. Here are his 10 Axioms About Faith.
I am not here to take pot shots at McHargue, I actually have a lot of respect for Mike, but his example is illustrative. I am here to say:
I don’t get it
In the days after my deconversion I was saying to myself, “why bother with a liberal theology?” To be clear I do not believe any gods exist in any way, but for the sake of argument:
If god is just the ground of being, should that be worshiped?
If god is just the deist clock maker, should that be loved?
If god is just the personification of human love and kindness, how is that useful?
If god is just the natural forces personified why is “God” necessary when nature is enough on its own?
If we all get to define god in our own image (and that is really the story of all of human history), then what benefit is that to humanity?
In short, if god is just these things, then god is not necessary. God is not necessary for meaning, goodness, love, joy, compassion, awe or mystery. We derive these things from each other and the cosmos.
From humanity and nature comes all of the things we hold most dear
So to me, hanging on to a more liberal interpretation of god is not only not necessary it is a detriment. For me, like Paul, it is pitiable. More than just god it is religion that is the baggage. Religion necessarily entails archaic morality, dogmatism and a destructive dualism. Those who are deconstructing I know have a sincere desire to redeem their traditions. I believe it is holding them back. They are unnecessarily starting in the hole. I believe we must let go of the past to move forward.
I recently re-read famously liberal theologian turned atheist, Bart Erhman’s Why Even Bother Being A Liberal Christian. He expresses both the reason it is difficult to let go and ultimately that it is necessary:
Yes, I could have left. But this is the key point: if I left I would have to go SOMEWHERE ELSE. And that somewhere else, in my view, was no better than the place I was leaving. You can’t go from something to nothing. You go from one thing to another thing. And why do that? Only because you can no longer stay where you are.
And so it made better sense to me to try to reinterpret the tradition I was standing within than to adopt an entirely new tradition. That’s why I never was (very) tempted to become Jewish. And not at all tempted to become Muslim, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or anything else.
But why be *anything*? The reality is that deciding to become *nothing* doesn’t work. We are all something or other. Someone may think that she or he is bold and brazen and a real pioneer to become an atheist. Really? That is bold, brazen, and pioneering??? As if no one else has done that? As if being an atheist doesn’t involve assumptions about the world, beliefs about where we came from, ideas about what it means to lead a good and fulfilling life? Really?
…
Until I could not do so any more. I eventually had to stop because the very basis of the entire tradition – the existence of a loving God – itself came under threat for me.
When Bart talks about having no where else to go, I get it. As I have mentioned in my discussion of Secular Grace, we in the communities of unbelief have a long way to go to catch up to the kind of community religion facilitates. “You can’t go from something to nothing.” But eventually, Bart felt compelled to let go.
I had a conversation on Facebook , where the question was asked if the term “liberal Christian” was confusing. To which I responded, “yes!” To me it is confusing to continue to use the term “god” when that has ceased to have objective meaning. Even for those naturalists who are liberal Christians they must deal with the implied supernaturalism.
There is more that needs to be removed from Christianity than needs to be retained. If one takes on the task that Thomas Jefferson took, to remove the supernatural parts of the bible, one is left with a very skinny book. If one removes the archaic morality, one is left with a leaflet that basically says: Be good to each other.
You can be good without god
Let go of that which is holding you back.
This post is a part of the series Communities of Unbelief. I’ll be writing more about communities of unbelief, some I choose not to be a member of, some I identify with and others I have yet to explore.
Since my deconversion I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about why I no longer believe. Most of this expression has occurred online as this is the place where freedom of expression has few limits. A part of this process has been the search for a community to belong to. I have written before about the need to have secular replacements for community.
This search has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. The community of non-believers is a many splintered thing. In fact, the term community does not really apply and the word factions leaps to mind. There are many factions often competing and often hostile to one another:
Those who never believed
I know quite a few atheists and non-believers in real life but their experience is more like water to a fish. Belief and unbelief is not something they are interested in.
Those who are aggressively anti-theist and anti-religion
Think “new” atheists (fairly or unfairly). More so than the famous authors are the everyday twitter warriors that take it as their personal responsibility to disabuse believers of their faith.
Those who are focused on legal maters pertaining to secularism
These are the groups like CFI, FFRF, Secular Coalition that are doing work I agree with but have little to do with community building.
Those who reject the fundamentalism but not the faith
This is the new hotness, deconstruction, not throwing the baby out with the bath water. I have met many many new friends in this category.
I find I don’t quite fit into any of those categories. My experience and particular brand of unbelief will forever be informed by my former faith. I have no desire to convince believers to abandon their faith. I have mentioned I am still a bit angry at apologists but I am not interested in taking down the average theist. I believe in a secular society and I support those causes but they do not inspire me. I find no joy in them. And finally, though I have met new friends who are in the deconstructing crowd, if I am being honest, I don’t get it. When I let go of faith I felt no desire to hold onto the trappings of faith. In fact, it was freeing to abandon them.
I am starting a new series about communities of unbelief. I’ll be tackling the following ideas:
I believe as humans we need community. It is a basic need. Those of us who have walked away from our faith have often also lost community we relied on. Hopefully, the series can help answer: What now?
Let me know what communities or factions I have missed, where I am being unfair and most importantly which communities you are a member of.
Check back often to read my explanations for these important questions.
Linda LaScola over at the Rational Doubt blog asked me a series of insightful questions trying to get at what precipitated not just my deconversion but my willingness to listen to my doubts in the first place. I failed miserably at trying to answer her questions. I have had some time to reflect on it and this my attempt to further answer her questions.
I have tried to explain the why of my deconversion in a few other posts. I have written about my deconversion story before and also a series about presuppositions (not to be confused with presuppostional apologetics) that lead one to believe or disbelieve. The more I think about it the more I am convinced these cultural norms are what contribute to wide spread belief and it takes analysis to overcome this cultural bias.
But to Linda’s questions of “what started you on investigating the doubts you say you always had?” and “what motivated you to give yourself the permission to take the first step?” In a word: discontent. Call it the (twenty) seven year itch. I was not satisfied and I had not been for some time.
A brief history
To better explain I have to give you a bit of history. I became a Christian in my late teens. I spent a year or so reading the bible before I went to church with any seriousness. When I got to church I experienced an initial shock. I would often find myself saying:
I wonder why they believe that?
I worked to fit in anyway and eventually I was encouraged to go to bible college. I attended a small fundamentalist bible college where, ironically, I received a fairly decent education in critical thinking. It was a (relatively) safe place to ask and wrestle with (most of) the big questions. With hindsight my professors, whom I am still fond of, were too good at their jobs. There were certainly down sides to being at a bible college, but the professors were intelligent, caring and loved teaching. Several of those professors had a particular focus on grace that made a lasting (to this day) impact on me.
The really big shock came when I graduated and it was time to get licensed by my particular denomination. In the opposite of the critical thinking of bible college, the leaders of my denomination demanded a level of doctrinal fealty not seen since the inquisition. (OK, not quite).
You will believe and preach X, Y and Z
I reluctantly signed on the dotted line after having spent four years attempting to attain this very thing. I then spent a relatively unfulfilling (loved the people, hated the job) two years as a youth pastor before succumbing to burn out (more on this in a future post). I finally realized leadership in the church specifically and the people helping profession in general were not good work for my particular personality, an occasionally misanthropic introvert. I moved on and have had a successful career in technology where misanthropic introverts abound.
I promise I am wrapping up my digression and getting to the point. In the ensuing years, on my own and eventually with my family, I kept trying to find that same bible college experience: big questions, critical thinking and a focus on grace. No pastor and no church lived up to this ideal in my head. Mind you, I remained a dedicated Christian during this time. But to say that I was unsatisfied by the church would be a wild understatement. I was discontent but I figured it was just misanthropic me.
Faith discredits itself by proving to be insufficient to satisfy the faithful.
— Christopher Hitchens
I started to really feel U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Which until then always confused me: Aren’t these guys Christians already?
I believed that if my faith was worth anything it could withstand scrutiny. So I stopped ignoring the occasional article that was critical of Christianity. I allowed myself to ask hard questions.
My last read through of the bible was uncomfortable as the grace colored glasses came off and I was facing head on the reality of the implications of the stories.
Already a science geek, I found the critical thinking and the big questions being asked. And unlike religious doctrine the more I explored the more solid the scientific truths became.
In essence the snowball was very slowly beginning to roll down hill. Finally, after having spent some time looking at the beliefs of religions that had more modern beginnings and which appeared to me as obviously untrue, it began to dawn on me that is how believers of other faiths viewed my Christianity:obviously untrue. In the end, my faith did not withstand scrutiny. I allowed myself to listen to those doubts and realized they were more true than my beliefs.
What about now?
I think it is a part of the human condition to feel unsatisfied. Sam Harris talks about the “fleetingness of happiness.” But this is what I find fulfilling: continually seeking knowledge, learning, asking the big questions and wrestling with the answers or lack there of.
It is the freedom of free thinking that is invigorating. There are no bounds besides my human finiteness on what I can explore and what knowledge I can seek. There are no questions that cannot be asked. And there is no fear in accepting the answers that are found.
As time passes and my deconversion is further and further in the rear view mirror, I find it more and more difficult to remember how or why I once believed certain things without questioning. Christians might say this is because I have distanced myself from god and I am alone in my sin. Which leads me to the topic of this blog post.
What the hell is the deal with sin?
One of the dark sides to religion is the focus on sin. This may be one of the most baffling aspects for secularists who have never subscribed to one faith or another. It is also one of the most difficult mindsets to break free from for the deconverted. Religions indoctrinate the idea that you, as a human being, are broken.
I have talked about morality before but I did not address the elephant in the room, sin. From the perspective of the believer it is why one cannot be good without god. It is why when secular humanists talk about morality and ethics believers are unable to to take them seriously. The presupposition is that as a human you are sinful and broken by default.
The most fascinating aspect of the doctrine of sin is that it is an entirely fabricated problem. The atonement is a solution looking for a problem. What Christianity posits is that a perfectly good god created good creations (humans). Gave them basically one arbitrary rule about a tree. And for reasons no one can adequately explain the humans decided to listen to the snake. Did I mention there was a talking snake? For this the whole of humanity is permanently held responsible for the rest of human history.
Think about this from an omniscient god’s perspective. Why create creations with an Achilles heel, knowing they will reject you, particularly, if your purported reason is for relationship with said creatures? Free will is a wholly inadequate explanation for why a god would make this decision. This bleeds into the problem of evil and theodicy which I have written about before.
Let’s take a closer look at the doctrine of sin. In Christian theology sin is pervasive and complete. Paul quoting the old testament explains it in this cheery way:
10 “There is no one righteous, not even one,
11there is no one who understands,
there is no one who seeks God.
12All have turned away,
together they have become worthless;
there is no one who shows kindness, not even one.”
13 “Their throats are open graves,
they deceive with their tongues,
the poison of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouths arefull of cursing and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood,
16ruin and misery are in their paths,
17and the way of peace they have not known.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
— Romans 3:10-18
In reformed (sometimes called Calvinist) theology, this is canonized as the doctrine of “Total Depravity.” Not all Christian sects go this far but it is illustrative. To be fair, the doctrine does not assert that people are all bad all the time. Rather, it suggests that even the best motives are tinged with sin. So even when a person is being good it is not purely good. It is not just about the sins one commits or omits but the state of having been impugned with Sin with a capital S.
Even for what I considered the best of Christianity, grace, sin is the dark flip side of the coin. The believer cannot understand the need for graceful forgiveness without truly understanding their sin. To the believer the doctrine of sin is not abhorrent because the solution to sin is one sinner’s prayer away. The entire point of Christianity is the sacrifice of Jesus dying on the cross for the Sin (capital S) of humanity. Good news, right?
He who is forgiven much, loves much
The critique I want to make is about the psychological damage that this inflicts. The message that is internalized is that the person themselves is worthless. Whether this is the intent of the doctrine or not this often happens in practice.
The constant message of the church is a dark one:
You are a sinner
You are broken
You are defective
You are lost
You cannot save yourself
Families are broken and dysfunctional
The world is broken
I want to focus on this word ‘broken’ because it gets used quite often and is quite damaging. Even beyond the spiritual term sin, broken has a very real world connotation. Constantly sending the message that a person is broken is not helpful, it does not encourage a healthy perspective and ultimately can be destructive.
Imagine a person who is experiencing real world tragedy, a person battling depression, and the message of the church is, “you are broken.” What would you expect that person to take away from that message? To add insult to injury, when people suffer real tragedy the victim is often blamed. This does not help people to wellness.
Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I’ll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well. –Christopher Hitchens
Before I continue, I need to address the reality of evil in the world. Human beings are capable of great good and terrible evil. I am not denying that we as a species are capable of the worst atrocities both individually and collectively. Though we have evolved the ability to think rationally, logically and morally, those selfish and sometimes destructive instincts can and do assert themselves. We are often in a battle with our baser natures. But stigmatizing this as sin does not help the problem and is certainly not a solution.
Evolutionary psychology has some insights into human nature. We have evolved to be selfish as a survival mechanism. We can be tribal. And we are prone to overreact to fear and anger. We are capable of fooling ourselves and others. But that is not the end of the story.
As far as we know, we are the only sentient beings in the cosmos. That makes us painfully unique and can add to our sense of loneliness as a species. At least on Earth we are the only species who have the capacity to be self aware of our instincts and act in spite of them with rationality and morality.
Humans are not broken, in fact we are the most precious commodity in the universe, sentient beings. We are capable of altruism, forgiveness and sacrifice for the greater good. Humanity is capable of both defining and being good.
To err is human, to forgive divine
Humans are, however, fallible. We make mistakes. Sometimes often. We need to be gracious and empathetic with one another. We need to acknowledge our fallibility even embrace it. Admit when we are wrong quickly and not beat our selves up over it.
We are accountable to one another rather than sinners in the hands of an angry god*. How we treat each other is the basis of all morality. I have argued for a secular form of grace. Humans deeply need to feel accepted. That begins with accepting one another’s imperfections.
Interestingly, the entire point of the scientific method is to rule out as much as is humanly possible human fallibility. Peer review, falsifiability and repetition are attempts to avoid human error. This method mostly rules out erroneous ideas leaving room to discover the truth. Through this method the human species has gone to the moon, overcome diseases and created the internet. What is next?
You are not broken you are human and that is divine.
* I am aware Edwards’ sermon was actually about grace but the phrase is evocative.
Since my deconversion and becoming an atheist I am particularly interested in engaging Christian apologists. During my Christian faith I was always fascinated and somewhat uncomfortable with apologetics. Reading apologists I began to realize the arguments tended to have fatal flaws and I became increasingly doubtful about their efficacy. Ultimately, apologetics was one of the factors that led to my rejecting the faith.
Now as an atheist I am relieved of the need to defend apologetics and Christianity in general. Instead I am fascinated by why I ever found them convincing even in part. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about why I used to find apologetic arguments if not fully convincing at least comforting and why now they sound hollow.
Atheists are sometimes falsely accused of being willfully ignorant of the gospel. Contrary to this false narrative, I find atheists to be some of the most biblically literate people I have ever met. Likewise many atheists can express apologetic arguments (and their flaws) better than Christians can.
Instead of avoiding apologists, I have re-read or read for the first time a number of books on apologetics after becoming an atheist. I actively listen to the Unbelievable podcast which hosts theists and atheists in constructively debate (however, with a decidedly Christian bias). In fact to put my money where my mouth is, if you are a theist and have a suggestion for an apologist with a killer argument I am not familiar with, let me know on Twitter or in the comments and I will try to read or listen and respond.
The average Christian in the pew (and even the average pastor) tends to take the resurrection as a given and work backwards. Jesus was raised, therefore he is the incarnation of God. God communicates with his people, therefore the bible is his authoritative word. God is, therefore he is the creator of everything that is, etc. It is in the realm of faith alone and evidence and logic have little to nothing to do with it. I actually have no problem with this as long as it is acknowledged and not obfuscated.
Apologists, on the other hand, at least make the appearance of objectivity, rationality and logic by attempting to make the arguments for God without taking his existence as a given, a priori. In other words, they have stepped into the arena of evidence. Evidence, unlike faith, can be tested and weighed for its validity.
On the podcast I challenge believers not to an intellectual contest but to an honesty contest.
So let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s assume there is a true 50/50 probability that God does or does not exist making as few assumptions as possible and let’s examine some of the apologetic arguments. I am going to be overly generous, only making passing arguments against, and granting the apologist’s argument as we go for the sake of argument in order to progress through the complete apologetic argument for Christianity. The point of this exercise? Does this line of argument lead to a theistic God? Does it lead to Christ?
My apologies up front for the cultural and religious centrism. Since my background is Christianity that is what we will focus on.
Watch your step
Step zero is actually granting that the immaterial, non-physical or meta-physical is even possible. I discuss this in a thread about presuppositions. It is important to highlight here that we cannot even begin the discussion without granting without any evidence to support it that the immaterial exists at all.
Rather than building up to an argument for the existence of a god, tellingly, we must begin almost immediately with asserting one. We effectively have to bootstrap the existence of a god. This takes a tremendous amount of assumptions about the nature of reality. Obviously, this is the step that atheists cannot accept. There are so many bootstrapping apologetic arguments that picking just one is difficult. I will focus here on the one that used to make sense to me.
First Cause
This is often called the Cosmological argument. Aristotle called it the Unmoved Mover. Thomas Aquinas called it the First Cause or the Uncaused Cause.
The modern version of the argument is called the Kalam Cosmological Argument most prominently espoused by William Lane Craig. It starts with this syllogism:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
2. The universe began to exist; Therefore:
3. The universe has a cause.
I’ll just mention that there is not scientific consensus beyond the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe. Therefore, even premise 2 is an assumption of sorts. However, here is where we get to the point of this post.
What if I grant you that?
If I grant the universe has a cause, this leaves us with a near infinite range of possible explanations. The cause could be 4 dimensional branes from M Theory banging together. The universe could be a simulation with an “intelligent designer” that would probably not satisfy theists. It could be that universes pop into existence from the quantum mechanical nature of vacuum energy. It could be the Great-Universe-Creating-Thingy. I am skeptical of all of these because as yet there is not enough or in some cases any evidence to support them. The point is I do not know what caused the universe. Scientists do not know what caused the universe or if it is caused at all. And neither do you.
Nothing about acknowledging the universe had a cause leads to evidence for a god. Ignorance (lack of knowledge) is a terrible argument for god, because our gaps in knowledge have a tendency to get filled. This has happened over and over since the scientific revolution.
Bootstrapping a deity
Having accepted that the universe has a cause William Lane Craig moves on to an argument for God:
1. The universe has a cause;
2. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful;
3. An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
Or like me and many many others, do you recognize that premise 2 is the definition of begging the question. That means the the desired outcome or conclusion is baked into the premise of the question. How did we get from a cause for the universe to “an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful?” I need you to feel the vastness of this logical leap.
If I tell you to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and unassisted hop over to the other side, that starts to… No that is not enough. Stand at the East coast of the US and hop over the Atlantic Ocean … No that is not enough. Hop from the Earth to the moon? No, how about from the Earth to Alpha Centari? I am only beginning to express the vast void one needs to traverse between premise 1 and premise 2.
In the technology world when a difficult problem is overcome with a complex solution, it is said:
Now you have two problems
Asserting a deity for the cause of the universe is the ultimate complex solution to a difficult a problem. Now you have the second problem of explaining where the deity came from. Further asserting said deity is uncaused and eternal only furthers your problems as you add complexity on top of complexity. If the deity invoked to explain the existence of the universe can be eternal and uncaused so can the universe itself which is the simpler answer.
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,
than answers that can’t be questioned. ― Richard Feynman
Before I grant you that. I actually need to insert several steps here because William Lane Craig has inserted so many unsupported assertions into premise 2 that I have to grant you more than one thing.
Rather than beat a dead horse, I need to grant you a number of things:
2. If the universe has a cause,
2a. there is an uncaused cause,
2b. it transcends the universe,
2c. it is powerful,
2d. it is a being or beings,
2e. it is creative,
2f. it is intelligent.
This is an incomplete list of what is being asserted in premise 2. Notice that none of these things follow from premise 1. There is no logical requirement that if the universe has a cause it must be a deity like being. We have begged the question.
What if I grant you that?
I need to point out that around this point, I have granted you Intelligent Design in regards to the universe. The ID advocates may rejoice.
Hold your rejoicing for a moment. We have had to grant a huge logical leap to bootstrap a deity or deities. But what does this give us? The answer is deism. Deism is the idea that there is a creator god but that it does not interact with its creation. The analogy of a clock maker is often used to describe deism. The clock maker winds up the clock and steps away from its creation. This was actually the predominant philosophy of the founding fathers of the United States. Thomas Jefferson famously ripped out all the parts of the bible that included miracles of any kind.
What deism is not is theism or a personal god that interacts with its creation. Most Christian believers will not be satisfied with a deist deity or deities.
Theistic God
Observant readers will note that William Lane Craig’s premise 2 sneaks in personal as one of the descriptions of the cause of the universe. I have left it until now to point out that even though we have granted the huge logical leap of a deistic deity or deities, absolutely nothing we have said so far requires said deity to interact with or care about its creation. The universe could be a simulation by a pan-dimensional programmer and it would mostly still fit what has been granted. Another point is that William Lane Craig has been a bit cheeky by asserting so much in premise 2. I had to break it into multiple arguments just to highlight how much question begging was taking place.
Update: I have come to understand why Craig does this, but this does not diminish in any way the critique being leveled here.
William Lane Craig is asserting an all powerful, all knowing, eternal, interactive, transcendent, unchanging, personal creator. Also note the singular.
3. An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
What if I *cough* *heave* grant you that?
Again, I need you to feel the vast logical leap from a deistic deity to a theistic one. Nothing requires this. It is being granted for the sake of argument. At this point, we have granted a theistic singular God who created the universe and interacts with his creation. Note: for the sake of the argument I will now use the capital ‘G’ and the pronoun ‘he’ just for expediency, nothing granted thus far requires this.
Try this thought experiment to see if you find this line of argumentation compelling in a different context.
One might think we have just about wrapped this up. But what we do not have is any indication if this God is a good God. He could be a malevolent sadist. Or he could be indifferent.
Eternal: Existing in all of time: past, present and future
This has effectively been granted thus far. But in addition to the above at least Christian theists add:
Loving and benevolent
Here we have to address a negative argument against the existence of God. If we accept the five definitions of God above we have a logical problem for the source of evil or suffering in the world.
This logical problem is most famously posed by Epicurus, the Greek philosopher:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
If you are a theist and you find William Lane Craig’s argument convincing as a logical argument, then you have to take seriously Epicurus’ logical problem of evil. Is God responsible for evil and suffering in the wold and if he is should one worship him?
The attempt at overcoming this logical problem is called theodicy. Theists have been making theodicy arguments for centuries for either why there is no logical problem or why God is still just to punish evil doers regardless of his own culpability in creating evil.
The most often quoted theodicy is free will. The idea that in order for creatures to love they must be capable of choosing otherwise. I’ll just note two problems with this. One, nothing about free will explains why a free willed good creature, created by a good God would choose evil. Why did Adam and Eve eat the apple? In fact, this raises more questions than it answers. Second, we run right back into a logical problem.
An omniscience, omnipotent and eternal God, one that knows the outcome of all possible choices would seem to preclude truly free will in his creatures. This God in physics speak is able to observe the space-time loaf and nothing can surprise him, so how could a creature choose anything other than what God already knows and wills? And if this is the case, how do you explain evil and suffering?
Extra credit: My favorite theodicy from a beloved systematic theology professor of mine is that evil is absurd and therefore cannot be accounted for. But again, this raises more questions than it answers.
What if I grant you that?
Let’s pause and appreciate, yet again, what a large leap is being granted. We are granting a benevolent theistic God that in some mysterious way is not responsible for evil and suffering experienced by his creations. This does not logically follow from what has been previously granted. This is granted for the sake of argument.
What has been granted is a benevolent theistic God. Should one worship him?
Pascal’s Wager
When theists talk with atheists they often eventually use some variation of this lovely argument:
If you (the atheist) are right and I (the theist) am wrong, when I die nothing happens.
But, if I am right and you are wrong, when you die you will go to hell.
This is called Pascal’s wager named after the famous mathematician who made this as a probabilistic mathematical argument.
God is, or God is not. Reason cannot decide between the two alternatives.
A Game is being played… where heads or tails will turn up.
You must wager (it is not optional).
Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (…) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.
But some cannot believe. They should then ‘at least learn your inability to believe…’ and ‘Endeavour then to convince’ themselves.
There are a number of problems with this argument. I’ll point out just one at the moment. Even if I am convinced by the probabilistic argument, can I make myself believe? Can I fake it till I make it? I understand that theists believe atheists choose not to believe but this is actually not the case. Atheists are atheists because they are unconvinced by the arguments for God. It turns out it is not actually possible to choose to believe. Think of it this way, can you choose not to believe?
What if I grant you that?
If I were convinced by Pascal’s unassailable game theory, I still have one very important question that needs to be answered before I can act on it.
Which God?
I was a bit sloppy earlier by jumping to the use of capital G god and using the pronoun he. Nothing precludes multiple gods nor likewise goddesses. But for the sake of argument let’s ignore that.
There are approximately 5000 gods worshiped in present day. If we take into account the 200000 years or so of human history, the vast majority of which was before writing was invented, that number likely balloons to something much greater. Even just within written history we have many gods to choose from. Is Zeus the one true God?
This is very important for theists to understand. The great passion, dedication and piety with which you believe in your God is equally felt and expressed by theists of other traditions. Yet each faith tradition claims unique exclusivity. How can a person possibly decide which is correct?
If you are a Christian, a Muslim feels exactly the same way about their God as you do about yours and looks at you as an outsider the same way you do them. Can you honestly say if you were raised in another part of the world under a different tradition you would still believe your current faith is the one and only?
Try this thought experiment to see if you find this line of argumentation compelling in a different context.
Even if you are of the ecumenical type who says that YHWH, The Father and Allah are one in the same that is still a tiny fraction of the gods who are or have been worshiped by humanity. Even if you are a universalist, many theists would argue you are condemned not in spite of but because of your universalism.
YHWH
As a nod to Pascal, let’s use probability math. Granting that there is a theistic God to begin with your odds are 1/5000+ (< or = .o2%) of having been born in the culture which worships the correct God. In this case, we are assessing the probability that YHWH is the one true God.
What if I grant you that?
YHWH is the particular theistic God who has been granted for the sake of argument.
Now the burning question is how should YHWH be worshiped? Do I need to sacrifice a bull? Will eating bacon offend him? Am I to give all that I have to the poor? Must I tithe? Is the Eucharist a saving grace? Is baptism a requirement? Do I need to be born again?
For the sake of expedience even if I grant that the God of the New Testament supersedes or reveals YHWH (with apologies to my Jewish friends), we are still left with approximately 2000 different Christian sects. Which one is correct?
This is a non-trivial question. For a millennium there was almost exclusively the Catholic (universal) Church. Then came the Orthodox Church near the first millennium. Protestantism is a relative new comer in the last few hundred years. There are some dramatic differences between even just these three faith traditions.
Evangelicalism
Things are beginning to take focus. Much has been granted but we still have a handful of steps to go. We are selecting among the many sects to decide which is the correct way to worship YHWH.
We still have a number of selections to make:
Jewish or Christian?
Catholic or Protestant?
Bible believing or liberal theology?
Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness or orthodox Christianity?
Main line or Evangelical?
What if I grant you that?
Ignoring the great many other sects of Christianity, let’s grant that Evangelicalism is the correct way to worship YHWH. For the sake of expediency we are going to ignore the fact that Evangelicalism itself can be split many more ways. Baptist or Pentecostal? Calvinist or Arminian? etc, etc. Diminishing returns and all that. We will grant that one must be born again.
Besides their focus on the Great Commission to evangelize the world the other defining characteristic of Evangelicalism is their reverence for the bible.
Try this thought experiment to see if you find this line of argumentation compelling in a different context.
The current question on the table: can the bible be trusted?
Biblical Authority
Fundamentalist Evangelicals hold to a few hard line doctrines in regards to the bible.
The bible is God-breathed: Inspired by God
The bible is inerrant: It has no errors
The bible is authoritative: The buck stops here
Apologists like to point out that the bible (if one takes it as one unit) is the most attested to ancient text. Meaning there are more and older fragments of the new and old testament than any other ancient text.
What is the second most attested to ancient text, you probably did not ask? Tellingly, it is Homer’s the Odyssey and the Iliad. Should we ascribe only slightly less authority to Homer’s descriptions of Zeus as we do YHWH?
Regarding inerrancy, apologists claim there are no contradictions in the bible. I will simply ask you to read two stories in all four gospels and decide for yourself. The Christmas story and the story of the resurrection. However, when you read them in each gospel, actually compare the genealogies, try to reconcile the timelines, who was where and when. I appreciate that there are apologetic explanations. But do you find that compelling when you read it for yourself?
For a slightly more comprehensive look at biblical contradictions take a look at http://bibviz.com/.
Update: When I originally wrote this piece I was still learning. Though the above link has many real contradictions, they tend toward the trivial and easily dismissed. For a much more scholarly and, therefore, all the more devastating look at contradictions see Steven DiMattei’s Contradictions In The Bible.
What if I grant you that?
Logical minded theists will note that around this point we should be at the end of the conversation. If I have granted you that YHWH is the one theistic God and that he has inspired the inerrant and authoritative bible and that Evangelicalism is the way to worship him, there is not much more to debate.
However, for the sake of argument I have granted many things thus far so please grant me a few more steps to discuss. We have yet to discuss Jesus. I think you will agree he is rather an important figure to bring to the front.
Jesus
It is to the person of Jesus we turn next. We have had to forcibly bend the arguments to get here by ignoring all the other religious traditions in human history. For Christians the person of Jesus is both the revelation and the veiling of YHWH. And thus the most important figure in history.
In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis put forth the argument that is often paraphrased as:
Jesus is either
a liar
a lunitic
or Lord
The argument that C. S. Lewis is making is that based on the claims of Jesus he cannot be just a good teacher. He is arguing against people who admire Jesus’ teaching but do not believe his claims as a member of the godhead. The fantastic claims made by Jesus require a choice to be made. You are “either for him or against him.”
There are some flaws in the logic and there are other possible answers. But ultimately, Lewis’ argument is that Jesus claimed deity and one must grapple with that claim.
Did Jesus claim deity?
What if I grant you that?
Because my background was Evangelicalism this one is not difficult to grant. Unlike a few sects of Christianity and many of the other world religions who deny Jesus claimed deity I have no problem granting that he made these claims, with a couple of fairly large caveats.
I’ll first have to grant the historicity of Jesus though this is not a given and requires granting. I’ll also have to grant that the words and claims made in the gospels attributed to Jesus were claimed by this granted historical figure. But please keep in mind the longstanding historical tendency to put words into a historical figure’s mouth long after the fact.
To be clear, what I am granting is that based on the New Testament texts that we have today the figure of Jesus in those texts claimed deity.
How do we evaluate those claims to deity?
Paul and the Gospels
If you have been paying attention over the last 20 years or so of apologetics, you will have noticed a curious thing. Apologists have stopped using the four canonical gospels as evidence and focused almost entirely on Paul and an early catechism of the Christian faith:
3 For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received – that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as though to one born at the wrong time, he appeared to me also. — NET 1 Corinthians 15:3-8
Rather than attempting to hide or downplay their lack of faith in the gospels many modern apologists in debates with atheists will make a point of it with a bold statement like:
I am going to make my arguments without reference to the gospels
What a curious thing. And the reason they are doing this is the dating of the gospels. Even conservative theologians are starting to recognize that the gospels were likely written much much later than previously thought. I’ll not go into depth on this argument but to say that some of the prophetic statements attributed to Jesus are not as impressive if they happened after the fact.
Regardless of the academic debates of the exact dating of the gospels, apologists have in fact moved away from using them as evidence. They now focus on Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15 catechism because it is dated much earlier. The average Christian is unaware that many of Paul’s writings preceded the gospels. It would not be unfair to say that Christianity is of Paul’s making.
Was the catechism in 1 Corinthians from an early date and an accurate expression of the Christian faith at the time?
What if I grant you that?
Accepting an early date of the Pauline catechism in 1 Corinthians proves beyond a shadow of a doubt one thing and one thing only. It proves that Paul believed that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and was the Christ.
I’ll just point out there is a huge difference between accepting that Paul believed Jesus was risen and Jesus having in fact been resurrected. An honest apologist will acknowledge this. When we read of other religious claims of people raising from the dead we dismiss them out of hand. There is as much reason to believe these stories as there is the Jesus story.
If you are an Evangelical you probably do not believe Joseph Smith discovered golden glasses that allowed him to translate the angel Moroni. Why not? Were you aware that there are signed affidavits to the authenticity of Smith’s translations? Clearly I am not trying to convert you to Mormonism. The point is you rightly dismiss this story as unreliable even though it has more and more recent “evidence” than the 500 unnamed sources who are claimed to have witnessed the resurrected Christ. Did they sign affidavits?
Resurrection
Apologists rightly focus on the resurrection. It is the crux of Christianity. C.S Lewis’ argument hinges on the resurrection to prove Jesus’ claims to the godhead. This is the starting point that most theists take as a given. But here we are trying to look at the evidence.
Believe it or not I agree with Paul:
12 Now if Christ is being preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty. 15 Also, we are found to be false witnesses about God, because we have testified against God that he raised Christ from the dead, when in reality he did not raise him, if indeed the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless; you are still in your sins. 18 Furthermore, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. 19 For if only in this life we have hope in Christ, we should be pitied more than anyone. – NET 1 Corinthians 15:12-19
A few years before my deconversion I had this conversation with my atheist friend. I acknowledged that it really is binary. Either Jesus was resurrected from the dead or this is all useless. At the time I was confident in my faith that Jesus was raised from the dead.
I would still be a Christian and I would return to Christianity today if there were strong objective evidence for the resurrection. Alas, I am sad to say there is not.
Either this super-natural, unprecedented and never repeated event is true or in Paul’s words “our preaching is futile and your faith is empty.”
What if I …
There is a fourth option to C.S. Lewis’ argument even granting that Jesus was a historical person: Jesus may have been acting on faith in what he believed and simply been mistaken.
Apologists tend to ignore or minimize information that is difficult to explain. Mathew describes some unbelievable phenomena at the time of Jesus’ death:
51 Just then the temple curtain was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks were split apart. 52 And tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had died were raised.53 (They came out of the tombs after his resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.) — NET Mathew 27:51-53
No one bothered to comment about dead people coming back to life and walking around town like some kind of zombie movie!? Not only do we not have a mention of this extraordinary phenomenon in secular recorded history but no other gospel writers felt the need to mention it. It is not that apologists do not have explanations, it is that the explanations make the apologists case less tenable. You might argue that this is poetic or metaphorical but if you do then you must give a reason why the resurrection itself is literal and not metaphorical.
Apologists often make the argument that the disciples were willing to die and therefore they must have seen the resurrected Christ. But to make this argument is to willfully ignore the history of martyrdom among all faith traditions. People have been willing to die for their particular faith throughout human history. Unfortunately, this is not unique to Christianity.
I’ll make the same point I did with Paul. The New Testament proves only that the disciples believed Jesus had been raised. And even here we have to grant the historicity of the disciples as the gospels were written years after the fact.
The difference between proving the disciples believed Jesus rose from the dead and Jesus actually having been raised is similar to our earlier analogy of hopping from the Earth to Alpha Centauri. This extraordinary claim would require extraordinary evidence. Hearsay is not enough for me.
Was Jesus resurrected? I am afraid, based on the evidence, I cannot grant you that. And if the resurrection is not literally true, believers “should be pitied more than anyone.”
Try this thought experiment to see if you find this line of argumentation compelling in a different context.
Conclusion
The purpose of this exercise was to see if using apologetic arguments from the general to the specific would lead to theism and ultimately Jesus and the resurrection. An honest apologist will acknowledge that at each step we had to grant the argument in order to proceed.
The arguments do not follow from each other logically and inexorably toward the resurrection. In fact the opposite is true, we had to make very large logical leaps at almost every step. The three largest leaps requiring the most faith without evidence are the following:
The non-physical exists at all
Asserting a deity as the first cause of the universe
The resurrection of Jesus
Without granting each of these there would be no discussion at all. There is no evidence for a non-physical reality. The apologetic theist needs to begin by providing evidence for meta-physics of any kind before asserting anything about deities.
It takes a massive complex leap to go from acknowledging a cause for the universe to asserting that the cause is a deity. “Now you have two problems.”
Having documents that show that early followers believed Jesus rose from the dead is much much different than having evidence for the resurrection itself. It takes more than an empty tomb to be considered evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
It is possible to quibble over a point here or there in the above arguments. I have purposefully avoided an in depth argument over any one given point. You may think, “Aha!, I have got you on this one or that one.” However, the thrust of my argument here is that the long list of assertions made by apologists is cumulative. If just one of the assertions is incorrect the whole of the apologetic argument crashes like a house of cards. I argue that none of the assertions has enough evidence to overcome reasonable doubt.
1 Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see. — NET Hebrews 11:1
Ironically, I am actually OK with a person saying that they believe by faith alone. If you find the above apologetic arguments comforting based purely on faith, more power to you. All I ask is that you acknowledge this. There are, however, some implications to this position. If it is faith alone, then the believer must acknowledge their faith has no bearing on anyone besides themselves and possibly their faith community. It has no claim to reality in the physics sense. It is not OK, therefore, to impose your faith on others in the public forum.
If, however, you enter into the arena of apologetics and evidence you must acknowledge the dearth and weakness of the evidence. Evidence is not that which convinces the faithful. Evidence is that which convinces the skeptic. Based on the evidence available to me I find the claims of Christianity un-believable.
Tripp Fuller, a progressive theologian, recently put into words on the God Debacle an evasive tactic I used to be guilty of and something I have heard over and over again now that I am an atheist.
When talking to non-believers you spend a lot of time distancing yourself from other Christians. “You don’t understand, I am not like the other 99% of Christians. I am different.” * Paraphrased quote
I think Tripp was mocking this position not espousing it. It was a communally self-aware statement so I will not disparage him. But what I used to mean when I said it is “Don’t judge me by all the horrible things other Christians have said. I am different, I know about grace.” I did not want to own the baggage that came with associating with the “cultural” Christianity one sees on TV. I certainly wasn’t a legalistic, moralistic, hell fire and brimstone Christian and I didn’t want to have to defend those who were. “Don’t you want to hear about my version of Christianity?”
Christians tend to slice up the world into smaller and smaller slices. Theists and atheists. Christians and followers of other religions. Protestants and Catholics. Bible believers and liberal theologians. Baptists and Pentecostals. My specific denomination. My specific church. My specific beliefs. I am the 1% remnant who really understands the gospel.
If you ask 100 Christians what Christianity is all about, you will get 100 different answers. There is no arbiter of truth between faith positions. One might say, “the bible is the arbiter.” But Christians are using the same bible and coming up with conflicting belief systems.
Here is a subtler version of the evasion expressed by Andy Stanley while on the Life After God Podcast with Ryan Bell describing having listened to deconversion stories:
I am so glad that you let go of that view of god …
The thing that drove this person away from faith wasn’t even an actual part of the Christian faith.
What he means is the version of god or Christianity someone believed in was incorrect: god as authoritarian, capricious and vindictive. Of course a person would choose not to believe in that god. The implication: “If only they believed in the version of god that I do, they would be spiritually satisfied.”
I am ashamed to say I used to use this tack. A lot. Here is the problem with that argument. I believed in the version of god Andy does. I was a “Grace Junkie.” I wasn’t interested in scaring the hell out of people I wanted to share god’s loving grace. I have read Andy’s books! I could have written similar books with as much passion and conviction. But for one problem. When one takes in the whole bible, not just cherry picking the “good” grace filled parts, the inescapable truth is that the god of the bible is authoritarian, capricious and vindictive. The version of god in the bible when read without grace colored glasses is a monster.
I became an atheist not because I had a terrible image of god and not because of some tragic hurt against me. I became an atheist because as soon as I began to use the same level of scrutiny on my faith (which included reading the bible as whole) as I did with others it did not hold up.
What I have come to understand is that followers of religions do need to own the baggage of their chosen faith. If one’s religious ancient text leads some people to do terrible things to other people one does not get to ignore those parts of the ancient text. There is no arbiter of truth between faith positions because faith positions are not based on evidence. If one’s own sense of ethics prohibits one from accepting the whole of one’s ancient text, then the ancient text and the god(s) it purports should be abandoned.
* I am paraphrasing from memory. My apologies to Tripp. Please correct me if I got this wrong or misrepresented the idea.
Philosophy of religion has much to say about the origins of religion. Under no compunction to accept religious claims as fact, philosophy of religion can look at the root causes. In vernacular terms, the explanation tends to be that religion evolved due to early humanity’s attempt to explain that which they did not understand. The list of confusing phenomenon included everything from the weather to death itself. The idea of an unseen agent observing one’s actions helped keep group mores enforced. The priests, shaman and spiritual leaders likely enjoyed the recognition and power it brought and began to use said power to overtly control others by enforcing orthodoxy (right thought) and orthopraxy (right action).
While the above explanation is a good one it does not capture the pathos of why religion is so tempting to humans. I will argue the driving force for the evolution of religion is death itself. The soul (if you will permit me the term) of the continuing appeal of religion today is the fear of one’s own death and the need to understand the death of our loved ones.
Lest you think this discussion is in the abstract, I would like to make this personal. I am writing this within arms reach of my mother’s ashes. Eight months after my loss of faith my mother somewhat unexpectedly succumbed to the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. I had to face the stark reality of her death without the comfort of my previous faith. She is gone. She will not one day be resurrected with a body impervious to addiction. I will not be seeing her again.
It is from this perspective that I would like to discuss how powerful a motivator the need to explain death can be. In my early not-a-Christian state I will admit it was tempting to fall back to the comforting self-delusion that I would get to see her again some day. Worse than that was dealing with the rest of my believing family showering me with similar platitudes that rang profoundly shallow to my ears. Not to mention, the misplaced attention on me by the family pastor who knew I was an atheist during my mother’s funeral.
We humans have a number of psychological defense mechanisms regarding death. We have the amazing capacity to ignore its inevitability until it is thrust in front of us. When we are young we are invincible. The understanding of our mortality slowly grows on us as we age. Some handle this gracefully, others rail against it until the end.
I am sympathetic to those who still believe and even more so to the early humans living in a hostile world they did not understand. The idea of our loved ones living on after death is a powerful one. Our minds take evasive action in order to protect ourselves from the grim reality that not only will we not see our loved ones again, but one day we too will cease to be. It is so much easier to tell ourselves a beautiful story about heaven, and easier still to ignore the evidence to the contrary.
Our cognitive goal is not one of truth but of validation. Opposition results in cognitive dissonance, a psychological conflict that is seldom resolved by the abandonment of belief. Consonance is restored through refutation, support, and proselytism. — Neil Brown
Accepting the truth that there is no life after death and the inevitability of one’s mortality has benefits beyond just being true. For one, I was able to truly grieve my mother’s loss without the pressure to “Buck up, because you’ll see her again someday,” I could allow myself to feel the pain of her loss, to weep with all of my being and to be inconsolable without the guilt of not having enough faith piled on top of my grief. This allows the eventual and even inevitable acceptance to feel freer and more complete. She is gone but the love that we had for each other continues on in me for a time.
Understanding at a deep level that this is the only life I get to live makes each moment more poignant. My time with my wife and children is invaluable to me precisely because it is finite. To be a mortal human is a glorious and terrifying thing.
As we as atheists* interact with and debate theists we must keep in mind the many powerful motivators pushing people toward faith. Our logic may come up short against the visceral need to believe life continues after this one. We need a bit of Secular Grace for them in our interactions.
Have you lost a loved one? Are you worried about facing death as an atheist? Need a bit of Secular Grace yourself? Tell me about it in the comments or on Twitter.
Secular grace is a proactive acceptance, love and caring for our fellow human beings person to person.
Secular humanism has a ways to go to catch up to religious organizations in regards to building community and facilitating deep human connection. Religion has had centuries and sometimes millennia to fine-tune their strategies. Some of their strategies have been manipulative and others have been genuine. One of the manipulative strategies is easy to induce guilt in the guise of sin against a deity. One of the more effective and genuine strategies is simply loving acceptance sometimes called grace.
When I was a Christian I was a grace junkie. I became a Christian because of grace and I stayed a Christian much longer than I would have without my understanding of grace. I understood on a deep level my need for acceptance. I saw it as equally important to give grace to other people. I still do.
Many atheists hate the term grace for a number of reasons. For one, the implications of both substitutionary punishment and substitutionary atonement are offensive. The idea that someone can be punished for another’s crimes is heinous as are the implications of human sacrifice. Atheists also don’t like the term because it implies people are broken in some way and are in need of fixing. The very idea of sinfulness has dark implications about how one feels about oneself. Lastly, atheist balk at the idea that people can do anything immoral and then just repent/confess and all is forgiven. Is that really moral?
Christians will argue atheists are reacting to the “offense of the cross,” without really thinking through the implications because to them atheists are actively rebelling against God. They cannot begin to comprehend how someone would reject such a wonderful offer sometimes while simultaneously condemning atheists to hell.
So let’s remove the theological implications of grace for a moment. At its best, grace is about being accepted and loved for who you are as you are. I believe there is a deep human need for this kind of acceptance and love. One of the great draws to religion is becoming a part of a community that cares for you. Our need for human connection does not go away when we discard belief. In fact, that may be the time of our greatest need.
So is grace about being forgiven by an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent god? Or is it at its heart people caring for people? I realized after deconverting that it is very much about the latter. And since then I have noticed more and more that religious organizations are leveraging their communities to bring people into their doors. It is the people and not a deity that provide meaning and connection.
Humanism is the idea of being good and ethical without the need for a god. I propose an addition to humanism: secular grace. Secular grace is a proactive acceptance, love and caring for our fellow human beings person to person. Humanists being human to other humans.
The concept of Secular Grace acknowledges that there is nothing more valuable, moral or ethical than people loving and accepting one another.
It is summed up succinctly in the South African term, ubuntu:
“I am because you are.”
Secular grace does not assume people are broken. It does not assume punishment is required substitutionary or otherwise. Neither does it necessarily condone peoples’ poor decisions. It does attempt to understand them. But most of all Secular Grace attempts to empathize with people without requiring them to conform to an ideal. This simple act of human kindness is quite powerful.
You do not have to look far for the opposite of secular grace. Many atheists and theist online see it as their personal mission to disabuse each other of their respective positions. I’ll admit debate and argument are a lot of fun. But it rarely actually changes someone’s mind.
I am much more interested in interacting with people who are questioning, deconstructing, on their way to deconverting or have recently deconverted. It is clear to me that this is the group of people who could benefit most from secular grace. People in these positions are in the greatest need of human connection and community.
When a person is considering giving up their belief structure, it is not just their beliefs they are losing. They may be risking relationships with family, careers and their concept of meaning. That is a fragile place to be. They need a listening ear more than cold hard logic.
I am looking for ways to create humanist community. And to help those who are doubting, deconstructing and deconverting through the process.
These kinds of messages have become cliché, but I find the need to write it anyway. Mostly this is an attempt to communicate to my friends and family as succinctly but thoroughly as possible the what and the why of my deconversion from Christianity. This is also for those of you readers who have had doubts and have struggled to keep them contained.
What I am
I am no longer a Christian. In the summer of 2015 after it became increasing more difficult to hold my beliefs against surmounting evidence to the contrary I admitted to myself I no longer believed. I was a Christian for approximately 27 years, until the Jenga tower of contradiction between belief and facts came crashing down. I could no longer sustain the mental effort it required to maintain belief against the overwhelming lack of evidence for that belief.
I am an atheist. Others, wiser than I, have pointed out that this does not tell you very much about me. To say that I am not something is not very descriptive. The list of things I am not is infinite. But I am not afraid of this moniker. I am not a theist. This means I do not believe in God or gods. I do not believe in the supernatural of any kind. The natural is more than sufficient.
I am a humanist. This means that I believe humanity is the most precious existence in the cosmos. It means that loving people trumps ideology. Julia Sweeny said it better than I can. In “Letting Go of God” after tentatively putting on the “Not believing in God glasses” she says:
And I thought wait a minute, wait a minute, what about all those people who are unjustifiably jailed? … There is no god hearing their pleas and I guess this goes for the really poor people too and really oppressed people who I had this vague idea that they had a god to comfort them and then an even vaguer idea that god had orchestrated their lives for some unknowable grand design. I walked around and thought oh, no one is minding the store! … And slowly I began to see the world differently.
We are responsible for each other there is no one else minding the store. Being acutely aware that this is the only life we get to live sharpens and focuses one’s sense of how precious our time together really is. There is no after life where we get a do over. This is it. We need to take care of each other. My time with my family and friends is the most important part of my life.
To say that I am a former theist is significant in that I have rejected Christianity not out of ignorance but from having lived it and found it wanting. It also means that I am not hostile towards my friends and family who are still believers. I have been there. I still respect and love those of you who are believers. Having said that, I acknowledge off the top that my rejection of Christianity and statement of unbelief necessarily implies a particular opinion about your beliefs. I cannot change this. I still love and care for you.
I am the same person I have always been though I am no longer a Christian. My morality did not disappear the moment I admitted to myself that I no longer believed. For my friends and family I hope to continue our relationship with each other. I have lost no love for you. If you choose, we can enter into a new conversation with one another. If you choose to pick up stones … well, there is a saying I can quote you.
A few things I am not
I have learned that there are a number of common, shall we say, embellishments that Christians tell each other about atheists that turn out to be untrue much of the time. And I am no exception.
I am not angry.
I am not hurt.
I am not depressed. My life is actually unbelievably wonderful.
I am not running away from anything.
I am not throwing away my morality to live a “sinful” life.
I am not ignorant of the Bible or the teachings of Christianity. My unbelief is because of this knowledge not in spite of it.
I am also not interested in arguing with you about your belief. I will say only this if you are having doubts try trusting your doubts.
The Why
Answering the why question will be the ongoing project of this blog but here are some of the highlights.
The Search For Truth
In a word: Science. The scientific method has proven over and over to be a reliable way to determine truth. A hypothesis is made. Evidence is gathered. If the evidence supports the hypothesis it may become a theory. Others test the hypothesis to find its weaknesses. If the evidence does not support the hypothesis then it is discarded.
David Deutsch in “The Beginning of Infinity” posits that for most of human history we have had “bad explanations” for things. If the weather was bad the gods did it. If the weather was good the gods did it. He describes this as highly variable. Which god? Any god will do. How? Magic? He points out we did not begin to have good (non varying) explanations until the scientific method came along and we as humans began to discard bad explanations.
In science theories are falsifiable. Meaning if evidence is found against the theory it has been falsified and thus will be discarded. What is important to understand is that scientific theories may be dependent on one another. If one dependent theory was in fact false subsequent theories would find falsifying evidence.
A quick example. Einstein’s theories of General and Special Relativity predicted several phenomenon that were not testable at the time. Black holes were predicted by the theories but not discovered until 1971. The theories predict time dilation both at relative speed and near a gravity source. GPS would not work if it did not account for the time differences between the moving satellites in orbit and the receivers on earth. Lastly, gravitation waves in spacetime, a mind bending phenomenon, was not proven until one hundred years after the theory was introduced that predicted them. The LIGO lab detected these waves in 2016. Ultimately, studying gravitational waves will give us a better understanding of our universe.
The point is, if either of the theories were incorrect then none of these findings would have been possible. And if we found contradictory evidence the theories would be discarded. Better yet, if we find a better theory that more tightly explains the data (less variance in Deutsch’s words) even Einstein would be replaced. It is not personal, it is about the truth.
Contrast this with faith. Questioning and doubt are things to be avoided at best and sinful at worst. Adherence to dogma is considered a virtue. Faith is hoped for and unseen. Seeking evidence is seen as “testing” God and a sign of lack of faith. And I can see why. The deeper I dug into my Christianity looking for evidence the shakier things became.
Which Faith?
I happened to grow up in the United States in a nominally Christian household. When I became a Christian in my late teens it was within the context of a culture soaked with Christian themes. But what if I had been born in Saudi Arabia? Wouldn’t I have become a Muslim? What about India? A Sikh or a Hindu? How can I honestly say I would have become a Christian if I had been raised in a different culture. The answer is I can’t.
People of faith have no problem not believing in other faiths’ gods. They do not believe that Zeus controls lightening. Nor do they believe in the literal thousands of gods worshiped throughout human history. Stephen F. Roberts famously responded to a believer with this quip:
I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Even within Christianity we have a tremendous amount of disagreement. Catholics and Protestants. Evangelical and Main liners. There are something like 2000 different Christian sects alone. As an evangelical we call many of them cults. But how do we determine what is a cult and what is gospel?
How does one determine whether one faith is more right than another? If your answer is the bible re-read the line about 2000 different sects of Christianity. Most of them use the same Christian bible.
Even within a narrow group like Evangelicals , who or what decides between two contradictory beliefs? Is pre-destination correct or is it human choice? Is baptism submersion or will a sprinkling do? Is it pure grace or good works that saves a person? I had strong opinions on each of these as do those who would have disagreed with me. But there is no way to determine which is true and which is false.
It comes down to cultural microcosms. If you were raised Baptist, then pre-destination is true. If you were raise Pentecostal then speaking in tongues is true. All the while both groups point to the other with disdain.
It was when I began to look at what my in-group considered to be cults trying to understand why a person would believe these “crazy” things, that it occurred to me that they saw my beliefs as just as crazy. And atheists thought we were all crazy.
You see, it is not enough to convince those who agree with you. If a belief or a theory is true it must convince even the hardest skeptic. John Loftus calls this the “outsider test for faith.” If someone outside your culture is unconvinced by your arguments, maybe it is time to re-evaluate your belief. Here is Hemant Mehta describing John Loftus’ “outsider test for faith:”
I believed that if faith was worth while it should stand up to scrutiny. Once I used the same basic scrutiny and incredulity on my own faith as I used for others, it did not hold up.
One of the factors leading to my deconversion was reading the bible through in a year. Seriously, have you read the bible lately? As believers (of all faiths) we have an amazing ability to cherry pick the bits of our ancient texts that suit us and be completely blind to the parts that are contradictory, horrifying and down right dangerous. The whole of the bible, including the parts often not read like Numbers and the prophets, and even the parts read often like Psalms, is dark, violent and hateful. Only through the rose colored glasses of blind faith can the whole of the bible be seen as a moral book about love.
Read the bible without the rose colored glasses of inerrancy or authority and a different picture of the holy book appears. Does the bible contradict itself? Try this yourself. Read the genealogies at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. Notice anything? They don’t match. If you say one is for Marry and one is for Joseph, isn’t God supposed to be Jesus’s father? Read the passion story in all four gospels and try and unify them. What events took place in which order? Who first saw Jesus after the resurrection? How many people/angels were at the tomb?
Update: When I originally wrote this piece I was still learning. Though the above link has many real contradictions, they tend toward the trivial and easily dismissed. For a much more scholarly and, therefore, all the more devastating look at contradictions see Steven DiMattei’s Contradictions In The Bible.
Apologetics
Apologetics is the defense of Christianity. Over many years I have read the best apologists Christianity has to offer: William Lane Craig of the Kalam cosmological argument fame and Guiermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards who wrote “The Privileged Planet”. As well as some that are not so great like Josh McDowell and Lee Stroble. The more I read the more doubt crept in. The arguments from these authors were bending over backwards requiring mental gymnastics to try and fit the supernatural into the frame work of the scientific understanding of the world and the cosmos. The more I dug the less convincing the arguments became particularly when pitted against established scientific knowledge like evolutionary biology, big bang cosmology and quantum physics.
We can argue over first causes or supposed missing links but the point is this is the “God of the gaps” or argument from ignorance. Throughout history science has been filling in those gaps overcoming ignorance with evidence. A couple of hundred years ago there was no germ theory. Attributing sickness or healing to a god was the “best” explanation we had. Now we prescribe penicillin.
There will always be gaps in our knowledge but this is a prompt to explore and discover and not be satiated by “God did it.”
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
― Richard Feynman
Tautology
A tautology is a circular argument. Here is an example:
Why do I believe in God? Because the bible tells me so. Why do I believe the Bible is authoritative? Because God says it is.
Now you can throw a lot of elements into this tautology beyond just the bible: The known universe (“creation”), one’s subjective experience, stories from missionaries from far off lands, however each of these is interpreted based on the others. In a word tautological.
Objectivity
The most convincing argument for any believer is their own subjective experience.
You don’t understand, I know God exists! My relationship with God is special and real.
I do understand. I felt that way. I knew that same way. Until I didn’t.
The second I asked myself one simple question, “Could I find an objective non-tautological foundation for my faith in God?” That was the beginning of the end.
The invisible and the non-existent look an awful lot alike.
I could be wrong
This might sound like a strange thing to say. But it is extremely important to me. The scientific method leverages falsifiability and requires error correction. When new information is presented that contradicts a hypothesis it must be taken into account and either explained or the hypothesis needs to be changed or thrown out. It is error correction that leads to the accumulation of knowledge and truth.
This is what led me away from theism. But to be clear, everything I write about and hold as true is available for scrutiny up to and including my atheism. But before you come at me with your unassailable argument, keep in mind, I have read a number of well know apologists, I read and consume podcasts from theists all the time and I was once an apologist of sorts myself. I remain unconvinced by the arguments for theism. So, to change my mind I need objective evidence of the variety that skeptics accept not the kind that allows the faithful to entrench themselves.
Here is a video by @holykoolaid that nicely sums up the kind of evidence that would be required to convert an atheist like me:
This was not a choice. I did not wake up one day and decide I no longer wanted to believe in God. This was something that happened to me.
When Bart Campolo, Tony Campolo’s son, was asked when did he start to lose his faith he said:
About 15 minutes after I started to believe.
In a sense, that is true for me as well. I struggled with doubt throughout my Christian faith. I knew there were areas best left unexplored. If I asked too pointed of questions I might not like the answers. So I didn’t for a very long time.
But this masks the fact that I had very real very deep faith for more than twenty years. It makes it sound as if my faith was not the right kind of faith. If you find that argument convincing, more power to you.
Under scrutiny, I could no longer believe. Belief escaped me. The very foundations of my faith gave way. I no longer believed.
The emperor has no clothes.
To the extent that this happened in an instant, my exact thoughts where:
Oh, ____, what am I going to do?
The very search for truth that led me to Christianity led me away.
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