Why I'm an "Atheist"

Before I start discussing my journey away from my religious faith, I want to make a few things clear.

The first is why I’m making this blog at all. I have been asked by several people, family, friends and even acquaintances why I left my religious faith. Some have asked explicitly while others have asked questions that assume one reason or another. I’ve been accused of “being mad at god” or just rebelling against my parent’s beliefs. Instead of having all these singular discussions, I thought it would be better to simply tell my story once and immortalize it in this blog.

I also want to make it clear that I’m not writing this in an attempt to dissuade people from their religious beliefs. The only arguments against Christian faith that I will make in this blog are the ones that played an instrumental role in my deconversion. This is intentionally short and concise. It took me nearly 6 years to get to where I am now and it would be impossible for me to include every piece of the puzzle.

If you want to present me with an argument for God of some kind after reading this blog, I’d gladly take a look and keep an open mind. I’m not opposed to the belief in a god, and am not so smug as to claim that I have heard every argument in favor of god. I am however aware of the most popular philosophical arguments and believe I have adequate responses to those- but now I’m getting ahead of myself. 

The last thing I want to do before I get started is clarify what it is I mean when I say “atheist” and “fundamentalist Christian”. This may seem a bit pedantic but if I’ve learned one thing about posting my opinions online, it’s that if I can be more clear, I should be. With that said, what I mean when I say “Fundamentalist Christian” is any Christian who believes the Bible is the literal, inerrant and inspired word of god. Growing up it was clear that every one of our tenets of faith was derived from this book.

As for the term “atheist”- there are many definitions of this word and if you talk to 5 different atheists, you’ll probably get 5 different answers. I personally identify with the philosophical definition of atheist- that being someone who believes the proposition, “God exists” is false. To be absolutely clear, this means that I don’t believe that any classical version of God exists. I want to be clear, that because I’m an atheist does not mean that I am a naturalist, empiricist, materialist or any other such belief so commonly associated with atheism. My belief that god doesn’t exist does not entail any other worldview.

Now that I think I’ve made myself clear, we should move on to my journey. I imagine that most people who read this, knew me at some point during my life so I’ll keep the recap brief. I was born, and grew up, the son of a Christian minister. I spent the majority of my childhood believing I would grow up to be a minister myself at some point, even preaching on a few occasions when my dad allowed me to. I had some doubts growing up, but was able to easily ignore them until I was about 21 years old.

At this time I had stopped attending church and decided I could learn all I needed about my faith from the Bible and biblical scholarship. The more I read, the more questions that seemed to come up. I prayed diligently for answers, and even asked those who I saw as spiritually mature. The majority of my early questioning revolved around the morality of the god described in the old testament. It seemed to me that there were a number of objectionable actions, not only allowed by God, but explicitly commanded by this God. As those familiar with the Bible may have guessed, most of these objectionable parts were from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The books that are essential to 3 of the major world religions.

My initial, and most influential objection to the text was not what many initially expect. I thought I could understand and explain away the Old Testament slavery and genocide without much difficulty but it was the treatment of women and marriage that really threw me. Specifically in Deuteronomy 22:13-21 which says;

"13 If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and detests her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings a bad name on her, and says, ‘I took this woman, and when I came to her I found she was not a virgin,’ then the father and mother of the young woman shall take and bring out the evidence of the young woman’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. And the young woman’s father shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man as wife, and he detests her. Now he has charged her with shameful conduct, saying, “I found your daughter was not a virgin,” and yet these are the evidences of my daughter’s virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take that man and punish him; and they shall fine him one hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name on a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife; he cannot divorce her all his days.

“But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall [a]put away the evil from among you.”

Deuteronomy 22:13-21, NKJV

In case it isn’t obvious what my objection is to this, I’ll state it plainly. Death is far too harsh a punishment for such a poor test of virginity. It is the case, as we now know form modern medicine, that not all women will bleed the first time they have sex. In fact some women are born without a hymen completely. Even women who do have a hymen (and I’ll admit that most do), as a woman is aroused, she not only lubricates herself, but her hymen relaxes and stretches. Especially the older she gets. My point is of course, that lack of blood on a sheet, which is presumably what they meant when they say, “they shall spread the cloth before the elders'', is not adequate evidence that someone wasn’t a virgin, and certainly you would want a more cogent test if you are going to kill someone for it. Further, killing them on their parents doorstep seems cruel and unusual punishment for the parents. I could get into my other issues with this text, namely that if a man makes a false claim, that could result in the death of the woman, he is only fined 100 shekels and she has to remain married to him! The man who literally just attempted to have her stoned to death, by accusing her, is the man she has to remain with all of her days. That, to me, is absolutely preposterous and- even when I was religious- seemed cruel and unusual. My disgust at this practice is only compounded by the fact that these are laws that God gave to them directly. This was not some man made tradition that God simply allowed to happen. On the contrary, this was explicitly endorsed by the biblical god.

Personally since then I’ve realized that I also object to the genocide and slavery of the old testament (even if you don’t think the old testament slavery was chattel slavery, I still believe it was immoral, but I’ll save that discussion for another time). The point is that at this point in my journey I was shaken to my core. I had previously believed that the God of the Bible was omnibenevolent- meaning maximally good. I thought that his very nature was that of moral goodness. It shook me to think that this god would command something that I viewed as so heinous. It was clear to me that I had some idea of morality that didn’t align with the biblical god- but I’ll return to this a bit later.

After my discovery of old testament atrocities, I went back to the new testament. I grew up loving nearly everything taught in the new testament- I was a big fan of first and second Thessalonians, first and second Peter, James and Luke to name a few of my favorite new testament books. However this time, when I went to the new testament, I approached it with a new skepticism. It was about this time I came across the work of Bart Ehrman. Dr. Ehrman attended Moody Bible Institute, where he earned the school’s three-year diploma, Wheaton College where he received a Bachelor's Degree, and he received his Ph.D. and M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a new testament scholar who became an atheist during his time at Moody Bible Institute after realizing the fallibility of the new testament. The reason I mention him is because it was his lectures, and my own independent research on the topic, that led me to realize there were a few unexplained issues with the new testament. I’ve seen many of his debates with theist scholars on where the text actually came from, who the authors were, or what their motivation was, etc. but none of that was particularly influential on me.

For me there was one key issue that he brought to my attention that sent me over the edge, the crucifixion. If you read the gospel accounts of the crucifixion back to back you may notice a few things. The one thing that bothered me the most was the account of the robbers who were crucified with Jesus. Did both robbers mock Jesus or did one come to his defense? As Bart Ehrman would say, it depends which Gospel you read. In Luke chapter 23, one of those crucified with him defended him and in Mark chapter 15, both of “those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.”

Why did this bother me so much? Well first because I had always found the story of Jesus forgiving one of the robbers to be particularly poetic and inspiring, but more importantly this was the account of the death of the messiah. If God truly inspired the Bible you’d think this would be one story he wouldn’t mess up. You would think that these accounts, more importantly than any other, would need to be completely in sync. However, I can’t even imagine a way to explain away this contradiction without claiming that one of the gospel writers was either misremembering their account or if they weren’t eye witnesses, were misremembering what they were told. Either way, it is absolutely clear to me that it couldn’t be an inerrant and divinely ordained book. At least I could no longer believe that it was.

This is far from my only issue I found while exploring the Bible but these certainly were the ones that had the most influence on me. This process took a few months before I really accepted that I couldn’t base my religious beliefs on the Bible going forward. I called myself a deist at this point because I still believed in intelligent design and a first cause. Though I wasn’t entirely familiar with the formal versions of the teleological argument or the cosmological argument for god, I based my belief in a god on a crude version of these arguments.

This brings me back to morality. Since I no longer had the Bible as a moral compass I began to look at what other ideas were out there on the topic. As it turns out morality is the primary topic of the philosophical field of ethics. Ethics is often broken down into three categories; meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. I won’t dig too deep into this subject now, but what I will say is that my primary question at the time was, “what is morality” which is the foundational question of meta-ethics. As it turns out, nearly everyone has a different idea of what morality is. Generally, I think it can be said that morality is a system used by moral agents to decide the moral value of the actions or character of moral agents. A moral agent in this case is anyone who is believed to be morally responsible. I think this definition works fine with nearly all moral theories I’m aware of. When I was religious, I would have said that the Bible designated the appropriate moral system, however without the Bible as a foundation I was left to find a new moral system.

Now, regardless of what moral framework I subscribe to, I at least know that I do have some beliefs about what is moral and what is immoral. I personally believe slavery and genocide are always wrong. I can’t imagine changing my mind on such a matter, and I also can’t imagine viewing the old testament god’s actions and commands in a way other than endorsing those exact things. Further, asking a woman to remain married to a man who attempted to have her killed, also seems immoral to me, as well as killing a woman for the crime of not bleeding during her first sexual interaction with a man. I think all of these instances are endorsed by the old testament god and therefore, I have come to the conclusion that even if he exists, he is immoral. If you are interested in my current beliefs around morality, I’ll happily discuss them with you but for now let’s step back and deal with my transition from deist to atheist.

As I mentioned before I was a deist because I couldn’t believe that the life we see on earth wasn’t designed. It wasn’t until I read the book, “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry Coyne that I got a very good understanding of what evolution actually is. I was taught my whole life to attack what is essentially a strawman of evolution. I remember being taught that there was micro and macro evolution. I was basically under the impression that micro evolution was small changes within a species while macro evolution was large changes, typically one species to another. When I actually took the time to read what evolutionary biologists actually believed- I found that macro evolution doesn’t exist. The belief is that all changes are small and gradual. That a new species is formed when members of a species are forced to adapt to different environments and they have many small changes over long periods of time until they are no longer genetically compatible. As I read up on what actual biologists had to say about evolutionary theory, I was fascinated to learn about all the various evidences we have for it. It wasn’t just about that though. I was most intrigued to learn about vestigial traits- the most interesting to me was that of whales.

As many people know, whales are ocean dwelling mammals. What you may not know is that they actually are born with hips resembling those of a creature with hind limbs, though they have none. We even occasionally see whales born with their hind limb bones which detach at some point during development and can be found floating in their blubber. It seems to me, these vestigial traits make it appear that life evolved. You may not see it this way yourself, and I’m not arguing here that you should. It just seems odd to me, if it was designed, what reason would there be for giving whales’ hips that could support hind limbs if they weren’t going to grow functional hind limbs? For me, the more I learned about evolutionary biology, the less I could accept a grand designer. It is obvious to me that evolution is either true, or we were designed to look as if we evolved.

I’m not going to defend evolution any further here but if someone wants to discuss it further, feel free to comment or message me and I’ll try to make time to discuss it. For me- the most important thing was that there was a plausible solution to the problem of apparent design. There was not only a reasonable alternative but if one was to actually look closely at the biological diversity on earth, it genuinely appears to have evolved. I would highly recommend taking a look at the book “Why Evolution is True?” by Jerry Coyne, or if you want a more comprehensive look into the science behind evolution, perhaps looking into the fourth edition of “Evolution” by Douglas J Futuyma. I do want to make one thing clear about evolution though, something that seems to be misrepresented in religious circles. The theory of evolution does not make any claims about the beginning of the first life- it only attempts to explain how we went from life of any kind to the diverse life we see now. As for where the first life came from, I find this fairly uninteresting, and it had no effect on my deconversion so I’m not going to address it here.

Instead I’ll move on to what was much more interesting to me, a creator of the universe. The classic argument in favor of an omnipotent creator of the universe is the Kalam Cosmological argument. It goes, roughly, as follows; 

premise 1: everything that begins to exist has a cause;

premise 2: the universe began to exist;

conclusion: the universe has a cause.

There are a lot of people who will try to make objections to the universe beginning to exist or at the very least object to the nature of the cause. There are those who object to the idea that everything has a cause, though that is a more fringe belief. For me personally, I dismiss this argument because of what I consider to be a false equivocation in the phrase “begins to exist” in premise 1 and “began to exist” in premise 2. I’ll briefly explain why I think this is the case below, but I have another blog that deals with this topic more succinctly.

In the first premise, we are drawing from what we consider “beginning” in our day to day life. We are talking about the beginning of objects by way of sufficient change in properties. That is to say that the properties of a given thing have changed sufficiently to warrant a new description. In the case of a chair for instance- a wooden chair stops being several random pieces of wood when combined into the shape of a chair and fastened together to serve such a function. However no new material was created. It was simply the reformulation of existing material. However in the second premise, when we use the phrase “the universe began to exist” we are talking about beginning ex nihilo (from nothing) which is a distinctly different phenomena than the changing the properties of existing materials. This is the most basic explanation of my objection- but I’d refer you to my blog entry on the topic for a more thorough objection if that interests you.

After coming to terms with the idea that the existence of the universe doesn’t require a supernatural cause, life doesn’t require a designer, and that the Bible not only presented a deity that I viewed as immoral, but also contradictions (at least 1) that cannot be reconciled, I gave up any belief in a god or gods. I realized at this point that there was insufficient reason for me to continue believing. There was one last thing I had to wrestle with though- experience.

Growing up as a pentecostal, we had some very emotionally driven services. I remember “feeling god” nearly every Sunday. I remember vividly the euphoric feeling I previously associated with the presence of god. As I researched this I found that it is incredibly common in nearly every religion, even those that aren’t of the judeo-christian variety. Additionally it seemed that completely atheistic people I know have felt the same thing at concerts or while doing psychotropic drugs. There have been some studies regarding these experiences, often called collective effervescence. It’s a euphoric feeling induced by social situations in which people meet for a common purpose.

As I was looking into collective effervescence I found several psychological studies regarding “mystical experiences”. These mystic experiences are often accompanied by hallucinations, not just visual, but also commonly of touch or of sound. These experiences may also be accompanied by out of body experiences, though they don’t have to. They, in almost all cases, bring joy, peace and turn out to be life defining moments for the people who experience them. This certainly was the case for me on at least two occasions in my youth.

I previously attributed such experiences as being caused by interacting with God but now I’m not so sure. One piece of this puzzle is the fact that it was instilled in me at a young age to believe that any euphoria I felt was from god and any misery was from the devil or some other supernatural evil.. I never considered that the feeling could come about completely naturally or could happen regardless of which religion you followed. If this was true, and it seems to me now that it is, then how could I trust that what I was feeling was coming from where I thought it was coming from. I was in a position where I realized for the first time that the cause of that euphoria was not explicit or implicit. All I had was an assumption based on the religion I was raised in and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people with similar experiences with different religious affiliations that will testify that their god is the true god because of the exact same euphoria in them. This realization dramatically changed the way I viewed my own experience,

It was largely based on the articles and studies I read on mystical experiences, the testimony of others, and a realization of my own bias, that I had to throw out my spiritual experiences as evidence for a god. It seemed to me that if I could appeal to my experience to prove god to me, then someone who held a contradictory belief for the same reason, with the same experience, would be just as valid. It seems to me that any evidence that supports a multitude of conclusions equally is not good evidence for either.

So at this time I found myself not being able to appeal to the Bible, an intelligent creator, a cosmic cause, or my own spiritual experiences to tell me the truth about whether or not a god exists. In light of this, I have accepted the position that I have found insufficient reason to believe in a god therefore I don’t believe. Further, even if I found good reason to believe a god existed, and that god was the Christian god, I wouldn’t worship him because I deem him immoral. In order to return to my Christian roots, I would need to not only discover sufficient reason to believe in that specific god but also reason to believe that he was not immoral.

With all that said, over the last several years I’ve dug deep into the philosophy of religion and encountered several arguments for god. In doing so, I’ve also come up with or borrowed (from much smarter people than I), what I believe are adequate responses to these arguments. Some of those arguments are; Pascal’s Wager, the Teleological Argument, the Cosmological Argument, the Ontological Argument, the Transcendental Argument, the Moral Argument, and the Argument from Contingency. If you are interested in my response to these arguments, feel free to comment or send me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

I really appreciate anyone who took the time to read this as I clarify exactly why it is I left my religious faith. I would like to think that everyone who reads this will have a better understanding of where I’m coming from when I say, “I’m an atheist.” This decision wasn’t easy for me and I’d appreciate it if anyone who comments or messages me based on this will do so with respect to my position as I’ve outlined it here. Thanks for your time!