Why I Am No Longer a Christian (2003)

Ruminations on a spiritual journey out of and into the material world

Kendall Hobbs

I have found it a rare occurrence to come across a Christian evangelist (living in the United States, evangelists are almost always Christian) who does not have serious misunderstandings of my beliefs and the reasons for them. Typically, they approach me thinking that if only I would read the Bible with an open mind, or be open to God, or experience God the way they have, I would certainly understand. Or, when they hear that I'm a former Christian, they typically conclude that I must not have been a real Christian, that I was not taught the true understanding of God, or that there must have been some sort of tragedy to make me angry at God. Or perhaps I am just an evil person and I have chosen to serve evil. Or they believe that no one can really be an atheist, that deep down I must know God exists, and rather than actually not believing that God exists I must be actively rejecting God and all He stands for. But in doing so, they fail to address me. They are not talking to me, but to their misunderstanding of me. So my hope is that this essay will give Christians, and theists in general, a better understanding of how at least one former theist came to be a former theist.

This is also for anyone who has had, or especially for anyone who is currently going through, a deconversion process, to have a story of someone else who has gone through it. Having gone through it myself, I know it can be an emotionally and psychologically painful process, but I can say that, for me at least, the rewards of my journey have been more than worth it.

My Life as a Christian

I suppose you can call this my "extimony," a term which I should explain for those who may be unfamiliar with the brand of evangelical Christianity in which I was involved. Among the evangelical crowd, having a "born-again" experience of admitting to God that you are a sinner, asking for his forgiveness which he offers through the sacrificial death of Jesus, and inviting God into your life to "create you anew" is crucial: if you have not had such an experience, if you have not so invited Jesus into your heart, you have not truly been "saved," i.e., you are not a real Christian. As the label "evangelical" implies, evangelical Christians also take evangelism very seriously (as in the "Great Commission" at the end of Matthew instructing Jesus's followers to go to all the world and preach the gospel). To evangelize involves "witnessing" to others, i.e., telling them the gospel message, the story (as they understand and interpret it, anyway) of God, Jesus, Heaven and Hell, salvation, etc. One's "testimony," i.e., one's own personal story of one's born-again experience and subsequent relationship with Jesus and of what God has done in one's life, features prominently in witnessing. Thus, as one who used to give my testimony when witnessing to others about how I became a Christian, I call the story of how I became an ex-Christian "my extimony."

So, by "no longer a Christian," I mean specifically no longer a born-again, Bible-believing, evangelical, Protestant Christian. But if you are a Catholic, Anglican, Mormon, or some other form of Christian--or even a Muslim, Hindu, or whatever else--before you conclude too quickly that I was just involved in the wrong religion and that your own "One True Religion" (tm) is safe from my critique, think carefully about how some of my general critiques of evangelical Christianity may likely apply to your religion, e.g., the question of the existence of a theistic god in the first place. Also think about how some of my specific critiques of evangelical Christianity can be easily modified to apply to your religious views, e.g., problems with interpreting and defending your "Holy Book(s)" and your interpretations of them.

And before I relate how I became an ex-Christian, I should say how I became a Christian in the first place. In brief, I grew up with it. My parents took me to church, and I believed and accepted what I was taught. But, really, it wasn't so simple as that. My born-again experience occurred when I was eight years old. I can still recall the conversation I had with my mother when she laid out the Gospel for me. The story made sense to me, I accepted it, and, as the next step was explained to me, I invited Jesus into my heart and pledged to serve him with my life, to follow his lead. Even now I recall the special feeling I had then, a feeling of everything falling into place and making sense, a feeling of inner strength and happiness and enthusiasm, a feeling of belonging, of having a place, of knowing who and why I was. It was a feeling, as was explained to me, of the presence of God. I felt God in me.

Sure, I was just eight years old, and I was accepting what my mother was telling me. But I really did accept it for myself. Just accepting whatever my parents (or anyone) said just on their say-so was not the way I typically operated. For as long as I remember, I've always wanted, and looked for, reasons for a claim, an expectation, a command. I've always been one to think about the whys behind the way things are. It should have been expected that I would eventually study philosophy in college and graduate school.

Also, though I was just eight and the emotions I felt at the time were quite immature relative to what adolescents and adults experience, what I felt was a big deal for me at that age. After all, when you feel the presence of God, that's a pretty big feeling at any age. I experienced it to the depth and extent my limited emotional capabilities allowed. In fact, the experience itself significantly enhanced and shaped my emotional capabilities. Before my born-again experience, I was without an overarching theme for my life, a general understanding that could encompass my life and experiences and make sense of it as a whole. I was just living. But Christianity gave me a reason for it all, a way to understand it all, not just something specific in life but the whole thing.

To some extent, I later sort of regretted having become a Christian so young, at least in one respect. As a teenager, I was very impressed by the powerful testimonies of adults who found God at a later age, after having experienced the misery and depths of a sinful, selfish life of rebellion against God and then having been redeemed from those depths by a loving God who recreated them into his joyful children to lead powerful, meaningful, fulfilled lives in service to him. I guess I had a touch of "testimony envy," finding myself wishing a bit that I had that sort of deeply-moving testimony that so obviously demonstrated God's love and power to those who did not yet know him. But I was even more grateful that God had spared me from having to experience those sorts of depths before he redeemed me.

And I did have what I believed to be powerful evidence of God's working in my life. Not having to have gone through such negative experiences was one. As I was taught, we as Christians should live our lives such that others could see the power of Christ in us. Having, as a Christian, been able to avoid those miserable depths should be evidence to others that there was another way available to them, that life can be better, it can have meaning and purpose and fulfillment.

Another among many convincers for me was what happened as a result of my father getting transferred when I was thirteen. Junior high school is not a good age to be uprooted from one location and planted somewhere else where the friendships and cliques had already been established, especially for an introverted person who already felt out of step with his peers in the first place. Added to that, I was a Southern boy from Georgia moving to a rather preppy and exclusive part of Connecticut. Further, I had been all set to transfer to a private Christian school the next year. I could not understand what God was doing.

But when we got where we were going, I began to understand. It took a while to realize it, but things were working out for me much better than I was fearing they might. The church we left, the one I had known my whole life, was decent enough for me, but there were not a lot of kids my age and I did not really fit in with them, and they were not all that serious about their faith. Our new church, however, had a lot of kids my age, and in fact many more around my age than any other age. Those of us around my age were sort of a "pig in a python" growing up in that church. Also, I fit in well with the group, at least by my standards of "fitting in." And, plenty of them were serious about their faith. It was definitely a time of spiritual growth for me. Along with them, I went through the ups and downs of adolescence as well as of Christian faith, continuing to learn more about my faith and growing as a Christian, seeking what God wanted for my life. At times I felt distant from God, but he always brought me back to himself. Looking back on it, going to a public school that had high academic standards, and going there with a good group of Christian friends who were serious about their faith and who could help me as I also helped them navigate the dangers and temptations of "the world" helped me grow in ways that I didn't think would have been possible in a more sheltered environment. It seemed obvious to me that God was working in my life, and that he knew what he was doing with me, that he could be trusted to lead me.

Then came the time to pick a college. Here was another opportunity to have to rely on God to lead me in the way he wanted me to go. I prayed long and hard, on my own as well as with friends and mentors, for God to help me make the right decisions. Ultimately, I decided that God was leading me to go to a secular university at which there was at least one group of serious Christian students strong in their faith. I also decided to study engineering. I had done well in all my high school subjects, and had at least to some extent enjoyed most of them, but there was no single subject or area that strongly interested me. Thus, a couple of engineer uncles said "you're good in math and science, so study engineering: that's where the jobs and money are." Also, I reasoned, an engineering degree would enable me to be a "tentmaker missionary" (a reference to the apostle Paul who is supposed to have been able to pay his way, at least in part, by being a tentmaker [Acts 18:3]), using my easily employable skills as a way to go to other countries where people needed to hear the gospel (there is a Tentmakers organization, but I was not involved with that particular group; "tentmaker" is also used as a general metaphor for this kind of missionary effort). My father had an uncle who had recently retired from his job as a professor at Vanderbilt University, and he recommended the school. It had a good engineering program, along with a variety of other strong fields in case either I had misread God's leading or he had other study plans in addition, and it had a number of organizations for Christian students, such as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) group of which I became an integral part.

So in college, I continued to get even more serious about my religion. I read the typical Josh McDowell and C.S. Lewis type books so common in evangelical circles, and took what they said to heart and head. I also read Bible commentaries and serious books about spiritual matters by a variety of evangelical Christian authors. In the IVCF group, I led Bible studies, helped organize and run community service projects, and in general revolved my social life primarily around the group. I was also involved in other nonreligious activities such as the campus radio station, both out of interest in the groups' focus and also for the purpose of evangelizing, by deeds as well as by words (just living a meaningful, fulfilled Christian life was supposed to reveal to others the Truth that was within me). Back at home during breaks from school, my growing "spiritual wisdom" was noted by, among others, the assistant pastor of our church, who taught the adult Sunday-school Bible study for those who were serious about their faith. He asked me to fill in for him while he was away on vacation. So here I was, a college student, teaching the Word of God to adults who were serious about their faith, my own parents and the parents of many of my friends among them.

The summer after my sophomore year, I took a Christian Counselor Training seminar at a place called His Mansion in New Hampshire, where some friends of my parents had moved to become involved in the program offered there. And quite a program it was. Talk about evidence of God working in people's lives! His Mansion was (and as far as I know still is) a self-sustaining Christian farm/commune with two missions. One was to minister to troubled teenagers and young adults, people whose lives had been shattered by drugs or alcohol, or by physical or sexual or emotional abuse. The other was to train Christian counselors who could help such people, or help troubled people in general, either as counselors at His Mansion or in professional or lay ministry in other contexts. I saw people whose lives had been totally messed up, who had been suicidal, criminal, mean and hateful, but who had been redeemed, renewed, and turned around by the power of God. These people were brought into the community at His Mansion and cared for and ministered to. They were also given responsibilities in helping to run the commune, and expected to contribute in order to benefit: if you don't work, you don't eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). But they were also taught how to contribute, and they were assisted if they had problems, either physical or technical problems with being able or knowing how to do the work, or emotional or psychological problems with accepting and acting on their responsibilities. By their actions, the counselors modeled God's love for these previously unloved people. And, with few exceptions, they flourished in that environment. Most became Christians or returned to Christianity; and even for those who did not commit their lives to Jesus, few if any left with bad feelings toward Christians or Christianity (at least, not toward these Christians and this type of Christianity, though some still had issues with previous religious abuse in other contexts). With few exceptions, their lives improved, often remarkably. With few exceptions, they still had issues to deal with and much further to go when they left that environment, and not everyone kept their lives together after leaving, but the results were still remarkable. I was in awe of the power of God clearly and undeniably on display there.

In addition, I was fascinated by the psychology and philosophy I learned at His Mansion. When I returned to college, I found I had lost interest in engineering. Actually, my interest had really been in general science, and as I started taking some of the "applied" engineering courses as a sophomore, what I was studying couldn't compete with my other interests. Now I was facing a junior year of primarily engineering courses, when my interests were clearly elsewhere. So I took a semester off to pray and figure out what God wanted me to do, but the answer seemed pretty clearly to study philosophy when I went back. That was confirmed for me when I attended an IVCF conference during Christmas break, shortly before I was to return to school, at which I focused on the more philosophically-oriented seminars available. I made sure I got as many InterVarsity Press books on philosophical subjects as I could, so that I would be spiritually and intellectually prepared to deal with whatever secular philosophy professors tried to throw at me. I especially loved the works of Francis Shaeffer, which took me to intellectual heights and depths and breadths I didn't know existed. I felt sure that this is what God was leading me to do. I realized the dangers of being taken "captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ" as Paul warns in Colossians. Yet I also believed with all my heart that all truth is God's truth, and that if I studied carefully and prayerfully, if I was as honest as possible with any questions I found and with where the evidence for answers took me, that I would find God at the end and be drawn closer to Him. I was excited by what I was beginning to seriously study, and I was excited to learn more.

And learn more I did. The first book I read in my first philosophy class (Introduction to Ethics) was John Stuart Mill's Utillitarianism. As we began the book, the professor gave an introductory lecture to familiarize us with the themes. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory which says that good and right acts are those which lead to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. I left that lecture thinking that Mill seemed to be saying something along the lines of "if it feels good, do it." If that's the sort of thing these vain philosophies of Godless thinkers said, then I would have no problem navigating these waters. The next couple of lectures and discussions and the time I spent reading the book, however, filled out many more details and nuances, and with a better understanding of Mill I had to admit that I had initially misjudged him. I had a lot more respect for his views. I still did not agree that his Utilitarianism was correct, at least not completely, but it at least made sense. It struck me as a very admirable approximation of "The Truth" for someone who did not know Jesus who was that "Truth." We went on to read the likes of Kant and Plato. For Plato, we read his dialog Euthyphro, in which he examines the question of whether goodness is good because God says it is good, or whether God says it is good because it is good. The dialog points to the latter as the conclusion: God says goodness is good because it is good. In my Christian mind, I took this to be an affirmation of the reality of goodness, which, I believed, was essentially related to God, and thus was just more proof of the reality and the goodness of God. I read more of Plato in other classes, and he in particular struck me as a very profound thinker, one who seemed to have gotten as close to "The Truth" as one could on one's own, i.e., without actually having The Truth living inside you and guiding you, as I believed I and all truly born-again Christians had. I also had to admit that what I was reading in these classes was, on an intellectual level, deeper and more profound as well as more rigorous and thorough in their arguing than C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. But I still believed that Lewis's and Schaeffer's writings were more true, because more biblical and Christian. I was learning so many fascinating ideas. But I was still able to accommodate them all within my evangelical outlook and framework.

The Next Chapter

I say all this to emphasize that I was serious about, and satisfied with, my Christianity. Often when Christians hear that I am an ex-Christian, they assume that I must not have been a real Christian, or at least not a serious one. I understand what they mean. When I was a Christian, I thought that anyone who was a real Christian and who had experienced the life-changing power of God and His Holy Word as I had could not possibly reject it so much as to become an atheist; "backslidden" Christians, perhaps, who had been tempted by the sinful things of the world, but how could one who has experienced God as I had come to deny that He even exists? I also fully believed with absolute certainty that my belief in God would continue throughout my life. Based on what I thought I had gone through together with God, I did not see how it would be possible to forget or deny him.

I recall a Bible study I was in during high school in which the youth pastor who led the group said, as a warning to us to remain steadfast in the faith, that on average about ten percent of Christians end up leaving the faith. If this held for our group of a couple dozen or so there that night, he warned, odds were that two or three of us would reject Christianity later in life. I can still clearly remember my reaction of looking around the room wondering who might be candidates for falling away, absolutely certain that I was definitely not one. In fact, I thought to myself, it just did not seem possible that anyone who was really a Christian could give it up. So, I concluded, those who leave the faith must never have been real Christians to begin with.

If I really wasn't a real Christian (whatever your definition of a "real" Christian may happen to be), I was certainly completely convinced that I was. I genuinely believed that I was born again and that God's Holy Spirit lived in me, that I had a personal relationship with Jesus my Creator. I also say all this to emphasize that I was not unhappy or disappointed with my Christian experience. Many Christians also tend to assume that I must have been in "spiritually-dead" and unfulfilling churches, or that I must have been harmed by false Christians, thus I'm mad at God, or at least at my inaccurate notion of God, because of my experiences with false Christians who harmed me by not showing me the real God. But that was not the case. As I write this and think about my experiences as a Christian, it brings back a lot of fond memories. Nor were there any tragedies that made me mad at God. Nor was it moral rebellion. Rather, it was all in my head. By that I mean that it was intellectual problems I found, and to which I could not find answers, at least not within Christianity or even theism.

I was not seeking anything beyond what I already had, other than seeking more of what I had. But in the course of that seeking, I found things I did not expect to find. Ironically, this all ensued from my desire to know and understand God as much and as well as I possibly could. I intently followed the commandment to love God with all my mind as well as with all my heart, strength, and soul (from Mark 12:30). And, being as interested in intellectual endeavors such as philosophy, logic, scientific thought, and such--as I was in college--I thought that my gift was in that area, and thus my Christian duty was to serve God with that gift and love him with all my mind. As I have already noted, I fully believed that all truth is God's truth, and that I could be unafraid to ask any question and investigate wherever the answers led. As long as I went about it carefully and prayerfully, I thought, God would guide me, and as I knew truth better, I would know God better. But I was completely surprised by the results of my journey.

Before I relate how my Christian worldview started to unravel, I should say something about how the incident which started my questioning could have been so significant. The incident, as you will soon read, was really a rather minor one. It was the sort of thing I had experienced many times before, without seeing any problem in it, and in fact had taken to be affirmations of my faith. And previously, if the following questions had occurred to me as a result of such an experience, the standard answers would have easily cleared it up for me. But I think that my training in philosophy and logic had something to do with being able to see and evaluate things from different angles. I had been concerned about the Bible's warning not to be taken in by the vain philosophies of the world, and I had been on a careful and prayerful lookout for ideas that might seem right to men but that would lead astray from the Truth. I did not realize until much later that in addition to learning about new ideas, I was learning new ways to evaluate ideas, and that it was this latter point that would prove to be subversive to my religious beliefs, or, as I view it now, would allow me to progress beyond those beliefs. So it was not the incident itself that started the unraveling, or even any ideas that I had learned. It was the way I was able to view and understand the incident.

My Christian worldview started to unravel at the end of my junior year (my "second" junior year; I had taken a semester off and switched programs, so I was a year behind schedule), when I went (for my third trip) to a weeklong retreat at an InterVarsity camp with the other leaders of our group to plan for the next year's activities. I prayed long and hard for God to guide me, and the whole group, in our planning. I was convinced that God was telling me that he wanted us to do X next year. I don't remember now just what "X" was, but I had something in mind. When we got together, and prayed for God's guidance for the group, we were all excited about the planning, and certain that God was with us and would direct us in his path. After all, serving God and following his path was, we believed, the most important thing in our lives. And we had seen God do some pretty amazing things in unifying us in one direction to serve him before. We had experienced him working in our group before, and we had faith, we had an expectation, that he would do so again.

I told the group what I believed God wanted us to do. But another member of our group said that she was convinced that God wanted us to do Y. Again, I don't remember exactly what "Y" was, other than that it also sounded like a reasonable Christian thing to do. But I do remember that we couldn't do both X and Y at the same time: they were both laudable goals, but they were going in different directions. There was, thus, some tension in the group. By "tension" I don't mean that there was animosity toward each other or stirrings of a fight over what we should do. Rather, there was a combination of high hopes and uncertainty of how those high hopes would be met. So we all talked and deliberated and discussed and prayed, and eventually we decided to do Z, and we all believed that God wanted us to do Z and that he had led us as a group to that decision. The tension and uncertainty vanished, and we were all relieved and excited about doing Z next year. So we all prayed and thanked and praised God, and we were all completely and unquestioningly convinced that we had just experienced God working in our group. We left the meeting on quite a spiritual high.

Now, I was already quite aware that many people think God says many conflicting things, but I had always still assumed that God was saying something to someone, and that there was a way to find out what "God's will" is. God's will may be difficult to determine, but I was certain both that he had a plan and that there was a way for us to figure it out. But for some reason it hit me later that day that this same situation, minus the praying and God talk, occurred at the campus radio station, with which, as I mentioned earlier, I was also involved. At the radio station, we had a parallel experience of having one person say we should do A the next year, another said we should do B, and there was tension, we discussed and deliberated, and did not pray, and came up with the same type of result: we all agreed that it would be wonderful to do C, and, the tension resolved, we all happily went our merry ways, excited about our plans for the future.

It hit me that, minus the prayer and god-talk, the experiences were really the same. I had truly and (until later that day, anyway) unquestioningly believed that I had experienced God at that IVCF meeting. But perhaps I had just experienced the same excitement that I had experienced with the radio station. No, the IVCF experience was much deeper, much more profound. But perhaps I had made it seem to myself to be much more exciting and more significant by thinking that God was there working in the group. Was that extra excitement and significance was due to my belief that God was working in that situation? If so, I could not use that extra depth and profundity I felt in the IVCF case to prove that God was at work there, since that depth might have its source in that very belief I was using it to prove. Or, perhaps the resolution of the tension was much more exciting and meaningful to me because IVCF and its mission were much more important to me than the radio station. Perhaps those for whom the radio station was the focus of their extracurricular activities and social lives had experienced at that meeting the depth of meaning for them that I had experienced at the IVCF meeting.

Previously, I could think of no way other than appealing to God to explain something like what happened in our IVCF meeting. But now I could think of another possible explanation, and it was plausible enough that I could not dismiss it without further examination. That other explanation forced me to begin to wonder not only how to determine what God was saying, but even whether God was necessarily saying anything, and how we could know if he was. I had to be able to answer those questions in order to settle the question of which interpretation of my experiences was more accurate.

It was very obvious that many, in fact most, people had to be mistaken about what "God's will" is since there were so many incompatible views. I realized that as sure as I had been in the past of God working in my life, other people were just as sure that God, or other gods, was/were working in their lives, but in ways that contradicted what I thought God was telling me. It was very obvious that many people had conflicting and contradictory views about God's will about what God wanted and about how God was working in their lives, or even about who God was (or who the gods were). And I realized that their conflicting certainties were just as certain to them as my certainties were to me; further, there was no objective, reliable way to determine who was right. If mine were the only form of the only religion that really changed lives, my own testimony would give me something to go on, it would add weight to my understanding of my experiences. But that clearly was not the case: I could not deny that others had been changed, and often changed radically, by their beliefs in their different versions of the Christian God or even other religions and gods. I had met such people, I lived in dorms with them, I had gotten to know them, and I could not deny what their religions had done in their lives. I could, as I had before, appeal to the Bible, but since so many different Christians have such different interpretations and understandings of the Bible, that just extended the problem. The Bible is supposed to be the guidebook and touchstone of the faith, the objective standard of God's Truth, the standard by which understandings and interpretations of God's will are to be measured. Yet it suffered from the same problems of having to understand and interpret it as does God's alleged will. Christians of different types interpreted the Bible in conflicting ways, each group just as sure that their interpretation is the right one. Besides, other people viewed, and were inspired and changed by other sets of scriptures that did nothing for me, while my set of scriptures did nothing for them. My certainties, I reluctantly had to admit, were not necessarily all that certain.

Obviously, at least most people have to be mistaken about what God says or wants, regardless of how sincere or certain they are. I was now able to allow myself to admit that it was possible for everyone to be mistaken about what God says or wants. Further, I realized that not only did I not know of any way to be sure of what God wanted. I could not even be sure whether God wanted anything at all. I still believed God existed, and I suspected that he probably did want something, but I suddenly lost confidence that we could reliably figure out what it was, and even had to admit the possibility that perhaps he did not want anything at all. I had to begin to be a bit suspicious of claims that there is a separate spirit of God in God's believers. I had believed, without any doubt, that I felt God in me, and that I was in communion with him and he was communicating with me. But, I had to admit, it seems that in matters of theology, morality, politics, whatever, God always invariably agrees with his followers--even when his followers disagree with each other on so many things and with such vehemence. It makes a lot of sense to conclude that religious believers must take their own notions of what an ideal human should be and call it "God." Since they cannot possibly all be right, I think that even theists would have to agree that most believers in various gods and various versions thereof are "worshipping" their own subjective ideals rather than a real external god. It's not far from there to the conclusion that they all do. But it still took me a long time, nearly two years, to get all the way to that conclusion.

When I asked others how to tell what God was trying to say in answer to a prayer, or even whether he was saying anything at all, all they could say was "pray about it and God will answer you." In other words, rely on subjective feelings that I had, which, I realized, I had no real way of distinguishing between my own subjectivity and the "spirit of God" which I had been certain was in me. To say that this spirit was not there before and is now, therefore it must be something from outside me, is no more valid than to say that because the set of teeth now in my mouth are not the set of teeth I had as a toddler, therefore the teeth are from some outside source. Perhaps one's own "spirit" is capable of growth and change, of newness, of increasing depth and complexity and "abundance" to degrees one would never have thought possible before. I had, I realized, seen people's lives changed by a variety of religious beliefs and by no religious beliefs at all. It is obvious that a belief does not have to be true to change a person, for a person to use it to live an "abundant" life. It need only be believed. But that meant that I could not use my own testimony, my own understanding of my experiences, my own subjective certainty, to verify the accuracy of that very understanding which was coming into question. How, then, could I be sure that my beliefs were true, that my interpretations of my experiences were accurate, that what I had been absolutely certain was God's Spirit in me really was from God, or from anything beyond me? Perhaps what I was calling "God" and my experiences of God were actually my own maturing and growing, my own increasing capacity for experiencing emotional and psychological depth.

I could not deny the experiences I had (and still have). But I was beginning to see a different way of understanding them. Perhaps this "new life" in me that was changing me is my life, "new" in the sense that it is constantly growing and changing and renewing itself, sometimes in sudden great and unexpected spurts, most often at a slower more-measured pace often hardly noticeable day by day but accumulating over the months and years to amazing new capacities. Again, if mine were the only form of the only religion that really changed lives, I'd have something to go on. But it was not. If the author of whatever set of "scriptures" that may actually exist would, in a publicly verifiable manner, state which set of alleged scriptures really were his and which interpretation of those scriptures were accurate, we'd all have something to go on. But he has not. By the answers they gave me, it was obvious to me that my friends were not allowing themselves to fully face the real issues I was bringing up. One friend did seem to grasp what I was really asking, but all he could offer in response was to admit that he did not have an answer.

I went home that summer and did some thinking about it, but mainly I tried to avoid the issue. Yet I could not avoid it entirely. I could not "just believe" and shut up. I wanted to know, not just believe. I was very serious about wanting to know the truth. When I was a Christian, I believed without a doubt that Christianity is true. But I also thought that if somehow Christianity were not true, if somehow, contrary to anything I though was actually possible, I had been mistaken, I would want to know. Even if the truth were something horrible, I wanted to know what was true. At this point in my journey, I did not yet believe that Christianity, or at least some form of it, was not true, but my belief in my ability to know was shaken. I remember having conversations with a few friends about that, and, when pushed on the issue, most tended to admit that if Christianity is false, they did not want to know. But I did, and, still believing (though a bit tentatively now) that all truth is God's truth, and that I was supposed to love God with all my mind as well as my heart and soul and strength and whatever else it was that I was supposed to love him with, I felt a Christian obligation to investigate these questions I had about Christianity. Still, even though I was allowing myself to admit that I was coming across an increasing amount of incriminating evidence, it took a long time, nearly two years from my first spark of doubt, to finally admit to myself that there is no evidence of any real theistic God as described in the Bible, at least not one that exists outside the minds of its believers.

It did not help that when I returned to school in the fall, the pastor of the church I attended, a well respected man of God who, we thought, knew the will of God if anyone did, preached a sermon one Sunday just after he had returned from a long vacation, in which he outlined all the wonderful things God told him that he was going to do with the church and what he wanted the church to do. It was a wonderfully impressive vision. And we all praised God. Then the next week, he got up in front of the church and apologized for jumping the gun by not talking with the church elders before giving that sermon. It seems that God had been telling different things to these church elders, also impressive and important things, but going in a different direction.

Later that fall, at that same church, a man got up in front of the congregation one Sunday to praise and give thanks to God for what God had done in his life the previous week. He had been in a very serious car accident, in which the car was totaled, and which looked to witnesses like there was no way he should have even survived it. But he walked away with no more than a few scratches and bruises. And he fell apart in front of the church in inexpressible joy and gratitude that God had miraculously saved him from a should-have-been-fatal car accident. He was so full of joy and thanksgiving that he could not speak and could barely continue to stand. And a whole church of several hundred born-again Bible believing Christians who believed with certainty and beyond a shadow of any possible doubt in God and Jesus and eternal salvation all joined with this man who believed likewise and praised God and thanked God that this man did not yet have to be experiencing perfect bliss.

Before my doubts started, I would have been one of the happy praisers. But now, this situation just did not compute. It did not make sense to me that someone who was just denied a certain chance to enter eternal bliss, and had to postpone his trip "home to heaven," would be so overwhelmed with gratitude about it. It reminded me of many similar events which I had previously taken as absolutely incontrovertible evidence of God working in lives by miraculously saving them from deaths from accidents and illnesses. I thought about how Christians immediately start praying for God to heal a Christian friend who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and how they praise and thank God if the friend is healed. I had to wonder whether, regardless of what these Christians believe in their heart of hearts, do they really fully believe, deep down in their mind of minds, that eternal bliss follows death?

Imagine being a minor league baseball player who is called up to the majors. Would you want to decline the call? Would you call the Big Guy in the front office and beg and plead for him to let you stay with your minor league team a little longer? Would you enlist the help of your teammates to convince the Big Guy to let you stay? Of course not, because, no matter how much fun you may be having playing minor league baseball, no matter how well the team is doing at the time, your goal is to get to the major leagues as soon as you can and to stay there as long as you can. Far more likely, you would be doing all you can to convince the Big Guy to call you up as soon as possible. That is how a Christian who really believes there is a "major league" beyond this one should react on receiving the news of a "promotion." But the first thing most Christians do when diagnosed with cancer or some other such disease is to call a bunch of Christian friends and ask their friends to pray that God will cure them.

Yes, there are Christians who face death with grace and dignity. But there are also non-Christians who do. And there are Christians who react the way this man and the whole church did. From my observations, I have noticed that the older one is, the easier it is to face impending death; and this is the case regardless of one's religion, or lack thereof. Also, I have noticed that Christians as well as non-Christians, when faced with impending death, tend to go through the same stages of denial, anger, depression, and acceptance (if they have that much time). I began to wonder what real (not just perceived or believed) difference even an absolutely certain and seemingly unquestionable belief really made. I know that I believed with certainty that my knowledge and experience of God (or at least what I then interpreted as and believed to be such) really did make a difference in one's life. By this point, however, reality had forced me to be less certain.

But how could it have all been just misinterpretations? I mean, I really saw and felt God work in my life. Then again, thinking more carefully about it, could I really say that God helped me find my keys, do well on a test, help me make a wise choice about which college to go to, help me make some friends, let me make at least some small difference in the lives of a few of the homeless people at the shelter I volunteered at? Why did God answer those prayers of mine when he ignored the prayers of Christian parents whose children were suffering from chemotherapy treatments as they were dying of leukemia? And if he did, how could I justify worshipping a God whose priorities were that screwed up? Wasn't it horribly self-centered of me to thank God for taking time from his busy schedule to help me find my keys when he could have been saving a child from being raped and murdered? Maybe I found my keys because I looked for them. Maybe I did well on my test because I studied. Maybe I spent a lot of time comparing colleges, maybe I spent a lot of time getting to know other people, maybe my own small efforts to help a homeless family make it through a rough stretch while they looked for a new job and a new affordable place to live, maybe that was enough on its own. Would any of it have happened if I had done nothing but prayed? Would it have happened had I looked, studied, helped, and not prayed? I had always been taught that it was sinful pride to take credit for the good that God was doing through me. But which is really more arrogant: to take credit for that which I am able to accomplish on my own, or to conclude that The God Of The Universe took such a special interest in me that he helped me find my keys while he ignored a whole city inundated by a flood? It seemed to make more sense to conclude that what I thought of as God's involvement was just my own involvement.

But what about my initial conversion experience? Hadn't I felt a power unlike anything I had felt before? And hadn't I really felt powerful, deeply moving experiences since? Perhaps I was misunderstanding things, but how could I deny these experiences? I knew they were real. I could not deny that. So how could I make sense of those experiences without appealing to God working in my life? God had to be working in my life. God had to have been the one who changed, and continued to change, me. How could I be wrong about that?

To examine that question, I'll start by drawing an analogy of a conversion experience. I have read very many books and heard very many ideas on many subjects in philosophy, history, social sciences, and sciences. I can learn at least something from just about any of them. Many of them do not make much sense to me, and I think they are wrong or misguided. But many books I have read have resonated with me, they have taught me new ways to look at things, ways which make sense to me and seem to make sense of the subjects they discuss. When I learn these new ways of seeing things, something sort of clicks in my mind, and lots of previously scattered thoughts, experiences, and pieces of information come together in a way they never had before. It can be a very profound and moving feeling when that happens.

I can recall, for one example, a sociology/history book I read many years ago which posited a recurring cycle in history. When I read it, the thesis and its explication resonated with me. I began to look at history and at current events from the perspective of this thesis, and I was able to find many things which fit the thesis quite well. Other things took more examining and thought, but could be seen or interpreted in ways which seemed to fit this thesis. It was, at least to my mind, a very elegant thesis which made sense, and it seemed fitting to me for it to be true. It would just sort of really be neat for it to be true. I kind of wanted it to be true. This was especially the case since, if these recurring cycles kept cycling, one could see a general outline (thought of course not in any sense in specific details) of what the future could be like. How neat would that be?! But, of course, there is also evidence against the thesis, and not all details can really reasonably be made to fit it. But it still affects the way I think, and, though I think it has its limitations, I think that there is at least something to it.

This resonating experience is not at all uncommon. And it is not at all always right. Many many theories have been proposed to explain various things and events, and these theories seem to have everything going for them and to fit all the known facts, and they appear to be very elegant theories, and it would be just so neat and cool if they were true. But, on further investigation, they often end up being falsified by further tests, experiments, or evidence, or other and better theories are developed. So, the experience one has when one learns a new way of viewing things and things seem to fall into place and make sense is no guarantee that the thesis itself is correct.

But suppose that after I had read this book, I started going to two or three weekly meetings to gather with others who read it and with whom it had resonated and who believed and accepted its thesis. Suppose that at these meetings we would read and discuss passages from the book, and we would look at history and current events to find things to confirm the thesis. Now, in a group like that, you are bound to find someone to come up with a creative enough interpretation of anything to find a way to fit any event or fact into this perspective. And if the rest of the group was ready and willing to believe that everything can be viewed, and viewed truthfully, from this perspective, and that this perspective was in fact the only way to view things truthfully, then we would all accept those interpretations. Suppose that, since the book and its thesis so strongly resonated with us, and since we were able to fit so many things into the thesis, we concluded that the book must be completely right, and it must be the only way to view things truthfully. Suppose also that because of the consequences of this thesis being true, i.e., that we thought that we would be able to have a general understanding of how things would unfold in the future, we really wanted for the thesis to be true. Wouldn't it then be likely that whenever we found any "apparent" discrepancies in the book, or any "apparent" facts that "seemed" to run counter to the thesis, we had believe that we were misinterpreting them, and we had perform whatever mental gymnastics necessary to save the thesis?

I'm sure you can tell where I am going with this, so let's go ahead and go there. Let's look at a typical born-again religious experience. You grow up in a society in which the Bible is generally respected but generally not read. Or, perhaps you grow up in a family in which the Bible is revered and read often. Or at least you know that some other society takes this stuff seriously. In any case, you have a background of hearing that this book is supposed to be the word of God, and that there is a god who could have such a word in the first place, and that this god is good and the source of goodness, etc., etc. Then along comes an evangelizer or two. These evangelists could be strangers, but more likely they are friends or relatives, people you know, people you like and respect and trust, people you have no reason to think are trying to deceive you.

They present to you a prepackaged gospel message with a few relevant scriptures taken from various places and put together to tell a coherent story of God, sin, separation from God, a sacrifice, redemption, salvation, etc. Now, you know you have done bad things. You have heard that God is supposed to be perfect. So, you agree, since you are not perfect, you are unworthy of being in this God's presence, etc., etc. It makes sense. It resonates with you. It puts things in a perspective you had not thought of before, it organizes a variety of previously unconnected facts and events in a seemingly coherent way. You are moved by your experience. And the evangelizers tell you that what you feel is God working in you. Now, you know you had an experience. And this experience was due to hearing what these people were telling you. And these people say they expected that you would have such an experience, and they told you that the experience is from God. So, you learn from them to interpret the experience as being an experience of God.

You also hear from them that there is a hell, and that in your present state, hell is your destiny. But there is also a heaven, a place of perfect bliss, which could be your destiny if you submit to God. Since the other parts of this thesis, about being a sinner and thus not perfect, about not knowing or being sure of the future, life after death, etc., has all seemed true and has resonated with you, you go along with this, too. If the thesis was right about the other points, it must be right about this, too. So, you fear going to hell, and you desire going to heaven. And you have been told that at this point, hell is your destiny, but if you pray this prayer, your destiny will be changed. So far, the story has made sense, and these are people who are sincere and you do not have any reason to believe that they are trying to deceive you. So you pray the prayer.

You now believe that your destiny has been changed. As a result, you feel a great relief that you are no longer destined for hell, and you are excited about being destined for heaven. You feel great; you feel wonderful; you feel uplifted; you feel as though a huge burden has been lifted from you. And you know with certainty that these feelings, these experiences, did in fact really happen to you. And these people tell you that the feeling is due to God filling you with His Spirit. Since the feeling was real, and since it resulted from what these people told you, and they told you to expect such a feeling, you think you have every reason to believe that they know what they are talking about when they explain the feeling to you. So you accept their interpretation of the experience: it was God working in your life, filling you with His Holy Spirit.

Social psychology, and specifically examinations of socially learned interpretations of private, personal experiences, is a fascinating subject for anyone who has had a born-again religious experience. I know for sure that I had experiences. I know that reading the Bible, praying, fellowshipping with other Christians, etc., all had real effects on me: I was genuinely moved in deep and profound ways. I do not at all doubt that others have had the same types of experiences. What I now doubt is the socially learned interpretations of those experiences. And I started doubting at that IVCF meeting when, at least on the surface, the same sort of thing happened there that had happened at a nonreligious meeting. I was finally able to see that perhaps the part about God being involved was just an interpretation I had learned to impose on certain types of events in certain settings. And I realized that it is possible for such interpretations to be wrong. The same things, minus the learned proclivity to attribute such occurrences to God, had happened in nonreligious settings.

Yes, I thought that the religious experiences were more profound and deeper, but could that extra profundity be a result of an added push the experiences received from the very act of attributing them to God? Could I really be sure that this attribution in a religious setting was accurate? Was I sure that my learned interpretations of my personal religious experiences were really accurate and true? Was I sure of the truth of what I had interpreted as born-again Christianity? This also relates to the questions I had about knowing God's will and knowing what God was trying to tell me and others. Perhaps what I took to be God speaking to me was just my ideas I came up with in the context of praying and reading the Bible; perhaps I had just learned from others to attribute such ideas in such contexts to God's trying to speak to me and to let me know His will. If so, this would certainly explain why so many people have such conflicting views on what God says.

As I previously mentioned, I recognized that the problems I was having with Christianity and with knowing God's will extended to the Bible, since I knew that many people interpreted many parts of the Bible in very different ways. But the Bible seemed to be my last hope for a way to find an objectively reliable guide through my questions. I knew, though, that I had to be rigorous in my examinations, to get to what, if anything, was truly an objectively and verifiably correct understanding of its message from God. I had to be wary of my own subjectivity interfering with my interpretations of its words. Since people with differing interpretations are all certain that their own interpretations are correct, it is definitely the case that one's own subjective certainty of the correctness of one's interpretation is not enough. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are other religions with other holy scriptures which claim to be the word of God or the gods. What evidence did I really have that the Bible is accurate in its claim to be the word of God when, for example, the Koran made the same claim, and many people believe its claims? Again, I knew people who claimed to have been changed by Allah, or by the Jehovah's Witnesses Jesus (a false Jesus, according to the groups I was in); and I could not deny that they had been changed by their beliefs. Obviously, then, people can be changed, and changed for the better, by false beliefs. So, how could I use what I believed to be God's working in my life to be evidence even that the Bible really is from God, much less that my understanding of it was correct?

So I had to examine the Bible as rigorously and critically and honestly as I could. I had to examine it by the same standards as I examined any other text. I could no longer approach it with deference unlike how I approached anything else. If my approach to the Bible assumed it is the word of God, and if I did not allow myself to examine or question that assumption, then I would blind myself to any contrary evidence. Scholars approach historical documents with an attitude of "doubt until demonstrated reliable, and then rely on it only to the extent it is so demonstrated." If indeed the Bible was the True Word of God, it should be able to withstand such treatment and its divine origin would be reliably demonstrated, and its superiority to other writings would be evident. And if indeed it is the True Word of God, how could I really know that for sure unless I had tested it and seen it pass the test?

As is the case with most born-again Evangelicals, I believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. I was aware of at least some of the "difficulties" in many passages, such as the differing genealogies in Matthew and Luke, and of the convoluted attempts to answer skeptics who pointed out such difficulties. It's amazing what a little creative interpretation, combined with appropriate narrowing or expanding or ignoring or adding to context, can do for an inerrantist's cause. But, as with all interpretations of the Bible, I had to start questioning these: they seemed plausible enough if you were already wedded to the conclusion that the Bible must be inerrant and must have no contradictions. But I began to see that there was no way these interpretations made sense if you did not already believe in the complete validity and reliability of the Bible. I realized that these "answers" to the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible are unconvincing for anyone, even the believers: they were inadequate to convince someone who was not already convinced, and someone who was already convinced was already convinced and thus did not need them.

As I started my reexamination of the Bible, I recalled a question that popped into my mind when preparing to lead a Bible study on part of the Gospel of John. In the first chapter, it includes the story of how Jesus began calling his disciples. According to John, Jesus found Andrew among John the Baptist's followers. Andrew followed Jesus, and then went to get his brother, Simon. I recalled having thought at this moment "wait, that's odd, I thought that some other gospel said Jesus met both Andrew and Simon together while they were fishing, and called them to be fishers of men." I remembered wondering about that, and thinking that I should do a parallel reading of the gospels to see how the stories fit together. I of course assumed that they did fit together. After all, there are editions of the Bible such as the Schofield Reference Bible which list the parallel passages in the other gospels which tell the same story; why in the world would Christian Bible publishers make it so easy to find contradictions if the contradictions really were there? I still thought it would be instructive to read the gospels in parallel, thinking that it would just strengthen my faith and understanding, but I did not think it was anything crucial since of course the different accounts were completely compatible.

But now, I realized that I had to examine that assumption. And looking at the different tellings of this story, I had to admit that the assumption did not hold up. Matthew does indeed contradict John's account of how Andrew and Simon are called. They also differ in their claims of whether Jesus started preaching and collecting disciples before or after John the Baptist was arrested and put in prison. I found that parallel examinations of different accounts of the same events was a very effective way of dispelling my belief that the Bible is inerrant. Examining the resurrection accounts in the last chapter or two in the four gospels and the first part of Acts along with the few bits Paul mentions yields a long list of incompatible claims. The Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles in the Old Testament retell, and rewrite along the way, many stories. One interesting example of a revision is the story in 2 Samuel 24 when God moved David to take a census, then it turns out that it was sinful for David to have taken a census (even though God does not lead people to sin according to James 1:13), and then God punishes David for this sinful act by killing 70,000 other people. 1 Chronicles 20 retells this story with Satan in the role of inciting David to sin by taking a census, thus revising the earlier version to get God off that hook. However, God still punishes David by killing 70,000 people whose only apparent crime was to have been among those David counted in his somehow sinful census. And there are plenty of other atrocities committed by God or at his command, such as in 1 Samuel 15 when God commands Saul and his army to slaughter all the Amalekites, even the children and infants, and even their animals, because their ancestors had done something to displease God several centuries earlier (though God had said in Deuteronomy 24:16 that children should not be punished for sins of the fathers). And in Numbers 31, God ordered all the Midianites killed except for the young virgin females. Or the Exodus story when the Egyptian Pharaoh was repeatedly ready and willing to let Moses and his people go, until God hardened his heart, and then God punished him for his hardened heart by sending plagues or killing children throughout all of Egypt.

As I discovered on closer review, even the message of salvation and what was required of Christ's followers is far from clear, though this should be obvious to anyone who thinks about why there are so many different denominations of Christianity with so many conflicting views on how to attain salvation and how to live as a Christian. As an evangelical Protestant, I had always been taught to read James's statements about "faith without works is dead" in light of Paul's claims about salvation coming through faith and not of works. But James does not just say that faith without works is dead; he says that we are justified by what we do, by our works, and not by faith alone. Had I been raised in some other group of Christians, such as among many Catholics, I might have been taught to read and interpret Paul in light of James. But starting with the assumption that nothing in the Bible can contradict anything else and therefore any apparent contradiction can be explained away by reading one passage in light of the other does nothing but pretend that one such passage (such as James's claims on works) does not really mean what it says, it really means what another passage says (such as Paul's claims on faith). Yet that method can be used to "prove" that the Koran is inerrant, or that War and Peace is inerrant, or that Snoopy Come Home is inerrant. And it does nothing to answer the question of, even if one passage should be read and interpreted in light of another, which passage should be read in terms of which. And it does nothing to change the fact that what James said about faith and works contradicts what Paul said about faith and works.

There are always dodges and attempts to explain away the contradictions and incompatibilities, but they all rely on pretending that one or another part of the Bible says something other than what it really says, or resorting to labeling it a "mystery of faith." I can listen to people who have an unquestionable assumption that there are no contradictions in the Bible, or I can look at the Bible itself and see the contradictions for myself. Why should I take their word for what the Bible says over what the Bible actually says? I do not want to speculate now on why fundamentalist Christians (including me when I was one) do not allow themselves to see the obvious. Whatever the reasons, the problems in the Bible are obvious, and I cannot take seriously the arguments of anyone who denies that. I know the Bible far too well to think that it does not have any errors, contradictions, or absurdities in it. They might as well be making arguments based on the claim that no birds can fly. I've seen birds fly, so I can't take such arguments seriously. I do want to say, however, that, given all the problems that even fundamentalist Christians themselves admit are at least "difficulties," the Bible began to make a lot more sense to me when I started looking at it as a product of many different humans with different perspectives on the evolving religious tradition in which they were writing than it does as The Inerrant Word of God. This became even more the case as I was taking a class on "Themes in the Hebrew Bible" which examined the Bible as set of historical documents, and with the same techniques and standards as historians examine any ancient documents. Again, it could only be by applying the same standards to the Bible as to other ancient documents that one could reliably conclude whether it is the True Word of God. But when so examined, it appears far more likely to be of human origins than divine. One would expect God could do much better. If there is a perfect God, the Bible does not measure up to the standards one would expect His Word would achieve.

I also want to make a brief comment on more theologically-liberal interpretations of the Bible. Many Christians admit that the Bible is the work of humans who were expressing their own fallible understandings of God. On this view, the Bible can be said to have been inspired by God in much the same way that a tree can be said to have inspired a poem. That may be true, but if so, it renders the Bible no more necessarily reliable as a guide for life or a guide to God than any other human writer or set of writers, and at least potentially a lot less reliable than the writings of those who have studied much more philosophy, science, history, etc., than did the writers and compilers of the Bible. Besides, it is typically not theologically-liberal Christians who preach at me and insist that I must view the world exactly as they do, so this extimony is not aimed at them.

But even if an evangelical were to give up the claim that the Bible is inerrant, one could still respond to me, as I used to ask when I was evangelizing, why would the apostles have died for what they knew to be a lie? Okay, so the gospel writers might not have written perfectly accurate documents. Still, they were eyewitnesses or knew eyewitnesses, so they must have gotten it at least largely correct. Also, they were martyred for their faith; why wouldn't they have recanted if they knew it was a lie? Even if their writings are not totally without error, they must have been right in their claim that Jesus was God and did rise again.

There are many problems with this response, however. First, it is hard to take it seriously from someone who is not a Mormon, since the same thing can be said of Joseph Smith and many of his closest disciples who would have known if Smith's preaching was a sham. Yet they faced persecution and even death without recanting. While in jail, Joseph Smith was attacked by a mob trying to lynch him because of his religious teachings. He could have at any time then or before, when he knew his life was in danger, when the crowd was approaching, whenever, recanted his claims and confessed his sins. But he didn't. He held fast to the end. If anyone would have known whether he had been lying about the Book of Mormon, it would have been him. The same could be said for Jim Jones, for the Heaven's Gate cult, and so many other martyrs who would have known the falsity of their claims for which they knew they were about to die. So, if you wonder why the apostles would die for a lie, tell me why any of these others would and you will likely have my answer to your question. Besides, in the case of the apostles, we do not even have eyewitness accounts of their killings, as we do in the case of Joseph Smith and many others. All we have are anonymous traditions, which often conflict with each other (Matthew died in so many ways and in so many places he had more lives than a proverbial cat). So we cannot even be sure they died for their beliefs, as we can with Joseph Smith and many others.

In addition, there are good reasons to conclude that the gospels are not accurate histories written by eyewitnesses in the first place. I have often heard it claimed, and used to believe and claim myself before I investigated the evidence, that there is as much historical evidence for Jesus as there is for George Washington, Napoleon, or Julius Caesar. It should be obvious to anyone with an understanding of how history is done that this is not the case. In Washington's case, we have original documents in his handwriting and with his signature. Even if you want to claim that they are all forged (and there are very good reasons to conclude that they are genuine), we do not even have forged documents that claim to have been written by Jesus. We do not even have copies of copies of anything written by Jesus, as we do in the case of Caesar. There are no photographs of Washington, but there are paintings of him, paintings for which he actually posed in the presence of a painter. Caesar's image is engraved on coins on display in museums around the world. The oldest paintings depicting Jesus are from centuries after his death, with his image reflecting the artists' imaginations. In addition to writings about Washington by his followers and admirers, we have writings about him from his enemies, such as British generals and political leaders, and also writings by disinterested observers reporting the news of their day. For Jesus, all we have are writings by loyal followers already committed to one or another set of beliefs about him.

The historical accuracy of those writings by Jesus's loyal followers are also suspect for a number of reasons. Tradition claims the gospels of Matthew and John were written by actual disciples, and those of Mark and Luke by associates of actual disciples. But that is what tradition claims. The gospels themselves are not signed; they are anonymous. Further, they are not even written as primary accounts. Paul, for example, in his letters writes about "I went there and we did this," as you would expect from a firsthand account. The gospels are not written at all like firsthand accounts are written. Then there is the problem of why Matthew, if he was an actual eyewitness, would have used Mark as one of his major sources. Why not just write his own account rather than rewrite (and alter along the way) the account of someone who was not an actual eyewitness? If he needed to jog his memory, why not use Peter's own account rather than Mark's account of what Peter told him? That brings up the question of why Mark would have written a gospel based on Peter's testimony (as tradition, not the Gospel of Mark, claims) when Peter wrote a gospel of his own. And this leads to yet another problem: no contemporary Christians accept Peter's gospel, or Thomas's gospel, as legitimate; they are not included in the Christian Bible, even though they were eyewitnesses. On what basis, besides a tradition which developed a century or so after any possible eyewitnesses and associates of eyewitnesses were long gone? Yes, the gospels themselves were written before the traditions around them developed, but even they came fairly late in the game. Only the most theologically conservative of scholars, those who came to the issue with their commitments already made and who, unlike many others like them, were able to maintain their commitments in the face of the evidence to the contrary, believe that even the earliest of the Gospels, that of Mark, was written before the early 70s AD, and the others came a few or several decades later. Matthew and John would have been very old men.

Besides all that, it is highly unlikely that there would be a teacher who, over a three year period, was popular enough to draw tens of thousands of followers and listeners from many nations, whose followers believed he worked many wondrous miracles, and that there would not be a single contemporary first-hand account of any of it. How likely is it that Herod could have killed all the infant boys in a town and not one of his enemies and detractors who carefully chronicled his many crimes, even quite trivial ones, would have even hinted at this one? How likely is it that zombies could have been walking through Jerusalem and no one at the time would have thought it worth writing about? I think it is far more likely that "Matthew" and company made up such stories, or embellished oral traditions that had been developing for decades before being written down, than that such things would have gone completely unremarked on by the historians and chroniclers of the time. The heavy reliance that evangelical apologists place on the two very brief, cryptic, and very likely at least modified if not wholly fabricated references to Jesus by Josephus (who was not born until 37 AD, so he could not even have been an eyewitness) only underscores the complete lack of contemporary accounts.

Note that this is not an argument against the possibility, or even the plausibility, of miracles and then a rejection of the gospels as accurate history on that basis. I'll grant that if there is a god, such miraculous occurrences are certainly possible, and even likely. But even if there is a god, I do not see how it is possible, and certainly extremely far from likely, that nobody in Jerusalem (a relatively large and literate town, in a time from which we have the writings of several contemporary and near-contemporary chroniclers) would have written about Matthew's alleged zombies, or at least mentioned that some crazies in town were claiming that they had talked with dead people who had gotten out of their graves. Or mentioned anything else from the later legendary accounts of Jesus. Not even a god could pull off a miracle like that. In other words, if the Bible stories were true, they would not be the only accounts of the events.

If you doubt these conclusions about the origin of the stories of Jesus, you have an enormous weight of New Testament scholarship, written primarily by people who consider themselves Christians, against you. But you do not even need that scholarship: the Bible itself is a sufficient witness against its allegedly divine origin. As I began exploring this scholarship, and to read the Bible with new eyes, it was only with great reluctance that I had to admit that there were serious problems with my previous beliefs about the Bible. I did not want to come to these conclusions. But I had to be honest with the evidence I was finding.

The Questions Get Personal

While I was trying to process all this, I was unexpectedly struck by a big blow. At Christmas break of my senior year, my girlfriend and I were discussing when to get engaged and make our impending marriage official. We and all our family and friends knew that this was inevitable, but it was still a very big step to make it official and to declare to the world that we intended to marry each other and to spend the rest of our lives doing all we could to make our marriage and any resulting family work. It was at this time, when I was contemplating the big step of marriage and how to make a marriage work, that an aunt and uncle, a Christian couple whom I greatly admired and who had what I took to be a model, Christ-centered, reliable marriage, had their marriage blow up in a very messy, nasty divorce. I was completely floored by this. How could this have happened to a couple like them, of all people? I have heard that it is very common for children to have a fear that something bad might happen to their parents. Well, since this aunt and uncle would have become my guardians if my parents were out of the picture, I never had this fear. In fact, it was sometimes almost a hope. I really admired them and their family. I admired their walk with God. And now this happened. It showed me that even if it is the case that it is necessary to have a "Christ-centered" marriage in order to make a marriage work, that this alone was not sufficient: Christ, once put in the center by this couple, did not keep himself there. So in a real sense, it was not up to God to keep the marriage going and good, it was up to the couple: it was their responsibility to keep God there, and God had not given any indication, at least in this example, that he would do much of anything to keep himself there.

But that is only if this really is a necessary condition in the first place. At this point, I was finally able to admit to myself that another aunt and uncle set (actually, my father's aunt and uncle [this was the uncle who had been a professor at Vanderbilt]), another couple I greatly admired, were not Christians. They had never talked about religious things, and only listened politely when I talked about God, but when I saw the way they lived their lives, when I saw their marriage, and especially when I saw how they faced death when this uncle was dying of cancer, it just did not compute in my Christian mind that they could be anything other than real, born-again, Bible-believing, evangelical Christians. This was not just implicit thinking on my part. I recall explicitly coming to this conclusion when my mother asked whether he was a Christian. Since he was dying, she was concerned about his salvation and wanted to include a gospel message in our family's Christmas card to him if he was not saved. I responded by saying that he never talked about religion or the place of God in his life, but he certainly lived it such that he could only have been a Christian. I did not think it possible for other than born-again Christians to live as they did. But, I finally allowed myself to admit (and later confirmed in conversation with my aunt), they were not. I could not have asked for a clearer example to demonstrate that Christianity is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a good marriage. I realized that if my girlfriend and I were to have a good marriage, it was ultimately up to us to make sure it worked; we could not rely on God, nor did we need to.

I know that the belief that a couple has put and kept Christ at the center of their marriage does in fact help many marriages (but, as with a placebo, a belief does not have to be true to be effective). Now, however, I found that reality forced me to have to admit that sometimes this does not work, and even further that marriages can work wonderfully well without it. Yes, Christ, or at least a belief in Christ, does in fact help many people. But there was nothing systematic about it. Many people are hurt by Christianity (as I have seen from others now that I'm out of Christianity and have met others who have also deconverted), and many people are helped by other beliefs. My previous belief that there was something unique about Christianity, and specifically my version of it, was further shaken.

It was shaken even more as I reflected more on and learned more about my father's uncle, the one who had showed me how well a nonreligious person could live and die. Nicholas Hobbs was a psychology professor who accomplished many admirable achievements over the course of his life, including helping to set up the Peace Corps, a fine example of people helping other people without any direct ties to religion. But Nick's proudest accomplishment was his work with, as he labeled them, troubled and troubling children. He wasn't much for therapy; he believed that insights in therapy were more likely the result of progress rather than the cause of progress. Real progress comes, he said, from doing stuff in the present and aiming toward the future, looking outside and forward, rather than from introspection looking inward and backward. He believed, and his successful work with troubled and troubling children seemed to give good evidence that, acting and changing habits of action was the more effective way to change the type of person you are. He also believed that, like our physical bodies, our minds/emotions/"spirits" can naturally heal themselves, as long as they have a good environment ("emotional splints"?) to do so. So he also focused on changing the environment that these kids were in by restructuring their social environments (e.g., helping parents become better parents, structuring activities so they were both engaging and educational), teaching them new habits for living in their new environment, habits of action that would also tend to maintain and enhance a positive environment (i.e., learn how to actively shape their environment so they would not be just passive victims), and allowing them to heal themselves in that better-functioning environment, rather than just by medicating them.

The schools and community mental health centers he helped set up with these methods worked very well. Children with emotional problems had their lives significantly improved by these methods. Just like the young adults who were helped at His Mansion. But Nick's Re-ED (reeducation of emotionally disturbed children) program did not rely on God. Like the people at the campus radio station as compared to my IVCF group, Project Re-ED duplicated the results of His Mansion without involving God. His Mansion provided a caring environment with counselors who held troubled people to high standards and assisted them in meeting those standards, in a prayerful environment. Project Re-ED provided a caring environment with teacher-counselors who held troubled people to high standards and assisted them in meeting those standards, but without appeals to the divine. Many of the teacher-counselors were religious, but many were not, and those who were religious were from a variety of religious backgrounds, and the Re-ED principles did not explicitly include anything religious or related to God beliefs. What could I conclude but that the prayers at His Mansion were superfluous? They may indeed have had a placebo effect on many people involved, but the results were duplicated elsewhere without invoking or involving God. My experience at His Mansion had moved me to the depths of my soul with what I took to be clear and incontrovertible evidence of God's goodness and God's work in human lives. But what if it was all humans' goodness and our involvement in each others' lives?

All this made me reflect on other professors I had gotten to know, both as teachers and on a more personal level. I could think of many admirable people among them, people whose manner of living and viewing life were well worth emulating. They were passionately interested in their research and teaching, and genuinely cared for their students. And yet I knew that many of these people I admired were not religious at all, and only a few of the religious ones were anything like the sort of Christian I was, and of course I believed one had to be to be a "true" Christian right with God.

In learning effective methods of evangelism, I was taught that a great stumper question for those who bring up all sorts of objections, questions, and rationalizations against the faith was to ask how they could explain how God had changed my life and the lives of so many others. How do you explain what God has done for me, how I have found meaning and purpose and fulfillment in life? I had heard many variations of a story along the lines of an evangelist who found himself out of his scientific or historical league and was having a difficult time answering the questions of a few atheist skeptics (typically portrayed in the stories as young and arrogant). Then an older gentleman politely pardons his intrusion, but goes on to tell his story of being redeemed from a meaningless, shallow, and unfulfilling life of sin (insert a few details of such things as drunkenness and fornication here) by finding Jesus, who reformed him and gave him meaning and purpose and fulfillment. The young skeptics find themselves at a loss to account for his story. But here I was being stumped by the mirror image of that question: how could I, as a Christian, account for this sort of behavior in the lives of non-Christians?

Previously, I had always thought that my abundant life was more abundant than the lives of other people who thought they were satisfied with their false religions. After all, when I attended their churches, the congregations and services just were not as alive as mine, they did not move me like mine did. If they would only visit my church, they would see just how abundant a truly abundant life really is. And when they did visit my church and found it as dead to them as their churches were to me, it was obviously because they were so far from the truth that they could not even recognize it when they saw it. Sure, many other people did seem lost or unsure of their lives or of any purpose in what they were doing, many of these people had, by their own admission, lives that lacked "abundance" and joy. But as I got to know some of these believers in other religions better, and as I got to know people with no religion, and as I allowed myself to admit that Uncle Nick was not religious, I had to admit that there were many people whose lives were at least as abundant to them as mine was to me, people who led joyful, fulfilling lives without my God or without any god at all. Their churches were as alive to them as mine was to me. I realized as I got to know more such people and to know them better that it had been horribly arrogant of me to measure their lives and their meanings, purposes, joys, and abundances by mine.

I found myself having to try to put new wine, and lots of it, into old bottles that were bursting at the seams, no longer able to contain all that needed to be held. The world I was coming to know was getting too big for my religion to encompass. Previously, the answer to the problem of God feeling distant was to spend more time in prayer and reading the Bible. If you feel distant from God, the saying went, guess who moved? Well, this time, it was God who had done the moving, and I did not know how to respond to get him to move back. Reading the Bible was harming my faith more than it was helping. And even prayer was becoming more of a problem than a solution. Previously, spending more time in prayer made me feel closer to God. Now, however, I found myself having to shorten my prayer sessions, lest I do more damage to my faith. The longer I prayed, the more I felt like I was just talking to the ceiling or thinking to myself.

This was a frightening thing for me. Previously, I had based all my meaning and purpose in life on the God I believed in. I thought that without God, life was a depressingly pointless and shallow futility. I was so glad that God had redeemed me, because without Him, I thought, I would probably have committed suicide. Such thoughts of life without God certainly discouraged me from contemplating the possibility that God at best did not care and was not involved in his creation, and perhaps did not even exist, at least not in any way that would make a difference to any of us. And yet, there was the example of Uncle Nick, of many of my professors, of friends in other religions or with no religion at all who lived meaningful, fulfilling, even joyful lives. Obviously, then, living well without God was possible, even if I did not know how to do it. I am sure that the examples these people provided me were a primary key in allowing me the courage to honestly face the questions I found, and to be unafraid of where the answers took me. Without their examples, and in spite of my previously stated desire to know what is true even if the truth is something horrible, I might still be a Christian today, too comfortable in my world and too afraid of anything outside that world to dare venturing beyond it.

Or, perhaps I still would have been willing to venture beyond my comfortable Christian world, but without the resources to do so. I had always been taught, and believed, that born-again Christianity was the only way to truly live "abundantly," to find joy and meaning and purpose and fulfillment in life. Those who lived that way, such as uncle Nick, I assumed must be Christians. Those who I knew were not Christians but who still lived admirable lives, I thought must be faking it and on the inside they knew they really were miserable. A few counterexamples to what I had always been taught and had believed would not be enough to dislodge firmly held beliefs. This is true for beliefs and conclusions generally: scientists, for example, put aside a few anomalies that do not seem to fit their current understanding of a subject, expecting that probably further examination would show how current theories can account for them, and usually it does. But I was getting to know too many other than born-again Christians, non-Christians of any type, and even non-religious people, who lived good lives and were happy and satisfied, and knowing them well enough to know that they could not all be faking it. And, like scientists facing an increasing number of anomalies, I had to be open to the possibility that my current theory, my current understanding of the world, was inadequate and had to be revised or replaced. Perhaps the IVCF/campus radio station comparison, though it was a relatively minor matter on its own, the sort I had so frequently overlooked or fit into my Christian worldview before, was the anomaly that broke the camel's back and forced me to consider that my worldview was inadequate to account for the world I was learning increasingly more about.

In that last semester before I graduated, I continued to participate in IVCF activities, but mainly because that was where most of my friends were, and I had made commitments to them and to the group and I felt obligated to fulfill my commitments. But it was kind of weird. I didn't say much to them about my doubts, but that was mainly because I already knew all the answers (or, rather, nonanswers) that they would give, rather than out of concern that they would consider me a heretic and shun me. And even if they did, I was going to be graduating in a few months and moving on, so that didn't really bother me. I did talk with a few, but now it was mainly to plant seeds of doubt in them rather than to try to get answers for me. In explaining the situation with my aunt and uncle as compared with my father's aunt and uncle, I was finally able to come across someone else who allowed himself to face my real questions (one of the IVCF staffers). And again, all I got was an admission that he didn't have any answers.

My fiancee was the one whose reaction most concerned me. But she allowed herself to face my questions, and admitted that she didn't have any answers. She knew me well enough to decide that she could trust that if I had questions, I was serious and my questions were legitimate. She decided to stick with me, believing that if God were there and had answers he would answer our questions, and if he weren't there she would rather not lose me for the sake of a god who does not exist. I'm very glad she felt that way, since she went ahead and married me, and we're still happily married, now with a wonderful son (and all without the benefit of religion).

The summer after I graduated, and before I was to get married late in the summer, I spent a month on a cross-cultural evangelism program. I had been planning on doing something like this for a while, since before my doubts began, and had thought it would be an important faith builder and way to serve God. By the time I left for the trip, however, my faith had been pretty well shaken. The experience, rather than repairing my religious beliefs, served to further damage them. I was struck by the small world, which they thought not only to be so large but also to be of such cosmic significance, of this international organization. Listening to the preaching, I was in a way embarrassed for them: I still had sympathy for them, and still to some extent considered myself to be one of them (yet with a very different, and still evolving, concept of the God we worshipped), but I also understood how those whose world was much larger would see them. I spent the month with people convinced they were in close communion with God and were offering a better, more abundant life to those to whom they were evangelizing. But, I had to admit to myself, given what I had seen from my uncle Nick and so many others, if I were not already a Christian, their witness would not convince me that they really had the more abundant life they believed they had.

A Way Out

By this point I could no longer consider myself a born-again evangelical Christian. But I could not get rid of the concept of God, and specifically of at least some form of the Christian God. I thought that God probably did not matter in a practical or day-to-day manner, or at least not much, but I could not (yet) deny the existence of a God of some sort. This was mainly because I could not see how something like human minds, or "souls" or whatever, could be a result purely of the material world. To say that it is all nothing but matter in motion would be such a diminishment of life. It would be a denial of the spiritual, emotional, thinking, feeling side of life, which I knew to exist, and to be the most important and significant part of life. I could not deny that existed. I could not possibly take a good look at life, at reality, and pretend that it was all just soulless matter in motion. There had to be more to it than that. There is more to it than that. To deny it would be like saying that no birds can fly; I've seen them fly, so the claim that it is all just soulless matter in motion just doesn't fly. So I settled into a sort of deism, albeit an uncomfortable one since there was still the possibility that I was wrong in rejecting my previous beliefs and there could be dire consequences for such a rejection.

After graduation, marriage, and moving to a new city where I was in graduate school, my wife and I tried a couple of born-again type churches, but we just found the same lack of answers to our increasing questions. So we started going to an Episcopal church, quite theologically liberal, and one which a couple of years earlier I would have considered at best dangerously heretical and probably filled with false Christians. My wife grew up in an Episcopal church before becoming a born-againer in high school, so she was comfortable with the church and its theology. And I was much more comfortable with it than I had become with the evangelical churches, but even the Episcopal church was not able to give what could work for me as a meaningful and reliable definition of the God I still thought must exist in some form but which I could not get any useful handle on.

But then in graduate school (studying philosophy), I read something, intended for a different point to a different audience, which helped answer this problem for me. In one of my classes, I was reading John Searle, who, in the course of making various points about the nature of mind in the context of various philosophical positions on the subject, made an observation that struck me, and made clear to me what should have already been obvious from what I had already learned previously. Like the incident that started my questions, this point that gave me a start on some answers is really a rather minor one, but it was that one extra piece of the puzzle that allowed me to see, at least in general, the picture that the puzzle portrayed. As an analogy to illustrate that mind can be a real emergent property of a brain rather than either just an illusion or epiphenomenon without having to resort to calling it an independently existing separate substance, Searle pointed out that water is just a bunch of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which individually are not wet, cannot be poured, cannot quench thirst, or any number of other things that water can do, yet water, which is not anything but those hydrogen and oxygen atoms, is generally considered to be rather real stuff, so why not the mind?

"Wow," I thought, connecting it to my personal religious concerns, and to other things I had been studying that semester. In this course and another I was taking, we were studying topics related to philosophy of mind, examining how minds work, how thinking and rationality work. And I was reading lots of medical research on brains and how they work, and what happens when they are damaged. All this augmented the knowledge of brain science I had previously acquired from various sources. I thought about what I knew about psychiatric medicines and how giving someone some drugs to alter the chemical composition of the brain can change one's personality, patterns of thinking, etc., i.e., it alters the mind. I have heard people on Prozac say that they are a different person when using the drug, and they mean that quite literally. I thought about how damage done to the brain, e.g., in a car accident, can damage the mind. Also, specific damage to a specific part of the brain causes similar damage to the minds of different people with similar injuries. How could anyone think, then, that when the brain is destroyed, the mind lives on somewhere without any ill effects? How could one avoid concluding that minds are products of brains, that the mind is an activity the brain performs?

It may indeed be the case (in fact, it is the case) that no one knows exactly how brains produce minds. But the evidence points beyond any reasonable doubt to the conclusion that minds are products of brains. In other words, it is physical brains which underlie minds. Minds are projects of matter. Now, I'm typically not one to reduce problems or issues to a simple either-or dichotomy, or to reduce complex disagreements to one fundamental issue; if there are two types of people in the world, one type which categorizes everyone into two types and another type which does not, I'm in the latter category. But this point about the relationship between mind and matter is, I think, a primary crux, if not the primary crux, of the disagreement between theists and atheists. Theists believe that mind is and must be fundamental to matter, that matter could not exist without a mind (or, a Mind, i.e., the mind of God) as its ground. Atheists do not think that must be the case; atheists think that matter is fundamental to mind. Typically, theists will react to this with incredulity, asking how matter can possibly exist on its own, or how mind can be fundamentally dependent on matter, how the material universe alone can give rise to mind. But an atheist can ask, with just as much incredulity, how can God think if he does not have a brain? How can God even exist if he is not made out of some sort of matter? If not knowing how is a problem for "materialists," then "spiritualists" have precisely the same problem: they can no more answer how specifically mind undergirds matter than materialists can say how specifically matter undergirds mind. So it becomes a matter of the evidence: which way does the evidence point? Given all that is known so far about how brains and minds work and interact, and given the lack of any real evidence of minds that exist independently of brains, how can I conclude anything but that matter is fundamental to mind, that without matter, mind could not exist?

There are such things as real emergent properties. Even on the purely physical level, water, for e