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 example, is in one sense nothing but a bunch of H2O molecules,
but it has properties and capabilities that those molecules do not have. How can
such properties just arise out of elements that do not specifically contain these
properties? Water is not just the molecules that comprise it; it is also the
active interaction of those molecules with each other in a system we perceive as
and call "water," with its properties such as wetness being produced by that
system. Atoms actively bond, or fail to bond, with one another in systematic ways,
and the resulting molecules do the same with each other. Those interactions are
only there potentially in individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but they are
activated when those atoms and molecules are in conjunction with one another under
certain conditions. That, I think, is where the commonly stated critique of what
could be called "materialism" (the objection that "there is more to it than that")
falls short: it fails to recognize that physical things can do stuff, that matter
interacts with itself, and it can do this because it has energy as an essential
component of itself, it is energy in another form. This includes brains, and their
neurons and synapses.

Now, this is where religious believers seem constantly to misunderstand my

perspective. As a Christian, I had thought that there must be more to it all than
matter in motion. I thought that to deny the reality of the spiritual realm was to
ignore the most significant and important part of being human, or even to reject
it completely, to pretend it isn't there. A solely material world? There is
obviously more to it than that. But a "materialist" most certainly need not ignore
this or pretend it is not there. Call it "spiritual," call it "consciousness,"
call it "subjectivity," it is something all humans are capable of, and
increasingly so as they grow and mature. I do not say "all is physical" in the
sense of denying the spiritual/conscious/subjective/whatever, and, in spite of
what so many religious believers tend to think, I wonder whether anyone really
says that. How could they? Just by thinking the thought one proves that thought
exists; by making the effort to expound upon it one proves that one values
thought. What I do say is that all this is the product of the physical. The
mental, subjectivity, what is commonly labeled as the spiritual realm, in all its
wonderfulness and centrality to being human, is part of what the physical is
capable of. A mind is not some "thing," or some sort of separately existing
spiritual "nonthing." "Mind" is not so much a noun as it is a verb. Mind is an
activity of a brain. Minding is something brains do. Minds are as real as baseball
games, but they are no more separate from brains than baseball games are from the
players, coaches, and umpires who play them. And, like the players playing a
baseball game, the matter that performs this minding is in turn affected by the
performance: the activity of minding results in changes and effects to the matter
performing the activity that would not be the case for this matter if it were not
minding. Just as baseball games make a difference to those playing them, minds
make a difference in and to the material world. This realization is what led me to
conclude that there is a lot more to this "matter in motion" stuff than I had
previously realized. My spiritual journey had taken me back into the material
world, and led me to realize that my "spirit" is a product of that material world,
spirit is created out of that world. My spiritual journey, then, was both out of
and into the material world. It led me to realize that the "more to it than that"
is already all there in the "that."

This was further confirmed by what I was learning about evolution, both (in brief)
in these classes and (extensively) on my own outside of classes. I had not thought
about that topic since before I began to have doubts about Christianity, i.e.,
back when I was a creationist and all I had read about the subject was written by
creationists. I started reading about the real science of evolution, and realized
how completely off base the creationists are, how very little they understand
about evolution, and how very much they distorted evolution. I'm not going to put
forth an explanation and defense of evolution here, since there is already plenty
on this subject (see for example Talk.Origins) and, as with any science, it takes
some studying to get a handle on it. But I will say that, once you have studied
the evidence, to claim that the evidence points to creationism and against
evolution is as ridiculous as to claim that the Bible has no contradictions,
errors, or absurdities. Again, you might as well base your arguments on the claim
that no birds can fly. I've seen them fly, so I cannot take your arguments
seriously. If the truth of Christianity is incompatible with the truth of
evolution, then so much the worse for Christianity. The majority of contemporary
Christians, however, recognize the reality of evolution and have found ways to
accommodate it within their religious beliefs. If evangelical Christians and other
creationists would do the same, I and others who recognize the reality of
evolution could at least have the option of seriously considering their version of
religion; as it is, I can no longer take seriously the religion I so fervently
used to believe--even if I wanted to try.

I have found that the Christianity I used to accept and believe can no longer
account for, contain, embrace, my experiences and reality and life as I see it. It
can consistently account for a wide range of phenomena, but I have found too much
that does not fit. It cannot explain how believers in other religions can have the
same experiences of abundance. It cannot explain, in itself, how some believers do
not experience this sort of abundance. It does not account for how a morally-
perfect God would allow innocent infants to suffer horribly from a debilitating
disease (at least not without discounting any meaning or point to this life and
such occurrences in this life, yet it is supposed to be what provides this life
with meaning). Many theists have proposed answers to this "Problem of Evil," or
"Problem of Pain," the question of why bad things happen to good people, but when
pushed, the answers invariably appeal to something along the lines of a "mystery
of the faith," or "God's ways are not our ways," or some such response admitting
that we cannot fully account for such things, at least not in theistic terms. I
used to think that God was so obvious, and that nothing would make any sense
without God. But, I found I had to admit, we theists kept having to resort to the
mysteries of the faith and noting that God's ways are not our ways. Did we really
have answers, or just the faith (groundless hope?) that there were answers
somewhere, even if we cannot understand them or do not have access to them? I used
to believe, with all my heart, that Christianity (and my church's version of it)
was the only way to make sense of the world. But, as my mind was beginning to ask,
why then are we still stuck with all these "mysteries of the faith"?

I have found that a naturalistic universe in which brains can evolve to produce
minds does a much better job of accounting for all this: there is not some cosmic
conscious reason (in the sense of a consciously intentional purpose) for such
things as the suffering of innocents; rather, stuff just happens, and some of it
happens to be harmful to us. No need to try to get a conscious God off the hook
for the suffering of innocents. No need to appeal to mystery, for there is nothing
mysterious behind the physical world; it's all the physical world. The Bible is
not the inspired word of a perfect God, thus it makes sense that Paul and James
disagree on how faith, works and how salvation relates, the writers of Chronicles
and Samuel have different takes on what happened, and the writers of the histories
were just attempting to justify their barbaric treatment of their
neighbors/enemies. Believers in a variety of religions, or in no religion at all,
can find meaning and purpose and life-changing experiences, because humans are
capable of finding or creating meaning and purpose and of growing and maturing.
And physical brains can evolve to produce minds, minds which can experience and
care about the world and other minds in it, and care enough to do good and great
things to help themselves and others to flourish, and to find meaning, purpose,
and a deep satisfaction in doing so. The "more to it than that" was already in the
"that." I found it far easier to account for good in the world without God than to
account for bad in the world with God. Thus, I am no longer a Christian, or even a
theist: God has become an unnecessary hypothesis.

My increasing understanding of "creation" was leaving increasingly less room for a

theistic god who is involved in his creation, until there was no room at all. By
now, the world I had gotten to know had grown far too large for my previous
religious beliefs to encompass it, either on a personal level or a more general
level. Not only did I have, on a personal level, the counterexamples of people
finding satisfaction in religions other than mine or without the help of religion
at all. More generally, the world itself was too vast for the small show of
Christianity, especially in terms of biology and astronomy. From biology, I
learned how wondrously amazing the human species is. But I also learned that we
are far from uniquely so. Cats, canaries, cockroaches, and cactuses, along with
tens of millions of other species past and present, are all just as wondrously
amazing. As special as we may seem to ourselves, there is, objectively speaking,
nothing all that special about us in comparison to other life forms. Sure, we have
our unique qualities, but we are not unique in that: so many other species have so
many unique qualities, too. And then from astronomy I learned how unimaginably
vast the universe is. Our sun is but one star among a hundred billion in our
galaxy, which itself is but one among a hundred billion galaxies dancing with one
another in enormous clusters. As the physicist Richard Feynman observed, "It
doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous
range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different
planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this
complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings
struggle for good and evil--which is the view that religion has. The stage is too
big for the drama." It's not about you. It's not about us. To think that we are a
central concern to the universe strikes me as utterly and absurdly hubristic, as
well as being just plain absurd.

But still, one may object, why is this wondrous universe here? Without God there
can be no ultimate answer to why things are the way they are. Where, for example,
did the physical world come from? How did it get here? Why is it the way it is?
Ultimately all I can resort to on my view is just to say that "well, that's just
the way things are, it's just a brute, unexplainable fact, it just is." Appealing
to God is supposed to get around that problem, because God is the ultimate "why"
behind everything. And even if it is a mystery to us, even if we do not understand
the "why," at least we have the "why," whereas in a godless universe we do not
even have a mysterious "why."

But does God really provide an ultimate "why," or does he just push the problem
back one step? Where did God come from? How did he get here? He is self-existing,
you say? Well, why couldn't the physical universe be self-existing? What's
stopping it? Are there standards beyond the physical universe which make a self-
existing physical universe impossible? Whence those standards? Why couldn't the
standards be such that they would allow a self-existing physical universe? What's
stopping them? Other metastandards? Well, why couldn't they. And on and on. If God
doesn't need a "why" behind him, then why would the physical universe need a "why"
behind it?

Ultimately, there can be no answer to the question of "why is there something

rather than nothing." To answer that question, you would have to appeal to
something. But then the question can be asked of that something. The only other
alternative is to have nothing to appeal to. God does not get around this
difficulty. If God exists, he is something, and you can ask the same of this
something: "Why God?" To say "God exists necessarily" is to appeal to some
standard or set of standards according to which God's existence is necessary,
i.e., you are appealing to something beyond God to explain his necessity, and you
could ask "why" of those standards. But, the theist responds, God is his own
ground of his own necessity. All that response says is that if God exists, he
exists necessarily. If he does not exist, however, there is nothing which
necessitates his existence. Or, if God can be his own ground of his own necessity,
why couldn't the physical universe exist necessarily and be its own ground for its
own necessity? What's stopping it? Nothing! For something to be necessary, it must
appeal to some external standard according to which it is necessary, something
else must be necessitating it, otherwise its existence, including the conditions
of its existence, is ultimately unconditional and entirely arbitrary.

Another way to put this is to say that reason alone cannot tell you what exists,
in fact reason alone can do nothing. Pure formal logic is only about the structure
of arguments, it says nothing about the content. Reason can tell you that if this
set of premises is true, then these conclusions must follow. But then you still
have to demonstrate the proof of these premises. If you use reason to do so, then
those premises become conclusions to another argument based on another set of
premises. If those premises are true, then the premises in your initial argument
are true. But that is another 'if,' another conditional. How do you demonstrate
those premises are true? Either you have an endless regress of conditional
arguments, or you have to appeal to a brute fact of existence, that something just
is, no reason for it. Reason reveals its own limits. Reason can tell you the
conclusions you can draw from the evidence, what worldview you can consistently
get out of it, what interpretations are consistent and supportable by the evidence
you have managed to gather and what interpretations are not consistent with
reality, but it cannot ultimately determine what that existence is or say what it
should be. Reality is not subject to a worldview; rather, worldviews are subject
to reality. Reality determines reason, not vice versa.

Whatever ultimately exists, then, is utterly unconditional, it is entirely

arbitrary, there is and can be nothing necessitating or prohibiting its existence,
nor anything regulating the character of its existence, i.e., there is no reason
for or against it. It just is, a brute, ultimately arbitrary, fact. There is,
then, ultimately nothing that would either necessitate or prohibit one form or
another of the Christian God's existence. Nor is there ultimately anything that
would either necessitate or prohibit any other god(s), or a self-existing physical
universe in which minds could evolve. The question of what ultimately exists, and
what its nature is, thus cannot be solved solely through reason or a priori
arguments. It is a matter of empirical fact, and can only be answered by appealing
to, by examining and studying, whatever it is. If you examine reality and find a
God, fine, God exists. If you find a physical universe in which minds can evolve
and you find no objective evidence of a God existing anywhere outside of his
believers' minds, fine, you are in a godless universe.

Seeing no reliable objective evidence that a god exists outside of believers'

minds, I had to conclude that there is no good reason to believe that there is an
objectively existing god, and that, despite my previous utter certainty that I had
a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ the Creator of the Universe, it
was all a product of my mind under the influence of parents, preachers, and Sunday
school teachers. I had to conclude that "God" is not anything "out there,"
objectively existing, but is a mislabeling or misunderstanding of our highest and
deepest subjective capacities. I certainly do not claim that the phenomena
commonly referred to as "God" do not exist. My claim is that "God" is a serious
mislabeling and misunderstanding of them. In a way, then, I still believe in God.
I believe in the existence of experiences of what most people call experiences of
God. They are deep, profound, powerfully moving experiences. But to call them
experiences of God, or the gods, is a socially learned interpretation of these
private, subjective experiences. I see and feel the evidence of the reality of
these experiences. As evidence that God-beliefs are socially learned
interpretations of these experiences, it is obvious that the vast majority of
people believe some form of the religion (or one of, or some combination of, the
religions) they grew up with. There are conversions to totally different religious
traditions, but they are relatively rare, and they go in all directions. Yes,
Muslims have become Christians, but Christians have become Muslims, and both have
become Buddhists, and Buddhists have become. . . . Most conversions are to another
form of the same religion, or, as with most born-again Christians, are a conscious
and deliberate personal dedication and serious commitment to the religion one grew
up with. But I see no reliable, testable, verifiable evidence of a conscious
entity out there which is external to the minds of experiencers and which causes
or induces these experiences. I think these experiences can be accounted for
without resort to appealing to such an entity, so I see no reason to posit the
existence of such an entity.

But how can most people be wrong about this? And how can I have the audacity to
claim they are? Well, given that, as I pointed out earlier, most notions of God or
the gods must be at least somewhat mistaken, it is not much of a stretch to make
the claim that they all are. Besides, anyone who makes any claim at all about who
or what God is has this same audacity to claim to know better than all those other
people who believe differently. So I'm not really doing anything unusual in making
such a claim. In fact, making such a claim is pretty much unavoidable if you are
going to talk about God at all.

Often at some point in discussions I have with theists, they see that reason,
logic, and evidence are not working for them, so they appeal to faith. They say I
am approaching God in the wrong way. God, belief in him, and following him are a
matter of faith. Hebrews 11:1 says that "faith is being sure of what we hope for
and certain of what we do not see." The Amplified Bible, which tries to include
all the nuances of the original in its translation, puts this as "FAITH is the
assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being
the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith
perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]." That is how we know
God.

This used to sound profound to me. Now it sounds like groundless wish-fulfillment.
It does not work, for two reasons. First, faith in this sense can be used to
"justify" believe in just about anything at all. It is a notoriously poor guide to
truth. There are no correcting mechanisms for errors other than one's own
subjective feelings, which have demonstrated themselves to be far from reliable
indicators of objective truth. On the other hand, only some beliefs can be
supported sufficiently by evidence and reason; many are ruled out, and false
beliefs can be reliably corrected. Using a combination of evidence and reason has
shown itself to be far more effective as a means to come to far more reliable
conclusions about reality. As the saying goes, "it is said that faith moves
mountains, but experience shows that bulldozers are more effective."

Put a hundred scientists to work on a problem, and yes they may all start out with
different hypotheses and discover, interpret, and reinterpret facts in different
ways along the way, but they eventually come to a consensus on an answer, and the
answer will be one we can effectively use. Scientists from all around the world,
regardless of religious beliefs or cultural practices or even previous scientific
conclusions were convinced by heliocentrism (Earth revolves around the Sun rather
than vice-versa), by plate tectonics (continental plates float around, and this
creating mountain chains and volcanoes), by evolution, etc., etc., because of the
evidence that they can test and verify themselves. Put a hundred theologians to
work on a question by using faith, however, and though they may all start out from
the same religious perspective, you will end up with at least a hundred
denominations, factions, and even new religions (all with their own denominations
and factions), and there will be no objective, reliable way to decide between
them.

Yes, what science tells us does keep changing. The weekly New York Times Science
section, for example, always reports new discoveries and disputes and challenges
and the like. But that is because scientists work at the edge of their knowledge.
They do not keep going over the things they have already settled. Yes, science
changes, but it changes by improving. What science tells us today is not what it
said yesterday because it has more, better, and better understood evidence than it
did yesterday. Unlike religious belief, science is self-correcting. Science does
not, and probably never will, give us perfect or perfectly reliable knowledge, but
it is far more reliable than its competitors. It may not be what we ideally would
want, but, as far as I can tell, it's the best we've actually got. Theology, on
the other hand, typically tells us what our parents believed, often with some
minor variations, occasionally with large variations, with conversions going in
all sorts of directions, increasingly less consensus over time, and nothing to go
on but subjective interpretations, what "feels" right to a particular believer.
With those track records to compare, I'll go with science's evidence without
certainty over religion's certainty without evidence.

A second reason for not resorting to faith to believe in God's existence is that
this sense of "faith" does not even make sense. Faith is in something like a
person's character, not in a person's existence, and even that faith is based on
evidence. For example, I have faith in my wife, by which I mean that I believe her
to be a trustworthy person whom I can rely on and depend on. I do not have faith
that she exists. I know she exists. I also know how she has acted in the past, I
know a lot about her character. And on the basis of that knowledge, I believe I
can safely rely on her being dependable in the future. In the case of God, you
cannot have faith that he exists. His existence would be a matter of knowledge.
Faith would come into play only after the knowledge of his existence and
character. Faith in God can come only after I have knowledge first that he exists;
after that can come faith in his character. And even that would require some sort
of objective and publicly verifiable evidence. Subjective experiences which can be
interpreted as being experiences of a divine presence in or around or somehow
affecting me are too unreliable as evidence of objective reality. Without some
means of objectively confirming those interpretations, I have nothing more than
any other theist with a subjective experience interpreted according to some
variation of some religious tradition.

A defense of faith that I have often heard is that we all have to have faith in
some things. Faith of some sort is unavoidable. No one can absolutely prove
everything one believes. And even, for example, the simple act of sitting in a
chair, since we cannot know for sure that the chair will not break this time, is
an act of faith. But that is an example of faith as going just a bit beyond the
evidence, taking the evidence a little bit further but in the same direction. The
chair has always worked before, it feels structurally sound as I pull it from the
table, its legs are all there and still attached, and I see no evidence that it
will no longer work as it has. So I conclude from the evidence that the chair will
work. If you want to say I have faith in my conclusion from that evidence, fine, I
have faith, a faith that takes the evidence a bit further in the direction it
points. But faith in the existence of a god is faith that goes against the
evidence. If there were evidence of God's existence, faith in that existence would
not be necessary, since we would know he exists. The very fact that faith in God's
existence is necessary to believe that God exists means that this faith is going
against the evidence.

About the only thing I can think of that could be construed as evidence that, if
taken a bit further in the direction it points, would point to God is the deep and
profound subjective experiences typically labeled as being experiences of God. And
I know what it is like to feel what is so commonly labeled "the divine," and to
label it as such, to believe it to be experiences of an objective reality beyond
me. I know what it is like to believe that I am in communion with God Himself. I
know what it is like to believe with all my heart that I am living daily in the
presence of God. And I still have such deeply moving experiences now. Yet now my
understanding of them is fundamentally different. Given all the different
religious interpretations of these experiences, and given the lack of any
objective evidence that there is some other conscious entity existing outside of
our minds which causes these experiences, I can no longer interpret them as I used
to. And that changes the experiences in fundamental ways. Changing my
interpretation of those experiences, changing how I understand them, changed the
way I experience them. The way I experience life is different. I still have those
deep and profound subjective experiences; but to experience them as if they were
experiences of God is utterly foreign to me now. Like many former theists I have
talked with, my deconversion experience was like waking up from a vivid dream, a
dream that felt so real to me while I was experiencing it, but then its dreamlike
nature was obvious once I woke up, and I wondered how it felt so real when I was
dreaming it. Like such a dream, it still felt somewhat real and compelling as I
was still waking up, but the more awake I got, the less real and the more
dreamlike it seemed. Now, it is like remembering such a dream in the late
afternoon and thinking, "wow, that was a weird dream."
Building a New World
But what do I do next? Where do I go from here? What do I replace my previous
religious beliefs with? Uncle Nick and many others showed me that it is possible
to live well without a god. But how?

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. Christianity gave me a reason for it all, a way to understand it
all, not just something specific in life but the whole thing. As a young child,
however, my lack of an overarching worldview was not a great concern. The thought
of having an overarching worldview had never occurred to me, so the lack of one
did not bother me. But it sure was a powerful feeling to acquire one. As my
Christian worldview was crumbling, I was once again without a worldview. This
time, though, it was a painful experience. And once again it was a very powerful
feeling when the framework for a new worldview came together. Ironically, for
those who learned how to interpret their conversion, or commitment, to
Christianity as a "born-again" experience, that experience is the best analogy I
can think of to convey what I felt when I was born a third time as a "naturalist"
(to attempt to give it a label). I was no longer lost in a sea of confusion,
unable to make heads or tails of life, the universe, anything. I had a theme, an
understanding, a coherent perspective. And it certainly was a powerful, positive
feeling.

Like my conversion/commitment to Christianity, though, it was just the framework

of a coherent worldview. There were still many details to work out. For me, the
two biggest questions were morality and meaning. Without God, what basis is there
for either of them?

After my deconversion, I was still moral and I took morality seriously, and I knew
atheists who lived admirable lives. So there was obviously something making that
possible. But I had always understood morality in terms of God. Was there a
secular, a naturalistic, basis for morality? I was finding it much more difficult
to come up with an account of morality than when I could just appeal to "God said
so."

Yet, in retrospect, just how good was that account? "God" said so? Or, God's
followers say God said so? As I noted earlier, in matters of morality God seems
always invariably to agree with his followers, even when they so vehemently
disagree with one another. I have never found a believer who claims to disagree
with God on a moral position. They always say God disagrees with others, but not
with themselves. Or perhaps that God told me I was wrong on a point previously,
but he changed my mind and now we are in agreement. But look at the other guy's
life: he's all messed up, so God must disagree with him. But the other guy will
say no, God agrees with me, and that is why Satan is attacking me and not you:
Satan sees that I am doing God's real work, and doing it effectively, so he is
trying to impede me. Or, God is allowing it (as he did with the righteous Job) to
develop my Christian character, or to teach me to depend on Him more, or whatever.
So, anything can be interpreted as being in accordance with God's will or
blessing. And God can justify anything. Even killing your own children. Abraham
was willing to kill his son at God's command, and, according to James 2:21, he was
considered righteous for doing so. In Judges 11, Jephthah was actually allowed to
go through with killing his daughter for God. How could, for example, Andrea Yeats
really have known it was not God telling her to kill her children? According to
the Bible, God did it before, and counted it as righteousness to be willing to do
so. "To obey is better than sacrifice," even if the command is to commit genocide
(1 Samuel 15).

What, then is really behind a Christian's, or any theist's, morality? What, if

anything, is behind God's morality, for that matter? Does he have reasons for the
moral commands he gives us, or are they just groundless, arbitrary whims on his
part? If he had reasons, then what are those reasons? To what did he appeal to
justify saying that X is good or right and Y is bad or wrong? And, if he had
reasons, then why can't we just bypass God and appeal to the reasons ourselves? If
he had no reasons, if X is right or wrong merely because he says so, if his moral
rules are just his arbitrary subjective whims, then what makes them any better
than our arbitrary subjective whims, besides his superior power to enforce them?
Does might make right? If not, what does?

Before you answer that the standards are derived from, or emanate from, or are a
part of his character or his being, keep in mind that the same sort of thing can
be asked of his character. Could his character, or his being, have been different?
If not, what constrains his character, and why couldn't we just bypass God and
appeal to whatever standards he must live up to? If so, if his being could have
been any way at all and whatever emanated from it would be "good" and "right" by
definition, what makes this any better, or any less arbitrary, a ground for
morality than anything else? If you are familiar with Plato's Euthyphro, you
probably recognize that these questions are from that dialog, which, as I
mentioned earlier, was one of the first books I read in a philosophy class. When I
first read it, I was still very much a Christian, and one who believed that God
and goodness are in some way fundamentally related. I was so wedded to that view
that I did not really get the full significance of Plato's argument. But now I was
able to see it in a very different light.

The way I see it, morality must be independent of God and his commands and
character, or it is just a case of might makes right. Either there are real
standards for a real morality which even God must meet, or God's rules become the
real, objective, absolute morality only because he's the biggest, baddest mutha on
the block and thus he can enforce his morality the way he wants to. I agree that
morality is independent of our unconstrained choice: I cannot arbitrarily choose
for raping my neighbors' wives to be good. But I also have to conclude that
morality, if it is real, must also be independent of God's choice, for the same
reasons. Or, do you think that God could make raping my neighbors' wives a good
thing? If not, why not, what constrains him and his character? If so, then how are
his arbitrary and unconstrained moral choices any better than mine?

But what, then, underlies morality? Is morality objective or subjective?

Typically, evangelical theists argue, and I used to believe, that morality is
objective, otherwise it is just based on arbitrary, groundless whims, and I could
not argue that, for example, the Nazis were bad and wrong. It would be a matter of
opinion, i.e., arbitrary whim. That obviously is not the case. Thus, morality must
be objective. And 'objective,' according to this view, means 'absolute,' true at
all times for all beings. This, however, is a false dichotomy. It is pointing out
two extremes on a long continuum of possibilities and pretending that the extremes
are the only possibilities. Typically, such views also conflate ideas that are
separate: 'real,' 'objective,' and 'absolute' are often used interchangeably in
explicating this view. But these ideas are quite different. Something can be real
without being objective, and something can be objective without being absolute. It
is not difficult to show that morality is real. But you cannot then jump
immediately to saying that it is therefore objective, and thus also absolute, and
thus dependent on God.

Morality, as I understand it, is real, and it does have objective elements in it.
'Objective,' however, does not mean 'absolute.' The word 'objective' in other
contexts means something along the lines of "of or having to do with a material
object as distinguished from a mental concept, idea, or belief." But when the term
'morality' is tacked onto it, 'objective' often switches to mean something along
the lines of 'absolute.' But by the standard definition of 'objective,' a divine
command ethicist is actually arguing for a thoroughly subjective notion of ethics:
it is dependent on the mind, or the personality, of God, based on his decisions or
his character. By the standard definition of 'objective,' this makes morality not
objective, as it is entirely a mental concept, even if the mind in question is the
mind of God. What objective moralists tend to mean by 'objective' would be better
labeled as 'absolute,' i.e., applying to everyone at all times and circumstances.
A thoroughly subjective morality backed by an omnipotent god would be absolute,
but it would not be objective.

Morality, as I understand it, also has subjective elements in it, and those
elements are no less real for being subjective. 'Subjective' refers to something
having to do with mental concepts, ideas, or beliefs. 'Subjective' does not mean
arbitrary or groundless or frivolous. Something subjective may be frivolous, but
it can also be quite serious. My love for my son is subjective, but it is far from
frivolous. 'Subjective' also does not mean that it is open to our choice. I could
not possibly choose not to love my son. A friend's betrayal of my trust may not
objectively, materially, harm me at all, but I will certainly feel bad, I will
experience negative emotions, I will be subjectively hurt. And my ability to trust
this friend, and perhaps even to trust others, will be harmed. That harm I
experience, though purely subjective, is real, and it is not a matter of choice.

Morality, as I understand it, is also relative, i.e., it is not independent of who

the moral agent is, nor of the situation in which the moral agent is acting. An
act such as killing someone or rebelling against the government may be good or
bad, depending on the circumstances. Killing in self-defense is justifiable.
Killing, performing the same act, in other circumstances, may be unjustified,
i.e., murder. To appeal to circumstances to justify or condemn an act is to say
that the morality of the act is relative to the situation. But, relative to that
particular situation, an act may be clearly right or wrong. Its relativity does
not diminish the reality of its rightness or wrongness.

Morality, as I understand it, is also not a matter of black and white. Black and
white do exist in the moral realm, but they are on a spectrum with a gradation of
grays between. An act may indeed be clearly right or wrong, but it may also be a
case where the different circumstances involved point in different directions.
What, for example, constitutes self-defense? Do I, or someone else, have to be in
immediate danger of being killed? Or can, say, a battered wife preemptively kill
her husband whom she legitimately fears will kill her later if she does not take
the opportunity to kill him first? Can a nation justifiably preemptively attack
another nation which it perceives as a threat? What if it is only possible that
the attacker might kill me, but I am not sure? How sure do I have to be that
killing is the only way to defend my life before I am justified in killing an
attacker? Can I kill in self-defense if my life is not in danger and I am only in
danger of being raped? How about if I am only in danger of being beaten up? Can I
kill to defend my property, if for example a thief does not stop trying to drive
off with my car when I point a gun at him and tell him to stop? The reality of
black or white cases, cases where the rightness or wrongness of an action is
clear, does not mean that there are not also cases where the rightness or
wrongness of an action is really, legitimately, unclear and debatable. To pretend
that dark gray is black and that light gray is white is to make poor and
inaccurate moral judgments in those cases, and it would make your decisions in
cases of medium gray completely arbitrary as well as inappropriate.

In other words, I am claiming that morality has both objective and subjective
elements, that it is relative, and often unclear, and yet it is real and it is not
arbitrary, there are standards for making better or worse moral choices, and, most
importantly, that it is not dependent at all on God. To explain how this can be
the case, let's start with a thought experiment:
Whatever the reason for its wrongness, rape is wrong. I think those who argue for
a God-dependent morality would agree with me on that. I think they could also
agree at least in general to a definition of rape as forcing someone to have sex
against one's will. A typical God-based moralist would claim that rape is wrong
because of an absolute unchanging moral standard that is based or dependent
somehow on God and not based or dependent on humans. This, however, would mean
that its wrongness is independent of what happens to be beneficial or harmful,
i.e., good or bad, for humans. I claim that rape is wrong because it causes all
sorts of real, actual harm to everyone, including the rapist, while providing no
benefit to anyone other than a minor, short term feeling of power or experience of
sex for the rapist. Certainly the victim suffers much harm, possibly physical
(objective) harm and definitely lots of mental (subjective) harm. And the
subjective harm is no less real for being subjective. Other women, who now know
that there is a rapist on the loose, suffer because of the fear that it could
happen to them. Men suffer, too: the victim's husband, father, sons, brothers,
etc., are all hurt and angered that someone they love and care for has suffered so
much. Other men realize that their wives, daughters, etc., are in danger. Even the
rapist probably has family members who could be victims of another rapist. The
rapist has at least harmed himself in that by acting on such impulses, he becomes,
or reveals himself to be, so dangerous. He thus cuts himself off from the society
on which he depends for his own well being.

But suppose we were a very different sort of animal. Suppose that if they wanted
to have children, women had to be raped, i.e., suppose that for some physiological
reason women could not get pregnant if they had sex willingly. Suppose further
that women never wanted to have sex initially, but once forced to start they
enjoyed it and were glad they were forced to begin. In this, it would be like
exercising is for me: I hate to start, but once I get going I enjoy it and I'm
glad I did it. Suppose that, because of the awareness that once one is forced to
start sex it will soon be enjoyable, that women suffered no fear or other
psychological harm worrying about whether they will become a victim. Suppose it
did not matter who initiated the sex, they would still find it enjoyable, and that
it did not matter to anyone if one's spouse had sex with someone else. And that
only a woman's husband could cause her to get pregnant, and only when they both
wanted her to become pregnant. And there was no such thing as sexually transmitted
diseases. Add a supposition that, like exercise, forced sex greatly increased
one's physical well being and made one healthier and happier. And suppose that for
some other physiological reason men could not properly perform sexually unless
they started by forcing a woman to have sex, i.e., men could not respond to a
willing partner. Suppose, in other words, we were a very different sort of animal
such that rape actually had a long list of beneficial effects and few or no bad
ones.

If all this were the case, wouldn't rape, i.e., forcing someone to have sex
against one's will, be something good? Kind of like forcing a smoker to quit
smoking? If we were this type of animal, whether God created us this way or we
evolved this way (this view of morality is independent of whether God exists, and
many theists agree on these or similar grounds that morality is independent of
God, i.e., that the divine command theory of morality is wrong), would God have to
declare that rape is good, perhaps even obligatory, since the benefits are so much
greater than the harms? If so, that would mean that morality depends on what
happens to be good or bad, beneficial or harmful, for humans, on what promotes or
hinders human flourishing, and that we determine the morality of an act based on
its cumulative good or bad effects. Or, would God still have to say that rape is
bad because it is bad according to an unchanging absolute principle which is
independent of humans and what sort of creatures we are? In which case we would
have to do things that are ultimately bad for us just because they happen to be in
accordance with some absolute standard which is independent of us and which has
nothing essential to do with us, a standard which is, from our perspective,
entirely arbitrary.

Yes, "good" and "bad" are real. And yes, morality is real. And there are at least
some objective elements to morality, there is an at least partially objective
basis for moral decisions. There are real standards of behavior, there is at least
some agreement to what these standards are, and we recognize these facts. But this
does not mean that morality is absolute, unchanging, and dependent on God. It is
due to the fact that we are one sort of being and not another. Correspondingly,
there are some things that are good for us, that benefit us and contribute to our
well being, and other things that harm us. In this, we are like trees. A certain
amount of sunlight and rain benefits trees: they can thrive and grow as healthy
trees. Too little water, however, or temperatures too cold or too hot, will harm
and even kill them. Also like us, there is a rather wide range of amounts of
sunlight, rain, and warmth in which trees can thrive, and a very wide and fuzzy
border between beneficial and harmful conditions. Further, like us, that range and
those borders are different for different trees and in different environments.
This means that good and bad consequences are both real (the trees, and we, really
are benefited by some things and harmed by others) and relative (what things cause
benefit and harm depend on the individuals and the overall situation they are in).

The significant difference between trees and us is that we can think, we are
consciously aware of what is going on, and we can also act, we can move around and
do things. When we act, our actions have consequences. Since we can think, we are
consciously aware of our responsibility for the consequences of our actions. I use
'responsible' here in a morally neutral sense, in the sense that a bolt of
lightning can be said to be responsible for, i.e., the cause of, a forest fire.
Combine thinking and acting, and we can imagine doing different acts and at least
roughly approximate the probable results of those acts. This is what allows us to
choose to do one thing rather than another. So, in addition to this awareness of
responsibility for the consequences of our actions, we are aware of our
responsibility for the consequences of how we choose to act. We are not just aware
of consequences, we can choose those consequences. This is where responsibility in
the moral sense comes in. We can hold ourselves and others morally responsible for
our actions.

But where does the morality itself come from? Not from just what naturally is,
I'll grant that. I am not trying to derive an 'ought' from an 'is,' i.e., trying
to say that because something is a certain way that it therefore should be that
way. Rather, morality comes (in part) from what could be. That is, I can imagine
taking different actions in a particular situation, and I can, with a more or less
reliable degree of accuracy, calculate the probable consequences of those actions.
Certain actions will result in beneficial consequences for myself, other
individuals, and the society on which we all depend for our well being, i.e.,
certain actions will be more likely to promote human flourishing. Certain other
actions will likely result in harm. But which of those results we try for, i.e.,
what could be, is up to us. Benefit or harm: it's our choice. Right actions are
those which result in beneficial consequences, wrong acts result in bad
consequences.

Or, rather, it would be more accurate to say "better" or "worse" actions than
"right" or "wrong" actions. As I pointed out, there is a wide range of
consequences that can to varying degrees promote human flourishing, and that range
is contingent on the individuals and situations involved. What really does benefit
some people in some situations really would cause harm to others in that
situation, or even to those some in a different situation. Real standards for real
moral decisions, but they are relative to the situations. But that undercuts a
significant pillar on which God-based morality stands.

Further, with humans, good or bad consequences can be subjective, too. I can be
emotionally harmed as well as physically harmed by another's actions. And the harm
is no less real for being subjective. To say that if morality is subjective then
it is arbitrary, groundless, or frivolous is to deny the reality and significance
of subjectivity, of the mental or emotional or "spiritual" side of humans.
Ironically, though, as I pointed out earlier, theists often fault "materialists"
for denying precisely this, yet they do so themselves if they say that a
subjective morality, a morality of and dependent on mind, is frivolous.
Subjectivity is real, and it is far from frivolous. So, from the reality of
morality it does not necessarily follow that morality is objective. It can be
subjective (or at least have subjective elements) and still be real. But that
undercuts another significant pillar on which God-based morality stands.

Another problem is that "good" is not fully commensurable. In other words, things
that are good are not always compatible with one another. What is good for some
may at the same time be harmful to others; do you sacrifice the good of some to
prevent harm to others, or do you allow harm to others to achieve the good for
some? It is good to uphold justice, to mete out rewards and punishments as they
are deserved. But it is also good to be merciful, to grant an undeserved reprieve
to someone who seems to have learned his lesson and desires to reform. It is good
to tell a negative truth to someone if a lack of awareness of that truth would
cause harm, but it is bad to hurt someone's feelings by telling that truth. Moral
dilemmas are not about good versus evil. That is not a moral dilemma, that is a
dilemma of will, of choosing what you know is right. A moral dilemma is when you
have to choose between two competing goods, or when you have to choose between two
unavoidable evils, or when it is unclear whether a certain set of consequences is
good or bad, or when it is clear that a particular consequence is both good and
bad. So, goodness is not unified, either. Nor is "good" always obvious. We cannot
accurately predict all the probable consequences of an action or the precise
probability of those consequences, and even when we can it is often difficult to
judge how good or bad, how beneficial or harmful, those consequences are.
Sometimes we do not and cannot with confidence know what is definitively right
even if there is a definitive right. Other times we can know with confidence that
there is no definitive right. And this undercuts yet another significant pillar on
which God-based morality stands.

But what of the 'oughtness' of morality, i.e., that which is generally taken to be
the essence, or at least a significant part of the essence, of morality? C.S.
Lewis (in Mere Christianity) says of this 'oughtness' that it is something "urging
me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I
think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we
know. . . ." All right, so it comes, as he admits, from mind. In other words, the
'oughtness' of morality, that which is at the essence of morality, is subjective.
Even if, as Lewis goes on to claim, that mind is the mind of God. By definition,
mind is subjectivity. But does it need to come from the mind of God? Why couldn't
it come from our own minds? After all, if what is "moral" is what promotes human
flourishing, then being moral is to function well as a human. It is just a
description of how humans function well. Given our evolved abilities to act and to
think and to think about acting, it would make perfect sense from an evolutionary
standpoint for us to have also evolved a capacity to care about all this, that we
would want to do the sorts of things that would likely tend to promote our well-
being, and the well-being of the other individuals and the society we depend on
for our own well-being. Oughtness comes from caring. All the above about
beneficial and harmful consequences, about acts promoting or hindering human
flourishing, about choices being better or worse, all may be true, but it does not
matter if you do not care. But if you care, it matters to you. And the more you
care, the more deeply it matters. You feel strongly that you should act in ways to
benefit whatever you care about. In other words, you feel you ought to do some
things and ought not to do others.

But, one may ask, why should I care in the first place? Well, if 'should' is a
form of 'ought,' and 'ought' is dependent on care, then without care, there is no
'ought' or 'should.' You will in fact be much more likely to live a better,
healthier, happier life if you care than if you do not. But that does not matter
if you do not care. If you do not care, there really is nothing to force you to
care; even if there were a 'should,' it could not have an effect on you. 'Should'
presupposes caring. But this is not a problem just for this nontheistic,
naturalistic account of morality. Without caring, not even God, not even the
threat of hell, could provide you with an effective 'should.' If I do not care
whether I wind up in heaven or hell, even those ultimate rewards or punishments
will not give me a reason to be moral.

So how do we start to care? Where does caring come from? As far as I can tell, it
is a natural capacity, a natural potentiality that is not too difficult to
activate. At least, it is not difficult to begin to activate it. To continue to
grow that capacity, to cultivate it such that it will effectively serve more
productive ends more conducive to the flourishing of life, is another, more
difficult matter, a matter of moral training. But the initial leverage appears to
be relatively easy to activate. Again, this makes sense from an evolutionary
perspective as well as from the perspective that God created us: a natural
capacity to care about our own well being and the well being of others is a
fundamental necessity for intelligent social animals to achieve that well being.
We care, and so, based on our beliefs about what acts will lead to what
consequences, we feel we ought to do some things and not to do other things.

All this, I think, does a much better job of explaining and accounting for the
differences people feel in how this oughtness is compelling us to act than does
the God-based view of morality. It also does a much better job of explaining the
incommensurability of good, and the difficulty and disagreements we often have of
determining what really would be good in a certain situation. In addition, it can
account for being able to say that some moral choices and standards really are
better than others: some really do tend to result in more real benefit and less
real harm than others. Further, we really can be mistaken in our calculations of
what actions will lead to benefit or harm, and in what consequences would actually
be beneficial or harmful in the first place. I do have real grounds, objective and
subjective, for saying that the Nazis got a few things wrong in their moral
calculations. And all this without appealing to any gods.

But why, then, would we ever be immoral? If morality is doing that which promotes
our well-being, why would we go against it? To answer that, I'll start by saying
that I think there is something to the Christian doctrine of original sin. It does
point to something real about us, though its account of that something is, I
believe, off the mark. We are born ignorant. We enter the world ignorant of causes
and effects, and unaware of the reality of others' subjectivity. We arrive viewing
the world from a narrow, short-sighted, self-centered perspective, not caring or
even thinking to care about others. We must learn what acts lead to what
consequences, and which consequences are beneficial or harmful. We must learn that
our own well being is dependent on the well being of others and of the society we
live in. Further, since benefit and harm are to some extent relative to
individuals and situations, what constitutes better or worse choices can vary in
changing circumstances. So intending to do good by doing what used to be
beneficial may result in harm. Thus we must learn to adjust our behavior to fit
changing circumstances. And we must also learn to care for others and their well
being. We are born with a capacity to learn to care for others, but that capacity
must be activated. To the extent that we actualize our potential to view the world
from a broad perspective, to take a long view, to take others' well being into
account, and to care for others enough to want to take their well being into
account, to that extent we activate our capacity for morality. To the extent that
this development is thwarted or bent, we are immoral. This depends in large part
on the training we receive when young, and then on the actual results of our
actions as we try to make our way through life.

It also depends on the type of person we want to be. Since you can make reasonably
good estimations of the probable consequences of your actions, and since some of
those consequences include the effects on your own character and how your
character develops and grows, you can to a large extent choose the kind of person
you want to be, then put yourself in situations in which you can act in ways to
become that kind of person. An athlete will train not just for sports in general
or even just for a particular sport, but also for a particular narrow ability in
that sport. Athletes put themselves in situations where they have to exercise the
general and specific skills they will need for games, to become better players.
With enough practice, the skills become habits and performing them is second
nature. Likewise, you can train yourself morally, in both general and very
specific ways, by placing yourself in situations in which you can practice acting
in certain ways (or, correspondingly, keeping yourself out of situations in which
you would likely act in harmful ways). With practice, acting in those ways becomes
habit. In other words, though much of your moral character depends on how others
trained you and treated you when you were young, your moral character also depends
on how you train yourself. Thus you are not a passive beneficiary or victim of the
circumstances which created the you that you are; you are also an active creator
of those circumstances. And even to the extent you are not responsible for the
situation you find yourself in, you are, as an active agent, responsible for what
you make of the situation you find yourself in. You are responsible for you, and
you cannot avoid that responsibility. You are, then, responsible for your
condition of "original sin." The human condition is essentially and inescapably a
moral condition.

And this morality is not either objective or subjective. Even less is it either
absolute and universal or merely groundless preferences and arbitrary choices. If
a rape victim is not physically harmed, then the only harm is psychological, i.e.,
subjective. But that does not mean the harm is any less real than if it were
physical, i.e., objective. And the fact that it is subjective certainly does not
mean that it is a matter of arbitrary choice: the victim does not choose to be
traumatized by the experience. The fact that harshly punishing one criminal would
be much more effective than showing leniency in reforming that person does not
mean that such harshness would not ruin, either by hardening or crushing, another
criminal who would have reformed much more easily if shown mercy. And the fact
that the same standard does not work the same in different cases does not negate
the fact that one standard really does work better than the alternatives in some
of those cases. Values do not have to be objective in order to be real; subjective
values are also real. Values do not have to be absolute to be real; relative
values are also real.

It may sound contradictory to say that morality is both objective and subjective,
that it has both objective and subjective elements in it. But, if you think about
it, this should be expected. We are, after all, both objects and subjects: we are
bodies (objects) which house minds (subjects). So naturally some values are
objective while some are subjective. Nourishing food is objectively valuable to
me. Friendship is subjectively valuable to me, and its subjectivity does not make
it any less real or valuable. Honesty is valuable in a number of ways, because
being able to trust one another's statements allows us to act far more efficiently
and effectively in our social environment (in some situations, dishonesty may give
one a short-term advantage, but a reputation for being dishonest harms one in the
long run; moral maturity is the ability to distinguish and pursue long-term
general benefits over short-term narrow benefits). My valuing such things is a
conscious awareness that they are valuable, and thus is subjective. My values
could be wrong, or misguided: I could value something that is not in fact valuable
to me, or I could fail to recognize that something else really is valuable to me.
Again, real standards for real judgments about subjective values. So, again, from
the reality of morality it does not follow that morality is objective, nor that it
is universal, nor that it is absolute.

Morality does not, nor does it need to, derive its authority from a lawgiver. In
fact, the situation is precisely the opposite: moral laws, moral rules and
precepts, derive their authority from the real and inescapable moral condition we
find ourselves in. Actions and consequences are better or worse, they are more or
less beneficial or harmful to our flourishing. Our sense of morality is merely a
recognition of this reality and seriously caring about it. This recognition, this
sense of morality, being a product of our minds, is subjective. The moral rules
and precepts we come up with are our attempts to achieve the beneficial results
and avoid the harmful ones, they are our hypotheses about the ways to live good
human lives, how to flourish as humans. These moral rules and precepts, again
being products of our minds, are subjective. But this subjective awareness is an
accurate recognition of our real condition, and our subjectively determined rules
and precepts are subject to real judgments based on the real results that follow
from putting them into practice. Our moral rules are not judged by some absolute
standard of law given to us by a god. Rather, they (including any alleged standard
given to us by any alleged deity) are judged by reality, the real world in which
we (including any alleged deity) live and act.

One possible objection to all this is to ask, this may be all well and good, maybe
we can have morality without God, but, so what? Without someone (i.e., God) to be
accountable to, how can anyone be trusted? If there is no heaven to reward or hell
to punish, then why not go out and rape and pillage the world? Why not lie, cheat,
steal, and kill whenever you can get away with it?

I have to wonder about anyone who would ask such a question. I have to wonder if I
can trust anyone who thinks like this. Is it revealing your own character? Is this
really what you would do if you could get away with it? Is the only reason you are
good because you fear the punishment that would result from being bad? Is your own
capacity for morality so underdeveloped or warped that you cannot even imagine
someone doing what is good simply because it is good? Can you not even imagine
caring? If this is how you feel, then you are why we need police and prisons, and
the rest of us need to figure out better ways to help you and others like you
develop or reform your thwarted moral capacities.

Another more serious objection is to ask: So what? So morality can be real without
God and without being absolute and eternal. But what does it matter if we are not
eternal? What difference does it make if we die and that's that? What if there is
no heaven, regardless of whether there is no hell? Why not just eat, drink, and be
merry, because tomorrow we die and then nothing else matters?

For one thing, it is almost never the case that tomorrow we die. Almost always, if
we eat and drink to excess, tomorrow we live, and we live with extra weight and a
hangover. There is only one day (out of an average approaching 30,000 days) in
each person's life for which it is true that tomorrow we die. And we almost never
know which day that is. On most days, we can count on the probability of having
months, years, even decades to live with the consequences of what we do today. So
I'll turn the question back on the theist: so nothing we do will ever matter to
the universe at the end of time. So what? We are not the universe at the end of
time. We are us, here and now, and for some number of years from now, and our
children and at least some other people we care about for even longer. And what we
do now does matter to us now, and for the amount of time we have left, and it does
matter to other people who matter to us. What we do now can make an enormous
difference for us over the rest of those however many years. To claim otherwise,
to say that it makes no difference whether I am a merry prince or a miserable
pauper (or a miserable prince or a merry pauper), is to deny any significance to
this life. Do you think that this life matters? Does it not matter to you? It
matters to me, and that is enough for me.

But, still, you may ask, what's the point? If we're all just gonna die anyway and
that's the end, why bother at all? What meaning is there to any of this? How, in
the absence of God, can life have any meaning? What is the point of our existence?

This is the other big question I had to face to rebuild a world after my Christian
worldview collapsed. Does life in a godless universe have any meaning? Can this
life matter to me? From the example of Uncle Nick and others, I knew people can
live meaningful, fulfilling, happy lives without God. But how?

It had been so easy to answer this question by appealing to God: God provides the
meaning, like he provides morality. Yet on closer examination, this too fell
short, and did not really deliver what it promised. I found two problems with the
God answer. First, did this life ever really mean all that much to me when I was a
Christian focused on the next life? Or did all its meaning derive from that
alleged next life? Is this world, and living here, just a way station on the
journey to the real world that really matters? Is there nothing in this life that
really matters except for whether you accept Jesus as your savior? What life does
Christianity really provide meaning for? This one that we know we are living here
in this world, or a possible next life we hope some day to be living in an alleged
other world? Another problem is that meaning, like a sense of obligation in
morality, is subjective. Meaning is radically subjective: it is not something that
can be shared. Even if my life means something to God, it does not necessarily
follow that it means anything to me. That would only be the case if I care about
what matters to God.

There are two senses of meaning: meaning for and meaning to. For a tree, a lack of
rain means it will suffer, and with a long enough drought it will die. That does
not, and cannot, mean anything to a tree, because it has no ability even to be
aware of that fact, much less to care about it. "Meaning for," then, as I am using
it here, is an objective sense of the term. "Meaning to" is meaning in a
subjective sense, an experienced meaning, a meaning we are aware of, that we can
feel, it is a personal meaning. The source of "meaning for" is external, such as
cause and effect in the physical world, stuff in motion bumping into other stuff
resulting in a set of consequences. God, then, would be another source of "meaning
for": God's meaning for our lives, what our lives mean to God, would be something
externally given to us. His plan for our lives would mean that this and that are
the case and this and that are not. But "meaning to" is the meaning that matters
to us, that we care about. It is our meaning. And care is the source of that
meaning, our caring is that meaning. If I care about my own life, what happens in
my life matters to me, it means something to me as well as for me. And if I care
about others, then what happens to them matters to me. To an extent, meaning is
just a natural consequence of being aware, of having subjectivity, of recognizing
the reality of "meaning for," of realizing the fact that, for example, eating
moldy bread means we will get sick. Meaning, to some degree, just comes to us
merely because we are aware. But that is only the beginning. There are many levels
and depths of meaning, and to get beyond that basic level we must do something to
cultivate meaning, we must actively create meaning, meaning to us.
Meaning, and a meaningful, fulfilling life, is, I have found, something we are
capable of, something we can create, and we can create it in a number of ways. But
that is no guarantee that any of us will succeed. We may never learn how, we may
never succeed in achieving fulfillment. Perhaps we try in ways that are not
compatible with our characters or capabilities, such as accomplishing goals that
are out of our reach or that are shallow and unfulfilling even if attained.
Perhaps circumstances beyond our control thwart our efforts which would otherwise
have succeeded. Many people have not succeeded in finding, or creating, a
meaningful, fulfilling life. But obviously many people have succeeded, and
obviously they have succeeded in many different ways, including different
religious ways and ways not involving religion. But from the fact that some people
have found meaning and fulfillment in one or another version of God, and even if
those people are unable to find meaning and fulfillment in any other way, it does
not follow either that everyone else can do the same, or that no one else can find
meaning and fulfillment any other way. You are not the measure of all things, you
and your experiences and your understanding of those experiences are not the
standard by which all meaning is measured. Merely because you found meaning in
your version of Jesus, or Allah, or Zeus or whomever/whatever, and you were not
able to find meaning any other way, it does not follow that this holds for
everyone else or even anyone else. Just a few examples of people who have found
meaning and fulfillment in other ways demonstrates that one does not necessarily
have to follow your path to find meaning.

Likewise, just a few examples are enough to demonstrate that one does not need to
be, nor even believe oneself to be, a significant character in a grand, cosmic
role to lead a meaningful, fulfilling life. If you do need that, if you say that
this life in all its mundane everydayness is not enough, perhaps you have not
learned enough or grown enough to find satisfying abundance in the everyday and
mundane. It is not that the abundance comes from the mundane, but that you can
create it out of yourself in the mundane. You do not need to look beyond yourself.
If you need to look beyond yourself, then probably the mundane is and never will
be enough. You will probably need, or at least need to believe in, a grand cosmic
scheme and a role for yourself in it. If this is the way you feel, perhaps you
need to ask yourself what you think it is that your life is missing such that you
feel you need a god to fill it.

I have found from the examples of others, and I am finding from my own experience,
that, with a little help from ones friends, one can create satisfying meaning and
fulfillment from oneself, and it can be done in a variety of ways. Many people
have found meaning in various forms of Christianity, or Islam or Buddhism or
nonreligious sources. So a fulfilling life is achievable, and it can be achieved
in a variety of ways. On the other hand, it is obvious that many people have
failed to find meaning in one or another of the various forms of Christianity, or
Islam or Buddhism or nonreligious means. Many have failed to find meaning from any
source they have tried. I agree with theists who stress the impossibility of
finding deep and satisfying meaning solely by achieving a high status in one's
career or making a lot of money or having a lot of sex or some other external,
usually competitive or comparative, standard of that sort. But the problem may be
one of trying to get meaning out of religion or a fancy car or whatever, rather
than bringing meaning to it. Meaning is not given to us from anything, we give
meaning to it. Meaning is not created for us; we create meaning for ourselves. I
have found that, for me anyway, internal and cooperative standards provide a very
rich soil for growing a meaningful and fulfilling life. It is in building caring
relationships with myself and with others that this meaning comes.

I once found a source of meaning in a relationship with God, or at least in what I

thought was a relationship with God. Then I realized that "God" was a label I had
been taught to place on certain subjective experiences, a misunderstanding of
those experiences. I realized that "God" was not really "out there" existing
objectively and independently of my, or anyone else's, thoughts about him. But the
meaning, the fulfillment I experienced, when I experienced it, was real. I felt
kind of like Dumbo the flying elephant when he discovered that the magic feather
which he thought made him capable of flying really was not magic, and he had
really been flying on his own. On the other hand, that analogy does not quite
work, because Dumbo just held the feather, he did not flap it around or do
anything with the feather to actually help him fly. My belief in God, on the other
hand, was not just something that I passively held to make me believe I could
create meaning by doing something else, rather that belief was precisely what I
used to create meaning and fulfillment for myself. So I could not just keep
"flapping my ears" as Dumbo did. I was "using the feather," so I still had to find
a way, or ways, to replace the belief I had been using to create meaning.

The fact that we have the capacity, the potential, for creating meaning and
achieving fulfillment in life, does not guarantee that we will get there.
Actually, there is no "there" in the sense of a final destination or finished
product anyway. It is not a case of either experiencing "abundance" of some sort
or not; abundance admits of degrees. Wherever you are, there is always more growth
possible. I am not, and would not claim to be, a sage or a guru who has "arrived."
I've just found ways to be satisfied by my journey. Nor would I claim that I am
always feeling happy at all times and delighted at all that happens. Far from it.
But I'm not really talking about feeling happy all the time, or even trying to do
so. What I mean by finding meaning and fulfillment is that even in the down times,
I still feel that it is worth it. I would not claim to be where Anne Frank was
when, in the midst of the madness of World War II and the Holocaust, she was able
to say that "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good
at heart," but I think I can at least understand how one could find even a life
like hers to be worthwhile (even if I might not be able to do it myself). Nor
would I claim to be a sage or a guru who can teach anyone else how to achieve any
of this; I think that this is something each of us has to learn on our own.

I can say that I have found that I am capable of happiness, joy, and abundance
right here in this life, regardless of whether or not there is a god. In terms of
having a meaningful life, the existence of God has become, for me, an irrelevant
question. His actual existence, were I to discover it, probably would result in me
making changes in myself and my actions, it might well make a difference in how I
go about pursuing meaning and fulfillment, but it would not make a difference as
to whether I could do so, nor in the source of that meaning and fulfillment. By my
differentiation of 'meaning for' and 'meaning to,' God's existence would provide
more meaning for me, but it could not provide more meaning to me; only I can do
that for myself. My life's meaning and abundance, any fulfillment I achieve in it,
is derived from life itself, from the life I am living. It is sufficient for
itself. Our existence is its own point. If it turns out that this is all there is,
then it is more than worth the effort.

As a born-again Christian, I believed that I had arrived, that I was "there," that
there was no "beyond" where I was. Continued growth, certainly yes, the spiritual
growth of becoming increasingly Christlike. But that growth was just to be more of
the same; there was no being born-again again. Now, I see that there is a "beyond"
all that, and as far as I can see there is and will always be further "beyonds."
But there being no ultimate destination given to us from outside for us to finally
achieve does not mean that the journey is pointless. Rather it is the journey
itself that is the point. Life is its own meaning. Again, what I thought of as the
"there must be more to it than that" when I looked at this life was, I eventually
realized, already in the "that," at least potentially, anyway. And it is up to
each of us to actualize that potential for ourselves.
As a Christian, I felt that I had an abundant life. But life is even more abundant
for me now. From my present perspective, the abundance I felt I had as a Christian
seems rather shallow and could not match what I have achieved now. It would be
easy for me to say that this is a result of me "moving beyond" Christianity, just
as I've heard so many evangelists say that their current abundance as Christians
is so much deeper and more fulfilling than anything they experienced before
committing their lives to Christ. They found greater fulfillment after they became
Christians. I, and other former Christians I know, found greater fulfillment after
dropping Christianity. So I don't think that picking up or dropping Christianity
necessarily has much to do with living a fulfilling life. But the one thing we
have in common is that we are all older, so I suspect it has more to do with age
and maturity than with picking up or dropping Christianity.

Yet, I think there are ways in which giving up Christianity, moving beyond
Christianity, has helped me to find more and deeper meaning and satisfaction in
life than I could as a Christian. As a Christian, I wondered how people without
God could really appreciate life and the world and all its beauty, and I doubted
that they could do so to the extent I as a Christian could. Without a relationship
with the Creator, how could one really appreciate creation? But, much to my
surprise, I have found life, the universe, everything to be much more wondrous and
beautiful without God. When I was a Christian, I considered this world to be just
a sign of the next world, the really real world. The beauty of this world was
merely a reflection of some other world. The beauty I experienced in this world
was derivative. Now, however, I see that this is the real world, this is the
source of all the beauty, as well as all the misery, the joy and the sorrow, the
fulfillment and the frustration. It is not derivative. It is all here. That allows
me to appreciate this world in ways I could not as a Christian.

In addition to this, there is also the recognition that I am no longer merely the
passive recipient of meaning given to me by God. I am actively creating it. I am
responsible for it. If I am to find meaning and fulfillment in life, it is up to
me to do it. And I can do it. I'm not always successful, and I have, and always
will have, more to learn, but I am increasingly successful the more I work at it.
And it is me working at it and accomplishing it. That realization in itself is
profoundly fulfilling. And it is a fulfillment I do not think is possible for one
who understands meaning to be something passively received from the outside,
granted from a god or some other source. At least, it is not one I ever
experienced when I depended on God to be the source of meaning and fulfillment in
my life. Life is its own meaning. The journey is the destination.

Looking back at some of this last section, from one angle it looks to me like a
series of shallow, trite platitudes, and I'm embarrassed to have written it. We've
all heard it all before: "it's not the destination, it's the journey," all that
sort of thing. But from another angle, I, at least, am able to see what, to me
anyway, is quite profound. Perhaps the fact that I can find that sort of tripe to
be profound says something negative about me. Or, maybe there is a point to the
claim that abundance, fulfillment, a deeply satisfying joy, can be found right
here in the mundaneness of everyday life. Maybe the point is to learn how to see
life from that angle.