Why I Am an Atheist (Part 1 of 3)

Why did I leave the faith? And what would it take to bring me back?

I hear a lot of nonsense coming from within religious circles about why people become atheists. Some want to pin deconversion to mere misinformation about the faith; others, to explain away everything the atheist has to say as coming from psychological issues (or anything except actual rational arguments). I especially resent when someone writes off my lack of belief as merely a matter of “will” or “emotions,” as if one could possibly be rational/moral/etc. only if one is a theist, or as if we were all natural believers who must have been seduced away from the truth. So I want to put my own story out there as a counterpoint. I did not leave the faith because I wanted to have sex with anybody and everybody, nor do I think that Christianity holds that I must believe in a literal 7-day creation, young earth, yada yada.

Of course, the issues here are complicated, many of them deserving of books. So I'll present a readable version first, with extensive footnotes for clarification on individual points. And yes, I realize that more could be said – but considering how few real discussions I've had with believers on these points (as opposed to bumbling attempts to proselytize me with far more adroit attempts to ignore everything I actually have to say), I'll save further elaboration for those few who genuinely want real conversation. I can quite literally count on one hand how many times the latter has happened since I left the faith – do not reply to this post if you are unwilling to read it and try to understand what I have to say first, and then to respond with something other than the standard dogma or some ten-step apologetics course. And of course, I am only arguing against Christianity here, as I have the most experience with it; but similar problems arise with any revealed religion.

First, why did I leave conservative^Definitions religion? This is only one subset of my journey out of faith, as I don't wish to say that Christianity is reducible to fundamentalism. But it was an important step for me.

Evangelicalism taught me to take the Bible literally. And the literal word of God has God commanding genocide.^{Canaanites and Moloch} Genocide. In short, Hitler was not wrong because of what he did, but because God did not command it. This is to say nothing of God-mandated torture in Hell. Again, torture. These phrases “genocide” and “torture” are accurate, because those are what a) the eradication of an entire people, and b) excruciating torment willingly inflicted on a conscious being, are by definition.^Hell

Answered prayer^{Purpose of Prayer} leads to similar conundrums. You hold out hope that God will make things turn out well for you and yours. But this God lets thousands of people starve to death daily. So either God doesn't answer prayers, or only answers yours. I'd rather believe the former, because the God of the latter gets the award for Biggest Asshole of All Time. (So when you tell me that God personally helped you run into a friend you needed to see, what I hear is that either God thinks your chance meeting is more important than ending a famine, or that you think you're more important.)

And isn't there supposed to be that Holy Spirit in the church, making believers into better people? Well, where is it? You don't get to claim sin as the reason why the church is as corrupt as everything else; everyone is a sinner, so Christians should still be substantially better than the world. And this is the almighty God who is supposedly working in the church! The slight differences of slightly better Christians, as measured in your own experience, albeit absolutely unnoticed by the world around you, don't count; that sounds more like confirmation bias than omnipotence.^{Slightly Better} But don't rail at the church for being corrupt. God's power is what is supposed to be working within it. And if you claim that reforming people is a process that takes time, what do you think is going to happen in Heaven? Somehow God makes us all perfect then, but can barely even get started on the process now?^Purgatory

Those are still just the moral issues. Logically, I cannot make sense out of many doctrines. God is three persons in one being? Jesus is one person with two natures? (Double natures; what does it mean?) I can do one of two things: I can avail myself of one of the many theories concerning these doctrines, in which case they're coherent but senseless (what the heck is a “subsistent relation”? It makes marginally more sense than a square circle, but only because I can't even think of what it's talking about to understand it as contradictory), or I can use analogies where the pieces make sense but they don't fit together. I can understand Jesus being human. I'm not sure whether I can understand Jesus being divine (unless you hold God to be some super-human like Zeus), but I certainly don't see what could be meant by saying Jesus is both human and divine.^Nestorianism And yes, mystery, divinity, blah blah blah; of course there could be mystery. There's plenty of mystery in the world. However, the dogmas I hold still need to make sense for me to hold them. What would it mean to believe a truth which I cannot even begin to understand? The idea is nonsense.^{Quantum Mechanics}

And then there's the Atonement. Jesus died for our sins. Again, this makes no sense, and is even morally reprehensible. Somehow, God forgives us our sins (correction: God forgives the sins of those who play his peculiar game of hokey-pokey where you hear the name of Jesus, believe the name of Jesus, and turn yourself around), but only by punishing someone completely sinless. And somehow this is more just and moral (and honourable, or however you want to phrase it) than simply forgiving us outright. God had to beat his own child (/Godself, since they are somehow the same, except not; see previous point) rather than simply forgiving those God chooses to forgive; yet, despite doing this, God still can't forgive everyone^Universalism, although the atonement's been done already and is supposedly something objective. Can you think of one single instance where we need to punish the innocent to be more just? An innocent person might of their own free will make reparations for the sake of others (for example, to pay a fee that another person owes), but what actual reparations are made here, and how could this be a necessity for justice?^{Theories of the Atonement} God doesn't need anything, being God and all, and the reparations don't help anyone else. And real injustices still occur and are not righted; what good is an abstract atonement for abstract justice to those actually dying and being oppressed?

There is also the anthropomorphic nature of most belief. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the philosophers, true, but I actually have some reason to believe in the latter. The former acts and thinks like a big human, even if ostensibly purified. Every emotional impulse of ours stems from brain chemicals. We have these mapped out. What possible sense does it make to talk of a non-physical being with emotions anything like ours? The structure of our thought has been shown to be shaped both by physical neural structure and culture; why would an immaterial God who antedates any culture think in categories anything like ours (assuming that talk of "thought" even makes sense without reference to neurons and communities)?^Thought And why should I believe that your God is any more real than those human-seeming gods of the past, which have been covered up by history?

With all of the above, even if one particular point fails, I don't see any need to get into arguments and apologetics. Historical arguments are always prone to being overturned (how much has our understanding of the history of the US changed in the past few decades, and that of large and recent events!), and all the more when the argument is for a singular moment in history. No matter how sound your historical argument is (and it can't be too sound, given that we only have a few accounts, written by insiders, who may or may not have been eyewitnesses), I will always say that it is more likely that your argument is flawed, than that your historical analysis is stronger than all the points I raised above.^{N. T. Wright}

Part II will deal with my objections to moderate belief (in sum: most of the arguments I hear from moderates tend to be pragmatic in nature, which I take to be insufficient for one who actually has the leisure to be making such arguments, even if they are what the average person needs to get through the day). Part III will involve details of my own thoughts, including what I take from religion (most of my arguments have actually not been from atheists, but instead from religious thinkers – and those from rationalist medievals who often were prominent figures in their own traditions), grounds for morality, and why I think these issues are too important to simply be left to “whatever a person wants to believe.”

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^Definitions

A few clarifications are in order. There are different reasons why I rejected different branches of Christianity. I will reduce these to conservative, moderate, and liberal Christianity. Conservative Christians hold the Bible (and/or Tradition) to be inerrant and literally true, in some sense, and hold to standard church dogma (of some sort). Moderate Christians would deny inerrancy and probably question some standard doctrine, but overall would place themselves firmly within the Church as a temporal organization open to change, but still with strong connections to the past. Liberal Christians keep the label of Christian out of some sense of sentiment for its cultural forces or key figures without holding to any particular set of doctrines, viewing the human trajectory of the tradition as what binds it together rather than dogma.

In turn, when I say that I am an atheist, I mean that I reject answered prayer (or any sort of personalized response of God/the Universe/etc.), providence beyond the mere fact of order in the natural world, an afterlife (whether resurrection, reincarnation, or existence as a separate soul), supernatural causation, and any sort of mysticism which denies the world; I do in fact hold that some of the more sophisticated versions of arguments for God's existence do indeed work, but that this God is utterly and completely non-anthropomorphic, and a principle of existence more than anything else.

^{Canaanites and Moloch}

One defence for the genocide of the Canaanites is that they sacrificed their children to the flames. Even assuming that this is true (rather than the sort of slander that we see attributed to outside groups again and again in history, often without foundation), how is killing them off an ethical act? They are evil because they kill some of their children... therefore the best action is to kill all of their children? Even assuming that their children would have grown up and continued the practice, some would have grown up, and some of their children would have grown up, etc., etc. Murdering the entire nation is at least as bad as the sin it was meant to address, for just about any sin.

^Hell

Yes, the view of Hell here is restrictive, but it's what many people hold. Annihilationism, in which God annihilates the damned instead of tormenting them, doesn't bother me as much. Nor does the idea that the damned create their own torment for themselves; but in the latter case, there seems to be absolutely no connection between not believing in articles of faith and being the sort of person who would then be self-punishing for eternity. Nor can I see how an omnipotent, omniscient^{Limited Omniscience}God would not have the wisdom to bring most of these sufferers around.

^{Limited Omniscience}

I do find it funny how God's omniscience appears to be based on the believer's need at the moment. Need a perfect universe, where everything will eventually work out? Want to believe that God is working all things together for your good? God is omniscient and omnipotent! But somehow, never enough to get people to behave themselves, here or in hell, or to plan events so that his descent to earth would be documented for people thousands of years later with legitimate concerns over history.

^{Purpose of Prayer}

Of course, one could hold that the reason for praying is not that one's prayers will be answered, but for the sake of holding a conversation with the deity, or molding one's will and desires to God's, or whatnot. That is a different issue, one with which I do not take offense.

^{Slightly Better}

Even if Christianity happened to be a better way of life than the alternatives, this wouldn't mean that it isn't man-made. I should to see something pretty amazing from God's own people, but I expect arbitrary groups of people to occasionally get things a little less muddled than usual.

^Purgatory

There is the possibility of Purgatory, which would provide a time between death and Heaven for people to gradually become perfect. This would at least remove one difficulty, though many of my other comments remain.

^Nestorianism

Unless you say that Jesus' will was merely perfect and representative of the divine, or something of that sort. Even if this works, and you don't mind being a heretic (you Nestorian, you), that would place you in the moderate to liberal camp, which I'll discuss later. I can make sense out of a “Holy Will” or whatnot, though whether it is well-applied to an individual whose recorded life comes down to us in fragments and sermons covering mostly 3 years is another story.

^{Quantum Mechanics}

To give an example of something mysterious that I do hold: I believe quantum mechanics because repeated experiments show that particularly odd phenemona occur, and we do have rigorous mathematical language to describe them, where said language has been repeatedly verified as not only describing the phenomena but also predicting new, unexpected results. So we can encounter mysterious phenomena that overturn our previous views of the world, and we can describe such phenomena with language that we don't really understand (or at least, Feynman didn't really understand what was going on, which is pretty much equivalent).

The phenomena have repeatedly held up to critical observation, and are there whenever anyone wants to see them under the correct experiment. And the language used to describe the phenomena is both internally consistent and has enough contact with other areas of experience to be meaningful, even when not truly comprehended. Quantum mechanics is strange, but is accessible step-by-step from our experience. We have a bridge of language which leads into obscurity, but we can at least see the bridge.

By contrast, the Trinity and the Incarnation are completely beyond our experience, and this gulf is what renders language about them useless; we have the endpoints for a bridge, but no actual bridge. Either we are talking about square circles (which seem coherent when only thought about square-wise or circle-wise, but these two can't be put together), or quarfluggles (which are an I-know-not-what, but which at least are not expressly incoherent). This is not to say that God would not be mysterious, but rather that what is truly mysterious can't be spoken of or even imagined. That's why it's mysterious. (So likewise, apophatic theology makes sense; it's kataphatic mysticism which strikes me as playing shell games with words).

^Universalism

Unless you are a universalist. For which there might be some Biblical warrant, but I'll leave that for the exegetes. At any rate, a universalist could hold a moral influence view of the atonement; that is, that Christ died to provide an example to us and show God's love. This could make sense of the problem, but at the cost of contradicting some generally stable church doctrines – which would put one at least into the moderate camp, which I'm saving for the next post.

^{Theories of the Atonement}

More detail, for those of you saying "Yes, that's precisely what Christ's death did accomplish": you could say that Christ's death was to pay some abstract notion of justice or honour, or to uphold the governance of the universe. However, even from within Christianity, we are told to forgive as our Father in Heaven; following the logic of the Atonement here (that justice/honour/governance requires punishment), the results of this injunction to “forgive” could get rather messy. It is easier to say: Anselm's view of the Atonement being demanded to fulfill God's honour was tied to a feudal cultural system, penal substitution is tied to a legal cultural system (which probably wouldn't even accept it in its own courts for most cases), and governance theories are tied to monarchic cultural systems, to the extent that they simply do not make sense without reference to those cultures and the anthropomorphism they demand. They might be helpful analogies at best, but they can't be the true explanation as to why the Atonement was necessary. And again, we are to forgive as our Father in Heaven forgives; why shouldn't Jesus' statement here be taken to be more indicative of the nature of the Father than post hoc theories explaining the Atonement?

One could also say that Christ was giving a payment to the devil (Christus Victor), which actually might be the view that makes the most sense, beyond moral influence; it may reek of superstition, but at least it's coherent and not morally repugnant, if one doesn't think too much about a God who would barter souls to the archnemesis. In this case, there would be reparations that need to be paid, and so the analogy to legal reparations is coherent.

Or perhaps one could say that the Atonement was to defeat death and corruption, and that the salvific power is concentrated in the Resurrection (this would be closer to the Eastern Orthodox view, in my understanding). I'm not quite sure what any of that even means, besides kind of cool aesthetic effects without reference, but this would not explain why that salvific power would not be available for all. If Christ has defeated death, death is defeated, and why can't God join to Christ's body whomever God pleases?

^Thought

Yes, this point requires a good deal more to be developed, and is weaker than the point about emotions. The weakest point would be that I only hold that God would not think in human categories, not that God could not express Godself (and God's own alien “thoughts”) in human categories. But one possible argument would be that the capacity of God to express thoughts in our terms requires some rapprochement between our thoughts and God's; however, there seems little reason to assume this is possible. Either our thoughts are due to our physical nature, in which case an immaterial being would be something completely different (for a small example, a baby human distinguishes objects based upon shape, while a baby dog distinguishes objects based up size. If we thought like dogs, our language and conceptual apparatuses would be markedly different); or they are transcendental, formed by the way we as finite beings synthesize the world, in which case an infinite being would be utterly different from us and not needing to synthesize the world in anything like the same way, while a simple being would not need to synthesize the world at all (for example, many of our concepts, if not all, come into play while finding order to what we encounter through our senses; what would a being that not only does not have senses, but is not caught between any heterogenous boundaries [such as different senses combined with intellection, or by finite chains of reasoning being applied to an infinite], have to synthesize and apply order to?). In either case, applying terms like "thinking" and "understanding" and "planning," etc. to God would be misleading.

If one instead says that concepts simply match the way reality is, then one might have an easier time explaining how God thinks the same way we do (at least, before getting down to arguments about the nature of God as infinite, simple, necessary, eternal, etc.), but then one is stuck with all of the problems of representationalism: how does a concept “in the world” get into our heads? How is an idea at all like a physical object? Are scientific models really in the world or not? And how do we then get so much wrong? This is aside from other metaphysical issues involved with God simply reading off ideas from reality (if God is omniscient, God would know every fact; then God knows facts about facts, since those are also facts, and similarly God knows facts about facts about facts, etc. But this would entail a set of all facts, which would be the same as the set of all facts about facts, which would be the same as the set of all facts about facts about facts, and so on; and this is impossible, due to both Russell's paradox and Cantor's diagonalization theorem).

^{N. T. Wright}

N.T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God is a symbol of many of the problems of the historical approach. I won't deny that it's a scholarly tour de force – I never said that to be Christian was to be an idiot or a poor scholar, though I suspect that it does mean having a well-used Procrustean bed. The work is huge, around 600 pages at least, with far too many references to check out accurately – am I to assume that God only deigned to give adequate evidence of what pertains to my immortal soul if I get a Master's first, and that in an area which is next to worthless should this particular hypothesis be wrong? But with that said, there are two main concerns which crossed my mind in the reading.

First, Wright claims that, before the New Testament, no one ever thought about a literal resurrection. Of course, a few people did here and there, but “the exception proves the rule.” But the exception stops proving the rule once one has to claim this multiple times, even if people think of the resurrection as something that doesn't really happen; the thesis he needs to make is not that people have thought a physical resurrection to be silly, but rather than people hadn't been thinking it at all and so it was a completely new thought.

Second, his jump to how a real resurrection was the best explanation for the newfangled notion of a physical resurrection seems to not quite understand what “best explanation” is. Telling me that a miracle happened, one which was relatively little noted at the time and of a kind which has never been reliably recorded by critical witnesses, is simply not a better explanation than that someone had a new idea (something which we do have record of happening throughout history), and that either by outright deception (something recorded in history), or by a mangled game of telephone amongst a community (something also testified) this idea originated and spread. Are there puzzling details still? Yes... but a couple puzzling details hardly command me to accept a jump to the miraculous. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a God who can command the whole of history can plant evidence as well as need be.