On "Life as a Leaver"

In Anna Scott's Life as a Leaver, she articulates the painful effort needed to withstand doubt and judgment. Her husband divorced her, and this suffering led her to doubt. She has been, and is, pursuing a career in ministry, and as someone concerned with being theologically orthodox, she faces the belief on the part of a lot of her fellow church members that, because she is a woman, she isn't fit to serve in the capacity she feels called to. Life as a Leaver is ostensibly in response to The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church by Drew Dyck, but her article stands on its own.

Although Scott will likely remain a believer, as a doubter she certainly has my sympathies. She describes the pat answers she gets, and the frustration of realizing that the intellectual understanding she had of God's love through suffering, that understanding was not as solid as she expected. I recommend reading her article for its frankness and the all-too-rare "I don't know" from a thoughtful religionist:

Surely, I am not the only person to have “crashed” on these “rocks” of sin and suffering, sovereignty and certainty. And I no longer think that it is a sign of immaturity or ignorance that these rocks give birth to doubt; in fact, I think it is immature and ignorant to deny these very real questions: about rape, about mental illness, about earthquakes, about affairs, about divorce, about children born into extreme poverty. Where does sovereignty end and sin begin? And what does that say about God? Shouldn’t this be relevant to any discussion of disbelief?

In Dyck's article, he says:

Over the past year, I’ve conducted in-depth interviews with scores of ex-Christians. Only two were honest enough to cite moral compromise as the primary reason for their departures. Many experienced intellectual crises that seemed to conveniently coincide with the adoption of a lifestyle that fell outside the bounds of Christian morality.

Moral compromise was not a factor in my departure from belief in God, and, if Dyck were to interview me, it would be dishonest of me to cite it as a reason for leaving. The part of Scott's response that was the most relatable for me was:

I want to end this litany of criticisms [of Dyck's article] by acknowledging a point that I found both offensive and mildly insightful, but for different reasons than Dyck identifies: I do think that moral compromise plays a role in a person’s decision to leave Christianity, but I think that the negative influence is actually exerted on the developing doubter, rather than on the moral transgressor. Having attended youth group religiously (yes, I am going with this idiom despite the pun) and a prominent Christian college, followed by years in communities, churches, faith-based organizations and Christian graduate school, I can easily attest to the willingness—even eagerness—of young evangelicals to compromise biblical standards and call it doubt or rebellion. But, sooner or later, these people will find a nice Christian husband or wife and return to the church of their childhood, because doubt is not their real issue. It is those of us who are trying to build a thoughtful, substantive, deep faith who observe this behavior in young people raised in the church and wonder what has gone wrong. What the hell is going on here? I often asked myself, observing this profound lack of authenticity. Why do these people—and, in all honestly, I became one of them in college—bother retaining the trappings of Christianity at all?

As I was doubting, I became more scrupulous in my moral behavior. Knowing that good works could not save me, and that my good behavior might be some vain attempt to pacify God, I tried to find the right spiritual muscles to flex, the ones involving humility and submission and resignation. I was afraid to sin, or even, to have a wrong spiritual inclination, because that would be an indicator that my doubts were inauthentic: perhaps I was doubting my way out of my moral obligations or the challenge of relating to God. I didn't want my honest doubts to be dismissible by others or myself as mere moral compromise. Scott is right in noting that others' moral failings are as likely to lead to doubt as one's own foibles, and right in noting the wrongness of looking to blame doubters. If there were a badge to give to Christians for being relatable to nonbelievers, she gets it.

Or else, what?

I remember one time I was walking across campus with a friend, we were having a chat about what it would be like to be an atheist. As we turned a corner around the fountain, I said that I'd commit suicide; my friend agreed that he probably would, too, either that, or he'd be an unrestrained hedonist.

A few years later, I was starting to doubt earnestly. Doubt didn't sound, in my head, like I would have expected it to. In the Commons, by Pete's Arena, the crappy pizza place, I ran into a friend, and he asked me how I was doing. Always loath to give a one-word answer to any question, I said, "I think that I'm becoming an atheist." We chatted a little, then I said, "Well, I'm going to go burn down a church or something," and we laughed a little. And I guess that was funny because it wasn't true, I didn't want to burn down a church, but I didn't know how I was supposed to feel. After that I got supper.

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We could go about knowing whether God exists by looking at common knowledge, or reason, or history, or spiritual experiences, or science, or some combination of these; these are all information. Regardless of the personal consequences of believing that God exists, say, salvation or damnation, these ideas about what my belief or non-belief would bring me aren't evidence about whether God is real.

Non-belief carries the threat of another sort of damnation, a death of the mind, in which my capacity to know God could by shut off by my doubting, my perceptions would be confused, maybe my heart would be hardened, as was Pharaoh's in Exodus. Or, maybe my doubts were dishonest in the first place, because I didn't want to submit to God's rules, or tradition, or to the idea of a spiritual entity bigger than people. Any of these might be the case, but there is no way to account for them in my thought process.

Apologists like Ravi Zacharias insist that we can't have a real morality without God, so it is imperative that we believe in God. Even if the nonexistence of God meant moral nihilism, that's no evidence that God is real. Presuppositional thinkers like Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Haddon Clark, and Francis Schaeffer insist that any worldview that doesn't presume the truth of the Bible and the existence of a triune God, any such worldview would be either inconsistent or futile. Schaeffer said, "If the unsaved man was consistent he would be an atheist in religion, an irrationalist in philosophy (including a complete uncertainty concerning 'natural laws'), and completely a-moral in the widest sense." Even if Schaeffer were correct about the implications of a non-Christian worldview, that wouldn't mean that it's logical to presume that God exists; it's not logical to assume that God exists just for the sake of making one's system of thought work smoothly. These arguments don't persuade non-Christians, they only make religious people more stubbornly religious.

I'm not unique in having confusions about God; knowing God is difficult for all human beings. There isn't a majority opinion, among humans, about what God is like. No matter who you are, most humans disagree with you about most important things about God: clearly, human beings aren't consistently good at knowing God. Maybe our minds are too small to comprehend God. Maybe God can only be known on his own terms, when he sends a sign or when he opens one's heart to receive him. There are many ways to impugn human perceptions of God. When figuring out whether God exists, threat of damnation, hope for salvation, suspicion of one's own cognition, none of these are evidence about God, regardless of how they weigh on one's mind.

Maybe doubt is a sin. However, the rule, "Believe in God, or else!" is meaningless without something following the "or else!" If God doesn't exist, there is no punishment for doubt. If God does exist, but would punish people for doubting that he does exist, this punishment would be unjust.

If doubt is a sin, I couldn't know if God exists. I might refrain from considering whether God might not be real; I might not pick up books by atheists, I might avoid non-believing friends, or at least, avoid listening to them with the idea that I might want to agree with them. I would avoid asking questions like, "What would the universe be like if God wasn't real?" or "If God disappeared all of a sudden, how would we notice?", or I might ask those questions, and be satisfied with weak answers. I might make my mind an aluminum-foil-lined house, impervious to secular influence, yet there would be a voice between my ears that would ask me if I knew that God is real, or if I was just too afraid to ask. I would sit in a rocking chair in this house, wondering if I knew that God is real, but afraid that I lied to myself saying that he is.

To this idea of, "Believe in God, or else!" it is sensible to respond, "Or else, what?" If God isn't real, there is no loss. If God is real and loving and good and worth having over for tea, God wouldn't punish me for doubting.

So, there's this distinction between evidence that God exists, and feelings and hopes and fears that one has about the idea of God, and this distinction is relevant, logically. Disentangling these two categories is slow, painful, and difficult, though.

The idea that God is infinite makes thinking about God a quagmire, because one can't be unbiased. I want an iPad, and I saw that I can enter a drawing to get one. It would be so useful, I could read articles on it, I wouldn't have to print things out on paper, I probably print about a hundred pages a week. There's a neat game where you tilt the iPad and a marble rolls around on it past obstacles. I was thinking about which carrying case I should get for the iPad when I realized that the odds of me winning the iPad are very low. Anyway, I was afraid that, if God didn't exist, there would be no way to have meaning or morality in life, everything would feel hollow. If God were real, experiencing his perfect love would be worth forgoing everything else. I wanted to believe in God so much that I was afraid that God isn't real and that I'm just biased to think that he is.

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I recently had to buy a car. I didn't have any special knowledge on how to buy a car. There are a lot of uncertainties when buying a car, like how safe it is, how much it will cost to repair it when it breaks down, and how likely it is to break down, and how long it will last before it breaks down completely and must be scrapped. These are probably the most important things about a car, but I don't know how to know them, so I picked out my car based on price and how good its cup holders are and whether I can plug my iPod into it.

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I can't think of any story in the Bible that rides on a person's belief or non-belief that God exists; what matters is how people deal with God, whether they want to be on his team. When the Israelites approached Jericho, the people of Jericho were not atheists. The people of Jericho were afraid precisely because they thought that the God of the Israelites does exist‚ and would destroy them like Og and Sihon of the Amorites. Rahab was different from everyone else in Jericho, not because she believed that God exists, but because she believed in him, she put her trust in him, she wanted to join his side, and she was rewarded for this faith.

In the Bible, the word "believe" is used in two ways, meaning either to suppose as true, or to rely and trust upon. In "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household" (Acts 16:31) "believe" means rely on. James makes it clear that these two meanings are distinct, "You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder." (James 2:19). Thinking that God is real isn't what saves one, so mere doubt can't damn one, either. The people of Nazareth doubt Jesus (e.g., Mark 6:1-6), they have no faith, but this isn't a show of equanimous non-belief, "they took offense at him" because "prophets are not without honor, except in their home town". Similarly, the Pharisees seem to doubt Jesus, but they're not intellectually considering him, they're casting aspersions on him because he's a threat to their power structure.

Yet, religious people treat honest doubt like it's a sickness or a problem or a sin; this does more to ensure conformity among believers than to reassure doubters.

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I was compulsively ruminating on contradictory ideas, that non-belief in God is empty and void, and that belief in God is a desperate fantasy. This psychological tension didn't enlighten me about God. I decided to live in a way that would be as meaningful as possible if God isn't real, and in a way that would let me find and relate to God if God is real. When I didn't think that God exists, I still tried to have faith in him, to rely on him, and not myself. By trying to minimize the consequences of my vacillating belief that God exists, I was able to think a little more clearly. Was God hiding from me because I was sinful? Was I mistaken about God not existing? How could I have meaning? How could I know what is right to do? I still had questions like these; even though I knew they didn't show me God, I anguished over them.

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Appendix

A previous post, The God I want to believe in, has some ideas related to this essay.

"I want God to be real, and I want to relate to him. I look for God carefully, but I don't see him. Not at all that I think that I'm saved by any of my own virtues, but if God would damn me for not believing that he exists when that's not what I have honestly seen or experienced, I don't find that God to be worth bothering with."

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There is another important meaning that the phrase "Or else, what?" has for me. Normative statements, statements about what ought to be, rules of morality, for example, are meaningless on their own. "You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass." isn't meaningful;

• "You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else people will become sad from the ugliness of the overpass."
• "You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else God will be angry at you."
• "You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else you'll regret it later."
• "You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else you might get arrested."

are meaningful statements. Thinking about norms, things like values and morality and purpose and meaning, by posing them this way, has been helpful for me as I've tried to make decisions as a non-theist.

Controlling for God

One time, Ludwig Wittgenstein was walking around by the pond with Bertrand Russel. Bertie said, "People treat the ancients as if they're terribly silly for thinking that the sun went around the earth. I think this is unfair; that is how it looks, after all." Ludwig said, in reply, "Oh really? How would it look if it were the other way 'round?"

(This never happened, by the way, this is a philosophical folk story. I suppose Wittgenstein would like being remembered for something that never happened, though.)

Sometimes, after music time in church, I hear people say, 'I really felt God moving in that time of worship. The music was so good.' It's rarer that I hear people say, 'The musicians made a lot of terrible mistakes, but, in God's sovereignty, I felt his presence, regardless.'

At one point in my life, I kept a daily journal to track problems with insomnia. I recorded things like when I ate and exercised and went to bed and woke up. I also recorded my mood. I rated, on a scale from zero to ten, how happy, alert, mellow, and theistic I felt.

I was expecting to believe in God less on days in which I was in a bad mood. I was thinking I would feel grumpy, and this would make me doubt God's existence, in which case my doubt would be illegitimate; the other possibility was that I would doubt God's existence, and that would put me in a bad mood.

I was surprised and liberated when I looked over a few weeks of data, and realized that there wasn't a meaningful correlation between mood and theism. I have a flakey problem with anxiety that comes and goes, independent of my life circumstances, and I go back and forth on how I feel about belief in God; these two things are independent. It's good to know this. Since then, I stopped telling myself that I feel anxiety simply because I don't believe in God, and I no longer tell myself that my unbelief is a mere artifact of my condition. Putting a feather in my cap might cheer me up, but it won't make me believe, and I need not force myself to believe something that I find unreasonable just to control my mood.

The problem of knowing God is different from any other knowledge problem because you can't control for God. That is, we don't have access to two universes, one with God, and one without, that we could compare what it would be like to be in one instead of the other, and know for sure what sorts of things prove that God is there. Some people look at poverty and use that as proof that God isn't real, and some people look at the compassion shown to and among the poor, and use that as proof that God is. However, without another universe to compare with, we can't honestly connect the dots between the state of our universe and whether God is real.

One can control for God a little bit, though, if one believes that God can be experienced personally, rather than only seen in nature. I used to think that experiences in meditative prayer were valid reasons to believe that God is there, until I started doing simple breath meditation. What I felt in meditative prayer wasn't any different from what I felt in breath meditation, so it's reasonable to explain those experiences as resulting from the repetition, the quiet, and the focus on breath, these things are the shared between the two practices.

(What I found in meditative prayer was superficial, it was what I wanted to find. I don't think this disqualifies meditative prayer from being useful and special; I don't know of anyone who promises that meditative prayer is particularly useful unless it's practiced consistently for a long time. I'll keep trying, to see if there's something else.)

Maybe you could compare how you feel while singing with a group of friends with how you feel singing worship songs in church on Sunday morning. Compare how you feel reading a good book, The House at Pooh Corner or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with the feeling you get while reading the Bible. Look for the times when you didn't pray and you should have, and things still turned out pretty well.

It would be a needless loss to live your life thinking that God is there, if he isn't, if your belief was only grounded in how you feel singing worshipful songs; you've at least missed many opportunities for fun in sing-a-longs on car trips, you might find those times just as significant. It would also be a needless loss if you believe in God, but for vague and subjective reasons, and that satisfied you, if God is real and has better things to show you.

The god I want to believe in

When I first drifted into agnosticism, I dreaded that God would damn me for not believing in him. I don't worry about that now.

I want God to be real, and I want to relate to him. I look for God carefully, but I don't see him. Not at all that I think that I'm saved by any of my own virtues, but if God would damn me for not believing that he exists when that's not what I have honestly seen or experienced, I don't find that God to be worth bothering with.

To believe that God is the sort of god that you want him to be, simply because that's how you want him to be, that is the height of intellectual dishonesty. Our ideas about who God actually is, our beliefs, ought to be grounded in experiences and evidence.

However, if one doesn't think God is real, and one wants to bother to look for God, why waste one's time on an unappealing notion of god? If God is real and ugly, why would one care, except to know how to stick one's thumb in his eye?

The difference here is the difference between hypothesis and conclusion. People who believe that God is real have their understanding of what God is like constrained by how they go about knowing God in the first place. People who don't think God is real are free to look for whatever sort of god they feel like looking for. This is sensible: looking-for and living-under are two different things.

I have some friends who are fellow doubters, but they're stuck in their search for God. I know people who can't believe in a god who would sanction genocide. I know people who can't bring themselves to believe in a god who would chose to save some and damn others, and leave them with no choice in the matter. I know people who are troubled that God would leave our capacity to relate to him up to our own choice, and are gripped with anxiety over not-choosing God and being damned.

We don't need these worries.

If God is real, I suppose he'd be so complicated that he could be good and seem bad in some ways. At the same time, if traditional theology isn't airtight and if the scriptures aren't infallible, forcing one's self to accept a notion of God tainted by human meanness is unnecessarily difficult. The hard work of filtering these things out ought to be left to believers who need a hobby. (I would suggest getting a pet rabbit, though, it's very soothing.)

If you want to believe in God, but don't, put your effort into believing in a God that's worth believing in, a good god, a loving god, a personal god, a challenging god. Don't worry about the things you've heard about God that you are horrified by; accepting them is no prerequisite to relating to God. At least, the god I want to believe in wouldn't reject you for misunderstanding him.

Belief in God is impossible in two ways

When I was a believing Christian, I wondered why it was that it wasn't obvious to nonbelievers that God is real. I figured that it must be that they were biased and dishonest. For some reason, they didn't want to believe in God. I thought of Romans 1, where Paul talks about how the people who don't follow God deny that God is obvious because they 'became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened'.

From Boğaziçi, Asia, New Year

When I stopped believing in God, many of my believing friends thought that there were only bad reasons for not believing in God, that people who don't believe in God don't believe because they are dishonest and biased. These friends had different theories as to why I doubted. Some thought that I was confused and going through a phase and figuring things out, but, at this point, my doubt doesn't look like a mere phase. Some thought I just didn't have enough information, but I've read stacks of books. Some thought it was in response to some suffering that I'd experienced that I was blaming God for, but I can imagine a good God that allows hangnails and horrible professors to exist (I have a big imagination).

This is doubly painful. I feel pain because I want God to be real but he doesn't seem real. Hurt is piled on top of that when my believing friends think that I don't believe in God because, at my core, I don't want to.

One reason why people don't believe in God is because people are small, in a petty sort of way. Another reason is that God is big, in a perplexing sort of way.

Five words into the Bible, 'In the beginning, God created', good theologians give up theology as a job and become truck drivers or moms or professors. If God is perfect, why did he create something imperfect? If God is perfect, why would he create anything at all? Christianity teaches that creation is under God and in God, but it is not God, and that's a flat logical contradiction. It's not a seeming paradox, such that if we attain some sort of heavenly enlightenment, the doctrine of creation will make logical sense; we might believe it more easily with more enlightenment, but it won't ever make sense.

For things that are very impossible, very strong evidence of very impossible things is required. I need more than second-hand stories about someone thinking that God told them something or cancer going into remission or a bag of groceries being left on a doorstep in a time of need. These things might be unlikely, but God existing is less likely, if we're talking about the sort of God that's worth believing in at all.

Intelligent design makes me a Christian agnostic

I'd categorize arguments for the existence of God into three categories*:

1. First cause
2. History
3. Experience

By first cause arguments, I mean arguments like the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, that is, that for the universe to move, something had to kick it into action, for it to have design, it must have a designer, and for rules to exist, a rule-giver must preside. By historical arguments, I mean people pointing to miraculous historical events like the Israelite exodus of Egypt, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed. By arguments from experience, I mean both people talking about internal spiritual experiences (a guiding light, for example) and eyewitness accounts of peculiar phenomena.

It seems to me that the first cause arguments, especially arguments like the anthropic principle and irreducible complexity, are today the most popular proofs of God's existence among smart believers. This is diabolical.


In He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Francis Schaeffer makes clumsy attempts at proving God's existence. What I love about this book, though, why I recommend it, actually, is that Schaeffer makes it clear that he's arguing for the existence of not just any sort of God, but the Personal-Infinite God.

If God's really real and really worth talking about, he'd interact with us in some personal way. Spinoza proved that God exists quite decisively, but in such a way that his God isn't worth writing Mom about. Scott Adams, my favorite Spinozist, says that this universe-God is even intelligent, in a sense. This isn't the same as God being personal.

I started writing this essay a year ago, and it stalled, because I thought that what bothered me most about these arguments from first cause is that they're deeply flawed. I realized that what bothers me more is that arguments from first cause don't work to establish God as a person who cares about us. That's the sort of God that I want to believe in.

That the most popular arguments for the existence of God don't point to the sort of God I need makes me think that God isn't real.

Jason doesn't buy the New Perspective on Paul because he doesn't trust theology that requires skill in parsing Greek verbs to be understood.

If God were real, we wouldn't fuss with learning modal logic notation to even understand Gödel's onotological proof of God's existence. We wouldn't mess with statistical mechanics to show that atheistic abiogenesis is unlikely. We'd say things like, 'Hey, you know Leper Larry? He's not a leper, anymore. Wild!' And we don't, and either God isn't real and I could be having a lot more fun getting into trouble, or he is and I am looking for him where he isn't, and you probably are, too.

*By wild coincidence, Wikipedia categorizes arguments for the existence of God into the same three categories that I do.