I went through the process of losing my Christian faith in my mid-twenties. It's hard to say exactly when the process started, since it is a normal part of growing up to reevaluate the beliefs and values you were taught as a child, and this doesn't necessarily mean that you end up rejecting everything you were taught. I was still a teenager when I started critically evaluating the beliefs and values I had been taught, and I expected that I would probably not continue to fit in well with the extreme fundamentalist sort of Christianity that I'd grown up with, but I also did not expect to lose my Christian faith altogether. I think I was about twenty-five years old when I finally began to understand how significantly my views were changing, and then it was not until I was twenty-seven that I finally admitted that I no longer accepted Christianity in any meaningful sense.
While I think it was ultimately a good thing to reject Christianity, the problem is that I knew that I was rejecting more than just a specific set of religious beliefs. In fact, I was rejecting a whole way of seeing the world, including many underlying assumptions about ethics and the nature of ultimate reality. Not only that, but I was also rejecting what I had always taken to be two critical sources for truth in these matters: the Bible in general, and the teachings of Jesus in particular. So it wasn't just that I stopped believing, say, that Jesus was God-incarnate. Pretty much anything that I'd only ever accepted on the authority of Jesus or scripture was now on the chopping block. Some things were almost certainly no longer credible, and other things were suddenly lacking any sort of justification, at least none that I could see. This included my beliefs that:
- death is the result of human sin
- all humans stand condemned before God
- history is moving toward a definite climax
- there will be a final judgment
- we will someday experience resurrection
- God will heal or recreate the world before life goes extinct
- God desires that every person come to believe in "him"
- all things work together for good for those who love God
- those who seek the truth will find it
- comfort comes through prayer
Losing these convictions was a big deal. It made everyday life feel completely different than it always had. Getting up in the morning and going to work was different, watching tv was different, spending time with friends was different, being alone at home was different. And I just had no idea what to do with myself for a while. I remember that for about six months after moving away from my old community in New York, I felt like I was in a daze. I stayed home a lot and played a lot of video games and spaced out watching videos on the internet. Sometimes when I went out, I felt like I was a fake person, or even like I was some kind of spy carrying around a new secret identity. Everything seemed strange and different.
This doesn't mean that I rejected everything I believed. For instance, I never stopped believing in free will or in the existence of a transcendent personal creator, nor did I stop believing in the importance of treating other people the way you want to be treated, with empathy and dignity. But by rejecting Christianity, I found myself in a completely new and unfamiliar situation. My understanding of the world was undergoing a massive, terrifying shift. I knew enough about other religions to know that I probably wasn't going to end up joining a different religious community. So from that moment on, my beliefs and values would have to be grounded fully in rational reflection and direct personal experience. In other words, I no longer had any option of appealing to any authoritative sacred texts or teachings, and I wasn't sure if God would guide my steps as I continued to seek after truth and wisdom. Whatever personal reservations I had about "rationalism" or "evidentialism" were irrelevant. If I wanted to know more about the world, I had to go look for the answers. I also had to learn to be completely honest with myself if I didn't have the answers that I wanted, which is much easier said than done. The most disconcerting thought of all was that I had no idea what to think about eternity or the afterlife. I didn't think I was suddenly in danger of going to hell, but was there any hope for a peaceful existence beyond death? Or did I have to come to peace with knowing that I would someday die and that would be it?
It's a daunting task to have to rethink your entire worldview. This is part of the reason why I've retained such a strong interest in philosophy, especially philosophy of religion. I am a naturally curious person, and more importantly, I want to know that I'm not wasting my life. For the record, I don't think I am wasting it. But I have tried to devote a reasonable amount of effort to reclaim a certain amount of stability in my worldview. I think that some of my efforts have paid off, although there is still a lot that I don't know that I wish I did.
Recently, I have been wanting to organize my thoughts more systematically. I'm not sure exactly why, although I think it has something to do with the fact that I was finally able to finish my book about why I rejected Jesus—a short book, but one that took a very long time to finish. With that out of the way, I felt like I could finally turn more of my attention to other matters. (Of course, now I'm slightly distracted with trying to finish a revision of my first book, about the Bible, but such is life.)
In any case, I think that is why I've started this blog recently. And it's also why I've been taking tons of personal notes for the past several years and trying to arrange them into some kind of big outline. I've been doing so much reading and thinking about knowledge and justification, truth and logic, time and relativity, evolution and quantum physics, ethics and free will, naturalism and mind-body dualism, and of course natural theology. I have a much stronger sense of what I believe now than I did a decade ago, and yet it still feels like I'll never get as far with it as I want to. I may eventually put that outline somewhere on this website. I'm not sure, because if I do it will be unfinished and constantly changing.
I think there are certain other factors at play in this project too. I recently turned 40 and the past few years of my life have been eventful in the sense of setting the course for what the rest of my life could look like, including with my relationships, my career, my social network, and my personal identity. There have been wonderful highs and terrible lows, including certain traumatic events like a big fire that took the lives of some of my neighbors. All of that is certainly enough to keep you reflecting on life's big questions.
I will say, though, that even if some of my biggest questions about life and reality remain unanswered, there are certain foundations that now, thankfully, seem immovable. Perhaps the most rock-solid component is my acceptance of moral realism and my belief that people should be treated with empathy. I know that there are people out there who reject moral realism, just as there are people out there who deny (if not by their words, then at least by their actions) that we have any moral obligations to try to ease the suffering and increase the well-being of people around us. I don't know what motivates people like that, but even in my most distraught moments I have not found myself questioning my convictions about moral realism and empathy. This has played a huge role in why I continue to embrace theism, which in turn has given me more peace of mind when it comes to my lingering questions about death and the reality of evil and suffering. So maybe the first part of my outline should deal with ethics and metaethics, except that I think it's impossible to discuss metaethics without dealing with natural theology. And that of course requires discussion of truth, knowledge, etc. It's exhausting. But it's a fun project, and it seems worthwhile.