I grew up in Southern California in the 1990s through the early 2000s with my older sister and younger brother. My parents were divorced and we lived with my mother but my dad was still around most of the time. From as far back as I can remember my father was always very religious (he would deny that term though, claiming that he doesn’t have a religion but “a relationship with Jesus”). This was always a common claim in evangelical fundamentalist Christian circles (even though the Bible itself says that Christianity is a religion: James chapter 1:26-27). Since mom was working so much (in order to pay the bills), dad would pick us up from school almost every day, take us to soccer or baseball practice, take us to get dinner or make dinner at home sometimes, and of course, he always forced us to go to church on Sunday mornings, even though we didn’t want to most of the time. When I was 10 years old we attended a Presbyterian church called Cathedral of the Valley, in Escondido California (it’s a different church now). It was a typical experience in terms of Protestant church services. It started with praise music, then a sermon from the pastor, the youngsters would get let go to Sunday School, then a longer sermon by the pastor, us kids would come back to the main hall, then an “altar call” mixed with passing around the offering plate for “tithing”, and then more music and maybe some more preaching. It was at one of these services, during the altar call phase, that I “felt the impulse” and went to the front to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, led by a prayer from the pastor. Right after this I didn’t feel much different but as time went on I started to interpret the world in a different way. I started seeing the world in terms of good versus evil, black versus white, and a spiritual warfare going on all around me.
As I entered high school I became very interested in playing drums and percussion. Years before, a friend from school had gotten me into them. He and his dad played rock drums and had two drum sets. So I bought a used set and started practicing every day. During my junior and senior years, I played in a couple of different punk rock and heavy metal bands and one of my bands was starting to get very serious. We had managed to get one of our songs on the local rock radio station and there was a lot of interest buzzing. However, it turned out that two of my band mates were Mormon and about one year into the band’s life, the two Mormons decided to go on their mission trip. This meant the band would break up and of course it upset me since we had worked so hard writing the songs and had major record label interest. As this played itself out I began researching Mormonism. I thought if I could somehow talk some sense into the guys, and convince them they are wrong about their religion, perhaps the band could continue toward our dream. At the advice of my father, I began gathering, reading, and studying Christian apologetics literature. This included books like: Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Martin, Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, The Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisler, and many online resources. I studied intently for weeks and one evening, during a time when I had been feeling under the weather, and was attempting to go to bed early, I experienced a vivid and lucid dream (I interpreted it as a vision). My eyes were closed but I felt half awake in a sort of daydream-like state. In the dream, I saw Jesus come through the door of my bedroom, just in front of me. He had his hands open and at his sides. He was wearing an all-white robe-type garment, surrounded by a near-blinding white light. He had a white beard and long wavy white hair. I could not see his face but I heard him say to me (in my head, not an audible sound) “Aaron, I want you to do something for me. I want you to read the Bible“. “Ok” I said, and that was it. He disappeared back into the door. Immediately after that I woke up in a staunch cold sweat and called my dad, informing him of what I believed had just happened and of the good news. Naturally, he was very happy for me and I began reading from the book of Genesis immediately.
Defend, Defend, Defend
Shortly after this occurrence, I became very interested in both the bible and Christian apologetics (meaning, defending the claims of Christianity against its critics). Because of my frustration with my Mormon bandmates, I began to debate with them about Mormonism and Christianity. However, that didn’t last very long as the band broke up shortly after and they left for their 2 year mission trips. I had failed in my endeavor to convert them. However, around that same time I started getting plugged into the local churches in my area, including the Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church, and the non-denominational Calvary Chapel. I also became very interested in Christian theology and philosophy. I wanted to prove to myself that Mormonism, and the other “cults”, were not true, and that what I called “Biblical Christianity” was the only true religion. As a result, this led me to a newly found lifelong endeavor (or so I thought). I became very interested in defending the Christian faith against any skeptics, doubters, or those who I perceived were worshiping false idols. In addition to going to church, I studied and prayed vigorously almost every day. Sometimes I would study for 8-10 hours per day or more. By this time, the internet was just becoming popular and I was excited because it allowed me to debate with atheists, Ex Christians, Agnostics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, and many others. After all, according to my interpretation of the bible, this was spiritual warfare and I wanted to save souls! Simultaneously, I was attending church, as well as Bible studies, about 4 to 5 nights per week while researching everything I possibly could about the arguments for and against Christianity. This went on for multiple years and over time I wound up purchasing about $2,000 worth of theology and apologetics-related books from the Christian bookstore near my house, as well as from yard sales, used bookstores, thrift stores, and Amazon. I would take every opportunity I had to defend the faith. For the most part, this meant debating online but I also did door-knocking as well as some street evangelism. I even went on a mission trip to Salt Lake City Utah in 2001, during the Winter Olympics, so that I could pass out anti-Mormon literature, debate with Mormons, and do my best to prevent as many people as I could from becoming Mormon. I believed they were worshiping a false God and leading people to hell.
As I kept progressing, I found myself always wanting to learn more about Christian theology, apologetics, philosophy, and evangelism while also “defending the faith” wherever I found people who disagreed with me. This included co-workers, intermediate family, close family members, and friends. I made it a point to bring it up at nearly every family function, dinner, or get-together. Yes, I was “that one Jesus freak” that everyone knew about. I made my beliefs abundantly clear ad nauseum, and I didn’t care about their feelings because I knew I had the truth and they were on their way to hell and needing salvation.
A Series of Challenges
During this period of perceived “spiritual warfare”, when I was debating online pretty heavily, I started to come across challenges to my beliefs that I had not expected or seen before. On some of the online Yahoo forums, as well as a website called EXChristian.net, some former believers challenged me to read Dan Barker’s book Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist. They also challenged me to read the four Gospels of the New Testament and compare the resurrection narratives to see if the stories lined up (of course I discovered that they don’t). Additionally, they recommended that I study evolution and learn the science from scientists, and vetted textbooks, instead of Christian apologetics books and people like Kent Hovind who were misrepresenting the science. These challenges caused me to go even deeper into my faith, and to seek out other Christian apologists who knew more than I did. I was certain there would always be a solid answer to any one of the skeptics’ challenges, and I just had to find them. I searched online and found lots of resources but one in particular stood out. I discovered CARM.org (Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry), run by Matt Slick who was just starting the website. Coincidentally, he lived about 10 miles from my house and we became friends. In fact, I saw him as a mentor. It was through Matt that I learned about Dr Greg Bahnsen and presuppositional apologetics (for those who don’t know, this is the idea that only the Christian worldview can account for things like the laws of logic, mathematics, inductive reasoning, and the uniformity of nature). Upon reading and listening to Bahnsen’s materials, reading articles at CARM.org, and talking to Matt over many months, I became convinced that this was the ultimate defense of Christianity, “because of the impossibility of the contrary“ as we often proclaimed. I also became convinced that reformed theology was the best theological position (this is also known as the doctrine of predestination – which is the idea that God has already predetermined everything to happen in advance, including those who will be saved and go to heaven and those who will go to hell, and that there is nothing anybody can do to change it). Suffice it to say, I was even more nested as a Christian than before. The previous challenges from skeptics did not deter me but they did cause me to want to seek truth even more and to continue reading, studying, and learning while doing evangelism and serving the Christian community.
As the months and years passed, I kept playing drums in bands while doing apologetics work, attending weekly Bible studies, doing street evangelism, and volunteering at various churches. I even became a youth pastor and taught Christian apologetics for a time. One night at a recording session with my band, at the recording studio where my dad worked, I met someone who has now become a dear friend, but who challenged my beliefs in a very profound way. His name is Ted (aka – T.W.). Ted was my father’s boss and the head engineer at the recording studio. I later learned that he was previously a very strong Christian for many years but eventually left Christianity and was now an agnostic. This seemed unthinkable to me. I was very curious as to why he left. How could he possibly know God and walk away, I thought. How could he have “felt the spirit” and now no longer believe? So I began meeting with Ted regularly and having conversations about his thoughts, story, and progression. I was certain that he was mistaken somewhere and I wanted to find out where so that I could prove him wrong. But what happened was quite the opposite. Ted began to challenge the very fundamental assumptions that I had made about the Bible, as well as the reasons I came to believe Christianity in the first place. It turns out that he was challenging me in much the same way that others had challenged him in the years prior, and how he has challenged himself. We discussed many topics but one of them focused on the clear contradiction between the idea that God is loving, and the idea that God creates animals specifically for the purpose of predation and causing suffering in order to survive (predation means being a predator and killing to eat). For example, he would challenge me to think about the fangs of a snake. These sharp poison injectors appear to be specifically for the purpose of trapping and killing prey, but if God (i.e. – Yahweh) is all-loving and all-powerful; this makes no sense, since if that were the case he could easily create creatures in such a way that they would not require the causing of such immense pain and suffering. What kind of a loving being would create such creatures (especially one that is allegedly all-powerful and has all possible options at his disposal)? If love means anything at all clearly it does not mean this. In addition to this, what did predator animals eat before the fall of Adam & Eve, fruits and vegetables? How did that make any sense with the teeth they have? Ted also challenged me to read the Bible on my own, without the influence of pastors, ministers, evangelists, apologists, or anyone else. He requested that I buy a notebook and write down any questions, or anything that didn’t make sense, as I read through the Bible. I thought it was interesting that a non-believer was asking me to read the Bible! As I did this I quickly began discovering what I perceived to be big problems in the bible that I could not stop thinking about. Those passages stuck with me (for example the idea that the god Yahweh allegedly commanded the Israelites to slay the Amalekites, along with all of their women, children, and infants in 1 Samuel 15 while at the same time being “loving”), or the fact that Yahweh condones slavery in Exodus 31 (allegedly saying that Israelites could own other people as property forever, pass them down to their children, and beat them). These, and many other passages, started to form “cracks in the walls of my fortress“. Such a command is clearly not consistent with a loving being. Later on I would hear Christian apologists, and other friends of mine, attempting to rationalize away these passages by claiming that these things happened because of sin, or that God has a “morally sufficient reason” for allowing such things but that “we just don’t know the reasons right now”. These responses sounded reasonable at first but eventually became wholly unconvincing to me as I thought more about them. What loving reason could be given for commanding humans to slaughter infants when you have all possible options available at your fingertips to solve problems? Is there any action that couldn’t be rationalized away this way; just claim it’s from God and therefore it is by definition loving? More and more, these responses began to sound like a way to hand-wave away any contradictions in the Bible so that belief in Jesus, the Christian God, the bible, etc (or at the very least, their preferred theology) could be maintained. In other words, all I was starting to hear was motivated reasoning, even though deep down I really wanted them to be right. I was desperate to find a way to make the puzzle pieces fit. However, I was certain that if the tables were turned and my Christian friends were being asked to believe in the claims of another religion (such as those in Islam or Mormonism), using those same types of responses, they would not allow such mental gymnastics. In this way, I found a kind of intellectual hypocrisy going on. I wanted to believe too but not at the expense of intellectual honesty or the honest pursuit of truth. So this experience was very painful.
During this time I still kept the faith though, believing that I would eventually find answers to these apparent contradictions, trusting that because I believed I had the witness of the Holy Spirit nothing could overturn my belief. I prayed everyday for answers, wisdom, and guidance, and continued to study my Bible while being part of church and Bible study groups (even though I was experiencing cognitive dissonance). Unfortunately, the answers I was looking for never arrived. Instead, the problems and contradictions kept stacking on top of each other (like a pile of ever growing dirty dishes in the sink). The philosophical arguments for God also began to weigh heavy on my mind and one by one I would discover that they fell apart upon rational examination. I would ask the advice and counsel of friends, pastors, other Christian apologists, and even radio hosts but none of their answers were convincing. They all seemed like rationalizations that wouldn’t be accepted under any other context or opposing religious claim (I later learned that this had been called The Outsider Test of Faith by John Loftus). Some of them would just quote the Bible at me (as if that would suffice), such as the passage in 1 Corinthians that Paul wrote about Christianity seeming like foolishness to “those who are perishing” (but essentially to believe it anyways). One friend even told me to just pray about it and stop studying or thinking! He was essentially asking me to “just have faith“ which I could not do (and neither could he, if he was being asked to believe another religion).
The Road Out Begins
I kept finding examples of these double standards, as well as logically fallacious reasoning, almost everywhere I looked. I studied presentations, debates, defenses, and rebuttals to the claims of the Bible, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the Ontological Argument, the Moral Argument, the Argument from Contingency, the Argument from Design (also known as the Fine Tuning Argument), The Argument for the Reliability of the Bible, and many others. The more I was honest with myself the more I realized that none of these arguments were powerful enough for me to continue believing in Yahweh, the god of the Bible. It was at this stage that I entered into a phase of ongoing deep bouts of on and off depression. “If God (Yahweh) isn’t real, then life has no meaning!“ I would say to myself. “Why not just kill myself now?! There’s nothing to live for!” I felt an immense and overwhelming amount of sadness, anguish, and existential dread. Sometimes the emotional and psychological pain was so great that all I could do was go to bed and pass out, crying myself to sleep. I would call out sick from work and take days off at a time, reading my Bible and desperately praying that God would demonstrate to me, in no uncertain terms, that he was real. He never arrived.
However, who did show up was Ted, and just as before, Ted challenged me to challenge myself and my own underlying assumptions that appeared to be what was causing so much pain. Why should it matter that life have an “ultimate meaning”? How could I justify making the assumption that without God life has no meaning at all? Where is this coming from? Why do I believe that? Ted would ask, “Does it make the apples taste any less sweet? Does it make you love your friends or family any less? Does it make the music sound any better or worse?” What Ted was uncovering were the layers upon layers of assumptions and beliefs that I had merely taken for granted over the years. Like most religious people, I had accepted those claims uncritically because I was influenced to do so from an early age. I didn’t have good reasons. Instead, I had faith, and faith is not a reliable way of knowing anything (I later discovered).
It was at this point that I really started to turn a critical eye toward all of the previous beliefs that I had about the Bible, Christianity, and philosophy, though I really didn’t want to, since Christianity had become my identity by this point. I was no longer trying to “defend” or do apologetics. Instead, I was merely trying to see whether my theological beliefs held up to scrutiny. Instead of searching through and reading nearly all apologetics websites, trusting them to properly represent the other side, I began visiting websites like infidels.org, talkorigins.org, The Panda’s Thumb, ffrf.org, and others. I also began watching debates on YouTube between popular Christian apologists and atheists. One debate in particular has always stood out to me. In 2004, on the Atheist Experience show (on YouTube), Matt Dillahunty debated Matt Slick on the Transcendental Argument for God’s Existence (TAG). At the time I felt this was the strongest argument for God’s existence. During the debate, Dillahunty pointed out how Slick was “confusing the map for the place“. Essentially, he was confusing logic with the logical absolutes (the reality upon which the language of logic is based). “In a universe where there are no minds, a rock is still a rock and it is not not a rock.” Dillahunty said. Slick essentially attempted to deny this by claiming that in a universe with no minds there would be no truth. This is because he wanted to maintain that “Truth is a statement”, that it must exist in a mind, and that logic, (the language that humans have invented to describe a part of reality that we experience – similar to the language of mathematics), is the same thing as the reality we are describing, when in fact, as Dillahunty points out, they are not the same thing. Put more simply, a map is not the same thing as the place the map is referring to, and a photo of an apple is not the same thing as an apple. The reason why this point was important was because, using the TAG argument, Slick was claiming that the only worldview that could account for the laws of logic (i.e. – reality) is Christianity since, according to him, the laws of logic must reside in a mind. In other words, Slick was claiming that both logic, and the logical absolutes could only exist, be reliable, and be uniform if they exist in a universal mind. Dillahunty, on the other hand, was rebutting this claim by showing how a mind was not necessary for a proposition to be true. All that was necessary was that a certain set of conditions hold, which is the case in a universe where there are no minds to perceive it.
I couldn’t deny it. Quietly in the depths of my consciousness, I had to admit that Slick had lost the debate. A universal mind is not required in order for certain propositions to be true (that is to say, be accurate about the world). Therefore, the TAG argument failed. But from that point, I did not yet become an atheist. I was still a theist but I was now very skeptical of pretty much every argument that Christian apologists made for Christianity as I had known it (that is to say, the fundamentalist kind). Before then, I had never looked at the defensive arguments for Christianity very critically (Cosmological, Ontological, Teleological, Moral, etc) but now I was determined to do just that. At the same time, I was very curious, and much more open, to hearing the stories, and reasons, why other ex-Christian atheists left Christianity. This led me down a very long pathway out of the dark “dungeon of despair”, as I call it. But, I had to go deeper into the dungeon first.
Into The Dungeon
In addition to reading and listening to defenses and arguments for the existence of God, I began looking a lot more closely at the other side. I read and listened to people like Dan Barker, Scot Clifton (aka TheoreticalBullshit on YouTube), Bart Ehrman, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Carrier, John Loftus, Sean Carroll, Tracy Harris, and of course Matt Dillahunty. For the most part I listened to them through live or pre-recorded debates, but other times they were responding to claims and arguments from apologists. In either case, every argument that I had previously thought was a solid argument for Christianity, the alleged divine inspiration of the bible, or the existence of Yahweh, was exposed as being logically flawed in one way or another, or just a mere assertion (such as in the case of presuppositional apologetics). One interesting thing to mention here too is that, in all of my years of reading and debating these arguments I have never once come across a theist who became a theist because of one of these arguments. In my experience, it is usually always the case that they came to believe first and then went about using these arguments as a protection mechanism. Here is a short list of some of the major arguments I could no longer accept as sound.
- Transcendental Argument
- Argument for Divine Origin of the Bible
- Argument from Historicity
- Kalam Cosmological Argument
- Teleological Argument
- Ontological Argument
- Moral Argument
- Argument from Miracles
- Argument from Personal Experience
- Argument from Contingency
- Argument from Consciousness
- Argument from Sensus Divinitatis
- Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
This is not an exhaustive list, and I won’t detail here why I do not accept these arguments anymore (I will do that in future posts). However, suffice it to say for now I eventually arrived at the bottom of the dungeon and found no fire-breathing dragon in sight. I not only came to the realization that none of these arguments were sufficient for me to continue believing in Christianity (they all suffer from one or more logical flaws) but also that no argument, by itself, would cut it. In other words, I realized within myself that I will not accept religious claims via the avenue of argument alone. And even though I had previously believed that I had an experience with Jesus in my bedroom years prior, through careful reassessment and critical thinking I came to the realization that it was not rational to draw that conclusion. How could it be? Since human beings make mistakes in reasoning all the time, and a more parsimonious explanation existed (i.e. – that it was a dream and I was mistaken in my interpretation) it is far more likely that what I experienced was just a creation of mind (just like other cultures experience in a similar fashion as well). Given these things, I had no choice but to let go of Christianity and Christian belief. After all, you don’t choose your beliefs. You become convinced by good evidence, bad evidence, or a combination of the two.
By late 2007, I had an opportunity to move to Arizona with a friend to start a music lesson business, and I decided to take it. Just before leaving town I had dinner with some old friends from church. I gave them the news that I was no longer a Christian and they were extremely surprised. One of them said, “No… You just forgot! You will remember! You just forgot!”. They knew how strong of a Christian believer and defender I was before, but I thought this was a very strange response. Unfortunately for her, my friend was quite mistaken. I moved to Arizona and didn’t think twice about ever going back to Christianity. For me, this would be like attempting to force myself to believe (not just say that I believe, but actually believe) that there is a winged rainbow-colored unicorn flying right next to me right now. I can’t do it, and this is exactly how I felt about Christianity. I could not force myself to honestly believe something for which I had no sufficient evidence to believe. And even though I was still suffering from a good amount of depression, since I was still feeling some of the effects of what I call “residual Christianity“, there was no going back. From that point forward, I considered myself a deist (for the time being).
From Deist to Atheist
In Arizona, I didn’t do much reading, researching, or studying philosophy or theology. I decided I was going to focus almost solely on my business and getting fit through dieting and exercise at the gym. I did these two things consistently for about 2 years but as the housing crash of 2008-09 came upon the world my business gradually dwindled and eventually I was forced to move back to California. I went back to teaching drum lessons privately and decided I would also enroll in school to get my bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Since I loved teaching, and I was very interested in studying philosophy, I figured I would work toward becoming a college professor. From 2009 to 2011, I focused diligently on work and school. I was determined to make my life better but at the same time my interest for philosophy had been rekindled and was growing by leaps and bounds. I took courses on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language, aesthetics, ethics & moral theory, metaphysics, and many others. While working on my studies I developed an immense passion for all things philosophy. Any extra time I had, I spent reading and studying various philosophical arguments and positions, especially arguments for and against the existence of God (whatever that term means). I was still determined to find a sound argument for the existence of some kind of deity. In fact, any paper I wrote in college pertaining to the existence of God, was always on the pro side. However, I wanted to take as objective an approach as I could. So I always researched the rebuttals and responses to the arguments I was making and the beliefs that I had. I still felt very much attached to the idea that there must be a God of some kind out there, someone that started everything off. Yet, just as before, I would eventually discover that my arguments contained logically fallacious reasoning and were not sound. To my sadness at the time, I eventually came to a point where I had to admit that I did not have any sound arguments for the existence of a God or the supernatural. At this point I was once again thrown into a deep depression. “What is life’s meaning? What is the purpose of everything? If there is no God then everything is chaos! How can I know what is right or wrong? There’s no foundation! We are in big trouble! We are all alone and life is very scary! The world has become a jungle of psychopathic indifference with no real justice! I’m just an animal like every other animal, living to eat, shit, and then die!” I thought. And once again, my friend Ted was there to challenge these assumptions. “Why does life have to have an ultimate meaning? Why is that required? Where did you get the notion that everything is chaos? How is that justified? What do you mean by “no foundation”? Foundation for what? Why is life so scary? What is scary about it? What is justice? What does that mean?” These questions got me to challenge my own underlying assumptions about the nature of reality. I started to see things in a completely different way, a way that I had not seen before. I saw a different pathway, a different description of life and my surroundings. If there was ever such a thing as a personal enlightenment, this was it for me. I started to realize that there was a completely different way to look at reality and the world, a reality without assuming the supernatural.
By the time I graduated college it eventually dawned on me that I didn’t have any good reasons for believing in a god of any kind. Up to that point, I was still convinced that presuppositionalism was the way to go, and that some kind of deist-type God was the necessary precondition for intelligibility and the uniformity of nature. Essentially I believed that a deistic God solved Hume’s problem of induction (which is the notion that there is no way to show any logically necessary connection between past cases or events and future cases or events). But eventually, that argument, along with all the other arguments that I had heard, did not stand up to rational scrutiny. I went back and listened to the Dillahunty/Slick debate again. It became so clear. Arguments in and of themselves are not sufficient for me to believe in the supernatural, of any kind. I remember thinking about Carl Sagan’s famous quote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and at that point I had not even seen or heard ordinary evidence for a god, let alone extraordinary evidence. Adding to this, I remember listening to an episode of “The Infidel Guy” on YouTube (the channel is no longer in operation). Reginald Finley (The Infidel Guy) was interviewing Matt Slick when a caller called in asking Matt to “define his God”. What stuck with me was that Matt was unable to define God with any positive primary characteristics. He was only able to provide either negative adjectives (“not material”, “not physical”, etc), essentially telling us what God is not, or point to secondary characteristics such as: all powerful, all-knowing, all-good etc. Not only was this wholly unsatisfying to me but it also got me thinking. Perhaps the notion of God is itself meaningless, or at the very least irrational (it turns out this position is called Theological Noncognitivism). How can something exist and have no essential characteristics that can be named? What is the substance of a “spirit”? I searched for answers, and as with so many other times before, I came up short. Everything always came back to alleged negative characteristics, which were not an answer to my question. If God is a spirit, and a spirit is something that is real, then what is it made of? What is its composition? What primary attributes does it have? I could find no answers that made any sense, and since knowing the truth was far more important to me than holding onto a belief, I had to give up the belief.
In the end, I am not a Christian anymore because I discovered that the reasons I had for believing in God were not good reasons and that the reasons I heard other people give for believing in God were also either logically fallacious or based on mere assertions. It was almost as if at some point along the line a properly skeptical switch had been slowly flipped on in my mind and I could not turn it off. Anytime I heard or saw an argument for the alleged supernatural, miraculous, God, Christianity, or any other religion, I would instantly begin to see the flaws. I am happy to say that this critical thinking “skeptical skill” still resides within me today and it is my intention, and hope, to spread that skill to as many people that I can while I am on planet Earth.
I will end with one of my favorite quotes of all time, from the late great Christopher Hitchens:
“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.“
Christopher hitchens
Rebuttals & Responses
- You were never really a true Christian!
This sounds like the No True Scotsman fallacy (which is logically fallacious reasoning). Can a Muslim be a “true Muslim” while Islam is at the same time false? In other words, can someone be a true believer of a particular religion even though that religion is false? If so, then you admit that a religious belief being “true” is not required for someone to be a true believer. This would mean that you, and Paul in the bible, are wrong. The only real criteria for someone to be a true Christian is whether or not they honestly believed it to be true, and I did.
- You must not have known the arguments well enough.
I knew the arguments quite well and they were not convincing, and still are not convincing. Not only that but each of those arguments (cosmological, teleological, ontological, moral, transcendental, etc) not only contain logically fallacious reasoning and thus I cannot accept them as sound, but they are also insufficient for me. No argument on its own is going to convince me that an alleged “god” (whatever that means) exists, especially if this alleged being interacts with the world in any detectable way. Would an argument, by itself, be enough to convince you that I have a pet fire-breathing dragon?
- God is obvious. You’re just blinded by sin and suppressing the truth in unrighteousness!
Parotting Romans chapter 1 is not going to be persuasive but you knew that already, right? This is no better than just saying “For the bible tells me so!”. How is that supposed to be convincing to anyone except those who already assume your beliefs are true? Would this line of argument be convincing if a Muslim used it against an ex-Muslim? Should it be? “It says so right here in the Koran! Therefore, it’s true!” That doesn’t work, does it? Therefore, it doesn’t work when you use it. Second, how is god “obvious”? The trees? Life? The universe? These things do not merely explain themselves. They indeed may require some sort of explanation, but merely asserting that your explanation is the correct one (because you say so or because you think the bible says so) is also not convincing. Would you be convinced if I claimed that those things are obviously explained by the flying spaghetti monster, or if another religion (which is opposed to yours) made a similar claim? All you are doing here is merely asserting & assuming that your belief is true, from the outset, and I see no good reason for making that assumption. Also, I think you don’t either, if you are honest with yourself. Assuming your position is true, doesn’t make it true and the time to believe a claim is after sufficient evidence has been brought forth, and not before.
- So now you believe we came from nothing?
Nope. I do not accept the claim that there ever was such a thing as “nothing” or “ex-nihilo” or “non-existence”. These also are just assertions. I see no good reason for believing there ever was a “non-existence”. This idea also sounds nonsensical. If “nothing” existed then wouldn’t it be something? In fact, I have to assume that you also do not believe there ever was a “nothing”. If you are a deist, theist, or pantheist, do you believe god is “nothing”? If the alleged thing you are calling god is “something”, and it always existed, then there never was “nothing”, was there? Thus, it seems to be the case that there always was, in the very least, something.
- You must have had some sin in your life that allowed Satan to creep in.
This once again assumes your belief in the Bible, or the Koran, which of course I do not accept, but it’s not relevant. All Christians, and Muslims, whether they admit it or not, have “sin in their life”. When you started believing in Jesus or Mohammed did you stop “sinning”? If not, then you have “sin in your life” too. Second, this response also just looks like you are assuming your interpretation of the bible is true, but why should I do that? How does it make any sense at all to assume your religious beliefs are true from the outset, instead of being skeptical first and then doing a proper investigation?
- Without God life has no meaning. You should have known that.
Why does life have to have an absolute or “meaning” on the cosmic scale? How can you justify this belief or requirement? I see no reason for thinking that life must have “infinite meaning” in order for it to have meaning in general, or even multiple meanings. Also, what is “meaning”? How are you defining that term? I suspect that we are thinking about that word, and its relevance, in two very different ways.
- You’re going to hell!
This is just Bible-thumping. “For the bible tells me so” is not going to cut it. At that point your assertion is no better than any other religious claim from any other religion. Why should I accept such a claim?
- Where do you get your morals from then?
I get my morals from a rational consideration of the consequences of my actions. However, whenever this question comes up, what I almost always suspect is that we are likely operating from different definitions of the term “morality”. If your definition of “moral” means something like “that which aligns with the nature of God” etc, then I don’t care. I see no reason for thinking that your alleged god is real, nor do I find that definition useful or helpful. In fact, it has shown itself to be quite harmful throughout history. At that point, you might as well just throw out your moral intuitions and just do whatever you believe an alleged god tells you to do, even if it does immense harm to tons of people. I wholly reject this approach. Remember the story of Jephthah in Judges 11, when he allegedly slaughtered his daughter after Yahweh allegedly allowed him to win that war? Yeah, I reject divine command theory altogether. All it looks to be is an a-moral (non-moral) blank check for doing whatever you actually wanted to do in the first place, so that you can feel justified in doing it. That’s not morality as far as I’m concerned. As Tracy Harris once said, that’s just a dog doing what its owner told it to do. It has nothing to do with morality.
Instead, I think morality (in general) pertains to the demonstrable well-being of conscious creatures and society, and it does not matter to me that there is no perfect definition (much the same as it does not matter to me that there is no perfect definition of the term “health”). As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a “perfect definition” of nearly any term, and yet we don’t need such a thing to move forward with life and do the best we can to improve people’s lives to the greatest amount and degree possible.
- Science can’t explain the origin of the universe, therefore it must have come from a god!
This is the classic and infamous, Argument from Personal Incredulity fallacy. It is logically fallacious reasoning. It is, effectively, a god of the gaps argument. Just because science has not yet explained something today does not mean or imply that it will not be able to explain it in the future, nor does it justify a claim to the supernatural or miraculous. Superstitious people in history have also attempted to use this same type of argument to explain things like sickness or disease, lightning, thunder, the shape of the earth, and many other unexplained phenomena. This argument didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now because the time to believe a claim is after we have sufficient evidence, not because we can’t imagine another explanation. Instead, the better answer is to say “I don’t know“, but unfortunately we live in a world where many people are uncomfortable admitting when they don’t know something. It is my hope to change that thinking as much as possible within society. Just because we don’t know something about reality doesn’t mean we can’t live relatively happy, healthy, productive human lives.
Aaron Lietz
Founder & President
Light of Reason Foundation