Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary

by Kenneth W. Daniels

I am not naive enough to expect that most who read this book will abandon the faith they hold dear, but I do hope to convince my readers that many of us who walk away have not done so out of a rebellious, juvenile whim, but rather out of a careful weighing of the reasons for and against our former faith.

Corinthians 15:14-18).

It is one thing for adults to hold to unsubstantiated beliefs, and I respect their right to do so, but it is another matter altogether for adults to press these beliefs on vulnerable children who have not yet developed the cognitive faculties needed to weigh the evidence for and against what they are being taught.

I regret having used up the best years of my youth pursuing religious goals. In retrospect I would have preferred a career seeking a vaccination for malaria, which kills one person every 30 seconds in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

It is as though the Christian faith enjoys a special status not shared by other perspectives: to reject Christianity, we must obtain a doctorate in theology and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it is untrue, but to accept Christianity, all we need is the faith of a little child, with no prior sympathetic or systematic study of other religious and nonreligious alternatives.

(Isaiah 44:14-20)[

Doubt cannot be imposed from the outside; it must begin from within.

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (Paine 1794),

By contrast, the New Testament suggests (at least, as I understood it; evangelical leader John Stott and Seventh-Day Adventists would disagree) that unbelievers will spend an eternity of conscious torment in hell, an infinitely worse proposition than being stoned to death. I could no longer believe that a god who enjoins us to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek could be capable of subjecting his own enemies to endless punishment with no further offer of mercy or reprieve (Hebrews 9:27). Why not simply annihilate his rebellious subjects and put them out of their misery?

If God is infinite and the universe is finite, how much relative effort did it take for God to design and create the world? Anything finite compared to infinity is nothing. How much effort does it take him to keep us free from disease or accidents, or to give us a raise on the job or a nice tax refund, or to watch the miracle of a baby developing from conception to adulthood through gene expression and natural development? Did he make himself good, or does he simply happen to be good? If the latter, what choice does he have but to be good, and if he has no choice, can he legitimately be considered a free agent rather than subject to a higher law of goodness outside himself? Is his wisdom a virtue; does he carefully decide between two options and select the best, or does he, being omniscient, automatically know what is best? Is there any virtue in that which requires no effort?

Reading Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box put to death any doubt about the supernatural origin of living things.

Anyone who maintains a fundamentally incorrect worldview in the face of sufficient evidence to discount that view is likely motivated by factors other than a pure love of truth and reason.

And by showing that self-deception is likely to evolve (because the best liar is the one who believes his own lies), sociobiology encourages self-scrutiny and helps undermine hypocrisy and corruption (Pinker 2002, 111).

In an interview following the publication of her book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, Carol Tavris explains the mechanisms by which we justify our own behavior and beliefs (Tavris 2007).

How can we take to heart physicist Richard Feynman's injunction, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool" (Feynman 2000, 212)?

It is common for Christians who firmly believe in the existence of the god of the Bible to consider that unbelievers also must secretly believe, but that they are bitter against God or God's people and are merely taking out their frustration by denying God. This outlook surfaces in comments such as the following by creationist Jonathan Sarfati, addressed to agnostic Ed Babinski: I hope you will understand that we can't possibly respond to all claims disseminated by every God-hater inhabiting the darker hovels of the Internet (Babinski 2005a).

This incident shows how we unbelievers are "damned if we do, damned if we don't." If we proceed to live immoral lives (at least by Christian standards), it is a sure indication we left the faith to get God off our backs and live as we please; but if we retain our moral standards, we are relying on our works for self-justification, which makes us equally culpable in God's sight.

(Deuteronomy 13:6-11).[24]

I see Christianity as a square peg and reality a round hole. The square peg doesn't fit in the round hole, so we start whittling and sandpapering the corners, trying to make it fit. The tools we use for whittling and sandpapering are collectively known as "Bible commentary." We find, for example, that the earth is very ancient, not a few thousand years old, that there are biological bases for illnesses like schizophrenia, not merely demon possession, that the Bible had a lot of editing as it was put together and doesn't appear error free. We incorporate these and other items into our Christian worldview, slowly sandpapering the edges and modifying our Christianity. When we finally get our Christianity smoothed down so that it can fit into the round hole of reality, we are relieved—until we realize that what we are looking at is no longer a square peg but a round one, no different from the round peg of Naturalism that fits into reality. Can what we have left of the peg, now completely rounded, still be labeled Christianity? No, it is Naturalism (or at best, Deism). Hence the loss of faith.

Today there remain many genuine unsolved mysteries about the nature and origin of the universe and of life. Christianity and other religions are eager to fill our thirst for a certain answer to these questions. These religious systems exploit our desire to explain what we do not know. In doing so, they illegitimately shift the burden of proof to the skeptic to answer questions that religion pretends to address, but whose answers are no more empirically grounded than the proposition that pillars bear the weight of the earth.

God is always to be credited for Christians' good works but cannot be blamed for their failures. Heads I win, tails I don't lose.

To be fair, most skeptics and freethinkers, including me, are also heavily influenced by the ideas of others. I doubt I would have had the courage to break with the faith of my youth had I lived five hundred years ago, before enough brave souls had risked their lives challenging the reigning dogmas of the day and ushering in the Enlightenment.

Could I deny that I would have been a follower of Zeus had I lived in Greece in the fifth century BCE, or a believer in astrological signs if I had lived at the same time in Babylon, or a subscriber to animistic practices if I had lived in the heart of pre-colonial Africa?

I can only conclude that we as humans are inherently susceptible to the suggestions of our culture and that we are in most cases virtually powerless—yes, powerless—to recognize this susceptibility in ourselves, but we are more than eager to identify it in others.

quite deep.

The possession of intelligence or bravery does not guarantee the possession of truth.