As I announced earlier I've decided to publish whole chapters from my books. I may eventually publish them all, certainly a bunch of them. The goal will be to publish one chapter every Monday. I may not leave them up for more than a few weeks, so be sure to subscribe or check in weekly for them (and for that matter, check in every Friday when Dr. David Madison posts some brilliant and hard-hitting stuff like his most recent one.
This book is effectively the third edition derived from my self-published book, Why I Rejected Christianity, which was published late in 2006 and has now been discontinued. The first edition of this work published by Prometheus Books cried out for yet another revision. While it was received very well by both skeptics and Christian readers and was used in both secular and Christian college classes on “atheism” and “apologetics,” there were corrections to make and more than a few chapters that needed to be updated with better arguments and references. I also wanted to answer some of the criticisms made of the first edition. In a few cases I have changed my mind. So I am grateful that the publisher has granted me permission to revise it.
What’s different? Plenty. In every chapter I have added to and strengthened my case, sometimes significantly. I have been thinking about these issues every single day for three additional years, so I have better arguments and better ways to communicate them. In addition, there is a much better flow to this edition. In other words, it’s a much better book.
Why I Became an Atheist may be unlike any other book you’ve ever read. It is specifically written to devout Christians by a former Christian minister and apologist for their faith who is now an atheist. It’s also written to Christians who are questioning their faith, as well as to skeptics who want to learn how to effectively argue against Christianity. Sad to say, those two latter groups of people will be more likely to read it and gain the most benefit from it. There are many books that “preach to the choir” in the marketplace, on both sides of this great debate. Mine is not intended to be one of them. I aim to bridge the gap between us by speaking to Christians in ways they will understand. Unlike some skeptics who think that Christianity has been debunked so many times before that it’s now time to ridicule it, I still treat it respectfully.
My hope is that Christians will consider the recommendation of Dr. Norman L. Geisler, who is a Christian apologist and author of more than sixty apologetics books, including The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. He said,
"First, [Why I Became an Atheist] is an honest and open account of how a Christian became an atheist. Seldom are unbelievers so candid and open. Second, every Christian—let alone Christian apologists—can learn some valuable lessons from it on how to treat wayward believers. Third, it is a thoughtful and intellectually challenging work, presenting arguments that every honest theist and Christian should face.”1
Let me put it to you this way. As children we were all raised as believers. Whatever our parents told us we believed. If they said Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny existed, then we believed what they said until we were told otherwise. If they had told us Allah or Zeus or Baal or Poseidon or Thor or Odin existed, we would have believed in them, too. It’s only as we become adults that we learn to be more critical of what we were taught to believe. The problem is that because our parents were never told by their parents that their inherited faith was false, they passed it down to us, their children. And we do likewise with our children. At some point, as we become adults, we need to critically evaluate what we were taught to believe. That’s why I maintain that doubt is the adult attitude and skepticism is a learned virtue.
In this book I have proposed the Outsider Test for Faith for believers who, upon becoming adults, wish to test their inherited faith. Learning our religion upon our mama’s knee is an unreliable way to gain the correct religious faith. A wide diversity of religions are taught to children the same exact way, only one of which at best can be true. The odds are that the religious faith we were taught to believe is probably false given the number of them handed down by parents in separate geographical regions around the globe. So we need to investigate what we were taught, by critically examining our religious faith as adults, with the same level of skepticism we use when approaching all other religions. I see no better alternative. If you want to know the truth about your faith, this is how you need to do it. Take The Outsider Test for Faith [book link added].
How often does the thought occur to believers that they could be wrong? How often do they seriously consider whether they believe based upon their upbringing in a Christian family inside a Christian culture? There are billions of people who have been brought up with a different religious faith because they were born into a different family and a different culture. The fact is that many believers do not want to know if their faith is false. Most Christians think doubt is something God would not approve of, so they won’t even entertain the thought. My claim is that this is not a reasonable position for an adult. Wouldn’t you want to know if your faith is false? A reasonable person would. However, when believers do decide to investigate their faith, most often they seek to confirm it rather than disconfirm it. Instead of reading a work by a skeptic like me, most believers will read one written by a Christian apologist who defends their faith. Why would they do that? That isn’t what they do when a salesman makes his or her pitch for a product. An informed buyer turns instead to Consumer’s Digest. In the same manner, believers who honestly want to know if their faith is true should read the works of those who don’t think it is. You owe it to yourself to read firsthand what someone like me has to say. You can read what Dr. Geisler and other Christian apologists say in response, of course. But nothing is quite like reading a book like this one firsthand if you want to honestly know the truth about the faith handed down to you. After you have done so you will be much better positioned to make an informed decision about your faith.
I know many devout Christian readers of this book will read it with the assumption that what I argue is not just false, but palpably false. The reason is because they feel certain their faith is correct. Yep, that’s right, they feel certain, or nearly so, that what they were taught to believe is correct. When I first converted to the Christian faith I attended the youth group of a Pentecostal church. John Lloyd was my youth pastor there, at the Adam’s Apple in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Not that long before this book went to press I met with him and he said to me, “John, I know that I know that I know that what I believe is true.” And when he said this he closed his eyes as if he was experiencing God. He meant what he said. But many other people in different religions would all say the same thing. Shouldn’t that alone give him pause?
Neurologist Robert Burton explains this misplaced sense of certainty in this way, “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of knowing what we know arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”2 Burton says that the “feeling of knowing,” or certainty of conviction, should be thought of as one of our emotions, just like anger, pleasure, or fear. This feeling is unrelated to the strength of the evidence of what we believe. The feeling of “knowing” can be extremely powerful—so much so that our feeling of certainty wins despite contrary evidence that should mitigate it. Not only this, but our brains are very good at making up reasons to justify this feeling of certainty rather than following the evidence to the reasonable conclusions.
As human beings we have a very strong tendency not only to believe what we prefer to believe but also to seek and find evidence that confirms our beliefs. The strength of this often-unconscious confirmation bias depends on how important we consider our beliefs to be and how much of a commitment we have in maintaining them. This has been shown by so many psychological studies it makes our heads spin.3 To understand this let me offer several mundane examples. Just think back to a time when you thought you needed something really badly but then your hopes ere dashed. What did you do? You eventually convinced yourself you didn’t need t after all, that you were better off not having had your hopes realized. It may take bit of time, but that’s what we human beings will do almost every time. It’s our natural tendency. It helps us deal with our pain and loss. It’s how we resolve our cognitive dissonance, that uncomfortable feeling that results from holding two or more inconsistent thoughts in the mind at the same time.
Christian author and instructor Jim West has degrees from unaccredited colleges and teaches for one, too. So it shouldn’t surprise us in the least that in one blog post West rants against the “exploitative” nature of college accreditation companies.4 Here we see a person who should know better arguing against that which he doesn’t have simply because he doesn’t have it. You see, I’ve never heard an educated person ranting against an education, and I’ve never heard a person with an accredited degree ranting against accreditation.
A woman I know took two of her grandchildren to see the movie How to Train Your Dragon when it was newly released. The movie was released in 3-D, but this particular theater did not have 3-D technology. Her grandchild asked the owner, who was standing in the lobby, if the movie was in 3-D. In response, the owner went off for ten minutes telling them that watching movies in 3-D is bad for their eyes. Of course he thought that. Why? Because his movie theater didn’t have the technology. Get it? Just imagine what he would say if he had 3-D technology. Then he would change his tune. We know this. It happens all of the time.
You should read the book by Ori and Rom Brafman called Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.5 These two brothers focus on several hidden forces that cause us to act irrationally. The first is value attrition, which they illustrate with several good examples before concluding, “Once we attribute a value to a person or thing, it dramatically alters our perceptions of subsequent information” (p. 55), making it “very difficult” to view that person or thing “in any other light” (p. 56). It is such “a strong force that it has the power to derail our objective and professional judgment” (p. 63). Another hidden irrational force is commitment. The more that a person has a commitment to an idea, the more it’s virtually impossible for him or her to take a different path. Independently these two forces have a powerful effect on us, “but when the two forces combine; it becomes that much harder to break free and do something else” (p. 30). The third force is diagnosis bias, which in their words “causes us to distort or even ignore objective data” (p. 75). Thus, “we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe” (p. 88).
To believers I simply ask, how do you know this doesn’t describe you with regard to your inherited faith? The only way to know is to take the Outsider Test for Faith. There isn’t a better alternative. This is something that the Brafman’s tell us to do in order to overcome our own diagnosis bias. They describe owners of a business who continue the pursuit of a failed project rather than pursuing a more promising one because they are committed to what they have always done in the past. The Brafman brothers propose answering the question: “If I were just arriving on the scene and were given the choice to either jump into this project as it stands now or pass on it, would I choose to jump in?” (p. 175). Likewise, believers must ask themselves if they knew as a child what they know now would they have ever made the decision to convert in the first place. They must reexamine the initial reasons they were given when they first made their commitment to faith. What were those reasons? Do those reasons hold up to the evidence that was initially presented, if any was presented at all? Usually what produces a conversion to faith is the Gospel story itself and the divine hope and love it promises. There is no discussion about how Jesus was 100 percent God and 100 percent man, or how the death of Jesus atones for sins, or even what to think about the millions of people who will wind up in hell.
This book is my effort to critically examine biblical, conservative, evangelical, or fundamentalist Christianity. I was raised and confirmed a Catholic, then in my teens I converted to a fundamentalist Christian church. Later, I was a liberal for a period of time. In my religious quest I started out as a fundamentalist, became a moderate, then a liberal, a deist, an agnostic, and finally the atheist I am today. I tell my personal story in the first chapter. In this quest I have rejected Catholic, liberal, and “cultic” versions of Christianity.6 So I know how to argue against other Christianities, though I focus on what is roughly considered to be evangelical Christianity, best represented by the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society.
The first part of this book provides the reasons why believers should examine their faith with the skepticism of an outsider. I consider part 1, “Christianity from the Outside,” to contain the most significant part of my case. In this part I share why the Christian faith has the burden of proof and why it should, but does not, pass the Outsider Test for Faith. Some of these chapters contain philosophical arguments while others are biblical in nature. If you find some of the philosophical arguments difficult to comprehend, you can skip over them without too much of a loss. The second part of this book provides some reasons why the Christian faith fails even an insider’s test for faith. In these chapters I share the arguments that led me to walk away from the faith. Then I include a final chapter describing why I initially became an atheist.
I’m writing to sincerely and honestly explain why I rejected Christianity. I’m doing so on the level of a college student, not the professional philosopher, and I have usually tried to quote from accessible books whenever possible. My aim is to bring the arguments of the scholars in their respective fields down to the university student and the educated person in the pew. In doing so, I present a cumulative case argument against Christianity. It includes my own personal experiences with the Christian faith, along with the arguments that I find persuasive enough for me to reject that faith. I consider this book to be one single argument against Christianity, and as such it should be evaluated as a whole. My claim is that the Christian faith should be rejected by modern, civilized, scientifically literate people, even if I know many of them will still disagree. I’m just sharing the reasons that convinced me, and I think they should convince others. If someone is persuaded by the same reasons I argue for in this book, then I’m pleased.
Whether you realize it or not, there are probably many Christian professors who have had some serious doubts like me. Dr. Ruth A. Tucker, in her book Walking Away from Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief, shares her own doubt and how she overcame it, hoping to challenge unbelievers to reconsider what they are missing.7 In one place in her book, she candidly confesses what sometimes crosses her mind when contemplating her own doubt. As a seminary professor she wrote, “There are moments when I doubt all. It is then that I sometimes ask myself as I’m looking out my office window, What on earth am I doing here? They’d fire me if they only knew” (p. 133). While she remains a Christian, her specific challenge to the Christian believer “is that you seek a better understanding of those who do not believe—particularly those who have walked away from the faith—and that you listen carefully to their stories and respond with honesty and sensitivity” (p. 12). According to Tucker, for those who walk away from their faith, “the process is full of sorrow and a sense of loss” (p. 13).
Christian philosopher James F. Sennett is another one who has seriously struggled with his faith, as seen in his unpublished manuscript “This Much I Know: A Postmodern Apologetic.”8 He confesses to writing his manuscript as a “first-person apologetic” to answer his own faith crisis. In chapter 1, “The Reluctant Disciple: Anatomy of a Faith Crisis,” he wrote, “I am the one who struggles with God. I am the Reluctant Disciple. . . . Once I had no doubt that God was there, but I resented him for it; now I desperately want him to be there, and am terrified that he might not be.” Prompted by a study of the mind/brain problem, he added, “Sometimes I believed. Sometimes I didn’t. And it seemed to me that the latter condition was definitely on the ascendancy.”
Drs. Tucker and Sennett are not the only Christian professors out there who have seriously struggled with their Christian faith. Many others do too, like philosopher Terence Penelhum, who has expressed similar doubts.9 There are even atheists in the pulpit, according to a study done by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola for the Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies.10 How do you know your pastor isn’t one of them? While I was never an atheist at the pulpit, I had my doubts, just like the others. At some point my faith just came crashing down on me.
I was a Christian apologist set to defend Christianity from all intellectual attacks. I was not afraid of any idea because I was convinced that Christianity was true and could withstand these attacks. I graduated from Great Lakes Christian College, in Lansing, Michigan, in 1977. Then I attended Lincoln Christian Seminary (LCS), in Lincoln, Illinois, and graduated in 1982 with MA and MDiv degrees, under the mentoring of Dr. James D. Strauss. While at LCS I was the founding editor for the now defunct apologetical quarterly A Journal for Christian Studies.
After LCS I attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) and graduated in 1985 with a ThM degree, under the mentoring of Dr. William Lane Craig, who is considered by many to be the foremost defender of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, the empty tomb of Jesus, and Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the grave. I took half of the hours required for that degree with him. I also spent a year and a half in a PhD program at Marquette University with a double major in theology and ethics, but I didn’t finish. My father had been told that he would die from cancer in a few months so I dropped out of school to be with him, taking a nearby ministry in Angola, Indiana. After he died I never returned to school as I had planned.
I have also taught classes at several Christian colleges, as well as at secular ones. At left is a picture of Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. James D. Strauss together with me at my 1985 Trinity Evangelical Divinity School graduation. Dr. Craig is on the left and Dr. Strauss (in a light suit) is on the right. Here is what Dr. Craig said a few years after I graduated from TEDS: In my former capacity as a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I enjoyed the privilege of having graduates of Lincoln Christian College in my classes. I was amazed as one after another distinguished himself as among my brightest and most capable students. What was it about this little Christian school in mid-state Illinois, I thought, that it should be such an academic powerhouse generating good philosophers? The answer was always the same: Dr. Strauss!11
The fact that I was a former student of theirs should mean nothing to either side of this great debate, even though skeptics may revel in it and Christians may scoff at me for it. I mention it only because it helps people know something about my educational background, and I am very happy to have studied with both of them. People come to their own conclusions, that’s all. I would still like to consider these two former professors as my friends. My rejection of Christianity isn’t anything personal with them. I think very highly of them both. They are both good men. The arguments just weren’t there, period.
I was also ordained into the ministry of the centrist Restoration Movement Churches of Christ by Jerry M. Paul, when he was at Christ’s Church at Georgetown, in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I was baptized by him and he later was my ordaining minister. I then served as an associate minister, a minister, a senior minister, and an interim minister for several churches. I had ministries in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. I was in the ministry for about fourteen years. My last ministry was for the Angola Christian Church, in Angola, Indiana, where I served as the senior minister. While there I served in the Steuben County Ministerial Association, and for a year I was its president.
I am now an atheist. The major reason why I have become an atheist is because I could not answer the questions I was encountering. I became an atheist precisely because that’s where the unanswerable questions led me. Now as an atheist, I turn that same intellectual muscle into arguing against the things I formerly defended. One of the major reasons I do this is simply because I want to share with others what it took me so long to realize.
From the outset, you should know that I am not an angry atheist. I am certainly not angry with God, since I can no more be angry with a God that doesn’t exist than a Christian can be angry with Allah or Zeus. And I’m not angry with anyone for teaching me to believe in the first place, since they didn’t know any better. And I cannot be angry with myself for having been duped to believe because I couldn’t have known better. Life for me has been good for the most part. So let me state for the record that although I reject Christianity, I do not reject Christian people, most of whom I respect as good people, nor do I wish to offend them. I will even capitalize the term “God” when referring to their God, and refer to God as “him,” so as not to offend Christians any further than they may already be with this book. I just consider Christians to be deluded about their faith, like I was. I think they are wrong, that’s all, massively wrong.
I know that even this revised edition could be bettered with further research in some areas. No one today can master all of the relevant issues, certainly not me. If I fail to deal with an important Christian argument, someone else has. I quote from and refer to many different resources that support and further argue for my position, and I don’t think with additional information I’ll change my mind. Many of the authors I quote from are liberal Christian scholars. I quote from them because I think they offer the best arguments against evangelical Christianity. If I were writing a book against liberal Christianity I might utilize the arguments of the evangelicals. When liberal and evangelical Christians criticize each other I think they’re both correct.12 It should go without saying that the Christian scholars I quote from don’t conclude what I do, but their arguments can be useful anyway.
I consider the book you’re reading to be my magnum opus. To read updates and discuss the issues in this book with me, visit my blog on the Web at http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/. Look for my companion book, Why I Became an Atheist: Personal Reflections and Additional Arguments, which can be found online. It contains a few chapters that didn’t make it into this new edition. So far to date, I have edited two additional works that further argue for what I’m doing here, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Prometheus Books, 2010), and The End of Christianity (Prometheus Books, 2011). Another book, cowritten with Christian professor Dr. Randal Rauser, titled God or Godless? is set to come out in 2012.
Some readers have grumbled a bit because there isn’t an index in the back of this book. If there were one it would make the book even bigger, since I mention a huge number of names and topics. If you want an index you can find one on Amazon.com. Just click on the “Search Inside this Book” feature and type in whatever word or phrase you’re looking for to find where I mention it.
Finally, a big thanks goes out to Hector Avalos, Graham Oppy, Andrea Weisberger, John Beversluis, Keith Parsons, Richard Carrier, Joshua Sharp, Felipe Leon, and Matthew J. Green, who all offered insightful comments in one way or another on various sections of this book. I also want to thank the various bloggers and commenters on my blog who helped by discussing these issues. Chris Knight-Griffin, just like Joe Holman before him, provided an additional pair of eyes to catch things I didn’t. I would also like to thank Brian McMahon, my copyeditor at Prometheus Books, for doing an excellent job.
All errors are mine and mine alone, but keep in mind I don’t claim anything so preposterous as that this book is inerrant.
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ENDNOTES [Added are a few comments below]
1. Norman Geisler, “From Apologist to Atheist: A Critical Review,” Christian Apologetics Journal 6, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 93–94. This is a review of my self-published book.
[Norm reached out to me after I my self-published book came out. We carried on a cordial email debate that lasted more than a few months back-and-forth. He was of the understanding that his faith was reasonable and that he could reason people into faith. That's when I did the research mentioned into the psychology of belief mentioned in this Introduction, reflected in several Endnotes below.]
2. Robert Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), p. xi.
3. There are many books showing this fact. See, for example, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007); Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008); Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (Boston: Mariner Books, 2009); Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown Archetype, 2010), and Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts to Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (New York: Times Books, 2011).
4. See “Whoring after Her Lovers: The Quest for Power, Control, Exploitative Domination, and the Industry of Accreditation—Or, How Academic Manipulators Have Become the New Magisterium,” http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/lover357908.shtml (accessed November 14, 2011).
5. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (New York: Broadway Books, 2008). 469.
6. By “cultic” I mean those versions of Christianity that evangelical Christians deem as intellectual deviations from “true” Christianity. See Walter Martin’s The Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1985), which addresses some of these “cults.” I myself am no longer in the habit of defining who is a Christian and who is not.
7. Ruth A. Tucker, Walking Away from Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2002).
8. As a good personal friend of mine from seminary days, Sennett told me he’s planning on revising this book significantly in light of some personal events that have taken place in his life. He provided me with a copy of this manuscript. [Sennett never told me what those personal events were, and as of this date he never published his manuscript.]
9. Terence Penelhum, “A Belated Return,” in Philosophers Who Believe, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1993), pp. 223–36.
10. See Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola, “Preachers Who Are Not Believers,” Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies, http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/Non-Believing-Clergy.pdf (accessed November 14, 2011).
11. This quote can be found on the back cover of Taking Every Thought Captive: Essays in Honor of James D. Strauss, ed. Richard A. Knopp and John D. Castelein (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1997). [An obituary of Strauss can be found here.]
12. To read my critique of liberal Christian theology, go to my blog Debunking Christianity, http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/ and do a search for “The Problem with Liberal Theology.” When it comes to the Catholic Church, I maintain that if the church has been wrong in the past regarding the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the scandal involving molester priests and the subsequent attempted cover-up, then I have no reason to think it is correct today. It just does not look like a divine institution at all. With regard to liberal “communities of faith,” I think it’s very probable that whole communities of faith can be wrong about religious truth claims, given their proliferation.
To read a nice critique of liberal faith see Paul Tobin’s “Excursus A: Liberals and the Bible,” in his book The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: A Skeptics Guide to the Bible and the Historical Jesus (Sandy Bedfordshire, UK: Authors Online, 2009), pp. 187–96. Of course, no better critique of liberalism has been written than Hector Avalos’s The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).
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