I Chose Faith over Fear
Some would say that, when I realized I could no longer believe in God, I lost my faith. I even used this phrasing to explain my changed views to others once or twice, but something about it never struck me quite right, and after thinking it over a bit, I realized why these words had seemed ill-fitted to the situation. It was because all my life I had heard the word "faith" used in two different ways without realizing it, and while I had given up on something that is called faith in certain circumstances, I hadn't stopped exercising the thing that is more broadly referred to as faith at all.
You see, I had gone a very long time without realizing that people were calling two different, and in fact contradictory, concepts by the same name. Now, I don't want to give the impression here that it's somehow wrong, bad, or incorrect for a word to have contradictory usages. The meanings of words tend to shift over time—that's simply how language works—and sometimes people come to apply a word to a greater and greater number of concepts, and some of these concepts might in the end have large differences between them even if they also share enough similarity to have brought the same word to mind. It's not (linguistically) problematic, for instance, to say that society sanctioned the purchase of goods from certain nations but because the government sanctioned those nations the goods weren't available for purchase. As long as meaning is understood, it's all fine and good for language to have its quirks. But what you don't want going on is a bait-and-switch, a situation in which people refuse to acknowledge the differences in the ways a word is used or in which they try to convince you that one thing really is another.
To some extent, I think this sort of bait-and-switch tends to occur when people talk about faith. They tell stories that illustrate the power of faith, but later on, when you're being told to have faith in something even though it makes no sense, the idea being promoted is not at all the same idea those stories illustrated. This shift in usage isn't meant to be a con—I don't think people even realize they're doing it—but nevertheless you've been sold on something, you've come to respect this concept called faith, and now you're being given something completely different and told to take it and treat it with the same respect just because it goes by the same name.
In its broader meaning, the meaning that sells people, faith is something we can't do without. This faith is the concept we learn about naturally through stories, conversations, and observations of the ways people interact. It is synonymous with words like "confidence" and "trust," and it is rooted in experience and knowledge of a person or thing. People have faith in individuals when they know them well enough to trust their intentions or when they see potential that indicates their abilities. We have faith in systems that have yielded good results in the past and in ideas that dependably turn out to be correct when tested. Faith is basically allowing yourself the freedom to extrapolate a bit, and living without it would be extremely difficult and inefficient. It's not pleasant to maintain a perpetual fear that people might be out to get you no matter how many times they show good character, or to never allow yourself to trust that the sun will rise tomorrow.
But it's also important to note that going too far in the other direction isn't a good thing either. Having faith in people and things that have earned your trust makes life much easier, but placing full trust in something or someone who you know nothing about is risky, and extending it to someone who has shown signs of abusing that trust is just a bad idea. Faith with no basis in knowledge and faith applied in spite of knowledge are very different things from faith that grows out of knowledge, familiarity, and relationship.
When it came to questions of religion, in the end I found myself torn between the options of placing faith in the idea of God's existence and of placing faith in my own ability to understand reality.
My whole life I had struggled to understand why I never heard, felt, sensed—what have you—God communicating with me. People all around me said that God talked to them and that they had a relationship with him, that he was what they loved most. I wanted to love God like that, but since I was never able to sense or experience him, it was difficult to keep going back to the same sources where I should have been able to find him (church, Bible reading, worship music, etc.) with any excitement or attraction. It was like trying to get excited to log into a chatroom where I had never seen signs of anyone else joining or to go meet someone who quite literally had not shown up to any of our intended get-togethers for the last twenty years.
My lack of personal experiences of God led me to look for other signs of him, and the more I looked for God, the more I came across information that showed it was unlikely he was real. In fact, there was so much information of this sort that it was more of a struggle to maintain a belief in God's existence than to give it up. So why at that point did I not immediately admit to myself that Christianity just wasn't correct? The unfortunate answer is, because I was afraid of hell. I was influenced by that way of thinking that says you can probably never be sure of the answers to religious questions so it's better to just do whatever you've been told will keep you out of hell. For a while, my fear was strong enough to keep me from believing that the reality staring me in the face was actually real.
This, I want to emphasize, was not faith, this believing in something I had no good reason to believe in simply because it came with a big enough threat to scare me out of evaluating things in a reasonable way. Yes, the idea of hell was terrifying, something that I couldn't risk ever experiencing if it was real, but the truth was that anyone could propose the existence of any terrifying thing. By itself, a claim that a terrible experience existed couldn't be a good enough reason for me to start doing anything and everything to avoid that experience without first finding out if it was real. I could spend my every moment trying to avoid curses, monsters, and conspiracies, all for nothing. This wouldn't do. I had to have a reason to conclude that hell, let alone anything else that formed a part of Christian belief, was real before I could go to the lengths of organizing my whole life around avoiding it.
What I did by finally allowing myself to say that God was not real was to choose faith in things that had proven their dependability time and again over a fear that came from my belief in the existence of someone who had consistently failed to show signs of existing. I chose to put unreasonable fears in their place and trust my ability to think, understand, and reach conclusions about the world around me. This ability, while not perfect, was at least good enough to get me through life each day. I didn't find myself stumbling through an incomprehensible world, constantly encountering inexplicable and unconnected events, unable to exert influence on the things around me or to predict what would happen next in the majority of situations. Instead, my senses and the logic I used to draw conclusions from their input consistently provided me with a coherent picture of the world that responded as expected when I interacted with it. Even when I discovered I had been mistaken about something, I was still using these same senses and this same logic to understand the source of confusion and correct for it.
Besides the fact that I experienced the dependability of my ability to understand the world every day, there was also the fact that serious logical problems arose if I thought I couldn't trust it. If my ability to reason and reach conclusions could not be trusted, then how could I trust that I was correct in coming to the conclusion that it could not be trusted? If I had done my best to understand the world accurately and it seemed to me that God did not exist and the only way I could continue to believe in God was to say that my brain was broken and didn't actually come up with dependable conclusions although it seemed to, then how could I at the same time trust that this broken brain was correct in insisting that God must exist?
My own sensing and thinking abilities had all this to recommend them. The day in, day out experience and the logical impossibility of erasing my trust in their accuracy in order to preserve trust in the accuracy of anything else. God, on the other hand, offered little to nothing to inspire confidence, trust, faith. There was a book with many wise teachings that claimed God existed, and I had grown up in a community of people who said the same thing. But there were other revered books in the world with communities of their own gathered around them, people who believed wholeheartedly in the religions they had grown up with and apparently took some sort of comfort or enjoyment from them, and yet, according to the words of our book and our community, these people were sincere but deceived. By the admission of our book and our community then, deception of this scale was nothing unusual. One could not trust the words of ancient scripture or the centuries of tradition that had formed around it or the feelings of assurance that a particular deity existed that were inspired by it: The majority of the world's population experienced all these things, but for deities who certainly did not exist. If I couldn't be a good Christian without saying that everyone else's sense of certainty in the correctness of their religion was deception, then I couldn't be a good Christian without having something more than this sense to point me towards God either.
That something more had never materialized. My book and my community portrayed God as loving, caring, personal, and relational—as a being who deeply desired meaningful communication with individuals. And yet I had never been able to find this communication that God was supposedly eager to share. They also said that God had created the world to work in an orderly way and given us the ability to explore and learn about it. I had been doing this my whole life with the hopes that I would find God, but instead I had found evidence against God's existence.
According to the way I had always heard Christians use the word "faith" in this specific context of faith vs. skepticism, I should have continued to have "faith" in God no matter what lack of evidence for his existence or what weight of evidence against it I encountered. People who wanted to defend and promote Christianity stressed that God would not prove his existence to a skeptic because he required "faith." And this was where the bait and switch was taking place. Sure, it's fine to use the word faith in this way. If I had to write a definition for this particular usage of the word, I would say something like, "a commitment to holding a particular belief regardless of the discovery of any seemingly contradictory evidence and without a requirement that supporting evidence be provided." It's not a problem that a word naming this concept should exist. And people do use the word faith in this way; therefore the word faith can be said to have this meaning, among other meanings. But this isn't the faith that I saw taught in the Bible at all. What had I read about in the stories of the giants of faith that my spiritual advisors had always encouraged me to emulate?
Well, there was Abraham, a man who trusted in a promise whose fulfilment could only occur generations after his own lifetime. Where did his faith in God's promise come from? We see that his story starts, in Genesis 12, with a message he received from God. God specifically tells Abraham (originally Abram) in Genesis 12:1–3 to move from one place to another and promises to make him into a great nation. God then appears to him again just four verses later with a similar promise. God talks to Abraham again in Genesis 13:14–17. In Genesis 15, God appears to Abraham in a vision in which he has a conversation with Abraham, answers his questions, and makes a formal pact to say that his promise will be fulfilled. And things continue in this way: Abraham exercises faith by believing that God will keep his word in the future, but he has very good reason to have faith in God in the first place because God keeps in touch with him. They talk. There is real communication, real experiential knowledge of what God's character is.
Sticking with the Old Testament, there are numerous minor characters like Noah and the many judges and prophets who show faith by taking action according to something God has said to them. But they are rarely portrayed as having uncertainty about whether the instructions they are given have really come from God or not. Their faith journeys begin after supernatural encounters, such as visions, clear words from God, or visits from angels, that get their attention and leave them without a doubt about what was said and who said it. Their faith has nothing to do with wondering whether God is real or struggling to determine whether an event that could easily be just a coincidence is actually a sign from a God who has never talked to them. Instead, they start off knowing that they've had an encounter with God, and their faith is all about trusting in God's character: believing that he will do what he promises to do even when it takes time or obeying his instructions despite difficulties that come from doing so. This sort of faith makes sense when it is placed in a person whose history of faithfulness you have heard of and whose existence is obvious to you because he's just talked to you.
Of course, there are skeptics in the Old Testament as well. Gideon is a famous example. His story starts in Judges 6, a chapter that tells the story of how an angel appears to him to say that God is calling him to save his nation from invaders. Gideon responds with sarcasm and doubt, saying that God seems to have abandoned the nation and that he himself would be a terrible choice of someone to save it anyway. The angel persists, and Gideon decides to ask for a sign to prove that this message is from God. It's not until the angel makes an offering of food burst into flame in front of him that he starts to believe in what is being said. But even after becoming convinced that God has really sent an angel to him, he has to confirm the message two more times. Gideon asks God to prove that he will keep his word, first by causing dew to form only on a fleece he leaves on the ground one night and then again by causing the dew to form everywhere except on the fleece. Both times, God responds with the proof Gideon asks for, and Gideon finally goes on to save his people in battle as commanded.
Moses too shows some skepticism when God first appears to him in the burning bush (Exodus 3–4). He doesn't doubt that God is talking to him, but he doubts God's ability to come up with a good plan, saying that he isn't a talented enough speaker to handle what God wants him to do, as well as presenting several concerns about whether people will believe he has been sent by God. God responds to all Moses' questions and doubts with communication. He explains how these problems will be addressed or says there is nothing to worry about, and eventually Moses goes to do as he's been instructed.
The vital point in both of these stories of doubt is that God is not portrayed as responding to skepticism with silence or through the mouth of someone who tells the doubting person that it's ridiculous to think God would prove himself to them. The way things are told in the Bible, God makes an effort to establish trust with people. The faith of each person is based on their certainty that God has communicated with them and shown himself able to do what he says. Some people believe this easily, while others require convincing, but God is shown to get all of them to where they need to be before they carry out the tasks he has for them.
The most prominent New Testament stories of faith concern Jesus' disciples and Paul. That is, (1) many people who are said to have spent time around Jesus, watching the way he lived, hearing his teachings, seeing him perform miracles, and then witnessing several appearances of him resurrected from the dead, and (2) one man who claims to have had a vision in which Jesus appeared to him and convinced him to change his ways and then continues to be led by the Holy Spirit and by divine instruction given through dreams. Let's single out Thomas from among the disciples, the man who is known for refusing to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead unless he could see Jesus again in person and touch his wounds. The story goes that Jesus appeared to Thomas, giving him exactly the reassurance he needed to believe. Just as in the Old Testament, we are dealing here with faith based on relationship and experience. The New Testament heroes of faith have very good reason to show faith, and the people who struggle to believe are given what they need to establish the foundation necessary for faith.
The sort of faith the Bible talks about is the same as our faith in the people around us: something that happens because of knowledge of who someone is, something that would not be possible without knowledge. That is what the stories illustrate.
When people say to maintain faith in God's existence despite all contradictory evidence and lack of divine communication, this is not the same usage of the word faith. This is a different concept, one that has no requirement for relationship or experience. And when I was too afraid of hell to admit that what I had always believed just didn't make sense, that ability to persist in a belief was not faith at all. In the end, I chose the informed type of faith that pervaded daily life over both of these things.
Although I had lost one type of faith, my choice to believe with no foundation, I was exercising more of the other faith than ever before. I was finally choosing to place the proper degree of trust in logic, in my ability to think and perceive, in the idea that I wasn't crazy. In the past, I had let fear rule over these things, and that had passed for faith in God. Now, even though fear still chanted a string of "what ifs" at me, I was choosing to have confidence in the things that had earned that confidence over the years. To do anything else would not have been true to the foundational concept of faith I had been taught. Although these things had proven their dependability repeatedly, in the past I had abandoned all confidence in them at the first twinge of fear. I had doubted them because the threat of hell was so effective at inspiring doubt in anything that tried to quiet it. Giving up religion was the first time I truly held onto faith in the face of fear and leaned on what I knew was true even though my feelings and the people around me told me to do otherwise.
And you know what? By doing this I discovered that what I had been told in church was true all along: Faith can move mountains. There is power in choosing to trust what works and freedom in standing up to your fears.
For as long as I could remember, my life had been overshadowed by a mountain of self-loathing that came from the belief that it was my fault God didn't talk to me, but once I allowed myself to believe what I knew was true, this massive problem I had given up on escaping started to vanish. It was okay now to simply admit that God wasn't there, and that meant I wasn't such a bad person after all.
The mountain of fear and uncertainty over hell was moved by my faith in reason as well, and in one respect you could say by my faith in God too. I started off fearing that no matter how good my reasons for not believing in God might be they would never be good enough to overcome the fear of being wrong, but after making my choice, in the process of sticking to it I discovered more reasons to trust that it was the right one. I say that my "faith in God" was part of this process because, in a sense, declaring to myself and others that I no longer believed in God was one last way of asking, "Are you there?" and the lack of any answer finally convinced me down to an emotional level that stories of heaven and hell were nothing to worry about. The God I had been taught from infancy to have faith in would never have behaved in the way I was experiencing. I could believe that well-meaning people had invented him and that that was why claims about him didn't match up with reality. I couldn't believe that he was real but indifferent, petty, or cruel. Through the years of silence when I did all the Christian things I was supposed to do and constantly prayed that God would show me anything about my life he wanted me to change, people often told me not to worry if God didn't communicate with me because it probably meant there was nothing that needed to be said—a no news is good news philosophy. They assured me that if I was ever off track God would make sure to get through to me to tell me what I was doing wrong. Clearly the idea that God would only talk to me if I needed to be corrected had already become problematic. It didn't sound anything like the sort of relationship people said this father God wanted to have with his children. But when even the aspect of discipline and correction failed to appear, I knew with certainty that God was nothing more than a story. I had enough faith in the character of the God the Bible described to know that he didn't give his children stones when they asked for bread. If he was real, how could I possibly go more off track than by abandoning all belief in him and starting to tell my story to others so that they would do the same? If there was a time for warnings, red flags, roadblocks, even punishments, anything to turn me back from danger, this would have been the time, but instead of encountering anything of the sort, I instead felt like my life was moving more smoothly and happily than ever before. I had let go of my worries and self hatred and the frustration of trying to patch up beliefs that kept springing leaks, and I felt like a fugitive who had just been pardoned going through a day without anxiety for the first time. There was no way the God who people around me said they knew would create this elaborate deception, always making it seem like something was wrong as long as I tried to live for him and then making it seem like life finally made sense only when I concluded he wasn't real. If this was the case, then God must have really hated me, really wanted to make sure I would never find him no matter how diligently I tried to. Even after all the trouble this imaginary God had put me through, I had enough faith in his character to know he wasn't a monster like that.
Fear would have had me keep wondering if God was real even if that made him a monster. Fear would have told me to keep believing I was a terrible person if that was what was necessary to keep all my other beliefs intact. If I had let it, fear would have squashed logic and taken priority over happiness, and I would still be fighting my way through life hoping that God would somehow change me into something I wasn't. I'm so glad I had enough faith to become an atheist.
I suppose I'd like people to understand all this, about different meanings of the word faith and how in some ways leaving a religion has nothing to do with losing faith, because I know there are other people out there who struggle with the question of what faith is and wonder if they're doing something wrong when they keep experiencing doubts. And I know there are people out there who are comfortable coexisting with their doubts and maintaining their religious beliefs, and lots of them are brilliant people, and I can't help asking myself if some good might come of it if they allowed themselves to say that the way things look to them is the way things are, if they didn't have this one important area of life in which they had to cut off their reasoning at a certain point and forbid some conclusions. Part of my compulsion to keep writing about religion is the thought that maybe some of these people will be helped by something I write and will get to have that experience of everything falling into place and finally making sense like I got to have.
And part of it is just my desire to explain myself and to explain away all the mistaken ideas about nonreligious people I heard growing up and bought into for a long time. I think I've addressed pretty thoroughly here the misconception that people stop believing in God because their faith is weak or because it's easier not to make an effort to live for God. For a lot of people, it's just the opposite. Giving up certain ingrained beliefs means fighting hard to exercise faith founded in reason rather than caving to the unreasonable demands of emotions. It's been just a little over a year now since I started making that effort, and hands down this has been the best year of my life. It was preceded by several months of terror that everything that had given my life structure might be fake, but once I made up my mind and accepted the unavoidable negatives, the positives outweighed them all to a degree I couldn't have imagined. At first it was a struggle to choose faith. It was difficult not to let fear have control again. But the more I exercised that faith the stronger it got and the more experiences I walked through that added to it. Faith will always be an indispensable part of life for human beings (and probably for any other beings with minds that share similarities to ours if there are any out there), and I can't express enough what an improvement it has been to finally give it the place it always deserved in my life.
You see, I had gone a very long time without realizing that people were calling two different, and in fact contradictory, concepts by the same name. Now, I don't want to give the impression here that it's somehow wrong, bad, or incorrect for a word to have contradictory usages. The meanings of words tend to shift over time—that's simply how language works—and sometimes people come to apply a word to a greater and greater number of concepts, and some of these concepts might in the end have large differences between them even if they also share enough similarity to have brought the same word to mind. It's not (linguistically) problematic, for instance, to say that society sanctioned the purchase of goods from certain nations but because the government sanctioned those nations the goods weren't available for purchase. As long as meaning is understood, it's all fine and good for language to have its quirks. But what you don't want going on is a bait-and-switch, a situation in which people refuse to acknowledge the differences in the ways a word is used or in which they try to convince you that one thing really is another.
To some extent, I think this sort of bait-and-switch tends to occur when people talk about faith. They tell stories that illustrate the power of faith, but later on, when you're being told to have faith in something even though it makes no sense, the idea being promoted is not at all the same idea those stories illustrated. This shift in usage isn't meant to be a con—I don't think people even realize they're doing it—but nevertheless you've been sold on something, you've come to respect this concept called faith, and now you're being given something completely different and told to take it and treat it with the same respect just because it goes by the same name.
In its broader meaning, the meaning that sells people, faith is something we can't do without. This faith is the concept we learn about naturally through stories, conversations, and observations of the ways people interact. It is synonymous with words like "confidence" and "trust," and it is rooted in experience and knowledge of a person or thing. People have faith in individuals when they know them well enough to trust their intentions or when they see potential that indicates their abilities. We have faith in systems that have yielded good results in the past and in ideas that dependably turn out to be correct when tested. Faith is basically allowing yourself the freedom to extrapolate a bit, and living without it would be extremely difficult and inefficient. It's not pleasant to maintain a perpetual fear that people might be out to get you no matter how many times they show good character, or to never allow yourself to trust that the sun will rise tomorrow.
But it's also important to note that going too far in the other direction isn't a good thing either. Having faith in people and things that have earned your trust makes life much easier, but placing full trust in something or someone who you know nothing about is risky, and extending it to someone who has shown signs of abusing that trust is just a bad idea. Faith with no basis in knowledge and faith applied in spite of knowledge are very different things from faith that grows out of knowledge, familiarity, and relationship.
When it came to questions of religion, in the end I found myself torn between the options of placing faith in the idea of God's existence and of placing faith in my own ability to understand reality.
My whole life I had struggled to understand why I never heard, felt, sensed—what have you—God communicating with me. People all around me said that God talked to them and that they had a relationship with him, that he was what they loved most. I wanted to love God like that, but since I was never able to sense or experience him, it was difficult to keep going back to the same sources where I should have been able to find him (church, Bible reading, worship music, etc.) with any excitement or attraction. It was like trying to get excited to log into a chatroom where I had never seen signs of anyone else joining or to go meet someone who quite literally had not shown up to any of our intended get-togethers for the last twenty years.
My lack of personal experiences of God led me to look for other signs of him, and the more I looked for God, the more I came across information that showed it was unlikely he was real. In fact, there was so much information of this sort that it was more of a struggle to maintain a belief in God's existence than to give it up. So why at that point did I not immediately admit to myself that Christianity just wasn't correct? The unfortunate answer is, because I was afraid of hell. I was influenced by that way of thinking that says you can probably never be sure of the answers to religious questions so it's better to just do whatever you've been told will keep you out of hell. For a while, my fear was strong enough to keep me from believing that the reality staring me in the face was actually real.
This, I want to emphasize, was not faith, this believing in something I had no good reason to believe in simply because it came with a big enough threat to scare me out of evaluating things in a reasonable way. Yes, the idea of hell was terrifying, something that I couldn't risk ever experiencing if it was real, but the truth was that anyone could propose the existence of any terrifying thing. By itself, a claim that a terrible experience existed couldn't be a good enough reason for me to start doing anything and everything to avoid that experience without first finding out if it was real. I could spend my every moment trying to avoid curses, monsters, and conspiracies, all for nothing. This wouldn't do. I had to have a reason to conclude that hell, let alone anything else that formed a part of Christian belief, was real before I could go to the lengths of organizing my whole life around avoiding it.
What I did by finally allowing myself to say that God was not real was to choose faith in things that had proven their dependability time and again over a fear that came from my belief in the existence of someone who had consistently failed to show signs of existing. I chose to put unreasonable fears in their place and trust my ability to think, understand, and reach conclusions about the world around me. This ability, while not perfect, was at least good enough to get me through life each day. I didn't find myself stumbling through an incomprehensible world, constantly encountering inexplicable and unconnected events, unable to exert influence on the things around me or to predict what would happen next in the majority of situations. Instead, my senses and the logic I used to draw conclusions from their input consistently provided me with a coherent picture of the world that responded as expected when I interacted with it. Even when I discovered I had been mistaken about something, I was still using these same senses and this same logic to understand the source of confusion and correct for it.
Besides the fact that I experienced the dependability of my ability to understand the world every day, there was also the fact that serious logical problems arose if I thought I couldn't trust it. If my ability to reason and reach conclusions could not be trusted, then how could I trust that I was correct in coming to the conclusion that it could not be trusted? If I had done my best to understand the world accurately and it seemed to me that God did not exist and the only way I could continue to believe in God was to say that my brain was broken and didn't actually come up with dependable conclusions although it seemed to, then how could I at the same time trust that this broken brain was correct in insisting that God must exist?
My own sensing and thinking abilities had all this to recommend them. The day in, day out experience and the logical impossibility of erasing my trust in their accuracy in order to preserve trust in the accuracy of anything else. God, on the other hand, offered little to nothing to inspire confidence, trust, faith. There was a book with many wise teachings that claimed God existed, and I had grown up in a community of people who said the same thing. But there were other revered books in the world with communities of their own gathered around them, people who believed wholeheartedly in the religions they had grown up with and apparently took some sort of comfort or enjoyment from them, and yet, according to the words of our book and our community, these people were sincere but deceived. By the admission of our book and our community then, deception of this scale was nothing unusual. One could not trust the words of ancient scripture or the centuries of tradition that had formed around it or the feelings of assurance that a particular deity existed that were inspired by it: The majority of the world's population experienced all these things, but for deities who certainly did not exist. If I couldn't be a good Christian without saying that everyone else's sense of certainty in the correctness of their religion was deception, then I couldn't be a good Christian without having something more than this sense to point me towards God either.
That something more had never materialized. My book and my community portrayed God as loving, caring, personal, and relational—as a being who deeply desired meaningful communication with individuals. And yet I had never been able to find this communication that God was supposedly eager to share. They also said that God had created the world to work in an orderly way and given us the ability to explore and learn about it. I had been doing this my whole life with the hopes that I would find God, but instead I had found evidence against God's existence.
According to the way I had always heard Christians use the word "faith" in this specific context of faith vs. skepticism, I should have continued to have "faith" in God no matter what lack of evidence for his existence or what weight of evidence against it I encountered. People who wanted to defend and promote Christianity stressed that God would not prove his existence to a skeptic because he required "faith." And this was where the bait and switch was taking place. Sure, it's fine to use the word faith in this way. If I had to write a definition for this particular usage of the word, I would say something like, "a commitment to holding a particular belief regardless of the discovery of any seemingly contradictory evidence and without a requirement that supporting evidence be provided." It's not a problem that a word naming this concept should exist. And people do use the word faith in this way; therefore the word faith can be said to have this meaning, among other meanings. But this isn't the faith that I saw taught in the Bible at all. What had I read about in the stories of the giants of faith that my spiritual advisors had always encouraged me to emulate?
Well, there was Abraham, a man who trusted in a promise whose fulfilment could only occur generations after his own lifetime. Where did his faith in God's promise come from? We see that his story starts, in Genesis 12, with a message he received from God. God specifically tells Abraham (originally Abram) in Genesis 12:1–3 to move from one place to another and promises to make him into a great nation. God then appears to him again just four verses later with a similar promise. God talks to Abraham again in Genesis 13:14–17. In Genesis 15, God appears to Abraham in a vision in which he has a conversation with Abraham, answers his questions, and makes a formal pact to say that his promise will be fulfilled. And things continue in this way: Abraham exercises faith by believing that God will keep his word in the future, but he has very good reason to have faith in God in the first place because God keeps in touch with him. They talk. There is real communication, real experiential knowledge of what God's character is.
Sticking with the Old Testament, there are numerous minor characters like Noah and the many judges and prophets who show faith by taking action according to something God has said to them. But they are rarely portrayed as having uncertainty about whether the instructions they are given have really come from God or not. Their faith journeys begin after supernatural encounters, such as visions, clear words from God, or visits from angels, that get their attention and leave them without a doubt about what was said and who said it. Their faith has nothing to do with wondering whether God is real or struggling to determine whether an event that could easily be just a coincidence is actually a sign from a God who has never talked to them. Instead, they start off knowing that they've had an encounter with God, and their faith is all about trusting in God's character: believing that he will do what he promises to do even when it takes time or obeying his instructions despite difficulties that come from doing so. This sort of faith makes sense when it is placed in a person whose history of faithfulness you have heard of and whose existence is obvious to you because he's just talked to you.
Of course, there are skeptics in the Old Testament as well. Gideon is a famous example. His story starts in Judges 6, a chapter that tells the story of how an angel appears to him to say that God is calling him to save his nation from invaders. Gideon responds with sarcasm and doubt, saying that God seems to have abandoned the nation and that he himself would be a terrible choice of someone to save it anyway. The angel persists, and Gideon decides to ask for a sign to prove that this message is from God. It's not until the angel makes an offering of food burst into flame in front of him that he starts to believe in what is being said. But even after becoming convinced that God has really sent an angel to him, he has to confirm the message two more times. Gideon asks God to prove that he will keep his word, first by causing dew to form only on a fleece he leaves on the ground one night and then again by causing the dew to form everywhere except on the fleece. Both times, God responds with the proof Gideon asks for, and Gideon finally goes on to save his people in battle as commanded.
Moses too shows some skepticism when God first appears to him in the burning bush (Exodus 3–4). He doesn't doubt that God is talking to him, but he doubts God's ability to come up with a good plan, saying that he isn't a talented enough speaker to handle what God wants him to do, as well as presenting several concerns about whether people will believe he has been sent by God. God responds to all Moses' questions and doubts with communication. He explains how these problems will be addressed or says there is nothing to worry about, and eventually Moses goes to do as he's been instructed.
The vital point in both of these stories of doubt is that God is not portrayed as responding to skepticism with silence or through the mouth of someone who tells the doubting person that it's ridiculous to think God would prove himself to them. The way things are told in the Bible, God makes an effort to establish trust with people. The faith of each person is based on their certainty that God has communicated with them and shown himself able to do what he says. Some people believe this easily, while others require convincing, but God is shown to get all of them to where they need to be before they carry out the tasks he has for them.
The most prominent New Testament stories of faith concern Jesus' disciples and Paul. That is, (1) many people who are said to have spent time around Jesus, watching the way he lived, hearing his teachings, seeing him perform miracles, and then witnessing several appearances of him resurrected from the dead, and (2) one man who claims to have had a vision in which Jesus appeared to him and convinced him to change his ways and then continues to be led by the Holy Spirit and by divine instruction given through dreams. Let's single out Thomas from among the disciples, the man who is known for refusing to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead unless he could see Jesus again in person and touch his wounds. The story goes that Jesus appeared to Thomas, giving him exactly the reassurance he needed to believe. Just as in the Old Testament, we are dealing here with faith based on relationship and experience. The New Testament heroes of faith have very good reason to show faith, and the people who struggle to believe are given what they need to establish the foundation necessary for faith.
The sort of faith the Bible talks about is the same as our faith in the people around us: something that happens because of knowledge of who someone is, something that would not be possible without knowledge. That is what the stories illustrate.
When people say to maintain faith in God's existence despite all contradictory evidence and lack of divine communication, this is not the same usage of the word faith. This is a different concept, one that has no requirement for relationship or experience. And when I was too afraid of hell to admit that what I had always believed just didn't make sense, that ability to persist in a belief was not faith at all. In the end, I chose the informed type of faith that pervaded daily life over both of these things.
Although I had lost one type of faith, my choice to believe with no foundation, I was exercising more of the other faith than ever before. I was finally choosing to place the proper degree of trust in logic, in my ability to think and perceive, in the idea that I wasn't crazy. In the past, I had let fear rule over these things, and that had passed for faith in God. Now, even though fear still chanted a string of "what ifs" at me, I was choosing to have confidence in the things that had earned that confidence over the years. To do anything else would not have been true to the foundational concept of faith I had been taught. Although these things had proven their dependability repeatedly, in the past I had abandoned all confidence in them at the first twinge of fear. I had doubted them because the threat of hell was so effective at inspiring doubt in anything that tried to quiet it. Giving up religion was the first time I truly held onto faith in the face of fear and leaned on what I knew was true even though my feelings and the people around me told me to do otherwise.
And you know what? By doing this I discovered that what I had been told in church was true all along: Faith can move mountains. There is power in choosing to trust what works and freedom in standing up to your fears.
For as long as I could remember, my life had been overshadowed by a mountain of self-loathing that came from the belief that it was my fault God didn't talk to me, but once I allowed myself to believe what I knew was true, this massive problem I had given up on escaping started to vanish. It was okay now to simply admit that God wasn't there, and that meant I wasn't such a bad person after all.
The mountain of fear and uncertainty over hell was moved by my faith in reason as well, and in one respect you could say by my faith in God too. I started off fearing that no matter how good my reasons for not believing in God might be they would never be good enough to overcome the fear of being wrong, but after making my choice, in the process of sticking to it I discovered more reasons to trust that it was the right one. I say that my "faith in God" was part of this process because, in a sense, declaring to myself and others that I no longer believed in God was one last way of asking, "Are you there?" and the lack of any answer finally convinced me down to an emotional level that stories of heaven and hell were nothing to worry about. The God I had been taught from infancy to have faith in would never have behaved in the way I was experiencing. I could believe that well-meaning people had invented him and that that was why claims about him didn't match up with reality. I couldn't believe that he was real but indifferent, petty, or cruel. Through the years of silence when I did all the Christian things I was supposed to do and constantly prayed that God would show me anything about my life he wanted me to change, people often told me not to worry if God didn't communicate with me because it probably meant there was nothing that needed to be said—a no news is good news philosophy. They assured me that if I was ever off track God would make sure to get through to me to tell me what I was doing wrong. Clearly the idea that God would only talk to me if I needed to be corrected had already become problematic. It didn't sound anything like the sort of relationship people said this father God wanted to have with his children. But when even the aspect of discipline and correction failed to appear, I knew with certainty that God was nothing more than a story. I had enough faith in the character of the God the Bible described to know that he didn't give his children stones when they asked for bread. If he was real, how could I possibly go more off track than by abandoning all belief in him and starting to tell my story to others so that they would do the same? If there was a time for warnings, red flags, roadblocks, even punishments, anything to turn me back from danger, this would have been the time, but instead of encountering anything of the sort, I instead felt like my life was moving more smoothly and happily than ever before. I had let go of my worries and self hatred and the frustration of trying to patch up beliefs that kept springing leaks, and I felt like a fugitive who had just been pardoned going through a day without anxiety for the first time. There was no way the God who people around me said they knew would create this elaborate deception, always making it seem like something was wrong as long as I tried to live for him and then making it seem like life finally made sense only when I concluded he wasn't real. If this was the case, then God must have really hated me, really wanted to make sure I would never find him no matter how diligently I tried to. Even after all the trouble this imaginary God had put me through, I had enough faith in his character to know he wasn't a monster like that.
Fear would have had me keep wondering if God was real even if that made him a monster. Fear would have told me to keep believing I was a terrible person if that was what was necessary to keep all my other beliefs intact. If I had let it, fear would have squashed logic and taken priority over happiness, and I would still be fighting my way through life hoping that God would somehow change me into something I wasn't. I'm so glad I had enough faith to become an atheist.
I suppose I'd like people to understand all this, about different meanings of the word faith and how in some ways leaving a religion has nothing to do with losing faith, because I know there are other people out there who struggle with the question of what faith is and wonder if they're doing something wrong when they keep experiencing doubts. And I know there are people out there who are comfortable coexisting with their doubts and maintaining their religious beliefs, and lots of them are brilliant people, and I can't help asking myself if some good might come of it if they allowed themselves to say that the way things look to them is the way things are, if they didn't have this one important area of life in which they had to cut off their reasoning at a certain point and forbid some conclusions. Part of my compulsion to keep writing about religion is the thought that maybe some of these people will be helped by something I write and will get to have that experience of everything falling into place and finally making sense like I got to have.
And part of it is just my desire to explain myself and to explain away all the mistaken ideas about nonreligious people I heard growing up and bought into for a long time. I think I've addressed pretty thoroughly here the misconception that people stop believing in God because their faith is weak or because it's easier not to make an effort to live for God. For a lot of people, it's just the opposite. Giving up certain ingrained beliefs means fighting hard to exercise faith founded in reason rather than caving to the unreasonable demands of emotions. It's been just a little over a year now since I started making that effort, and hands down this has been the best year of my life. It was preceded by several months of terror that everything that had given my life structure might be fake, but once I made up my mind and accepted the unavoidable negatives, the positives outweighed them all to a degree I couldn't have imagined. At first it was a struggle to choose faith. It was difficult not to let fear have control again. But the more I exercised that faith the stronger it got and the more experiences I walked through that added to it. Faith will always be an indispensable part of life for human beings (and probably for any other beings with minds that share similarities to ours if there are any out there), and I can't express enough what an improvement it has been to finally give it the place it always deserved in my life.
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