Discussion Grounds

Tom,

Yes, let’s share our personal stories.

I was raised a preacher’s kid in Minnesota, USA. I grew up believing the same as you: orthodox Protestant theology. I went on missions trips around the world, volunteered to assist with an Alpha course, played on the worship band, attended Bible studies, prayed daily, and attended Christian school.

And I experienced God. I even took the Experiencing God course by Henry Blackaby. At times I was overcome with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Other times I felt God nudging me to say a particular thing to someone – and each time I did, they told me it was very meaningful to them. One time my family was praying for a new vehicle (we lived below the poverty line) and I saw a vision of a burgundy minivan driving down the highway. One month later God provided that exact van I had seen in my vision.

When I read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, I was so overwhelmed by its content that I had to slam the book shut every 30 seconds and clench my fists and rock back and forth for a while just to calm down so I could read a bit more. That book taught me how to really fall in love with Jesus – which made obeying him much easier.

My theology evolved over time, of course. I was raised a Creationist but by the time I got to college I had realized there was no denying evolution, and Genesis had to be re-interpreted. Around the same time, I became less interested in the doctrinal accouterments of an ancient religion (were Jesus and Anselm really talking about the same things?) and more concerned with simply living out the mission of Jesus.

But that meant figuring out who Jesus really was. So I started to study what scholars had to say about the real Jesus who ministered to humanity 2,000 years ago.

Reading these scholars introduced me to a new way to look at things – not through the eyes of confirming my own faith, but through the critical, fair, open-minded eyes of someone who wants to know the truth even if it doesn’t confirm his own beliefs. The scholar looks at all the evidence. He looks for ways to disprove his own views, so as to overcome his own cognitive biases. The scholar submits each subject matter to the same criteria. He does not play favorites.

Immediately I could see this was the path to take if I wanted to know the truth. And I wasn’t worried it would destroy my faith. After all, most of the scholars I read had used these methods and still come to think Christianity was true.

Still, what I learned was pretty shocking. The gospels are riddled with contradictions, legends, known lies, and absurdities. Jesus and Paul disagreed on many central issues, and Christian theology had actually sided with Paul against Jesus!

Moreover, Christian scholars had known all this for centuries, and it was taught to seminary graduates like my father, but it had never been taught to me in church or Christian school. Were my pastors and teachers interested in truth, or were they interested in keeping me faithful no matter what? The prediction of Evangelical scholar Daniel Wallace was coming true for me: “The intentional dumbing down of the church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ.”

I also started to wonder how I could accept the miracle claims about Jesus when I rejected even much-better-evidenced miracle claims from other religions as “superstition.”

I admit my journey was unfair. For every skeptical article I read, I probably read five by Christian apologists. I desperately wanted to keep my faith. I loved being a Christian, and I had been taught that unbelievers cannot have any morality or purpose in life.

My apologetic readings led me to study philosophy of religion, too. I tired of the Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell types quickly, and went straight to the best Christian defenders in the world: top-notch analytic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne.

But in the end I had to admit I had no good reasons to think Christianity was true. In fact, I had no reasons to think God even existed.

I was lost and miserable. I felt empty. All the joy and purpose in my life had been pulled out from under my feet. I begged for God – whoever he was – to reveal himself to me. I kept hoping I would find truth in some concept of God, but I didn’t. God was dead, and I had killed him. I had killed my best friend. If only I could rewind the clock and never study anything! I wanted my Christian life back.

My life was pretty sad and aimless for a couple months. But eventually I learned what hundreds of millions of atheists had known for centuries – that there is plenty of purpose and joy to be had without God! Perhaps more.

My rediscovery of moral truth came much later. After losing God, I studied every theory of moral realism I could find. They all made a weak case for the existence of objective moral truths. In fact, moral realists usually used the same lame arguments that theists used to argue for the existence of God: “The burden of proof is on the skeptic,” “Most people feel morality is real so it must be,” and so on.

I gave up on morality. It just didn’t seem to exist. In November 2008 I wrote a short essay embracing moral nihilism.

But in January 2009, a guest on my podcast presented a theory of moral realism that did not commit any of the mistakes common to all the other moral theories I had studied. I was floored. I had not expected that. I immediately bought his book. For several months I tried to find where it went wrong, but I couldn’t. So for now I tentatively believe in objective morality. Specifically, I think desirism is true.

So here I am: 24 years old, atheist, metaphysical naturalist, lover of truth and beauty and morality. That’s my story.

Tom, in your last letter you helpfully outlined what you believe. I look forward to hearing your story of how you got there. Two more things I’d like to be clear about before we proceed are your beliefs about the Bible and about evolution.

My own beliefs about those topics will not surprise you. The Bible is a collection of fully human writings filled with many genres but lots of myth and little history. Evolution is an extremely well-proven scientific theory, though of course it does not rule out the intervention of intelligent agents we could detect (via secret messages from alien designers in our DNA, for example) – it’s just that we have no such evidence so far.

Now, back to our quest to find some common ground. You agreed with everything in my list, with some qualifications.

First, you agree with my statement that “Science is thus far our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world” as long as we understand “natural world” to mean “matter, energy, and their interactions by way of necessity… and chance.” But you noted we probably disagree on what exists in the natural world. You do not think “consciousness, free will, morality, reason, and other phenomena related to human personality” are fully natural.

That’s fine. Let’s back up to where we agree. We agree that science is the best way to gain knowledge about the natural world. And we probably agree that consciousness, reason, and other phenomena of personality are manifested at some level in the natural world – for example, we both believe in physical brain states. It’s just that you also believe there is a supernatural “soul” behind it all. (We can ignore free will and morality for now.) But we agree that science is the best way to truth about the natural world, whatever the natural world happens to contain or not contain.

Second, you weren’t sure what I meant by “The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist a priori.” The term a priori refers to knowledge gained independent of experience. So what I meant is that the supernatural may exist, but we can’t know whether it exists until we go out and experience this world we happen to have been born into it. That is, there is a possible world in which the supernatural does not exist. Perhaps there is also a possible world in which only the supernatural exists. But to know which kind of world we live in, we have to experience it. I think we probably agree on this.

So it seems we do agree on everything in my original list:

• Truth is not relative.
• Science is our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world.
• We humans are plagued by many cognitive biases, which corrupt our pursuit of the truth.
• The laws of logic are true.
• Some propositions are more probably true than others.
• You and I and the external world exist.
• The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist a priori.

Now, let me test the boundaries of our agreement:

I suspect you think Christian belief is not properly basic, as Plantinga does. You sound like an evidentialist to me. If so, you think the truth of Christian belief should be (and can be) inferred from certain evidences – for example religious experience or the complexity of the universe.

I suspect you think the ontological argument does not succeed. The argument itself sounds absurd to most Christians I’ve tried it on, and few philosophers accept it. I also hope you don’t accept it, because it is difficult to discuss in this format.

I suspect you agree with me that science has a lot to say about whether or not Christianity is true. Christianity claims that the supernatural interacts with the natural in certain ways, and so our observations about the natural world imply something about the plausibility of certain theories of the supernatural. For example, you may think that our scientific knowledge about the physical constants of the universe or the complexity of living cells may provide reason to believe in God.

But I can only guess about your beliefs. Please correct me if I’m wrong. And, what else do you think we probably agree about?

Cheers,

Luke