Since I observed dishonesty in evangelicalism in 1990 and left that movement, my views have evolved. Watching the decline of Christianity in America, for me, was like being up in a hot-air balloon that is sinking toward hostile territory, and you are jettisoning all the extraneous weight to keep it afloat. Soon, I discovered that all of it was extraneous- what I call the religion of Christianity- down to the basket itself: the belief in a personal creator, Jesus as their messiah, and following Jesus’ teachings to love. For me, and I think this would be helpful for many people, but not all, I’ve arrived at a place of what I call rational-secular Christianity. Rational because I’m convinced that while not perfect, human reason is God’s gift to us for finding factual truth about the reality around us by looking at the evidence. Secular, because it has been stripped of the human-derived religious trappings (and those are the major reasons people are leaving).

If you take the Bible as an authority, Christians were called to meet for only one reason: to encourage others toward love and good deeds. However, most Christian gatherings are dominated by competitive piety. Therefore, the woods are full of well-meaning people who got too close to Christian gatherings and, rather than coming away encouraged, come away with a body full of arrows, and that’s regrettable.

My life is short, and I have no more Christian friends, so there is no reason for me not to be honest about my views, as I have no more Christian friends to lose. But I do have the hope of being helpful to those who are leaving Christianity, so you do not have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Because it is almost impossible for us to think Christianly without thinking religiously, like trying to understand a completely foreign culture, many Christians cannot understand my position without imposing the MO of religion, competitive piety, and thus more arrows. I have left that game of trying to prove who is superior based on beliefs, churches, or religious practice. While I reject many of evangelicalism’s ideas and those of the postmodernist progressive church, I do not consider myself superior and would welcome their friendship, if they would just put down their bows.

If competitive piety is the cornerstone of most religions, then supernatural inspiration is the foundation that most religions base their entire belief system on; Christianity is no different. Actually, this requirement for supernatural proof is stronger today, or so it seems, than at any other point in Christian history. “I know that God exists because I feel Him, supernaturally, in my heart.” Direct inspiration.

Now, while you will find such language in both the Bible and in Christian traditions, on a human scale it is impossible for us finite creatures to distinguish between the voice of God, divine inspiration, and emotional noise inside our heads. The Bible agrees: Jeremiah 17:9 says the human heart is the most deceitful thing in the cosmos.

This has left many rational-thinking people with a chasm between their spiritual façade and their hidden insecurities in private, what some would call doubts. These doubts often grow, and they’re one of the most common reasons people leave Christianity for good. These doubts grow not because of a moral or spiritual problem, but because of an intellectual one. Just as we can tell if an animal is fitted by nature to live in water by its fins, gills, or webbed feet and flippers, we humans are fitted to live in an objective, rational world by the rational nature of our brains.

In this postmodern world, all truth is subjective, and with Søren Kierkegaard’s irrational leap of faith, we are now like fish or seals living out of water, which is why we are plagued by doubt in our private lives. We are told to neglect rationality and embrace subjectivity and emotional thinking, but most of us instinctively know that such subjectivity is not trustworthy. Imagine boarding a plane and the captain says, “I’m turning off all the instruments and am going to fly this plane today, with my eyes closed, and relying on the spirit of God to guide us.” If that would make you feel safe, you are delusional.

When we approach our belief in a creator and Jesus as the messiah, the first thing we realize, if we know anything about psychology and human behavior, is that our subjective ideas are profoundly untrustworthy. Maybe because my degree was in psychology, I have seen the plethora of studies starting in the early twentieth century, showing how untrustworthy our subjective beliefs are. The classic example is a classroom interrupted when a thief (staged by the professor) comes through the door and steals a woman’s purse. The professor does not discuss what happened until the end of class. He then reviews it and shows that the witnesses are almost always wrong. They say the intruder was black, when they were white. They say it was a man, when it was a woman. They say they came in through door 1, when it was door 2.

My point: if God does speak supernaturally, it would be almost impossible for anyone to know this with certainty. Virtually all horrible cults begin when a group of people is 100% sure that God has spoken to them with a supernatural voice, a work of the Holy Spirit.

So how do we build a Christian perspective without depending on supernatural intervention? It is not easy. When I was an evangelical, we believed and claimed that if you do not believe in a creator, then you are stupid and /or (likely both) immoral. It was based on such verses as Romans 1:19–20: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

The problem with this verse is that it was written in the early first century, when this belief was common. In that Roman period, we knew so little about nature and how it works that people assumed God or gods were at work, and nearly everyone believed that. However, today, we know much more about how nature works. At a basic level, with limited scientific knowledge, there is room for atheistic theories of origins and methods. I believe that you have to study much more to reach the point that it seems certain there must have been a designer. That’s why I hear particle physicists, biochemists, and mathematicians, after living a life as atheists, in the end, suspect there really was an intelligent designer after all.

Let me add that those of simple faith, like their parents who never had curiosity about it and just accepted it, if the object of their faith is correct, it doesn’t matter, does it? But the problem is, it is dangerous. Many with simple faiths will believe that a golden calf is God, or that lightning is God, or that God is an alien from another planet. But religion pressures people to be mentally lazy, to not think, to not be curious, but to accept what they are told, because their main goal is conformity so that they can have power over you.

In conclusion to this long rambling, from my view, the answer is to use the rational minds God has given us to seek truth honestly; while we finite humans cannot reach certainty because our reason is not perfect, it is a noble pursuit. But we can reach a high probability, and on that basis, we can commit to living accordingly. That is my faith. I have studied and have a strong inclination that there is an intelligent designer, and on that rational hunch, I can commit to believing in the Judo-Christian God, Jesus as their Messiah, and following Jesus’s teaching to love others as best I can.

As a footnote, if you are interested in this modern argument that nature testifies to an intelligent designer, I suggest Stephen Meyer’s book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, as a starting place.

Respectfully, Mike