I am working on editing my new book, How Cancer Taught Me to Swear. I worked through this section today, and while it needs more work, I thought it was a concise story of how I left Christianity and then re-converted to Christianity, but apparently a very different Christianity than most people today follow. I had converted to conservative Christianity as a high school senior when a teacher recruited me to be part of The Navigators, a very conservative Christian organization.

From Chapter Five, Finding Religion

The final blow came four years later. Denise and I had married, had two boys, and a third on the way, and, following Jesus’ example, we gave away all our material possessions to the poor and moved into a van for almost two years while we raised financial support to become missionaries in Cyprus, working with refugees from the Lebanese civil war. There, we suffered abuse by the leader, Jason, who didn’t want me to bring Denise and our kids because “they would get in the way.” He quickly reassigned us alone to Cairo, Egypt, the moment our feet hit Cypriot soil. Two years later, the next time we heard from him, he reassigned us to Yemen and wanted me to lie to Denise about it, “Because women are weak and can’t handle such things.” I refused that order, and the order not to take our very sick son to America for medical treatment when the Egyptian doctors said that if we didn’t, he would die. Suddenly, the light went on for me, and I said to God… if there was a God, “This is bullshit!”

Leaving Egypt, I also left that discipleship group, Christianity, and theism. I spent the next decade studying seriously, trying to make up for two decades of ignorance. I wanted to make sense of the world again. However, with further studies into history, abiogenesis, quantum mechanics, geology, string theory, and cosmology, I eventually found atheism wanting. Yet I wanted to approach the idea of God this time with profound candor, something most religions reject.

When you approach the question of God honestly, a paradox emerges. From giant galaxy clusters to quarks, the cosmos is built on an incredible mathematical order. This is not imaginary or confirmation bias. We don’t impose order on the cosmos; we observe the order that is already there. I’ve even heard theoretical physicists, self-proclaimed atheists, confess that the order is eerie. It screams of a designer, a much bigger and more mysterious designer than most Christians imagine. Yet, if there is a personal God, except for creation itself, that God is silent. Internal messages from God, subjective. One of the best examples of this subjective basis of belief is the old Appalachian hymn, which asks the question, “You ask me how I know He lives… He lives within my heart!”

The problem with that approach is that it ignores how unreliable our emotional perceptions are as a basis for epistemology, or for finding truth. Even the Bible calls emotions the most deceitful thing in the universe (Jeremiah 17:9). So, if you base your entire worldview on a hunch or a feeling, how reliable is that?

But while Christianity has always had a subjective side, in some places and periods more than others, the Christianity of today is not your grandfather’s faith. It is profoundly subjective and not palatable to us rational people. But the Christianity of Augustine, Aquinas, and Isaac Newton was deeply rational. During the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic period—all driven by objectivity—we looked at evidence and reached conclusions through deductive and sometimes inductive reasoning. Those movements solved most of human difficulties… but not all of them, especially moral problems such as cruelty and war. The trouble with those movements, from a Christian religious perspective, is that they challenged several long-held church traditions, such as the Earth being six thousand years old, animals being created as they are without any preceding transitional forms, and the invalidation of some so-called miracles, such as the weeping Virgin Mary Statue of Sicily.

In response to these challenges to church tradition, Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard of the early nineteenth century concluded, in his book, Fear and Trembling, that the act of Abraham in following God’s order to sacrifice Isaac, through whom God had promised a great nation, was totally irrational and subjective. Therefore, all of the Christian faith and thinking must be irrational and subjective. However, when you look at this honestly, if the creator of the entire cosmos gave me orders to jump off the Empire State Building, and his direction came objectively, I would rationally be a fool not to do it.

But this turned Christianity, and eventually secular culture, on its head in a movement that is better known as postmodernism, as it came after the rational modernistic periods. As a result, the conservative Christian movements, such as the discipleship group I was in, declared war on reason, learning, and science. You see it in our present government, heavily influenced by conservative Christianity. Without requiring evidence for rational deduction, that brand of Christianity is now drowning in conspiracy theories.

The progressive branch of the church adopted a similar subjective approach to God, focusing on an ambiguous, irrational spirituality. Therefore, we analytical people who still believe we find truth by evaluating objective evidence are not welcome in either. If we try to be part of any church, we are at least relegated to the most inferior of Christians, if not personally attacked without mercy. For us, the study of creation and science is far more enlightening about the character of God than religious rituals or subjective experiences.

I knew that if I remained honest in my rational search, I could never know with certainty that God exists, or that Jesus was His messiah. Yet, the alternative is an irrational leap into certainty, without evidence, and calling that faith, which would never work for me.

On the other hand, a godless universe, by definition, appears spontaneously and therefore has no external meaning or morals. The popular postmodernist view is that we manufacture meaning, morals, and even God from scratch and that’s okay. I want meaning and morals… but I also want reality more. Even without certainty, yet with high probability, I believe in a personal God and that Jesus was His messiah. While this may sound like confirmation bias or wishful thinking, I see our longing for meaning and morals as further evidence that it is true, though not with certainty. You can call this faith, but it isn’t the blind faith most religious people hold up as the ideal in the postmodern world.

I learned from Thomas Aquinas that God has two books for learning about them: the canonical scriptures and nature, and that’s why nature was so refreshing for my pursuit of the Creator. Another thing I learned from Aquinas is from his statement: “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.”

The last thing that happened in my de-conversion was that I regained the humor my aunt Helen had taught me, which the discipleship world had sucked out of me. I would need it when soon… cancer would come a-knockin.

Respectfully,

Mike