1 — Losing Faith
How and why I found myself unable to believe in God.
Watching Richard Dawkins debate Jordan Peterson was a very interesting experience for me. These two men were extremely influential in my life, and I know I’m not alone in this. Richard Dawkins was the reason I lost my faith. He was the first trigger that initiated a causal chain of events that culminated in me wanting to kill myself. This goes deep.
Explaining why I lost my faith is, I believe, a much more straightforward task than explaining why I got it back. So here I will do just the former.
Getting an education can mean a lot of things. Among others, it means learning about the world. We learn facts: we live in a planet called Earth, planets are sphere-like things that go in circle-like motions around stars, which are shinny and huge sphere-like things. Earth has different continents, with different geographies, different peoples, different ways of living.
Getting an education is expanding one’s horizon of understanding and perception: we see more in the world, we see more depth in trivial things, we are able to think differently and more widely. We are able to compare different stories about things and evaluate them.
To me, that process was particularly marked by a huge shift in understanding, a huge shift of general perspective, when I started to learn more about Empirical Science. I was deeply impressed to learn about the method used to literally uncover the mysteries of the world and build new ones. A method so simple and yet so powerful. Truths so complex, yet so intuitive.
The big moment in my life, though, was when I began to notice apparent conflicts between the story science told about the world and the story told by my religion.
Christianity is full of beliefs that would seem very much counter-intuitive to any one. A man was born from a virgin mother impregnated by the “Holy Spirit”, died and then came back to life. He cured blind people by touching their eyes, walked on water and brought people back from the dead too. Another man put his stick against the floor and split a river in two so that his people could pass. That seems very, very, very unlikely.
And more: the world science shows us is governed by rules. More than intuition to guide us about which things happen and which don’t, we have laws. Rivers do not split in two as a consequence of a rod. Ever. The world is older than 5000 years. Adam and Eve were never actually born. There was no such thing as a Garden of Eden. Those are just stories. It seems insane that people older than 10 believe all these things.
The thing that really tips the scale in favor of science in this regard is very simple. Science gives a method to prove every single one of its claims. This method is based on experimentation. The method is powerful because it can be replicated and the conclusions based on it can be used to make predictions that can be proven to be true or false. In a way, science is a dialogue with the world: we test things and see which ones the world actually agrees with.
If we try to replicate the things said by christianity, we can’t. I have never seen or heard of someone coming back from the dead. I have never seen or heard of someone splitting a river in two with a rod. Everyone that tries fails. What is the world telling us about those beliefs then?
There seems to be a narrative of myth and illusion and a narrative of fact and truth. One way has kept the world stagnant, the other exponentially increased our wealth and power. How not to think religion is an artifact of older times, a wish to believe in stories that just do not hold any ground anymore?
Especially when no believer around me could answer my questions adequately, especially when I could literally find no christian or religious person in general who seemed to know anything about science, or even if they knew, who just could do no better than finding some excuse to live in cognitive dissonance, believing in contradictory things simply out of fear not to let go of their religion?
Especially given the progressive regression of the ambition of religious claims: many things that people previously attributed to the power of God are now easily explainable by science. So it seems the only things people can still attibute to God’s power are things yet not reached by science’s epistemological grasp. God fits into the gaps of our knowledge, lurking in the corners not illuminated by science, until we finally explain those things too, doing away with the darkness that made a home for such a mysterious concept as God.
Belief in science is the belief that the world is there to be discovered and unveiled by man’s intellect. It is a heroic endeavour to peel away the layers of deception that our perception is clouded in. The problem is that religion seems to hide precisely within them. Only things we do not understand can we claim to be only within the power of God. Eventually, though, we see that it was not God, it was the laws of gravity, it was biology, it was DNA, it was inertia and the laws of physics, it was electro-magnetism.
Instead of throwing one’s arms up in desperation and helpless hope, begging for a help to come from the sky, the man of science helps himself. Instead of deferring power and knowledge to an infinite being whose only evidence for existence lies in our own imaginations, the man of science acquires knowledge for himself: he steals the fire from the gods and makes it his own. He is able to contemplate the perfection of the universe without being hindered by an irrational attachment to silly morality tales and false claims about reality.
That is what I decided I wanted for myself. More than the problem of evil, more than the wars that have been waged in the name of religion, what I cared about was believing in things when I apparently had no good reason to. Had I chosen not to renounce my faith, I would have done so at the expense of my own rationality and critical thinking. That was simply too high a price for me to pay. If the belief in God is not compatible with my best efforts to understand reality, then it is not warranted.
No matter the cost (and it turned out to be substantial), I was determined to act as I knew best, in accordance with what I thought was the most justified way of proceeding. I wanted to pursue the same heroic path those great men of science before me did, and I knew that no hero tale comes without its perils and suffering.
