The Unconditional Love of Reality

It’s all too easy to get one’s own narrative wrong. A pattern-seeking brain takes the raw materials of a messy life, viewed in retrospect, and knits a script with you-know-who in the heroic lead. It’s like a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a 747.

Okay, bad analogy.

But once we know the outcome, there’s no difficulty in each of us turning our lives into Homeric odysseys of trial and triumph in which Ithaca was always inevitable, and convincing ourselves we’ve merely taken dictation.

My own establishing shot has me, at the age of 13, staring into my father’s open casket. His death, I always told myself and others, was the event that hit me between the eyes with the Big Question. Not because I was “mad at God” for taking him away. I loved my father, but it would have been perverse indeed to blame God for killing a 300-pound man with a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. I was floored by an all-consuming intellectual curiosity, one I had never felt before with such heat. “My Dad” was clearly not in that casket. So where was he? As the lid was slowly lowered, I swore through my tears to learn The Truth.

Or not.

The casket scene isn’t the only one I recall from that time, you see – and at least one other calls the casket epiphany into serious question. I spent the day before the funeral avoiding hugs and well-meaning reassurances from the murmuring relatives who filled our home. At one point I ducked into my bedroom, a ploy that couldn’t succeed. Someone was guaranteed to notice the missing son and head off on a seek-and-console mission.

Sure enough, as I was reading on my bed, a voice from the doorway startled me. “Oh Dale,” said my Aunt Dar, my father’s sister. She looked at the book in my lap and gasped. “Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad to see you reading that, dear. There is no better place to turn in times of trouble.”

It was the Bible.

What my pious aunt could not have known is that I hadn’t turned to it for comfort. I was already reading it skeptically. I don’t know when I had begun, but I know by what happened next that it wasn’t set in motion by my dad’s death four days earlier. Dar walked to my bedside and glanced at the page I was reading.

“Oh – oh no, dear, you don’t want the Book of Kings. Not now. Not that.” She was right, of course. Unless you are consoled by rivers of blood, Kings is not much use. God sends bears to slaughter children for taunting Elisha over his hair loss. Women eat each other’s children. Ahab’s 70 children are beheaded. That sort of thing.

She flipped forward to Psalms (!), patted my shoulder, and left the room, click-click-click, knitting her own happy narrative.

See the problem for the casket epiphany? Nobody starts reading in Kings. Like everyone else, I started in Genesis. I was well into my first full read-through of the Bible, something that took me three years of stops and starts to complete. Even if Dad’s death had been the impetus for my questioning, there’s no way I would already have found enough time alone to get so far.

Poking further back, I find some more plausible catalysts for my eventual disbelief. I adored Greek and Roman myths when I was a kid, which led me to wonder what was so very different about the more current versions. I read the story of Danae and Perseus (in which a god impregnates a woman, who gives birth to a great hero) around the same time I first heard of the divine insemination of Mary and birth of Christ. I read twice about the infant boy who is abandoned in the wilderness to spare him from death, only to be found by a servant of the king who brings him to the palace to be raised as the child of the king and queen—first Oedipus, then Moses.

I had also developed an attitude toward the world that is the essence of inquiry: I had fallen in love with it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and other popularizers of science, I’d come to the conclusion that the universe was wonderful, period, and that I was incredibly fortunate to get a chance to be a conscious thing in the midst of it. The wonder of it came with no strings attached, no “ifs.” I was unconditionally smitten with reality and began at some point working on the Big Question: Does God exist?

If I had any predisposition, it was the usual human one: a desire that it all be true. How could I have stood at that casket and wished for anything but the existence of God, since that might continue the existence of my father? But my love of reality naturally came with a serious distaste for self-deception. The truth itself is more beautiful than an illusion, even when that truth is uncomfortable. I would be thrilled if there was a God; I would be thrilled if there wasn’t. I just wanted to know.

In short, I took the question seriously.

Three obstacles presented themselves immediately. The first was the claim that the question simply can’t be asked. “It’s not that kind of question,” I remember a Sunday school teacher telling our class, without explaining what that could possibly mean. For the sake of the inquiry, I had to assume that was untrue and see what would happen if I asked it.

The second obstacle was the wrath of God. Doubt is a sin, probing questions an offense to the divine. After some thought, I decided that God was unlikely to be so insecure or frankly egotistical as to punish me eternally just because I was honestly wrong about him.

The third hurdle was the notion that even if it were a question like any other, there was simply no way to answer it. You can neither prove nor disprove God.

I was in high school before I surmounted that one. I realized I didn’t have to answer the question “Does God exist?” Must we believe all assertions that can’t be disproven? Russell’s Teapot says no. So a perfectly askable and appropriate question was “Why do other people believe in God, and are those reasons convincing?”

By the time I started college, I had 15 years of churchgoing and at least 10 years of skeptical thought behind me.

Our family had attended church all my life, and I continued for 20 years after my father’s death, but with a new intensity. I was wide awake, listening, thinking, reading, and questioning in the churches of nine denominations—Catholic, United Church of Christ, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, Mormon, Presbyterian, and Lutheran. I asked believers why they believed, why they weren’t Hindus or Druids, what they thought was literal and what was figurative in their scriptures. And I read their scriptures—not only the Old and New Testaments, but large parts of the Qur’an, the Vedas, the Gnostic texts, the Apocrypha, and commentaries on them all.

Was I “searching”? Was I wrestling, Jacob-like, with God? Was I “on a faith journey”? Not really, no. As compelling as all those narratives are, my goal was simpler. I had already decided that I didn’t believe in the Christian scheme, and did so based largely on armchair reasoning.

For starters, I spent my early years immersed in Greek and Roman mythology prior to getting the Christian memo. When I subsequently met up with the Jesus story, it was instantly recognizable as the same thing in different (and less interesting) garb.

Second, God’s plan for salvation is hideously unfair. My birth into a Christian place and time clearly gave me a leg-up on Paradise compared to the billions born into other faiths. Would God operate such an important plan so unfairly and inefficiently?

Third, the demand that we believe in and praise God above all else seemed an unlikely and unseemly trait for a deity.

Finally, I knew that our growing knowledge of the universe and ourselves more often than not contradicted biblical claims. The advance of knowledge should prove scripture more and more accurate if it were valid; instead, there’s a steady retreat into the remaining gaps in what we know.

It all seemed like a quickly unraveling fabric of delusion.

But I continued the inquiry anyway, dogged by the nagging suspicion that I had to have missed something. I had come to my conclusion, but I was convinced that I just had to be wrong. Not because of the evidence, but because I couldn’t conjure up the chutzpah to believe I’d figured out something that everybody else had missed. With the apparent exception of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who scared my teenage self half to death, I thought myself the only nonbeliever on the face of the Earth. How could I think otherwise? The greatest minds of every generation had apparently accepted Christianity, so I was sure I’d missed something. I doubted the Christian story, but I’d yet to discover any system of thought to replace it, nor any real company for my doubts.

In college my investigation of reality was formalized. I majored in anthropology to fully understand evolution. I learned that the theory had withstood three generations of scientific onslaught before being accepted as an awe-inspiring and humbling reality that establishes a deep kinship of all life on earth – a perspective far more beautiful than special creation in my eyes. I realized, very gradually, that a full understanding of all the implications of evolution by natural selection leaves the most essential element of Christianity—human specialness among the creatures of the Earth — utterly dismantled.

But it was still just Madalyn and me, as far as I knew. Even in college—at Berkeley, for chrissakes—I hadn’t learned of any significant presence of articulate disbelief in our cultural history. How could I disbelieve when all of my greatest heroes believed? I’d heard it said that the Founding Fathers of the United States were Christians—when in fact very few were. I had heard that Darwin found no contradiction between evolutionary theory and Christian belief, when in fact he did. He made that clear in his autobiography—though those pages were removed from the first edition by his wife, with the best of misguided motives. I assumed that Einstein’s references to God were literal reflections of a personal faith, only later discovering his several irritated denials of that claim.

I was in my 30s before I finally discovered, in the works of A. N. Wilson, how many of the greatest intellectual and moral minds of every generation were freethinkers of one stripe or another: Seneca, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Freud, Twain, Hume, H. L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell. They had all written eloquently of their doubts and their reasons. But those writings had not reached me, despite every possible predisposition on my part to receive them.

A systematic cultural suppression of the rich heritage of religious doubt keeps that heritage out of view. Doubt is rendered unthinkable by the stripping of its intellectual tradition. Once I discovered that suppressed body of work, I swam in it. In the span of a few weeks, I went from total isolation to the company of giants.

Still, I thought there must be something to it. It might be incorrect, but I hadn’t yet seen what so many had found convincing. So I went to the mountaintop, to two friends and colleagues of mine, Catholic theologians, and engaged in lengthy correspondences—only to find that they had nothing whatsoever but smoke and mirrors. Nothing.

I was astonished. More than that, I was pissed off. I felt what Dorothy felt when the man behind the curtain was revealed to be pot-bellied Francis Wupperman. That’s it? Are you kidding me?

A process that had begun with a deep desire for the truth ended at last with the solid conviction that religion is an utterly human-created construct, reflective of nothing but our hopes and fears set in the amber of our ignorance, propped up with the flimsiest of twigs and durable nonetheless. So I wasn’t to be a theologian after all. In fact, if there is such a thing as an atheologian, I am it.

Most stunning of all to me, standing there in the ruins of the temple, was the totality of the failure of Christian belief to stand up to examination. It wasn’t a question of a scale tipped slightly in the direction of disbelief, 51–49. There was nothing whatsoever remaining to support belief in the doctrines of Christianity, no close decisions, no stumpers, no fuzzy outcomes. I was dumbstruck to realize how thin a veneer covers the whole enterprise and how easily and completely that veneer is broken by the simple determination to consider the question a question.

I wanted an arduous process, but there wasn’t one to be had. I got the answer right very early on—then took 30 years checking my work.

How do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system so self-evidently false and self-contradictory? We do so by believing what we hear from those we love, from those who wish us nothing but the best: that religious faith is inherently and unquestionably good, and that all good people are people of faith.

I do have empathy for those who wish to believe. I could have used some comfortable certainties when my father died. I tremble to imagine myself on a spinning ball racing 40,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space. And though Huxley and Hume and Epicurus have helped me, I do fear death, especially now that I’ve reached my father’s last age. But I know that all the comforts and assurances I need, all we’ve ever really had, are those we get from those around us who have inherited the same strange, scary, wonderful conscious life that each of us has.

We are cosmically insignificant, a speck in space and a blink in time, inconceivably unimportant—except to each other, to whom we should therefore be unspeakably precious.

This article is an excerpt from 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), edited by Udo Schuklenk and IEET Fellow Russell Blackford. Posted by permission of the author and the publishers.