Joy Seeking Understanding
In 2005, I loved Christ with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. By 2011, I was an agnostic who despised most of the Christians in my life. What happened?
If this first post seems excessively autobiographical – don’t worry, later posts will focus less on me and more on philosophy. But I must say something about how I got to where I am. I was raised in a very strong Christian home. I remember first understanding the Christian story at about six years old. After hearing about how Christ died to save me from my sins, I wanted to ask Christ to come into my life. So when I got home, I told my Dad that I wanted to “ask Jesus into my heart,” and we knelt at my bedside to pray. That memory of kneeling with my father in my bedroom is the clearest memory I have from early childhood; it was a decision has shaped every subsequent moment of my life. I grew up with a desire to know God, a passion for studying scripture, and a desire to do something for Christ and for the people around me.
In my pre-teen years, I also gained a passion for literature. I read voraciously – first finishing all the fiction books in our house then going to our public library and checking out as many books at a time as I could. I proceeded author by author, reading everything by Rudyard Kipling, then by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Alexandre Dumas, Jack London, Twain, Dickens, Poe, Doyle, and so on. But by far the most significant writer for me during this time was C.S. Lewis. The beauty and power of his fantasy stories (especially his Space Trilogy) excited within me that deep sense of transcendence which Lewis called “joy”. Lewis describes this experience much better than I can as “an unsatisfied desire which [is] itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” These transcendental experiences burned themselves into my memory; almost twenty years later, I can still remember many of them with startling clarity.
I quickly moved on from Lewis’s fiction to Lewis’s apologetic books. These works inspired my passion for philosophy. I say without apology that Lewis’s Mere Christianity has had a greater impact on me than any other book I have read, not because it convinced me that Christianity was true; I was already convinced. But Lewis’s book was asking amazing questions! No other book I had read spoke seriously about ethics, beauty, existence, purpose, faith, love, and so on. For the rest of high school, I continued to read and reread Lewis. When I left for college, my reading tastes were broadening into other apologists (Chesterton, Zacharias, Schaeffer, etc), and I had become very confident in my Christian beliefs.
How did I lose my faith? Well, I began my descent into apostasy by spending a lot of time with conservative Christians at my university. I quickly found that these believers weren’t at all like my loving family. They were deceitful, they were backstabbing, they were cruel, and they used scripture as a tool to control others. They treated any person who was struggling morally like a leper to be rejected – not a human being to be loved. Meanwhile, those who weren’t as serious about their faith, or who weren’t Christians at all, were much easier to be around. Non-believers weren’t constantly evaluating your ethical performance so I could relax around them.
During this time I also began to spend more time online, and I discovered the then much-less-popular online message board entitled 4chan. 4chan introduced me to a huge mass of new ideas. I suddenly realized that many people not only disagreed with my beliefs, they also thought my beliefs were stupid and wicked. But two things made an impression on me in my apologetic conversations: first, many people on these message boards dismissed all of Christian philosophy as being a joke, a façade so outrageous that any intelligent person could see through it. This attitude unnerved me greatly; was there something obvious that I was missing? Second, these critics rarely responded seriously to the arguments. Their comments on Lewis’s arguments, for example, showed that they hadn’t even understood his works, and they made simplistic objections that Lewis had taken pains to respond to throughout his work. Nonetheless, the confidence with which skeptics dismissed the evidence for God gave me some serious intellectual vertigo. 4chan also introduced me to the infinitely varied world of internet pornography. I had always struggled to remain “pure” in my thought life, and now I had access to images of all the naked, beautiful women I could handle. Did I feel guilty? At first, yes. But the guilt didn’t last long – and the meaningless pleasure was still more meaningful than the campus church services.
As time went on, the actions of the Christians around me grew more and more distasteful to me. These people contradicted everything I thought beautiful about my faith. If Christianity were true, then these very serious believers should be acting better – far better. According to Christian teaching, these people had the Holy Spirit living within them. And if they had the Holy Spirit within them, they should behave at least slightly better than nonbelievers. Obviously, they would be far from perfect, but you should see at least some difference. But I didn’t see any positive difference; in fact, I saw the opposite. Christians had all the flaws of the non-believers combined with a controlling, deceitful veneer of sickening self-righteousness. For me, Christians were the greatest possible evidence against Christianity.
Unbelief crept up on me over a period of five years. One Sunday morning in the fall of 2010, a visiting evangelist announced to my Church that he would be sharing the Gospel at a local fair, and he invited the church to come help. I knew I was in a slump in my faith (though I didn’t realize how severe the slump was), so I figured I should go with some of these other “soul-winners,” hoping that the fellowship with other strong believers would encourage me. I ended up being the only person who showed up, but I decided to stick it out. All day long, the evangelist and I gave out tracts, and we gave the Gospel to anyone who stopped to listen. I even led two girls to accept Christ as their savior – normally a very exciting event!
But as I showed those two girls “the way of eternal life,” I felt nothing. Nothing! How could I feel nothing? How could I feel no emotion about introducing two people to the savior of the world? They now had an eternal relationship with the creator of the universe, and God had used me to do it! That was amazing, right? Right?
Even the evangelist noticed that something was off, “Is everything OK? Normally people are pretty excited about this . . . .” I quickly realized that I felt nothing because I didn’t care about the Gospel. And I didn’t care because I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe that Jesus loved those girls. I didn’t believe that God sent his son to save the world. I didn’t believe the Christian God existed. I didn’t believe.
That day I walked away from my faith. I stopped spending time any remotely conservative Christians except my brother and his wife. I had a decent job at the time, so I enjoyed spending money at bars and strip clubs. I had felt sexually shackled as a Christian, so I made sure to experiment as much as possible. I even tried out some escorts and some massage parlors (both of which are vastly overrated). Thankfully, I was very busy with my job so I didn’t get into nearly as much trouble as I could have. Christians will probably wonder if I felt any conviction during this time; I did not. Why should I have? Christianity was false, so why should I have felt shackled by its unnecessary sexual restraints?
But certain aspects of my Christian past left their mark on me, most notably the philosophical influences of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Lewis and Chesterton had convinced me that reason and logic were essential to any worldview. Any view which undermines logical reasoning undermines itself and therefore should be rejected. Even God himself cannot violate the laws of logic. This first principle, the centrality of logic, remained foundational to my thinking as an agnostic, and it remains foundational today. From this first principle comes the importance of free will. Since free will is necessary for a person to be a rational agent, free will is also a foundational reality that any coherent worldview must account for (yes, I know this is controversial. I’ll develop this idea further in another blog post).
I also held on to Lewis’s views concerning beauty and ethics as discussed in The Abolition of Man – a text I had read over a dozen times before I got to college. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis establishes the absolute inadequacy of purely subjective descriptions of beauty and morality. He argues that, if beauty is purely person-relative, then it ceases to be beauty at all; such subjective beauty describes only the feelings of an individual rather than any description of external reality. So when someone who believes only in subjective beauty says that “the sky is beautiful tonight,” he is not actually saying anything about the sky – he is just referring to his own emotional experience. Similarly, any theory of ethics which reduces ethics to a subjective opinion fails to be a theory of ethics at all, because it turns ethical statements into mere individual preferences.
Since I accepted reason, free will, and morality as objectively real, my goal as an agnostic was to make sense of these qualities within a materialistic worldview. Such realities frame all our experiences – they are foundational to how we experience the world. But after three years of reading and studying, I came to a rather harsh conclusion: materialism not only fails to provide a foundation for rationality, free will, beauty and morality; it cannot even allow for the objective existence of such things. Once again, I know that this is a huge claim, so I plan to use later posts to expound a little further.
I eventually concluded that materialistic atheism was absurd on multiple levels and would not work as a coherent worldview, so I turned back to the study of theistic philosophy. Over time I became familiar with the works of the much-maligned William Lane Craig, and I became convinced by his historical arguments for the resurrection. Three years after I had walked away from Christ, I returned to the faith of my childhood. So now I’m a Christian again, ironically a much more confident and more orthodox believer than I was before my doubts.
So what’s with the title of my website, “Joy Seeking Understanding?” Well, there are qualities of life that, whether we admit it or not, define how we experience and think about the world. These qualities include rationality, freedom, beauty, and morality. Because of my experiences, I would add to these qualities the transcendental “Joy” that C.S. Lewis talked about. Such realities are not things that I feel I must prove; rather I know that free will exists because I make free decisions every day. No proof for free will is as obvious as my experience of free will itself. I study philosophy to help me understand my experience of freedom, not to prove it. Similarly, I know that rationality exists from my everyday experience; now I seek to understand rationality through philosophy. I can also perceive moral truths directly in my daily life, so I use philosophy to better understand what morality is and how exactly we should live moral lives. Through my faith, I have found joy; now I seek understanding.