Unanswerable Questions: How I Lost my Religion. Part 3.
Note: This is the third of a four-part series on my transition out of Christianity. Each segment is a journal entry I made during some of my college years, between 2005–2007.
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March 14th, 2007
So continues the saga of my late night theological and philosophical ponderings. As established above, I am now at a point in which I do not adhere to any brand of religiosity, and I no longer believe in the practice of “prayer”. This would probably be a fitting, though perhaps obvious time to also mention that I do not believe in the idea of “fate” either.
I have thought about this for quite a while now. You always hear people say things like, “Well, it’s in God’s hands now.” Or, “If it’s meant to be, then it’s meant to be.” And as scary as it is to acknowledge, I am almost absolutely certain that none of this is actually true.
It all seems so subjective. I’ve realized that talk of fate is just another way that people try to deceive themselves.
It’s a strategy for avoiding a genuine confrontation with life’s harsh realities. It seems that most people just cannot or do not want to accept that things just are the way that they are, and that there really is no master plan behind it all.
Try to think about it in terms of positives and negatives. For example, when people discuss certain major life events, such as marriages, or a perhaps successful careers, they often attribute the event to “God’s will” or “fate”. I’m currently thinking of a successful second marriage between two adults in my family. Reflecting on the serendipity of their initial meeting, one of them declared, “There must have been a higher power working there!” This comment was met with knowing nods and smiles by the family elders.
These expressions of faith in fate are ubiquitous. Yet, what if I said, “Wow, I went to the store to buy a book today, and when I got there, it was marked 50% off! It must have been God’s hand at work!” Clearly, this sounds a little ridiculous, we can all pretty safely acknowledge that the fact that the book ended up being on sale was just a random coincidence, not the result of God intervening on my personal behalf.
Now backtrack a second. Why do we accept that the book discount was coincidental, yet we say that a meeting that led to marriage must have been the result of “God’s will,” or “fate”? Perhaps someone would reasonably respond that God really doesn’t control our every action, but he does guide our major life decisions. It would seem reasonable then, that God may influence our marriages, our careers, and perhaps other major events, but not our trivial day to day business.
Yet, where exactly does this line get drawn? What exactly constitutes a major life event, and what doesn’t? Is it fate if I get accepted into the college I want to go to? Is it fate if I meet a new friend? Is it fate if my favorite sports team wins the game? Does fate effect solely human life, or other living things like animals and plants?
Does God predetermine mosquito mates, as well as human mates?
Does fate affect non-living things, like whether or not it will rain tomorrow? This all seems supremely illogical. Fate can certainly not determine every single event that occurs in the whole world. Because of this realization that fate cannot affect everything, and since the lines are entirely subjective between what is “fate” worthy and what is not, it seems clear to me that there is simply no good reason to believe that there is any such thing as fate at all.
Additionally, there is the matter of alternative consequences. If people believe that God’s will determines all major live events, then there are quite a few unseemly conclusions that must be accepted. Certainly, for every happily married couple out there, there is another that ends in acrimonious divorce. In fact, many people can live their entire lives without ever finding love or happiness. Is it fate, or God’s will at work for the people who live alone and in misery?
What about health? People always say that they’ve been “blessed” with good health. But what about the people who aren’t?
What about the innocent 10-year-old who comes down with Leukemia? What about the 6,000 people in Africa who die every day from AIDS? Was this their fate? Was this how God, in his infinite wisdom, personally planned out their lives? The millions of lives which have known little else beyond poverty, disease, hunger, violence and despair?
Many people respond to these questions by claiming that “God works in mysterious ways.”
They would say that although we do not understand God’s intentions, that he does have a plan, and everything will just work out fine in the end. At this point, all I can try to do is appeal to logic. Even people who believe in fate acknowledge that they can’t explain God’s will. Yet, it seems clear that to the best of our ability to understand, if there is any force out there that has the ability to change the course of our worldly events, then they are clearly doing a horrible job.
If you believe that God is responsible whenever a healthy child is born, then you must also believe that God is responsible whenever a healthy child is raped.
If God influences worldly events, then he influences them all. And largely because this seems extremely hard to believe, I do not believe that there is a God influencing our actions, nor do I believe in any sort of fate. It seems entirely more plausible that things just are the way they are, and as much as it scares us to admit, there really is no “greater plan” for our lives.
This conclusion is hard to swallow, even for me.
Even since I stopped praying, I have still occasionally felt the urge to do so, in situations that just seemed too much for me to handle. For example, this past fall and winter, I was tutoring two young boys at a charter school on the south side of Milwaukee. One day, minutes before the kids were supposed to leave, there was a frantic announcement over the intercom, a woman screamed: “Code Red! Code Red!” Within seconds, the teacher of the room I was in had shut and locked the door, turned all of the lights out, and ushered all of the kids into the far corner. I had been through school lock down drills before, but the sense of urgency and panic, in addition to the neighborhood that I was in, told me that this was likely not a drill.
After several minutes of silence, I heard someone walking through the hallways with a walky-talky. The two words out of the conversation that I heard were: “Shots fired.”
Those words hit me like a wave. Columbine images came to mind. “Holy shit,” I thought to myself, “this is actually happening. I could die right here in the corner with these kids.” At this point, I felt the overwhelming urge to start praying “Dear God, dear God, please help us get out of this. Please let nothing happen.” And although I hadn’t been praying for months, in this moment of intense fear and unknowing, it seemed natural to revert to the belief that there was some “higher power” pulling the strings.
Yet, I just could no longer bring myself to indulge this ignorant luxury. This was a truly challenging and strengthening experience. Acknowledging that whatever was going to happen, was just going to happen. Not as a result of divine intervention, but because that’s just the way life works.
Belief in fate seems like a basic human urge, to let go of your worries in exchange for the thought that everything is “happening for a reason” and that even if it may not seem like it, it will all work out fine in the end. This is clearly a natural instinct, yet that doesn’t make notions of fate any more so grounded in reality.
Ok, now I would like to briefly address what I originally intended to in this entry. My disbelief in fate could have just as easily been written in the last entry. But I think something more fundamental has changed in my theological understandings since then.
As of right now, I think I am at another sort of transition point. Specifically, I am no longer confident in the assertion I made in my first entry, in that there must be some form of God. It’s funny, because the question that has made me challenge this belief is listed within that first entry itself, yet I just never fully appreciated its significance.
The question being: how did God come to be?
As explained in that first entry, I used to believe that human life was just so fundamentally complex, so full of indescribable intricacies, that it could not have been the result of some biological accident. I believed that life is so complex, it must have had a definite beginning, and thus, a “creator.”
This premise still essentially makes sense to me. The problem is, if I believe human life must have had a creator, then, wouldn’t the creator have to have been created himself?
This of course leads to an infinite reduction to absurdity. Surely, in all his divine capacity to create and control human life, God would have to be infinitely more complex than humans. Yet, if I can accept that complex human life cannot begin out of nothing, how can I justify the existence of God himself?
Quite simply, I can’t. If I accept that human life must have had a planned origin, then I must accept that divine life must have had a planned origin, and this simply doesn’t make any sense.
The idea that divine life was created accidentally, is clearly more improbable than the idea that human life was created accidentally. Yet, the other half of the puzzle is still missing. For the first time in my life, I can now say that I find it plausible that there might not be a God at all. Yet, I certainly cannot explain the alternative.
I still find it hard to believe that human life was the result of an environmental accident. But I now think that it is equally, or perhaps even more improbable that human life was somehow magically created.
This conclusion leads me to, for lack of a better word, refer to myself as an Agnostic, at least for now.
I still have this primal urge to believe that I, as a human, am “part of something bigger.” As already discussed, it just seems comforting, on a basic human level, to believe that a divine creator is behind it all.
Yet, although I still would not call myself an Atheist, I can now say for the first time that I have serious doubts as to existence of any God at all.
