The Errors that Led to Tom the Agnostic/Atheist

All my life, from a young child onward, I had a curiosity about everything, but especially spiritual things. I always had a sense that there was more to know – that there was more to life and that if I could find it, would lead to a better life. Consequently, I asked many questions of the nuns and priests at my parochial grade school. But the answer to my questions, only led to other questions and I never felt satisfied. And of course, more than once the final answer in the series of questions and answers, was, “My child it is all a matter of faith.” Later I found what I believe are the answers I was seeking. However, there were significant delays due to errors in my thinking.

I actually interviewed parents of my friends who were very religious and asked them, why they did what they did. Their answers always involved heaven – they wanted to go to heaven. And, with all the emphasis on eternal punishment back then, it is a good bet that they also had at least a subconscious motivation of the fear of hell.

So as reached my late teens, I concluded that the church didn’t have the answers to my questions. And since I had been taught all my life that the Roman Catholic Church was the original Christian church, with one of Jesus’ apostles as the first pope, it seemed a reasonable conclusion at the time, that if the Roman Catholic church didn’t have the answers then no one had the answers: the answers didn’t exist.

So, my thinking was that if there are no answers to life’s questions, like: Why is their illness, war, poverty and suffering? then there must not be a God….stuff just happens. I reasoned that there was no rhyme or reason for tsunami’s, earth quakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, or devastating floods that took thousands of lives. If an all-powerful God really existed – a God that is unconditional love, then certainly such a being would not allow all of this to be going on.

So, I was easy pickings for the religion of materialism that says that nature/evolution is so perfect that no Creator God is really needed. And thus, for over twenty years my world view was somewhere between agnostic and atheist. I was pretty sure that there was no God, but just as no one has ever proved that God exists, no one has ever proved that God does not exist. And I know the materialists will instantly say that you can’t prove a negative, there are many daunting questions that materialism has been willing to accept on faith. The Big Bang theory is just one example. This theory says that all the energy that represents all the matter in the universe and all the energy in all the billions of billions of suns was compressed into one infinitesimally small singularity. Then for a reason unknown, with no outside interference it simply exploded. And the velocity of the explosion was exactly perfect to form atoms, and molecules and all of the matter in the universe. Another one is abiogenesis, the accidental formation of the first single cell organism capable of reproducing itself. That if you let pools of compounds fester for eons, that amino acids will combine to produce the multiple parts necessary for a cell capable of reproducing itself. Many scientists have calculated the odds of that happening and the numbers are astounding. I realize that it would be just as easy to believe in a Creator God as it would be the god of random chance in which materialists put their faith….except of course, they never call it faith.

So there was a period of my life when my doubt did grow into at least a mild atheistic mind-set but when I examined materialism more deeply I discovered significant doubts about that as well which for a time pushed me back into the belief that no one will ever know for sure either way so maybe the agnostics have it right after all.

Then I got a push by a TV pastor, Dr. Robert Schuller. It was a Sunday morning and we didn’t have cable at the time I flipped the dial and there was Dr. Schuller. I paused and listened for a couple of minutes, thinking that this was probably going to be useless like the other TV evangelists I heard. But he actually made sense to me. At one point he argued that both the atheist and the believer have faith in that they both have made a decision to believe in something that neither one of them can prove. Then he said, ‘So you say, Well, I’ll just be an atheist. I won’t make any decision.” Then he paused and said, you know what you just did? You just decided to make a decision to believe in indecision.” Then he glared at the camera (It looked like he was glaring at me personally), and he said, ‘You think the atheist has nerve? Well so do I….But YOU DON’T! Either the atheist is right, or I am. Then he pointed at the camera and said with a loud voice,  “For sure you’re not!”

That made perfect sense to me. I had been making an error of making the decision to accept and believe in the faith of indecision (agnosticism). I realized I was responsible to choose. I had to choose to either believe in a Creator or not. I had to get off of the fence.

The other error that I had discovered in my thinking that led to my decision to be an agnostic/atheist was that after rejecting the god and the theology of mainstream Christianity, I had made the error of assuming that what they taught and what they knew was all that there was to know about the Spiritual side of life. So, in rejecting mainstream Christianity all that was left in my mind was either agnosticism or atheism. Now In my defense, there was no internet back then, and I had no knowledge or even an inkling of alternative explanations of life and spirit.

So at this point in my life, I began studying both belief and unbelief. I grew to realize that materialists must have faith in random probability that no one in a court of law would ever accept because they are possible but so fantastical in terms of probability as being almost impossible to believe. I did a lot of reading and thinking about Jesus afresh. Not what I was taught or what others believed, but what he said and what he did. I remember thinking to myself at one point, “What if I adopted to the best of my ability the teachings of Jesus? Would it make a difference in my life?” And so, I read Jesus teachings anew with that question. I’ve always been interested in psychology and loved the popular self-help books at the time. And so of course, it was obvious, if I adopted Jesus’ teachings I would virtually guarantee that at least to some degree, I would have greater peace, and joy and general psychological health than if I did not adopt those teachings.

Then one dark winter morning in my car on the way to work, I was contemplating all this and I blurted out, “God if you are real, then I am willing to listen.”