Category: abandoning faith

Open thread: how did you become an atheist?

July 6, 2015 • 2:10 pm

by Grania

We’ve often talked about reasons for being an atheist on this site, but not so much about how we became atheists – that is if we weren’t one before. Probably few of us had as dramatic an experience as Jerry’s own Road to Damascus deconversion experience where there was one pivotal moment that marked: Here believer; and afterwards no more. Probably several readers here never believed and grew up in secular homes (you fortunate people). Jerry thought it would be interesting to ask readers: what did it for you?

TL;DR: you don’t have to read my overly-long saga below – you can now skip to the comments and add your own story.

For myself, looking back with the sort of 20/20 vision that hindsight blesses us all with, perhaps I was never a fervent believer. But I certainly had what Dan Dennett would call Belief in Belief. Raised in a moderately conservative family by a Catholic mother and a hard-to-pin-down father (he is technically Jewish, Lutheran on paper and was almost certainly skeptically agnostic but polite enough to never say anything about it).

I received a better-than-average schooling in being a good Catholic than the average Catholic circa 1970s. Unlike some modern Catholics who are outraged when Richard Dawkins had the nerve to point out that they are supposed to regard the transubstantiated communion wafer as the literal body of Christ, I was taught in painstaking detail exactly what Catholics were required to believe in. (Oh dear god, the wasted hours of frustration and boredom… )

I believed because everybody seemed to believe, perhaps not in my particular flavor of Christianity; but certainly pretty much everybody appeared to adhere to one of the myriad versions of it. But I expected more of it than tedious Catechism books and hours spent reciting mind-numbing prayers on and endless repeat cycle. Also the knees, damn wooden pews hurt like a sonofabitch after half an hour. I expected that the very least a benevolent God could do was at least once reply to my earnest prayers. There was never anything though, not even something that a relatively imaginative child could try to pretend might have been a response from a seemingly disinterested deity. The people and priests I talked to about this were kindly and patient and offered me all manner of conflicting advice: pray harder, don’t pray – just listen, read more about your faith (bad advice, really), maybe He has already answered you, sometimes God says No, sometimes God says Wait A While, don’t overdo the bookish learning – too much knowledge is enemy of faith (that’s true).

In the end, what killed my belief – or belief in belief was the following:

  • a serious lack on God’s part of ever trying to acknowledge my existence. That was just plain rude.
  • Latin in High School – Pliny opened my eyes to a version of early Christianity I had not ever heard about in church – especially the bit about female deacons.
  • Actually reading the bible. Paul pretty much made me lose my temper with his sexist twaddle and I couldn’t take the book seriously as a moral guide after that.
  • Law School – courses in subjects such as Comparative Law and Roman Law pretty much destroyed the last shreds of credibility the bible had left and laid bare its cobbled-together, plagiarised and fabricated origins. Ironically two of my very excellent lecturers were Catholics too.

Anyway, I came out of university accidentally unable to sit through any more Sunday sermons without getting fairly furious at the inaccuracies, the omissions and the one-sided version of morality that got served up. I didn’t call myself an atheist for many years to come after that, but I could not take religion seriously any more. It no longer held any interest for me and we parted ways amicably.

An erstwhile creationist becomes a biologist, due in part to us!

May 18, 2015 • 11:30 am

Over the past five years, one of our readers—Dan Metz—has been undergoing an odyssey. This involved leaving a strict religious background, abandoning belief in creationism and accepting evolution, and then, ultimately, becoming a biologist. It’s a heartening story, one that shows how even a “strident” atheistic site run by a biologist can, despite the godlessness, turn people towards science.

We first heard from Dan in 2010, when, writing anonymously, he described how learning about evolution was the key factor in his leaving religion (he was originally a Southern Baptist creationist from the Appalachians). Here’s just a small bit from that letter:

You probably know the rest. The initial rejection of what I’d read, trying to get someone to explain to me why all the evidence pointed toward evolution instead of away, realizing that the answers that I was getting from the creationist side were either evasive, inconsistent, or deceitful. And the long, slow, painful process of shedding a belief I’ve had instilled in me since childhood.

In 2012, Dan wrote again, this time making his identity public and recounting how he worked two years in banking to save up enough money to go to college and study biology. Again, a small part of his testimony:

In that letter, I mentioned my “biggest regret”–that I had never pursued the opportunity to study biology academically. I now proudly report that in another two weeks or so, I will have completed my first semester as an undergraduate in biology and mathematics. Your book, your site, and the comments of encouragement that your readers posted in response to my first letter were all instrumental in nudging me toward my current position in life. And I couldn’t be happier!

Note that you, the readers, get a large bit of credit for helping Dan fulfill his dreams. You might want to look back at the comments to see the encouragement he got.

I heard from Dan again yesterday, and he’s succeeded brilliantly:

Dr. Coyne,

It is amazing how things can change in so short a time. I wrote to you five years ago as a confused and floundering young apostate, unsure of my place in a world suddenly bereft of gods and magic and neat little explanations for every manner of phenomenon.

The encouragement I received from you and the readers of your website (which I continue to peruse daily) led me to pursue a degree in biology, mathematics, and chemistry.

I completed that degree last week, with the titles of Summa Cum Laude, Dean’s Scholar, and Artis Fellow (head of all Dean’s Scholars of the graduating class). I am also a National Research Fellow through the Ecological Society of America, and have the honor of describing not only a new species, but a new genus of eukaryotic parasite as the fruit of my undergraduate research.

I’ve been accepted into a PhD program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography under the tutelage of a scientist I’ve admired for years.  This would not have happened had it not been for our initial correspondence. So thank you, and thank your readers.

My friends, family, and professional contacts have given me the support I needed to excel as an undergraduate. But I seriously doubt that I–an uneducated man from a very rural, very religious background–could have even conceived of a career in understanding the chemical mechanisms of parasite-mediated behavioral control had it not been for our initial correspondence.

So I simply wanted to thank you, and to wish you well on the outreach of your new book. I, of course, will be ordering a copy as soon as my next paycheck comes in.

Thanks,
-Dan

You can see the announcement of Dan’s success, and of his ESA fellowship, at this post from Radford University’s newsfeed.

And here’s the man himself demonstrating how to get pinched by a crab:

Finally, Dan asked me to convey this to the readers:

[G]ive my warmest regards to your commenters. They’re a big-hearted bunch, to throw such well-wishes to a guy they never met. It’s a trait they share with their host!

Now isn’t that nice?

Two readers testify that evolution helped them give up religion

April 30, 2015 • 9:55 am

Since Tuesday I’ve gotten two heartening letters from readers, both erstwhile religionists who abandoned their faith at least partly after learning about evolution. One was a Mormon, the other a Jehovah’s Witness. And both gave me permission to publish their emails and their identities.

I have to admit that I’m pleased that I was given credit for some of their enlightenment about the truth of evolution and the falsity of faith, so one of the labels I’ll put on this post is “self promotion.” But I want to make two points about these emails, and about similar ones I’ve received over the years.

First, you can change religious people’s minds about evolution, even though it’s not common. Accommodationists tout the alternative strategy of evolutionists kissing up to religion, saying that once religious people realize that evolution is compatible with their faith, they’ll flock to Darwinism. Well, that hasn’t worked. And there’s no evidence for their assertion that being an atheist and at the same time promoting evolution actually drives people away from atheism and science acceptance. I claim that the number of believers in the world has been reduced by my writing WEIT.  I’ve heard from a fair number of people who left religion because if it, but none who abandoned evolution in favor of faith because Professor Ceiling Cat is a Strident Atheist. (And believe me, those people would tell me!)

Second, I’ve learned that abandoning faith often begins with learning facts: often the scientific facts supporting evolution. I have heard many times (twice at TAM from Orthodox Jews—and in a single day!) that people’s journey to rationality and unbelief began with learning about evolution. This shows, to me at least, that religions do depend heavily on believing actual facts about nature, and are not simply vehicles for communality and empathy that are devoid of factual content. Were that the case, learning about evolution would not motivate people to leave religion. In the case of the two men who testify below, it was the dissonance between what their faith taught and the actual facts about evolution that made them see their religion was purveying lies. If those lies could easily be re-cast as metaphors, as Sophisticated Theologians™ urge, this wouldn’t happen.

So all of this does indeed justify the fears of some believers that evolution is dangerous to their faith.

On to the emails. In both cases I verified the identities of the correspondents.

*******

Hello Mr Coyne,

I would like to thank you for writing the book ‘Why Evolution is True’, and I am really enjoying the posts on your website.

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, and last week they forcibly disassociated me from the religion (meaning that I am now labelled a ‘wicked’ person, to be shunned by all JWs). I am still waiting to find out whether my dad and in-laws will ever talk to me again. The reason I was given the boot is that I wrote an account of my reasons for leaving the faith (although I never tried to persuade anyone else to leave).

Anyway, inspired by your book, but wanting a more concise resource summarizing some of the more impressive evidence for evolution, I wrote a compact list of the evidence for evolution, which can be found here.

Thank you for helping me make the transition from belief to scepticism. I am a lot happier for it!

Regards,

Russell Walker.

In our further correspondence, he told me that it was difficult to leave the faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses have a policy of completely shunning those who leave: a border-collie tactic designed keep sheep in the fold. (Here’s their own explanation of how this odious practice works.)

He added this in a subsequent email (Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course, completely reject evolution):

Leaving the JWs was quite a traumatic experience. From initial doubts to being completely honest with myself that I didn’t believe took about 10 years (I left in 2010, but was only officially expelled last week). After admitting to myself that I did not believe, I spent several months reading voraciously. Early on in that process I found out (in part thanks to your book) that the people who lead the religion, whom I had trusted implicitly, had been shockingly dishonest about the evidence surrounding evolution. I was absolutely appalled at the quotes taken out of context, logical fallacies (I had to learn what a logical fallacy was), and thoroughly biased presentation of the subject. None of this was apparent to me when I was a believer because of the information control that the religion imposes (including not trusting ‘worldly’ sources of information, and completely shunning apostates – refusing to even look at anything they have to say).

Within a few weeks of leaving, I had come to terms with the fact that there is simply insufficient evidence for a supreme being, and that I was not going to live forever. When I was a believer, I thought that such a realisation would render my life meaningless (and that prevented me from pursuing answers to my doubts), but in reality I very quickly adapted, and now feel that my life has much greater meaning than ever before. I am mentally free. I no longer live with the anguish of doubt, and other psychological baggage that comes from being in a high control group.

Sadly, it looks like the JWs will continue to cast their pall over my family life for some time yet. Still, I have no regrets.

Russ.

Finally, I wondered what kind of role learning about evolution really played in Russ’s de-conversion, so I asked him this:

“It does surprise me that reading about evolution is enough to turn the tide. I wouldn’t have expected that a priori, but, I suppose, evolution is the one solid bit of evidence that everyone can understand AND that contradicts one’s faith.  Maybe that’s why reading about Darwinism tends to dispel faith.”

He responded in this way:

I think the reason evolution was such a clincher for me is that my whole belief was built on what I thought was solid and logically sound proof of creationism. My faith was a house of cards built on ‘proof’ that God exists (rather than any personal religious experience or anecdotal evidence). In effect, I was ‘reasoned into’ belief in God (albeit the reasoning was unsound), and therefore was able to be ‘reasoned out’ of it too. I think this is rare among the religious though – when I was a believer, I was often a little frustrated with the fact that my fellow believers ‘believed the right things for the wrong reasons’ as I saw it!

Russ.

To those who argue that religion isn’t based on factual beliefs, but on beliefs that are really “fictitious imaginings” (see my previous post about Tonia Lombrozo’s  and Neil van Leuuwen’s defense of this indefensible claim), Russ’s story stands in stark contrast. I think he’s right that people aren’t “reasoned into belief” (indeed, that was the point of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience), but that doesn’t mean that their religion, arrived at by emotion or revelation, doesn’t need to be buttressed by beliefs about what is true.

The notion that factuality of beliefs has little or nothing to do with religion is a recent trope of accommodationists, faitheists, and others who want to render religion immune to scientific and rational criticism.

I applaud Russ’s desire to put truth over falsity, even if abandoning superstition meant abandoning his social network. As you see, he’s actually much happier now.

*******

Here’s an email I got from Chris Smith of Bakersfield, California, who in subsequent correspondence ask that he be identified:

Dear Jerry Coyne
I finished reading your book “Why Evolution is True” about a year ago, and I loved it! I was raised in the Mormon church, and I left partially due to your book. I never understood evolution until I read your book, so I wanted to email you and say thank you so much for your clarity and sincerity in the way you explained evolution. Since leaving the Mormon church, I’m so much happier. And thanks to you, I’ve discover how much I love science! Evolution is true!
Thanks again for your book. It meant a lot to me.
Sincerely,
A fan
Kudos to Chris as well. I have another “testimony” that I might publish if I get permission, from another Mormon who told me how strongly the church and its adherents reject (or ignore) evolution. Chris’s account jibes with that.