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In a recent podcast with my Christian sister, she pressed me on the reasons why I don’t believe. I always struggle with answering this question because the reasons are so complicated that I’m never prepared to give a succinct answer.

Instead, I gave a more meta answer: doubt is something that happened to me. I can’t say what it was that made me the skeptic, and why my skepticism was so relentless when others in my life were content to just believe. That is a mystery of temperament. To this day, I continue to believe that, ultimately, faith and lack of faith are not conscious choices, but forces beyond our control that emerge from the depths beneath conscious cognition.

But the questions keep coming, and they probably won’t stop. Prompted by my sister’s question, I decided to sit down and write out my post hoc reasons and the story I tell myself about why I lost my Christian faith. The document started to run long, though, and this is just one portion. If readers enjoy this essay, I might release the other segments.

The problem of miracles

I grew up in a culture of miracles. My father is a protestant minister, exorcist, and miracle worker. I traveled the world and attended conferences with him. I saw convulsions, and speaking in tongues, and ecstatic states of consciousness.

In my late teens, I joined a missions organization called Youth With a Mission, and I traveled the world enveloped in a culture of miracles. In YWAM I saw wondrous faith and overwhelming fervor.

But what I never saw — not once, in all my years as a missionary, a charismatic Christian, or the son of a modern-day prophet — was a miracle.

I never witnessed a single healing, a single air-tight prophecy come true, a single breaking of any law of physics. I heard a lot about miracles occurring all around me — a physical healing, an astonishing event on the mission field, or a dream that came true. But it seemed that I was always one step behind God; I was always on the crime scene right after he left. I could only live like that for so long before I started to get suspicious.

I see now that I lived in a culture of perpetually reinforced divine presence. We all believed in the miraculous and socially reinforced that reality. I hate to be a killjoy, but I no longer have much confidence in humanity’s ability to keep its facts straight. We exaggerate, confabulate, and agree with our peers, especially when we believe it is in the service of the truth.

The complete absence of miracles in my life when they should have been abundant led me to question the veracity of all miracle claims. I examined the historical miracles upon which the Christian faith is based and found the evidence lacking.*

A meaningless God

If God is real, then he must interact with the material world in a meaningful way. If he does interact with the material world, then we should be able to observe and measure those interactions. That is the domain, if not of science, then at least reason and our observational powers. If he does not interact with the world, then he is a meaningless God that I have no reason to believe in — the equivalent of Bertrand Russel’s heavenly teapot:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

I don’t use Russel’s absurd illustration to belittle or mock Christian belief. The Christian God isn’t a mere teapot. Instead, the thought experiment demonstrates why I’m not obligated to believe in an entity for which I don’t have sufficient evidence. A God that does not interact with the material world in any measurable way warrants as much belief as an undetectable teapot in the heavens. Both are superfluous.

The miracle of creation

One may retort that the miracle of God is nature itself. We are mysteriously conscious creatures living in a seemingly fine-tuned, vast, and complex universe. And I would agree; it is reasonable, in my view, to call nature a miracle. Leaving the faith has opened wide for me the magisterial mystery of our existence and the natural world.

But that miracle is an entirely different category from the workings of a conscious God interacting with our world in specific ways, and I have a bone to pick with apologists who conflate the two. Christianity is not merely based on the awe of the inexplicability of the natural order — if that were so, then I would have no argument with it. Instead, Christianity — according to the doctrines of the most prominent churches, now and through history — is based on specific, extraordinary, miraculous claims: Jesus is the son of God, the third person of the trinity, born of a virgin, and was crucified and resurrected on the third day.

Yes, the natural world and our place in it are miraculous. But that fact only points me into deeper mystery and unfathomable awe, not towards a particular deity who works miracles within that natural order. There is, in my view, an unbreachable chasm between the expansive miracle of the cosmos and the specific miraculous claims of religions. One cannot extrapolate from the former to the latter.

Correlation is not causation.

But what, I’m sometimes asked, would I do if a miracle occurred before my eyes? What if I witnessed a miraculous healing? Would I believe in Christianity then?

No, because correlation is not causation. Just because a miraculous event might correlate with a Christian revival or a fervent belief in the Christian God does not mean that the Christian God caused the miracle to happen.

Instead, I would be left with a profound mystery, the explanation for which I could not (in the moment) imagine. Leaping to the conclusion that it was the Christian God would rule out the near limitless other possibilities. How would I know it wasn’t aliens? Advanced technology? A glitch in the simulation? A disturbance in universal consciousness? If it was a god, how do I know which one? Why, with such infinite possibilities, would I settle on the Christian God? The answer is simple: the miracle simply correlated with a cultural context in which belief in Christianity is prevalent.

I think the correlation/causation glitch is a deep one in the human psyche, and claims of Christian miracles almost entirely depend on them. Example: “I went to a prayer meeting for the healing of my 3rd-stage cancer. At my next screening, the cancer had gone into remission!” But this is a fallacy. Correlation isn’t causation, no matter how astonishing.

I consider myself epistemically open to the strange, unexpected, and miraculous. I want to believe. But if a miracle truly does occur, then it will have to stand on its own as a profound mystery until further evidence for its causation is established. Our ape brains don’t like that fact, and we rush to fill the gaps with correlations.

I was ultimately left with a God that existed as an interior and intellectual construct but did not interact with the physical world in any meaningful, measurable way. I can’t live like that. Why? I don’t know. There are many believers who confront the exact same conundrum I faced and persist in their belief. Why am I not like them? I don’t know. All I know is that I couldn’t continue to believe in a God that existed entirely in my mind and the minds of my fellow Christians when all the while I couldn’t taste, touch, smell, see, or hear him.

*More on the historical claims of Christianity in a later post.

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But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and I might feature them in an upcoming post. Subscribe if you haven’t already, share this post with friends to rise on the leaderboard, and join the cult … I mean Discord server.