Why I am Not a Christian: The Problem with Fearing Godlessness

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This is the third installment in my Why I am Not a Christian series. I invite you to read the other articles, but they are not necessary to follow what I will argue in this post.

One of the things that kept me from accepting my disbelief for so long was a fear of what the universe would be like without God. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling:

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

Kierkegaard is speaking to a primal fear that I notice in many theists: if there is no solid ground in this universe — be it God, or divine consciousness, or a soul, then how could anyone bear to live?

I remember reading materialist theories of consciousness, and feeling absolutely horrified and alienated by the thought that my consciousness itself was just an impermanent, flickering hologram produced by dead matter following the laws of physics. Horror doesn’t begin to describe what I felt. It was unbearable.

As I struggled with the implications of a godless universe, I latched on to the work of H.P. Lovecraft because I found it the perfect illustration of my fears.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” Lovecraft writes in The Call of Cthulhu,

is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

If there is no God then the universe is a Lovecraftian one, utterly indifferent, cold, and horrifying. My faith was kept alive by this motivating fear: that universe simply cannot be ours; I won’t know how to live if it is.

I see this fear all the time now when I talk to theists. One friend told me, “Stephen, I simply do not understand how people can confront life without belief in God. You have to believe, because if you don’t, all that’s left is emptiness.”

To meet an atheist is, to many theists, like encountering a philosophical zombie: a being that looks and acts and talks like us, but is utterly devoid of consciousness. The animating spirit of purpose, joy, and ethics is gone, and yet they go on acting as if there is purpose in the world. Atheists, I believe, fall into an uncanny valley for many believers and spark fear, loathing, and revulsion.

The problem I kept returning to as I confronted a godless universe was that these feelings of horror and alienation were no sound reason to reject it. A feeling is not an argument. My horror at a universe with no God was no more an argument against it than my horror at the Holocaust is an argument against its historical existence.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote of crossing the chasm of doubt with fear and trembling. Faith in God, he argued, is incomprehensible. It is only when one steps out in faith and crosses the chasm of doubt that faith resolves into something mystical, personal, and relational. (Note: it’s been a long time since I’ve read Kierkegaard, so philosophers in my audience are welcome to correct my reading if I’m getting something wrong.)

I posit that there is a similar leap of faith but in the opposite direction.

There was no convincing me that life on the other side of atheism could be beautiful, meaningful, or full of purpose. That black box was inaccessible to me. It was only when I confronted the fear of a meaningless universe, choosing to follow my conviction anyway, that I rediscovered purpose in a godless world.

I discovered that the universe is what it is regardless of what I believe about it and that the most beautiful things about my life — love, higher meaning, and transcendence — were just as real as they were before I crossed the chasm of unbelief.

My previous article Why I Am Not a Christian: The Problem with Experiencing God sparked some thoughtful discussion.

Bo McGuffee, author of the Evolving Faith Network on Substack, wrote,

I believe growing spiritually needs not only depth but also breadth. When we go deep, such as the case of pursuit of personal spiritual experience, I think there is a tendency toward an egocentrism that can lead to a sense of superiority, followed by judgment. When we expand the breadth of our experience, such as learning of other ways of understanding spiritual truth, it acts as a reminder that we have a choice when faced by otherness. We don’t always have to choose to be right, but can choose interactive creativity instead.

I love this insight. Encounters with radically different spiritualities and practices keep us humble and recognizing that our knowledge of the world is approximate at best.

Erica Philips, a pagan and author of The Experimental Intuitive on Substack, wrote,

I went down this road in college. A book I found fascinating, “why I am not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell. A philosophical wormhole. I eventually found paganism later on, and I am all in on it, but also very practical. I am more a “our gods/goddesses are archetypes to call on, They are energies” person. As oppose to the all the gods/goddesses are real viewpoint. I am also an empath and can sense spirits, so my inner belief is a little in contradiction since I have direct knowledge of those things.

Grew up catholic. Just horrible, ditched that in high school as soon as I could. There are so many other things in the world to explore than Christianity. It’s really a shame more people don’t see this. My thinking is that if someone doesn’t believe in religion, that’s not only ok, but should be embraced and respected. Organized religion serves as a way to control the masses, among other things. We can choose to simply not participate are go our own way.

She is not the only pagan to respond favorably to this article. The overarching theme of the feedback is that one can have skepticism towards interior mystical experiences, but still gain deep meaning and pleasure from them.

Zee Jay shared some of their journey and how the election of Trump initiated their loss of faith:

I grew up being taken to church every weekend by my Christian grandmother. For 20 years, I believed the Bible / Christianity was true, but that it wasn’t for me… yet. My parents then converted, then my girlfriend, and I finally decided it was my time to take it seriously. I spent the next 30 years deeply Christian, studying the Bible, never questioning that it was absolute, divine truth.

Long story shorter, then came Trump. Seeing the vast majority of the church rabidly embrace him shook me. I had to figure out HOW and WHY. This began the deconstruction process in me (though I wasn’t aware that was what I was doing). Many, many books were read during my journey. The process ended when I finally worked up the courage to read my first Bart D. Ehrman book, which I believe was “How Jesus Became God”.

…My faith in the truth of the Bible was absolutely shattered. I realized I’d spend 30 years studying the Bible and theology and had never once studied or questioned where the Bible and its contents came from in the first place. A few more books were read, and my fight to hang onto my faith ended in agnostic atheism (with a roughly 5%/95% leaning, currently). I found your article to be spot on but that particular quote really hit home with my personal experience.

I think the election of Trump presented many Evangelicals with a terrifying choice: deconstruct or join the cult. It’s a terrible choice, and I’m proud of any evangelical who took the former path and decided that deconstruction was preferable over joining the cult of Trump. Some have abandoned it completely, while others have opted for a more expansive, generous Christianity.

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.