Dear Atheist,
A Brief Letter From A Former Fellow Nonbeliever
I get it — God, as often presented, doesn’t make much rational sense. Before you throw the baby out with the nativity hay, please hear me out.
Imagine if I tried to convince you that J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t actually exist, and the Lord of the Rings books were actually just the result of a million monkeys given a million typewriters, and wouldn’t you know it, eventually they popped out a literary classic.
That’s basically the argument for the human nervous system, the cosmos, the ecosystems of Earth, all just happening for the sake of happening. This is what’s known as the Fine Tuning argument.
I do understand disbelief though — some of the Sunday School stories may sound absurd and implausible, if not outright impossible; many of the practitioners of religion are corrupt, hypocritical, and seem disingenuous. School says one thing, the church says another, and then experience tells you yet another third even weirder thing.
Leave your own religious upbringing or external experiences with religious folks at the door a moment. Forget the intellectual certitude, philosophical posturing, and how funny it is to make fun of Westboro Baptist Church. (What a URL, right?)
While there are certainly some truths to be found in all corners of belief systems, worldviews, and concepts of what “reality” is, there is also a mootness found in entertaining these all equally — a sort of unanchored adrift-ness in which finding peace can be like searching for the corner of a round room.
If you don’t believe me on anything else, believe this: feeling like Mr. or Mrs. Smarty-Pants is not worth your soul. As a ginger kid in the early 2000s, I grew up frequently told by peers that I didn’t have a soul to risk losing, and for a while, I agreed… but I was soundly and profoundly corrected.
Reductionist materialism has been fantastically good at determining explanations for many complex phenomena, producing fun little gizmos and gadgets, but it can’t quantify how much a parent loves their child, measure how beautiful a sunset is, or penetrate the mysteries of the Divine. It also completely removes free will from the decision-making equation, as fellow Medium user Colin Mathers points out, citing the likes of Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, and Daniel Dennett.
When we reduce God to merely a mythically concocted projection of our own selves, a bearded cloud-riding father figure, some vague animistic presence that permeates all materiality, or really any definitive certitude of who or what God is, we cheat ourselves out of the wonder and awe which is inherent to that which is merciful, beautiful, and creative beyond our human comprehension.
Hell is not necessarily fire, brimstone, and pitchforks, it’s an unbridgeable separation between ourselves and God. If we look for Him earnestly, God reveals Himself in ways that can scarcely be articulated.
