"Who am I? I am a friend, parent, child, lover. I go to school and work hard. I love my country. I love music, stars, books, running, laughter, people. Above all, I am a lover of truth, wherever that may lead."
- The Redheaded Skeptic,
from Who Am I?: A Portrait of an Atheist
The journey about which I have been writing - my own journey from Christian apologist to atheist - is the result of a desire for truth. As a Christian I longed to know the truth, and worked fervently to support with logic and reason what I believed to be the truth; namely, the core doctrines of my particular brand of Christian theism. Love of truth caused me to ask questions, and look for answers. Had I not cared about truth, I would probably still be a Christian.
When I say that I care about truth, this is what I mean: to borrow words from Christian author James Sire, to care about truth is to strive to possess "an intelligence that pursues truth regardless of its implications for one’s life or the life of one’s community or country." Truth should be pursued with an open mind and a willingness to evaluate the facts objectively, to "speculate without the restraints of prejudice, self-interest or prior commitment to a way of life or set of values."
I find myself coming back to the words of James Sire, particularly those found in his book Habits of the Mind, because that was the book that influenced me the most as a Christian, and the one book that most influenced me to step away from Christianity. I recall his definition of an "intellectual":
An intellectual is one who loves ideas, is dedicated to clarifying them, developing them, criticizing them, turning them over and over, seeing their implications, stacking them atop one another, arranging them, sitting silent while new ideas pop up and old ones seem to rearrange themselves, playing with them, punning with their terminology, laughing at them, watching them clash, picking up the pieces, starting over, judging them, withholding judgment about them, changing them, bringing them into contact with their counterparts in other systems of thought, inviting them to dine and have a ball but also suiting them for service in workaday life.
An intellectual judges ideas, but also withholds judgment when it is appropriate to do so. The obvious question here is, when is it appropriate to withhold judgment? The (hopefully obvious) answer is, when one does not have sufficient evidence or reason to make a judgment.
My search for truth has not eliminated ignorance as much as it has exposed it. My work as a Christian apologist is best described as an attempt to convince the world that sufficient evidence and reason exist to justify Christian faith when such evidence and reason is nowhere to be found. I was convinced I had knowledge when in reality I did not. Honesty and integrity demand that I recant the claims and arguments made when I was a Christian apologist, and proclaim myself agnostic about such matters.
Calling myself an atheist does not mean I think there is no god. I'm not proclaiming, "There is no god!" or denying the existence of a being that could rightly be called "god." I'm not even claiming that Christianity is wrong (although I do have my doubts). When I refer to myself as an atheist, all I'm saying is I do not have a belief in any god - however "god" has been defined. I lack a belief in a god or gods. I withhold judgment on the existence of god; therefore, I neither believe in nor deny the existence of god. In other words, I make no truth claim concerning deity. My beliefs will remain a-theistic (without god) until such time that I discover sufficient evidence and/or reason to either believe in god or deny that any such god exists.
This is where my journey as an intellectual has taken me. This is where it will continue to lead me.
Dead-Logic.com
The Journey to Atheism
