I left the Catholic Church at twelve. I was obsessed with physics, but couldn’t understand how a universe where particles behave predictably was compatible with the God I grew up with. I had a crisis of faith, and talked to a priest. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but I remember being told that it wasn’t a sin to use God’s gift of reason to explore the universe, wherever that took me. So I went.
The only real contact I had with atheists at that point was with the ones online: the ones who left with conviction. They cited Dawkins and Hitchens, church scandals, the cruelty of the religious people in their lives. The religious said people left the church due to moral rot. The secularists agreed.
It surprised me, though, that most of the secular people I met in real life weren’t passionate about it. They were casual atheists; God didn’t really do anything for them. It wasn’t a crisis of faith, a possession by the devil, drugs, or forbidden knowledge. It was just… indifference. How do you become indifferent to the creator of the universe?
I think the answer is that for most, the faith they inherited had already atrophied long before they got it. If your parents only went to church out of habit, it was just an annoyance and a waste of a couple of hours. The fall of faith isn’t a sudden rebellion; it’s the logical conclusion of a shift that happened two or three generations ago.
Humans need to have reasons for everything, and we really like stories. Put those two together and you have the idea that theism arose from using God to fill in the blanks: why the sun rises, what lightning is, how we got here. Science then put God out of a job. That’s how the story goes, anyway.
I think it’s a decent reason why theism exists, but I don’t think that explains religion. The questions that drove humans to their knees weren’t about the nature of physics; they were Book of Job questions.
In the Book of Job, a good man loses his livelihood and all ten of his children in a single day, and then his health. His friends show up offering an eerily modern version of religion: God has a plan, you must somehow deserve this, apologize and move on. Job refuses. He demands the Almighty show up and explain Himself. He yells at the sky. When God finally answers out of a whirlwind, He doesn’t explain anything. He asks where Job was when the foundations of the earth were laid, and Job backs down. But then God turns to Job’s friends and tells them He is furious with them. Unlike Job, they didn’t speak the truth. God preferred the man screaming into the void to the men reciting theology.
For almost all of human history, Job was the baseline of daily life. Roughly a quarter of all infants died before they turned one, and nearly half of all children died before reaching adulthood. There are graves we can see today where seven small headstones sharing a last name all have similar dates on them. Who do you yell at but God? You scream at Him, you bargain with Him, you hate Him, and you beg Him again the next time your precious child starts coughing. You cannot be indifferent to someone you’re fighting with.
What ended that fight wasn’t On the Origin of Species. It was penicillin. It was clean water, childhood vaccines, the neonatal ICU. In the span of a few generations, we made it ordinary to expect all your children to grow up. When my kid gets sick, I don’t have to pray to God that I get to see him again tomorrow. I drive to a pharmacy, pay twelve bucks for amoxicillin, and play with his hair as he relaxes in bed.
Modern medicine and prosperity didn’t disprove God; they made it so you didn’t have to fight Him at every turn.
Political scientists have a name for this: Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart call it existential security. Around the world, religion holds on hardest where survival is least certain and wears away among the comfortable in rich countries. Where the small graves are still being dug, the fight never stopped.
Modern secularism is completely rational on that view. If you think of religion as a strong medicine like chemotherapy, it makes a lot of sense. When humanity was living through the brutish state of nature, the medicine’s side effects were a price people were willing to pay to keep from soul death when they dug a third tiny grave.
Today, most of us don’t live under that threat. Why would you need to take medication with strong side effects if you don’t feel sick? Smart, secular people look at religion and see scandals, bad politics, hypocrisy, cruelty, and lack of reason. They aren’t being blind or irrational; they are being entirely sensible. If your life is safe and functional without the supernatural, why on earth would you want the side effects?
When Nietzsche wrote “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” he gave those words to a madman who runs into a marketplace holding a lantern in broad daylight. The people, the everyday atheists, just laugh at him. Did God get lost? they joke. Did He emigrate?
The madman screams that by killing God we’ve wiped away the horizon, unchained the earth from the sun, and plunged humanity into an unbearable moral abyss. The crowd goes quiet. Then he smashes his lantern on the ground and says he has come too early: the deed is done, but the news hasn’t reached them yet.
Nietzsche was right about what happened. But that was almost a hundred and fifty years ago, and the news still hasn’t arrived. The sky didn’t fall; society didn’t collapse into chaos. You could point at the twentieth century, at the trenches and the camps, and say that was the news arriving. The trenches, though, were dug by nations that still filled their churches, and the pews emptied fastest in the decades afterward, the same decades that wiped smallpox off the planet for everyone. I’d argue society is more moral now than it’s ever been. The usual reply is that we’re running on fumes: decency is decaying too, just slower than churchgoing. But people getting more moral doesn’t really fit with that. The crowd was right. It turns out you can kill God and enjoy the weather. There’s nothing irrational about ignoring metaphysics and having a laugh with your friends.
I came back to faith in my twenties anyway. I followed that priest’s advice to follow reason wherever it took me, and eventually strict materialism stopped being the obvious answer.
Physics is beautiful, which is why it convinced me at twelve that the universe was the most majestic clock. But what it can’t explain is why it feels like something to be the person watching the particles. When you run into the hard problem of consciousness—the undeniable fact of first-person subjective experience—the clock stops looking like a complete explanation.
I read the materialists who tried to fill the gap. The best known of them, Daniel Dennett, argued that consciousness is essentially a user-illusion created by the neurochemistry in the brain. Okay, but an illusion is still an experience. If it only seems like I’m in pain, it still hurts.
Even the secular philosophers who do care about the gap don’t all stick with dead matter; some land on panpsychism—treating consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe, like mass or charge. Strict materialism doesn’t have a clean answer to everything. Neither does religion; God never did tell Job why. For an atheist, that doesn’t really matter. You don’t need the answer to why we’re conscious to live a good life.
Once reason showed me that neither side could close every gap on the chalkboard, I was free to choose which gap I wanted to live with, and I chose theism. But a God who fills in a blank had never brought anyone to their knees.
What got me the rest of the way was the will.
Take the burning monk. In 1963, Thích Quảng Đức sat down in a Saigon intersection, let another monk pour gasoline over him, lit a match, and burned to death without moving or making a sound. He was a Buddhist protesting a Catholic government, and my Church would not bless what he did. I respect him immensely anyway. He stayed motionless as his skin turned to ash, in service of something he believed he ought to do. Billions of years of evolution built that body to flinch, scream, and run, and something in him overruled every bit of it. It is hard to think of a more extreme example of a person telling his own biology no.
That doesn’t prove there’s anything beyond matter. But try telling the story from the bottom up, from particles to neurons to a man sitting still inside a fire, and see how far you get before you want to say that he held himself there. A belief about what he ought to do decided whether a muscle moved. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it means for an ought to have that kind of hold on a person.
Hume’s guillotine says you can’t get an ought from an is: no amount of facts about how the world is can tell you how it should be. But oughts clearly exist. A parent at a third tiny grave who says this should not have happened isn’t just describing a mood. They’re right. And if you can stop the next child from dying, you ought to.
I couldn’t get that obligation out of a universe of pure is, even one with consciousness built in. I chose to believe its source is God.
It’s the madman’s argument, just run backward. He said that if God is dead, the horizon goes with Him, and I think he was right about that. But the horizon is still there; the crowd in the marketplace is still finding its way by it. So whatever we killed, it wasn’t the source. I think what died was the fight. And following oughts doesn’t require reckoning about their source. The crowd does it every day and they’re fine. I just needed to know.
A God who only fills in the blanks is an explanation. A God who is the source of every ought is someone you answer to. He’s also someone you can yell at, the way Job did, when the world isn’t what it ought to be. I’m not sure you can be religious without choosing who you’re religious to.
I didn’t come back looking for a neat system of rules. I came back to the Franciscan side of the Church, the side that says the will comes before the math: what you choose to love counts for more than what you can prove. The first Franciscans called themselves penitents, and penance is the part I love most. Catholicism doesn’t tell you what you are and leave you there. It gives you work to do, and you keep remaking yourself with it. God stays hidden enough to leave that up to you. The priest who let a twelve-year-old walk out the door knew that a faith you aren’t free to leave isn’t worth having. So I went back.
I’m a dad; I love seeing my son’s smile and being relatively certain that he’ll get to be 70 years old, with grandkids of his own, and still my baby. By making the world safe, we made God optional. It means that for some of us, the reverts and converts of the world, choosing to believe is entirely our own fault.