Daniel Arndt
First of all, thanks to PZ Myers for bringing this to my attention. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get this all down in writing somewhere, and this seems the best one so far.
It was just this weekend that I was retelling my conversion story to a friend. I didn’t go into as many details as I will here, but in retrospect, I began thinking critically about my religion at a very early age.
I grew up in the Pentecostal church. Speaking in tongues, arm waving, and faith healings were as commonplace in our church as hours long sermons and upbeat Christian praise music. Every Sunday I’d go to Sunday school, get taught stories like David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, the Creation story, and the birth of Jesus. We would sing songs praising Jesus and talking about how much we loved God and how blessed we were to live in a country where Christianity is an accepted religion. It was the largest church in my city at the time, but I really have no idea how many people actually went there. As I entered the public school system, I gained a love for dinosaurs, and ancient life, that I think started me on a path to leaving the church and thinking more critically about what the church was claiming.
You see, even then, dinosaur books were very good at educating the reader about the age of the Earth. They would show maps of what the planet looked like 600 million years ago, then 400, then at the beginning of the Triassic at 235, the beginning of the Jurassic at 205, the Cretaceous at 144, and then what it looked like when the dinosaurs went extinct at 65 million years ago. The last image in the series would usually be one of modern Earth, and you could see exactly how the continents fit together and how they drifted to where they are today. Well, as an inquisitive kid, I would ask my mom or my grandparents why the Bible said things differently than what all these dinosaur books were saying. I tried to justify it in my mind, and as a kid, cognitive dissonance won the day, so I simply just didn’t allow the two things to clash in my mind. As I grew older though, and retained my interest in science, the more I learned, the more dissonant the two competing topics had to become. Each passing year, my faith in God grew, but my knowledge and passion for science did as well, leading me to, eventually, a very untenable position. I attended summer church camps, spoke in tongues myself, praised Jesus, and one summer even did a missionary camp in the downtown core of my city, with a different summer Church camp.
I should also point out that I was one completely credulous kid. At the age of 12, I entertained the idea that I had been abducted by aliens, cut up, and reassembled, based on certain scars I have on my arms and legs that seem to be complete radial cuts. I believed in ghosts, vampires, and bought into astrology and psychics.
I was no stranger to the Bible, either. I did what few Christians do. I read the whole damned thing. See, pastors and preachers pick and choose a couple pieces of the Bible here and there to put together a sermon to say whatever they want the Bible to say. They tend to ignore the old books of law, the unsavoury verses, but glorify the blind faith of Abraham, Moses, and Paul. The more I read, the more I came to realize that the church really wasn’t quite doing what Jesus had taught, and wasn’t the selfless, generous, and grassroots organization that the New Testament really seemed (to me, at least) to be pushing for. So with that, by the age of 15, I stopped going to church.
I kept my faith a personal thing. I still prayed. Still lived a “good” life. But I simply could not support a church that claimed one thing and did another. It wasn’t long after that that I moved out on my own, making a very poor, in retrospect, life decision, and moved away from home at the age of 16. It wasn’t for another 2 years that I would re-enter high school and finish my upgrading to enter university, but during that time, my faith became more and more of a side-note. Still there, mind you, but dwindling down and away from anything resembling like Christianity, and turning to a basic “spiritual” view. Throughout university, I would still pay lip service to it. Praying before tests, praying that I had passed, thanking God for letting me meet this or that cute girl, hating him when we’d break up.
The last couple of years of University were the transformative ones. Having slipped straight out of the spiritual position to one of scientific skepticism, I no longer believed many of the things I had when I was young. Psychics were bunk, but I didn’t quite know why yet. Astrology was laughable in that it was so generic as to apply to anyone. Aliens weren’t visiting Earth and experimenting on us, because of the distances involved and the current understanding of physics simply does not allow for it. Ghosts aren’t real because there is no evidence of an afterlife. The Earth was vastly older than 6000 years, and far closer to 4.5 billion years, based on geologic evidence supported by radiometric dating methods. And lastly, God was a question to which the answer was simply indeterminate. I became aware of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that summer, after graduation, and began looking into their writing. The first book I read was “The God Delusion”. When I closed the book, I had gone from wavering agnostic, to devout atheist. I can’t say exactly at what point I went from “Well maybe there’s a God” to “It is incredibly likely that there simply is no God”, but I know that it was more like turning up a thermostat, than a light being switched on.
With that assertion made, I delved deeper into my skepticism and atheism. I re-read Origin of Species. I read The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. I listened to science podcasts more regularly, and expanded my knowledge into areas I didn’t study in school. I learned about the history of agnosticism, looked into the real story behind aliens, UFOs, ghosts, and the like, and to my surprise, stumbled across The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast in October of 2007. In a whirlwind of podcast listening at home, at the gym, at work, and even just around town running errands, I was educated very rapidly in exactly why psychics are frauds, why alternative medicine doesn’t work, and why birds are in fact better than monkeys. Instead of taking all of this at its face value, I researched many of the topics that had a more skeptical bent to them, and found that logically, I simply agreed with the skeptical position as the most likely answer. It was like I had finally found a group of people who were just as willing to question absolutely everything presented to them from authority, as I had for many years in university. I had found like-minded people, many of whom were also atheist, and many more who had a similar story to mine. It was truly amazing.
So, to end this story, I have to give my personal thanks to Richard Dawkins, for both clearly and eloquently articulating the inherent weaknesses of the God hypothesis, and to the SGU: Dr. Steven Novella, Evan Bernstein, Jay Novella, Bob Novella, Rebecca Watson, and the late, great, Perry deAngelis, a skeptic of some note. Keep up the good work.
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