Matt Miller
Three and a half years ago I was a graduate student in the philosophy department of the University of Iowa. The reason I was there was to become a good pastor. When I was 13 God had told me that I was going to grow up and be a preacher, just like my dad, my grandpa, my uncle, my great grandpa and Billy Graham. He chose to do it while I was in the shower in the basement of a rich Christian doctor’s house. We were living there for 6 months while our new house was being built. We had been evicted from our old place, a worn down little green hovel 30 miles outside of town. The state decided to widen highway 30 from 2 lanes to 4. If our house was still standing, it would be destroyed by the first semi heading west towards Mt Vernon, since the highway passes right through were our living room used to be. We were warned plenty in advance that they were going to knock it down to make way for progress, and my dad decided to build. But for some preordained reason we weren’t done with construction soon enough to move straight from one place to another. We had to stay in someone’s basement. In all actuality, their basement was one of the nicer places I’ve ever lived. Maybe the nicest. We had our own racquetball court. It was a little small for a family of 6 though.
Our new house was next door to the church. My dad was the pastor, of course. So, for me, there was never a distinction between home and church life. They were the same thing. I even went to Isaac Newton Christian Academy through the 8th grade. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how peculiar that name was. Isaac Newton was probably the greatest scientist who ever lived. But he certainly was not the greatest Christian. He was, in fact, one of the greatest Deists who ever lived. He told everyone that God was like a watchmaker. He assembled the universe, wound it up, and let it go. God was not in the business of messing with his handiwork. He was a “hand’s off” God. And Isaac Newton made great strides helping mankind devise the rules that governed God’s clock. But he certainly didn’t help the modern fundamentalist agenda at all. If anything, he made it look just a little bit more ridiculous. After all, if we can describe the motions of planets and cannon balls and light beams with a few simple equations, that’s just three fewer things we can credit to God.
One day at fundamentalist school my teacher called in sick. He taught language arts, science, and Bible class. My grade only had 3 teachers, and they split the subjects between them. Apparently there was no good substitute teacher laying around, so my principle, Mr. Spanich, had to fill in. I don’t remember what he taught us in language arts or science class, but I do remember his Bible message for the day. He told us that God had a plan for our lives. I already knew that. But he also said that God wanted us to know that plan. I wish I could remember his exact words, but I can’t. I just remember he said that if we pray and ask God, and we really believe he’ll respond, and we’re really really willing to do anything he tells us, then he’ll tell us what we’re supposed to be when we grow up. Mr. Spanich was a very confident man. He spoke with authority. Students were not allowed to question Mr. Spanich. So I believed him. I had been wondering what to do with my life anyway. When I was about 5 I decided I wanted to be a scientist, because I liked science and I was really smart. But I was also a good talker. I had no fear of public speaking – a rare trait – and I was good at expressing myself. I also had an uncharacteristically deep understanding of doctrine for my age, and, of course, my whole family was made up of preachers.
I used to take showers at night. It’s weird now that I think about it, because I hate showering at night. I wonder when that switch happened. I guess these things just sneak up on you. Anyway, that night in the shower I had a few minutes alone. So, before the hot water ran out, I stopped and prayed a short prayer. I don’t remember the exact words of this one either, but here’s a good approximation: “God, what do you want me to do with my life?” I sat still for a minute, and then the thought “Be a preacher” popped into my head. It was obviously the voice of God. And so from that moment on I was a preacher in training. I am now a scientist.
Even without knowing how things would turn out, I prepared for my life as a scientist rather well. I set a world record for number of science and math classes taken during high school. In fact, my senior year, after I had taken all the science classes my school offered, I drove down the road and took some at Coe College. But it didn’t matter. There weren’t any Christianity classes at public high school. So I could learn whatever I wanted until Seminary. As far as I understood it, it wasn’t really important what I did in high school or even college. It was just important that I graduate from both. Ever since my conversation with God in the shower, the plan was simple: get some sort of bachelor’s degree then go to seminary somewhere.
Despite nearly genius level intelligence, my high school academic performance was lackluster. I had little ambition to go to a great college. I had no particular major in mind, and whatever one I picked, it wasn’t important that the school had a good program. I just needed a diploma. Admissions standards are not too high at your average seminary.
To save money and effort, I only applied to one post-secondary institution: the University of Iowa. It was only 30 miles from home and I could commute. This way I could still go to church and everything. When I applied, I picked the major with which I had had the most experience: physics. I dropped that after two or three weeks and switched to math. I was better at math. In order to fulfill a diversity requirement, I took an introduction to philosophy class. I enjoyed it, and realized that philosophy had a lot more to do with theology than calculus did. I could learn all sorts of useful skills, like critical thinking. Plus, I’d be able to get really familiar with all the backwards, inverted silly ideas of mankind. Then I’d be more prepared to deal with unbelievers and write good sermons. It was perfect. After my first semester, philosophy it was.
Sometime over the next two years I decided that an undergraduate degree in philosophy wasn’t really enough. If I was gonna be a super ultra awesome preacher I should get my Ph.D. Then I could go to seminary and be the next Ted Haggard. So to save effort and money I applied to grad school at U of I. I couldn’t really move at this point, because I had caught a bad case of marriage. The marriage wasn’t really that bad, I had just been completely infected. I could barely move (around the country).
The problem with grad school is it’s really hard. Undergraduate philosophy is sort of like paint by numbers. But when you get to grad school, you realize numbers don’t even exist.
My plan to learn a bunch of philosophy to make me a better Christian backfired. You see, I had unfortunately picked up a lot of skills, like critical thinking. Be careful what you wish for.
It turns out that if you practice picking apart Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, you get good at it. It’s like dipping your fist in molten iron or something. Anyway, I couldn’t help but turn my ironfists towards my own beliefs. Who would have guessed that if you teach a fundamentalist Christian modern philosophy he starts to question his faith?
And so it started. At first is was small things, like “Nelson Goodman makes a good argument that there is no objective point of view of the world, so how can Christianity claim to be ‘absolutely true’?”. I also started wondering about the “inspiration” of scripture. See, if you study language for 10 minutes you’ll realize its utter imperfection. As Wittgenstein said, language is not the transmission of data, it is a game we play with other people. Ideas are not neatly and cleanly conveyed, no matter the “perfection” of the text. So how could the Bible be “perfectly true”?
I banished these thoughts as fast as I could have them. But my critical mind, like a well trained puppy, kept bringing them back up. I had taught it to seek out logical inconsistency, and I found myself unable to shew it away from my religious beliefs. It didn’t matter how well I explained it: “No, rational mind, you can think critically about all my other thoughts, just ignore these religious ones that are sitting behind the curtain.” It was not very obedient.
My doubts progressed in 30 second increments. That’s about how long I would entertain my rational criticism of my beliefs. If I had been open minded I could have gotten through the process in 4 or 5 hours. As it was it took about 6 months.
I remember the first moment of true doubt. It was a big turning point – when the façade cracked and it became okay to question religion. It was so insignificant, but it was the first time I said to myself “no, my religion is clearly wrong about this thing.” Once you say that, it opens the floodgates, because if it could be wrong about one thing, then you better well verify if it’s right about the rest (which, unfortunately, it’s not). Here was the stupid, insignificant straw that broke my back: I was reading the creation story (yes, I was still a creationist – don’t shun me). And I was thinking about how, before the earth was created, time was measured in “days.” And I thought to myself “but where did they measure the passage of time?” You see, at that point God had already created the cosmos. According to Einstein, time moves differently depending on how much gravity there is. So, without an Earth as a reference point, it’s strictly impossible to say that “one day has passed.” You have to say “one day has passed relative to this particular point in space.” So, I realized that the Bible couldn’t be precisely accurate in counting the days before the creation of the earth. And that was it: provable scientific inaccuracy in the Bible.
The entire creation story was abandoned moments later.
This sped the process of abandonment up considerably, however it didn’t make it any easier. I still didn’t want to give up my religion. I fought for every inch of ground. And I was fighting with myself. The process was cyclical. 1) Realize that some particular bit of my theology was either inconsistent with itself, or with some other belief of mine. 2) Fight to maintain that bit of theology by explaining away the inconsistency. 3) Begrudgingly abandon my original belief, and replace it with a slightly-less-strong belief that doesn’t generate the same inconsistency. Goto (1).
And thus my beliefs were slowly whittled down to nothing.
Then, one Wednesday night, I was driving home from youth group. I was a youth pastor at the time – a job I’d been doing for about a year. Yes, that’s right, I came to doubt the core of my faith while I was the acting youth pastor for Northbrook Baptist Church. They were even paying me. If I were them I’d ask for a refund. They made my life miserable for a while though. I think we’re even.
My wife and I were on Boyson Rd., and my mind was wandering. I was assessing the depths to which my beliefs had fallen. I didn’t believe in anything extra-physical. I had long since abandoned beliefs in souls or the after-life. I was a true Isaac Newton deist. I thought that God had created the universe with a Big Bang, but that he didn’t interact with it at all, the development of religion was a natural phenomenon, he had no plan for our lives, and absolutely everything happened according to the laws of physics. That was okay, though, because God started it all so he was still somehow responsible.
But as I thought about this, I realized that God was absolutely unnecessary in this picture. The universe as I imagined it, and the one that sprung from a natural big bang without a God, were identical. The only difference was this pitiful afterthought of a God that was tacked on to settle my mind. I realized I was holding onto God just because I didn’t want to give him up, but that he made no sense and was only holding me back. So right then, as I turned left onto the I-380 entrance ramp, the words “I don’t believe in God” popped into my head. WHAT?!? I was dumbfounded, flabbergasted, immobile. What did I say? Was it true? Is it okay to even think that? (I almost crashed the van) Just like Iraq, it was shock and awe. It was the most religious experience of my life.
I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. My brain was a giant rickety machine whose parts suddenly snapped into place and began working like they were meant to. The world made sense. It came into focus for the first time. I finally grasped it as a unified whole. I no longer needed the hypocritical dichotomous attitude of all modern Christians (to reconcile their wacky beliefs with the hard truths of modern science and culture). It was freedom. It was joy. It was life. It was a rush of emotions that immediately turned sour as I realized that I was an atheist, sitting next to my Christian wife, driving home from my youth pastor job, at the church where my father was the pastor, and every friend I had attended.
Luckily the church hired a new youth pastor a couple weeks later (God must have known about me). I breathed a sigh of relief and transferred to Iowa State to do computer science (yes, it is a real science). I told people I was into the philosophy of artificial intelligence and wanted to implement some of my ideas, but the truth is I was starting over. I hit the giant reset button and picked a new life. In some ways I made this choice just as arbitrarily as the last one, but at least it had more to do with my skill set.
I like to say that I hit the marriage lottery. My wife and I got married very young for the same reason all Christian couples get married young – sex. It was a monumentally stupid decision at the time. We had no idea if we even liked each other, and our marriage could have gone very very badly. But, thanks to the grace of god, it turns out we make a great team. She rejected her faith about 6 months after I did, and it turns out she was having doubts right along with me. It took 6 more months because that’s how long I postponed talking to her about my conversion. I’m such a coward.
But now I’m happy. And that’s awesome. I’m a grad student and researcher at Iowa State, with great academic prospects. My wife’s a violin teacher and performer and illustrator in her spare time. We’re doing what we love, and it looks like things are going to turn out okay.
Oh, I forgot to mention, my wife and I kept our doubts about the religion a secret. Well, it wasn’t a complete secret, we just didn’t bring it up to any Christians. We figured it’s probably better to be a little secretive than to alienate both our families and most of our friends. So we still walk the tightrope. But that’s my life. And that’s my story. I hope it can help somebody someday, because escaping from religion is one of the most terrifying and difficult things I ever had to do. But it is by far the best thing that has ever happened to me.
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