Why I became an atheist.

Peter Mayhew (January 2011, revised March 2011)

In recent months I have renounced my (admittedly weak) allegiance to Christianity, the religion under which I was brought up and educated, and in which British culture is steeped.  The process has been very enlightening, and, I think, worth sharing.

How did I become an atheist?

I was brought up by parents who were technically Anglican Christian. I would describe my mother as a rather loose and skeptical Christian, who doesn’t take much literally (but happens to like traditions, church architecture and history, and some church music). I don’t think she believes in the resurrection, or the virgin birth or that Jesus was the son of God, for example. I don’t think my father was much of a churchgoer when I was young, but is probably more of one now, for much the same reasons as my mother. When I was young I had the odd conversation about God with my father; things that were said included (roughly) “God must exist: just look at all the devotional music/painting/architecture/literature. Would all that have been done if it wasn’t true?”.  And “The ten commandments provide the basic moral framework for civilization”. And “The story of Jesus is the greatest story ever told”. When I was young, I didn’t have the ammunition to challenge assumptions or my parent’s opinions much, so didn’t argue back at statements like those the way I could now.

I went to schools that reinforced these views; we had daily prayers at assembly and in religious education we learned about Christian beliefs. The institutions of my country also reinforced them; the queen was religious and so were all our political leaders. Every town and village had a church. At secondary school I was lucky enough to have a chaplain who didn’t interpret the Bible literally, and encouraged us not to as well. I mean why not? He was an intelligent guy with a degree, and he knew that there was a lot of mistranslation and contradiction out there. It was great to have those issues brought to my attention. I guess it was about this time that I started to doubt the veracity of Christian beliefs.

When I was 16 my grandmother said to me in front of my family “ When are you getting confirmed?”  I said I didn’t know. Frankly I was not at all sure if I was a true believer. “What are you going to be then – a hippy?” she retorted (she really did say that). I had no answer of course because I had never been taught about any other religion, or philosophy, or non-religious way of life. It was a public and rather pushy way to get me to do what was expected. I knew that atheists existed of course but I guess I just saw them as people without morals, and nobody I knew was an actual atheist. I figured that if I didn’t get confirmed I couldn’t take part in all those significant events in life that were expected like marriage, baptism of children etc….so I signed up for confirmation classes. And there was another fairly significant factor too: my brother had got confirmed, and I always did everything my brother did. Actually I was quite eager in the end, because I was sure that I would be presented with the convincing evidence for God that had somehow eluded me up to then. It must be nice, I thought, to know for certain all about the meaning of life and how it all started, why we are all here. Cool. At the end of classes the teacher was asking who wanted to get confirmed. I was in a quandary. I wanted to get confirmed (in fact I knew I had to, because I wasn’t going to go through life not being accepted), but I wasn’t convinced about the existence of God. So I asked the teacher “I can believe in Jesus, but I have trouble believing in God: I mean what’s the evidence for God?”. I think the response was one of the most disappointing moments in my life: “I think you’ll find that it’s impossible to make sense of Jesus without God.” That was it. Clearly he expected us to take the word of the New Testament literally. It clearly didn’t occur to him that there are other ways we might read it. I mean if billions of people can be convinced of things that aren’t true, why couldn’t Jesus too?  Anyway to his credit, the teacher did question whether it was wise for me to get confirmed (knowing I wasn’t convinced about God), and I had to fob him off with some story about how I had become convinced by some argument. I knew this was dishonest, and all I can say in my defense now is that I felt under pressure and I wanted to be left alone, and that seemed like the only way out. So there we are: I got confirmed, largely through social pressure. I tried hard to believe and did like the idea of some of the things I was asked to believe in, and kind of tried hard to make it true for me. But I guess I never really convinced myself.

So having joined the Anglican club, luckily it was no questions asked from then on. British society is funny that way; it generally avoids talking about beliefs and religion. I didn’t think much about religion for years after that, but dutifully went to church when I had to – you know; Xmas, Easter, christenings, weddings etc. Most of them were nice occasions and I certainly didn’t dislike them, although I did have to cross my fingers during the creed, and treat myself to a very liberal intepretation of the word “God”, which would probably have shocked traditionalists. I guess I figured it was all fairly benign and harmless. I occasionally went to church to be sociable. In the 1990s, when I was a PhD student, some of the other students attended a local Baptist church, and I went along. I felt distinctly uncomfortable. There was lots of arm-raising during “hymns” (if you can call them that) (people were distinctly “in the zone” to the point of losing their senses), and I even remember one prayer which almost made me object out load. We were all asked to pray that muslims would see the light and convert to Christianity. Whilst I could see that this was consistent with the aim of spreading the Christian message, my common sense told me that their belief system was in no way less justifiable than Christianity.

At the same time I joined some choirs (either non-religious or more moderately religious) and did a lot of church singing; I got a kick out of that, but I felt like an outsider when I was surrounded by people with a firm faith in God. When I got married in 2000 my wife and I were actually denied a church wedding (my wife was previously divorced), and I was hugely disappointed because only a church wedding really seemed to do justice to the importance of the occasion for me. In this sense, I am admitting to a sense of the “sacred” in my marriage that I don’t feel a registry office wedding reflected adequately. So we had a church blessing instead.  In retrospect, I wish I had investigated alternative forms of celebration, such as humanist ceremonies, but I hadn’t taken the necessary steps out of Christianity by then.  Later, we had kids, and they were baptised in church too, and, naturally, we recruited godparents for them, and got recruited ourselves. I did have a few worries about this as I wasn’t sure I wanted my kids to be brought up in a faith system that I wasn’t myself very committed to. But I also didn’t want them to feel like outsiders in their own village or school. In retrospect I can see now how I was just forcing my own children into the same pattern of religious upbringing that I had experienced.

You can probably tell that throughout my life it wouldn’t have taken much for me to step over the line and become an atheist; now I am one I feel that it’s the set of beliefs (or absence of them) that feels most right. I’ve really been an atheist all my life and just not known it. What pushed me over the edge? In 2008 I bought, on a whim, a copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and took it on holiday with me. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I just about agreed with everything written in that book, though I still, sceptically, like to argue over bits of it. By the time I finished it I knew I was an atheist. Years ago I wish the Bible had given me the same feeling. Reading The God Delusion was life changing; finally I felt OK with the contradictions between my head and faith; here was someone else saying that it was legitimate to not follow the established Christian dogma, and what is more, it actually made sense.

Retrospectively I can see that two things were preventing me from leaving Christianity: first, the need to conform to those around me, and peer pressure to do so, was very powerful in my life.  I think it’s taken the rise of “new atheism”, combined with the confidence that comes with age,  to allow me the security to go against the norm.  Second, I liked the basic moral messages of Christianity, and still do, and I felt some kind of loyalty to them: in a way I think I synonymized them with the Christian God. I didn’t realize that those morals could exist apart from Christianity. Around the time I first read The God Delusion, I also started teaching a class on primate societies, which really started to awaken ideas in me about the natural origins of virtue.You could say that this was the last “pillar” of my Christian faith, and I had just crumbled it by reading some science.

Since the God Delusion, I’ve read a few more books on similar lines by e.g. Chistopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and A.C. Grayling, and I’ve read a lot of the religious counter-arguments to those books. The process of renouncing Christianity has sparked a new search for my place in life, and a quite feverish fascination with religion, belief and truth.  I’m really quite surprised that, as I approach 40, life still has such novelties in store for me.  I’m just a bit sad that it took me until I was 40 to get this far; it’s as if I only discovered my true self half-way through my expected lifespan.

What do I actually now believe?

I believe that science and reason provides our best chance of understanding the meaning of things, and therefore, because scientific knowledge is heavily incomplete, it must be accepted that we will not have answers to everything. As a scientist myself, I find this a relatively easy task. The reason for stacking my chips in the science box should be obvious to anyone; it works, and it’s the only technique we have to distinguish fact from fiction in this universe of ours. Historically if there is any point of fact on which science and religious doctrine have disagreed, then we all know which side to believe; the Earth really does go around the Sun, and humans really do share a common ancestor with apes. I’ve examined the arguments for God put forward by religious apologists and rejected them all: they don’t make any sense to me, and I can’t accept them. I’m not a hard atheist (i.e. I am not certain that there isn’t a supernatural deity); I simply feel that the burden of proof is on the claimants. For me, that is simply what my stance on religion comes down to: I can’t accept the existence of a God, at least not yet, and it’d be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise. In discussions with religious people, arguments nearly always fall back on the need for faith to accept God: if you’ll just accept the truth of God, you’ll see it makes sense. For me that’s the wrong way around: I need to see the sense in an argument BEFORE I accept it, not afterwards, otherwise I might be persuaded by people/doctrines that are genuinely mistaken, or downright misleading, and potentially evil. Having discovered the existence of a religion called Unitarian Universalism, I would have to admit that I have not rejected all religions per se: just those based on dogma, and the existence of a supernatural deity, and it’s dogma that I’m really against.

I have other reasons for siding against dogma. Our ability to understand the universe around us sets us apart from most other organisms. Most of us enjoy making sense of stuff: our brains are built for it. It would be negligent of us not to celebrate and encourage this understanding. But faith in dogma inevitably stifles free-thought and inquiry, in ways that, in my view, leads to immoral consequences. Truth is important to me; it matters to me whether I am being taught the truth about the universe when I go to church, or indeed when my children go to school. However moderate your church, there will usually be dogma, and authority, and I want nothing to do with them.

Now for the positive: being an atheist is enlightening about life. The viewpoint that emerges is that the universe largely doesn’t care about us. You are a survival and reproductive machine for your genes, and you are here because your way of surviving and reproducing worked for your ancestors. As part of the process of surviving and reproducing we undergo remarkable experiences and interactions with others. We help and are helped through the process by friends and family, and we get the opportunity to engage with a fascinating universe. In short the meaning an atheist finds in life comes from that process of enrichment, and engagement with opportunities. Enrichment can come through helping others, amongst other things, just in case you were wondering about that. At the end of our life our dead bodies are recycled, and we leave behind our influences on others and the environment, memories in other’s minds of their interactions with us, our physical creations (e.g. art, music, architecture, literature, infrastructure), and our children. Those are the things we work towards. In short, life is an experience to make the most of, if we are lucky enough to be able to. If you miss the sense of community that comes with religions, then you could try joining a local humanist group (see link below), and if you need the ceremony and “sprituality” (“church”) without dogma and supernatural deities then you could look up Unitarian Universalists, though I admit that it’s not for me.

I think it plausible that human sense of right and wrong evolved as a survival skill to help us interpret the feelings of other individuals in social systems (here primatology and evolutionary anthropology is informative and I’ve enjoyed reading about that). In that sense we share common humanist values of right and wrong with every other human on Earth: if what I do causes you pain or relieves your suffering, I feel I am doing wrong or right because my brain is able to empathize with your feelings. That empathy is where the human values of right and wrong come from. Science does and should inform these values (for example it can tell us if homosexuals are born gay, or when human embryos gain self-awareness, or what a cow feels when you cut its throat or remove it from its calf). Thus, we should seek an informed consensus with others on behaviours that we would like to encourage or discourage. Morality then becomes simply the evolving consensus of human thought on these issues (the moral zeit-geist if you like). When I see religious institutions encouraging actions that conflict with my common humanist values (e.g. discouraging contraception, stifling medical research, flying airplanes into skyscrapers, discriminating against homosexuals), because their interpretations of their divine texts, or the voices in their heads, instruct them to, then being an atheist helps me to stand up for my common humanist principles: in short it helps me to do good.

A final word on these beliefs; they are all open to change given the right sort of evidence. But a lot of this will never realistically be rejected by new evidence; there’s been an awfully long time for God to convincingly show his presence, and he apparently won’t reveal himself through science anyway.

Being an atheist is both easy and difficult.

In terms of my relationship with the rest of the universe being atheist is very easy: all you have to do is be critical about things and follow the evidence. That is something I have to do in my job every day. If I need moral council I ask my wife, or someone else to hand, how they feel about stuff, and see if that matches my own feelings. I feel I’m a much better father for being atheist because I talk very readily about the big issues in life and encourage my kids to think for themselves and question things. On the other hand there are very few countries on Earth where people who openly claim to be atheists are the majority, and in most religion has some involvement in the workings of the state. So, openly being atheist is seen as threatening to many established institutions and people around us. In Bishopthorpe I live with an Archbishop on my backdoor step, my children attend an Anglican faith school, and the local church still dominates many aspects of the local community and culture. One of my biggest difficulties with being atheist is tolerating other people’s religious faiths. Clearly, freedom of thought is very important to me, and that means allowing people the freedom to choose their own paths in life. But with freedom comes responsibility, and if people’s religious choices involve human suffering, which they nearly always do, then it’s only right to point that out. I would be OK with any religion that was a) based on verifiable evidence, and b) not imposed on me, and c) not harmful. Liberal religions are more likely to satisfy these criteria, but even for them, I am doubtful.  So, what’s surprised me most of all about becoming an atheist is how it turned me overnight into a moral activist. In doing this I’m consciousness raising, and I hope in the end that’s a good thing. Being critical of religious practices is often seen as disrespectful, but it’s disrespect for the practice, and not the person. I realize better than anyone how I was once like them.

Am I spiritual?

I have to be very careful how I answer questions like this. In the sense of being elated or uplifted by experiences, then I am spiritual very regularly. You can probably get a feeling for what gives me those feelings from this blog. I find life, the universe and everything truly inspiring, and I feel very lucky to have a comfortable life that helps me to appreciate it. But I don’t think there’s anything supernatural going on. It looks to me as if the universe behaves according to natural laws that can, in principle, be worked out. In principle, but maybe not in practice, why the natural laws are the way they are can also be worked out.

Resources for those interested in questioning their faith, particularly Christianity:

The skeptics annotated Bible. Commentry including contradictions, immorality, errors of fact and history. You’ll be astonished. If you want a more overt version of this, which I actually think is pretty funny, try Evil Bible.

Iron Chariots: a wiki site about apologetic arguments. Still think your faith is underpinned by reason?

Alpha Course reviewed: The alpha course is Christianity’s answer to falling church attendance. This website quickly became one of my favourites.

The ballony detection kit: How to verify claims. Carl Sagan’s original version here.

Why atheists are angry. Every religious person should read this.

Hitchens’ ten commandments. The great Hitch at his best.

Pat Condell: nothing like forthright views to make you think. I love this guy’s videos.

The Atheist experience. TV Q&A show about atheism.

Breaking free:

Belief-o-matic: find out what belief system , or lack of it, might best suit you in a few easy questions.

Freedom from Religion Foundation. (American)

Secular Student Alliance (American)

ExChristian.net: community of deconverts

Ask the atheists:  get your questions about atheism answered.

Thought reform: how does your church persuade?

Gerin Oil: Religion as a drug

Converts Corner: Deconversion testimonies

Ten truths/untruths about atheism.

National Secular Society

British Humanist Association: live  a fulfilling moral life without God, I dare you.

Secular web: discussion and resources for Godless people.

The Sceptics Society

The Richard Dawkins Foundation: as above.

Local resources:

North Yorkshire Humanists .

York Unitarians

York Brights.