21. Agnostic: No place to call home

The period that followed was one of the darkest in my life. I’m grateful that I had good friends to help shepherd me through my agnostic wilderness, but it was personally pretty tough on me.

Through my theological studies in college, I had at least some sense that the Bible didn’t exactly say what I thought it did as I was growing up. However, it really bothered me not to have a clearer sense of what it DID actually say.

I had a handle on the basics—God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, God loves us, humans are not all good, and the like.

But when it came down to the overarching plan, I was a little bit lost. I knew that the Bible said that God expected something from me, but I wasn’t sure I had interpreted correctly what it I was supposed to do.

Was I supposed to get saved? Follow the commandments? Just love God and my neighbor?

If there were a God…?

I embarked on a systematic review of the Bible, trying to get at the heart of what God was really like and what God wanted of me.

At the same time, if I were going to be truly intellectually honest with myself, I would have to admit that, while figuring out what God wants is a noble pursuit—and for some, it would be considered the most important work there is—I hadn’t satisfactorily proven to myself that God existed at all.

I had sorted through the many apologetic arguments—that creation needed a creator the way a book needed an author, that things like love and beauty indicated a thoughtful creator, that there were certain designs in evolution—the eyeball, for instance—which were irreducibly complex and seemed to have required an intelligent designer.

However, the rules of scientific inquiry told me that no matter how much these pieces of evidence nudged me over to the side of believing in God, that it was still always more likely that the universe was created by forces we have observed—such as natural selection—as opposed to forces we had perhaps invented as a magical solution to problems we didn’t understand.

It was weird to think of a universe which had, in some form, always existed, infinitely backward in time, or to conceive of a universe which appeared from nothing. But it was just as weird to think of a universe created by a God—a God who had existed infinitely backward in time, or who emerged from nothingness.

And even if I were to establish a likelihood that God created everything, there was still no further evidence that God was anything like the anthropomorphic force we often think of as God—something with a personality and feelings and intelligence, which wanted to have a relationship with us.

A God who was embodied in the father, son, and holy ghost was still a long way off in my calculations.

Still, I held on that there was more to heaven and earth than my calculations would provide. I just needed the time and the clarity to figure it out.

What about the bigger picture?

To compound the problem, I was not so sure that just hanging out in the Christian part of the universe of religious inquiry was the most thorough approach, either. After all, I knew that I had a strong bias toward Christianity, because of my strong familial and cultural ties to it—even if I struggled against those ties.

Had I ever really considered other possibilities?

To tell the truth, I had never felt the temptation to explore those other systems of religious belief which I knew something about—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism. I honestly didn’t give them much more consideration than I gave to Greek mythology.

I figured that if people had grown up in those traditions, and had strong cultural ties and a long history of people who had found fulfillment in those belief systems, then they would naturally have no inclination or reason to explore my religion.

Whether their religion was mistaken, or it was just another pathway to God, I didn’t know, nor did it really matter to me. I thought God would be forgiving enough to give everyone credit for doing the best they could with what they knew.

But I had a hard time extending this ecumenical generosity to myself. It was profoundly unsatisfying not to know if my religion was mine just because I had been born into it, rather than a true expression of the divine into which I just happened to be born. (Although at this point, the contours and shape of my faith were indeed starting to look very different from those of my extended family.)

At the same time, I couldn’t face the overwhelming prospect of standing back to look at all the belief systems of the world—including those without any gods at all—sifting through all the natural, psychological, sociological, biological and other evidence—trying to find some universal answer.

That exploration could take my entire life—and still not yield any answers.

What could I know NOW?

I needed to know something soon—something that would tell me what to believe and how to behave—and with sufficient evidence to make me feel like I could legitimately stand behind it and defend my position rationally.

Until I found that, I was swirling in a circular system of logic. It felt like I had fallen into the “wheels within wheels” of Ezekiel’s prophecy.

I wanted to know the truth about God and the Universe.

I was looking in the Bible to find it.

I wanted to know that the Bible was an authoritative source for my information.

In order to establish the Bible as an authority, I had to know what it said, which had been muddied and blurred by my explorations into hermeneutics. I really didn’t know what it ultimately said.

Then I would pull myself back and ask, why are you so hyper-focused on the Bible at all? What is it about the Bible that makes that the primary source for you, instead of stepping back and looking at the whole picture

And round and round I went, spinning in this circle.

I remember it was right before the turn of the millennium—when we were supposed to be partying like it was 1999. I felt so much pressure that the end of the world could come soon, as prophets of doom predicted. (It was about 2 years before 9/11, when the world as we knew it really did come to an end, albeit not as we thought it would.)

Meanwhile, I was trying to make the case many of the ideas that I had grown up with, about the rapture, the end of the world, the final judgment, and other topics about the end times were misreadings of scripture and were NOT going to happen when the clock struck midnight at the turn of the millennium.

At the same time, my premillennial anxiety grew with each passing day.

I would pray, but I didn’t really know if God was there.

I would try to do good, but I didn’t really know what God wanted me to do.

I would try to enjoy myself, but I did not know what my purpose was.

I would try to believe it was going to be OK, but I feared I was approaching everything in the universe wrong.

I was deep in the dark, buried far in that cave that Plato had told me about years before.

I was ready for a light in the darkness.

I was ready for a revelation.