Instinct and obedience to God

On losing and finding faith

As a child I believed in God with the effortless sincerity of all children. His existence was a basic fact of life affirmed by everyone who loved and cared about me. He was real, Jesus died for our sins, everybody knew that. Matters of divine power, absolute morality, and the afterlife were taken for granted among my grade-school peers in our leafy suburb. Despite being a precocious and independent-minded child I never found reason to seriously question the religion handed to me.

My early unexamined faith was a product of my familial and social environment, not of any institution. The various churches of my childhood failed utterly to inspire a sense of the divine or the sacred within me. The quaint local chapel, the booming megachurch with stadium seating, the proudly non-denominational suburban cookie-cutter affair — these were temples to tedium, and, as I got old older, social awkwardness. But not faith. I did not feel the movement of the spirit in the songs we sang or the rambling parables related by the pastors. When we sipped from our plastic shot glasses of protestant grape juice and ate our oyster crackers, I understood the solemnity of the affair but sensed none of its mystery. I sometimes watched fellow worshippers raising their palms heavenward during prayer or song and wondered what they felt.

In adolescence, the salience of religious practice faded into the background. My family’s church attendance, always irregular, tapered off into a near-total lapse. My parents would remind us that Jesus was the Reason for the Season of Christmas, and on Easter they would answer the phone “He is risen!”, but on most years they failed to corral us into the pews before we ate our chocolate bunnies. They lacked the ardor required to haul a protesting family out of bed on Sunday mornings, and by high school we lost the habit entirely.

Then by early college I was a reluctant agnostic, and shortly after that an avowed atheist. This change in outlook overtook me gradually and then all at once, until one day I realized I was firmly convinced there was no God, faintly embarrassed to have ever fallen for such obvious lies. I fell from faith with sudden violence, landing in a rigid material realism with shock that gave way to smugness.

Nobody converted me to atheism. No one shamed me for my Christian beliefs. Nobody talked me out of it or made me feel stupid for believing in God. I was not shaken to learn new facts about the world, like a young-earth creationist dismayed to discover carbon dating and fossils. I had known by middle school that evolution shaped and created species, knew the facts of deep geological history. I understood the philosophical problem of dualism and free will. I was aware of the dizzying diversity of other beliefs historically and geographically. I had a ready answer for all of the problems posed by these facts, and none of them altered my basic belief in God.

But in late adolescence, when I turned my mind to the subject of belief itself, to consciously develop a coherent metaphysics that I could defend with the intellectual rigor I had begun to demand of the other things I believed about the world, God simply fell out, squeezed from between two mental keystones fitting together with perfect logical clarity. The worldview I had slowly and unconsciously adopted required belief, any belief, to be compelled by evidence — preferably repeatable, overwhelming evidence. It didn’t feel like I had chosen this belief system at all; fittingly, it felt compelled, the only possible conclusion one could reach if one cared about being right. I insisted that all of reality could be reduced to the interaction of matter and energy, described by mathematical formulae. Today I would probably characterize this worldview as scientific materialism or simple skepticism; at the time my philosophy major friends called me a “physicalist”. It left no room for mystery, or for God, or indeed for any metaphysics at all.

And yet. Sometimes, after a late night working on an important deadline, I would toss and turn, unable to sleep, my nerves keeping me awake. The anxiety of knowing I was already going to be under-rested for an important day made sleep impossible despite my exhaustion. In these moments, I would set aside my principled disbelief and pray: “Dear God, please let me fall asleep, and please let however much sleep I get tonight be enough. Amen.” It always worked. And in other moments of extremity, waiting in terror for bad news, imagining the worst, I would silently pray, asking God for peace and being granted it. It always worked.

I treated these relapses into faith as mere foibles, wrote them off as the force of habit, vestiges of my upbringing brought gasping to the surface by distress, moments of weakness when I lost sight of what I truly believed and became willing to grasp any straw. I considered them an intellectual failing. In my sober waking hours, I knew that these habits of prayer and faith were silly, ontologically indefensible. I wondered if I would always revert to the faith of my childhood under enough strain, retreat from the cold light of logic and evidence toward comforting lies.

Apart from these occasional lapses, I shed God from my daily life and thoughts for decades. Being purposefully alienated from God didn’t feel like a loss. In my work at various elite tech firms, living in a large progressive metro, I encountered very few devout people, and counted none among my close friends. I didn’t pity believers or look down on them; on the contrary, I flattered myself that I knew exactly where they were coming from, having walked in their shoes. I didn’t kid myself that I was happier or more moral than they were for my evolved lack of belief, but I did think I was braver in some important sense, daring to face reality as it was, not as I wished it were. While I understood that my family and many other people derived real benefits from religious practice, I believed I had advanced beyond the need for primitive superstition. I congratulated myself for having grown up and left childish things behind.

But my atheism was never as ironclad as I projected. Privately, I had doubts. I lacked full certainty in the non-existence of a world beyond our senses, of truths beyond the reach of reason. Taken to their logical conclusion, my beliefs amounted to nihilism, the death of all meaning and objective value. Any qualia of “meaning” I experienced could only ever be subjective and solipsistic, the result of mere chemical interactions in my body and brain, lacking any inherent value to an uncaring universe. “Just what enough hydrogen does when you leave it alone long enough.” In honest introspection, I didn’t truly believe this, nor did I want to. But neither could I justify any other conclusion from inside the belief system I had adopted. I was trapped: I reasoned myself away from God and from meaning, and I didn’t know how to get back.

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My children led me back to God.

As a parent, you devote time thinking about the values you’re transmitting to your children and the impact those values will have on their lives. When it came to faith, I had gradually come to consider my godless nihilism to be a kind of privilege that I took for granted, bought and paid for by the faith of my fathers. It had been easy, safe, for me to abandon God. I had been raised with the certainty of his presence, in a community and culture that respected his commandments. I didn’t know if it was right to deprive my kids of that aspect of my upbringing, whether I believed in its metaphysical underpinnings or not.

But one thing became abundantly clear: to simply reject Christian metaphysics would not, in my children, produce the pure absence of belief I fancied myself having. Even if I succeeded in expunging from them any trace of the supernatural or the spiritual, my children would believe in something, as all people do. Failing to provide a belief system for them would leave them hideously exposed to whatever the broader culture chose to install there instead, beliefs that I looked upon with dawning horror. One way or another, they would be indoctrinated — and indeed, everyone agrees they must be indoctrinated, we simply disagree on the doctrine.

I have had many occasions in recent years to reflect on that famous quotation of C.S. Lewis about atheism:

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

I had lately become quite wary of the self-destructive social currents we saw tearing through our peer group, and thought that Christianity could be an anchor for my children: a connection to the customs of their forebears, a rock to hold onto in the face of cultural sea change. Despite my personal lack of conviction in the metaphysics, it seemed a far better choice than sending them out in the world armed with nothing in particular and hoping for the best.

And so we enrolled them in our local Catholic school, following my wife’s upbringing. Despite my reasons for choosing the school and the expectation of their getting a religious education, I was shocked to discover that Catholicism wasn’t mere backdrop to their education but a central part: my children were not only learning about the sacraments and the saints, they were attending Mass with their classmates several times a month. Well, yes, my wife gently chided me when I expressed my surprise to her, what did you expect?

The truth was, I hadn’t really known what to expect. After being surrounded by the godless for so long, spending time around people who took religion seriously was surreal, like watching a pack of wolves trot across your backyard. Out of a sense of duty, curious to better understand what I had foisted on my children, I began taking the family to Mass, first at school events and then on Sundays. To my great surprise, I found that I liked it.

The kind of religion practiced at our parish chapel was alien to me, both to my adulthood atheism and to my protestant upbringing. The Catholics were disciplined and rigorous about their faith in a way I had never encountered in person. It had a weight, a formality totally absent from my childhood protestant churches, where the charisma of the preacher and an invitation to accept Jesus into your heart were the only structure. I discovered that I enjoyed the ritual and formula of the Mass: the confeitor, the readings, the psalms, the call and response, the recital of the lord’s prayer, the sign of peace, the endless kneeling and sitting and standing, and of course communion itself. Every week, every Mass the same: the same faces, the same chants, the same prayers, the same blessings. The repetition had a soothing, meditative effect on me quite apart from the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which I still couldn’t bring myself to swallow.

This meditative aspect of the Mass, the endless standing and repeating and kneeling, gave me ample opportunity to reflect on what was drawing me to church as an unbeliever. Besides enjoying the rituals themselves, I was frequently moved by my children’s rowdy but obviously sincere piety, as well as the church community’s welcoming attitude toward our large family — an island of people who genuinely loved children in a sea of mild hostility toward them. Attending Mass as a member¹ of the Church was filling several emotional needs I hadn’t realized I was lacking: first, belonging to a community of shared values; and second, regular time spent in quiet reflection and devotion to something bigger than myself. This latter part was puzzling to me, until it began to dawn on me that my unmet needs weren’t strictly emotional but spiritual as well.

Spirituality was a word I held at arm’s length even as I worshipped alongside believers. Privately, I thought of myself as “religious, but not spiritual”, and had begun to adjust my rigid epistemology accordingly, to acknowledge the utility of instrumental belief: a belief you adopt because you expect acting on it to make your life better, not because you are compelled by evidence. An instrumental belief can be held lightly in a state of superposition, neither accepted nor rejected in the moment but endlessly considered, acted out in a willful suspension of disbelief that vanishes with the last strains of the pipe organ. Allowing myself this kind of belief didn’t feel like a betrayal of my principles, and helped me make sense of my attraction to practices I had abandoned for decades.

At Mass each week I stood on the threshold of belief, holding the idea of God in my mind, turning it over, speaking the words but not truly accepting them. This sometimes made me uneasy, made me feel like a fraud and a freeloader. I was well aware that the metaphysics I couldn’t bring myself to accept were load-bearing elements of the Church’s function, that if everyone felt as I did the edifice would swiftly collapse along with all the benefits I was deriving from it. But did it actually matter? Didn’t God want my obedience, the presence of my children, at least as much as he wanted my belief? And in any case, if I was benefiting from Mass, by humbling myself before God, singing hymns, saying prayers — and I clearly was, the improvement to my life was unmistakable — then what did it ultimately matter if I believed in the truth of the gospel? This was how I rationalized my attendance as an unbeliever, somewhere between “cultural Christianity”, a social group, and a meditation class.

This fragile detente could not last. What I found both beautiful and troubling was that Mass made me feel things, upwellings of emotion I struggled to explain. Was this what people meant when they talked about feeling the presence of God? I didn’t know. But I began to understand that my conception of religious worship was in some ways backwards. I had always thought of belief as strictly preceding worship, of worship being an outpouring of those deeply felt beliefs. Of course that’s an important aspect of worship, but it can work just as well in the opposite direction: the act of worship, and especially the repetition of rituals, week after week, can lead to the formation of faith. I suspected that, in fact, this was the normal order of things for most people joining religions throughout history. I also suspected that the Catholics understood this quite well, and had adopted the rituals I found so compelling through a millennia-long process of refinement, retaining the ones that inspired the very feelings I was experiencing.

I couldn’t explain it or justify it, but I had begun to feel the presence of something, to seriously entertain the notion of a world beyond my senses, and this disturbed me. After twenty years of cynically dismissing mere feelings as an inadmissible form of knowledge, a sort of faulty limbic vestige that could only interfere with the beautiful machine of empirical reason, I didn’t know how to reconcile my growing conviction that there was something more. I couldn’t prove any of it, I had no evidence beyond my own intuition, but I felt it quite strongly at times. And in fact I realized that all of my strongest moral intuitions were just as unprovable, forever beyond the reach of a randomized controlled trial. I believed in the goodness of human life and procreation. I believed in the justness of natural law. I believed that good and evil were real and objective, not infinitely malleable to human judgment and custom. I couldn’t justify any of these beliefs with peer-reviewed evidence. What made God different?

I came to understand that there was a third, vital kind of belief, beyond those compelled by evidence or adopted for utility. It was possible to choose a belief, to accept it, to enter into it aspirationally with the hope of its truth despite lacking proof, to imbue it with substance by an act of will. It seemed to me that this was the form of belief implicit in asking if someone “accepted” Jesus as their savior — a kind of agreement or submission to a creed, entered into willingly and then made real by having chosen it. A decade earlier I would have scoffed at the idea that a person can or should choose beliefs in this manner. But after a year at Mass I couldn’t deny its instinctual appeal. My emotional stance had flipped without my noticing: rather than demanding justification for choosing such a belief without hard evidence, I wondered how it could be wrong to accept the creed of a faith that had already brought me such fulfillment in its practice. Imagining myself accepting the creed this way felt right, natural, just.

I still couldn’t honestly say I believed in God in the way I imagined other people did, or with the effortless sincerity of my childhood. But for the first time in decades, I wanted to believe, wanted to deepen and explore this new part of my life rather than remain on the sidelines. And so, with some misgivings, feeling like an impostor at times, I enrolled in RCIA classes to be baptized and join the Church.

At Easter vigil I was still an agnostic at heart, still not intellectually convinced of the reality of God and the resurrection, as I affirmed my belief in them and was baptized in front of the congregation. But I no longer considered those things self-evidently ridiculous. I wanted to believe in them, and had found parts of myself, in quiet moments when I managed to silence my inner skeptic, that did. I chose those beliefs of my own free will in front of my community, assented to them with every hope they were true, committed myself to acting in their name.

And maybe that’s the best I can ever do, maybe every intelligent person struggles with the basic precepts of faith, wrestles endlessly with his own faculties of reason to convince himself of something unreasonable. After all, isn’t this all a bit silly? Magic isn’t real, people don’t come back from the dead. Pre-scientific people told all sorts of myths about the world which we rightly dismiss today as primitive superstition.

But then. Sometimes, seated in the pews with my wife and children, I hear the swell of the choir, smell the tang of the incense. I see the statue of Mary, Christ mounted on the crucifix over the altar. I feel my children nestled into my side, my wife’s hand in my own, and I sense the presence of God.

And I believe.

1. I was really only a guest at this point, but a welcome one, being married to a Catholic (not in the sacramental sense — that would come later.)