Losing My Religion

I grew up in the baptist church. I've played the organ in church for thirty years. But, somehow, I seem to have become an atheist malgre lui, or at least a strong agnostic. The process has been long and slow. Since I'm still the church organist, I don't really feel free to discuss these changes with my friends in church. That's why I'm writing all of this here. 

Looking back over my life, I can see how I arrived here. (But I always worry about the bias of distorting my own memories to fit my current self-image.) As a child, I never had any kind of deep religious feeling. I walked down the aisle and “got saved” because I felt pressure from my parents and because I felt guilty about my own sinfulness. I remember lying on the couch that Sunday afternoon, hearing the neighbors mowing their lawns, and thinking that nothing felt any different, that I was still the exact same person that I was before. I’ve always envied the Pauls of the world—those who are radically transformed by a salvation experience. (Although, if I think about it, Paul wasn’t really that different afterwards. He went from being an inflexible Jewish ideologue to being an inflexible Christian ideologue.)

In high school, I was outwardly religious, but I didn’t really think deeply about religion. I do remember scandalizing my cousin by saying that I didn’t believe in angels. I thought that, if God was omnipotent and omnipresent, why did he need minions to fly around and deliver his divine messages?

In college, I was more of a New Age/Thoreau/Transcendentalist than an orthodox Christian. I’ve found some writings from that time that show that, at least sometimes, I didn’t feel the Bible had any more authority than, say, the Baghavad Gita.
During graduate school, I seem to have been at my most orthodox. I now cringe with shame when I remember trying to convince students in my classes that Darwinism wasn’t proven, that evolution was just a theory. Reading Derrida and other deconstructionists made a profound impression on me, as did reading Hume’s radical skepticism. I remember telling a friend that skepticism was the only true philosophy, that Christianity required a leap of faith (Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death had also impressed me—I started reading scripture more critically afterward). The friend insisted that there was evidence for belief, but I wasn’t convinced.

The cracks in my faith continued to widen as I started reading science books in earnest. The one I remember as having the biggest impact on me was The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. The more I read, the more the universe started to make more sense without a God than with one. In River Out of Eden, Dawkins was discussing religious leaders who were trying to understand a bus accident that killed many children. The leaders were making their vain attempts at a theodicy. But Dawkins said that the universe looks exactly as it would if there were no God:

Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, others are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. (132-133)

That's where I stand now. The real problem at this point is how to "come out" to my baptist friends. I still care deeply about them, and I don't want to hurt them. But I just can't believe the same things they believe any more.