Once upon a time...

As I've mentioned here, I had a very sudden loss of faith in the summer before I began my PhD. One of the most frustrating things about this loss of faith at the time was that I was completely unable to give a good reason for it. I certainly hadn't discovered any logical inconsistency within Christianity, nor had I suffered at the hands of my fellow Christians. I wasn't going through a lull in my prayer life (though I did, as part of a wider crisis, a few months before), and I was still studying the Bible regularly.

Since then, I've put together a `just so' story, which I think gives some explanation of how it happened. However, you should bear in mind that this story was put together over a year after the fact, and it may well be off the mark.

Before I get into the story proper, I'm afraid I need to digress to explain some technical details to do with apologetics. The word `apologetics' refers to the practices employed by Christians in defence of their faith, especially reasoning and argumentation. The kind of apologetics that matters for this story is called presuppositionalism. It is based on the idea that, whilst we justify some of the things we believe in terms of others, we all have some ultimate presuppositions on which our worldviews are based and which do not rest on anything else for their justification. A key part of the presuppositionalist strategy, at least as I encountered it, is to conclude from this oversimplified picture that it is OK to take, for instance, the existence of God and the truth of the Bible as such basic presuppositions. In other words, on this view there is no need to argue for these beliefs - they can be taken for granted. There's much more to presuppositionalism than that, but what I've said is enough to let me press on with the story.

When I was at university, a charismatic member of my church was a presuppositionalist, and I encountered this style of apologetics in conversation with him. It made a lot of sense to me (at least, the parts I explained in the last paragraph did) - after all, if God is foundational for ontology it makes sense for belief in God to be foundational for epistemology. So I became presuppositionalist.

This meant that, when I encountered a refutation of an argument for the existence of God, I didn't have to worry. After all, my faith wasn't based on such flimsy things as arguments. So I could examine the refutation and, if it made sense, accept it. Here are a few typical examples:

• Argument: the unity and perfection of the Bible indicate that it must have had a divine source.
  Refutation: examination of the text shows that the various authors had very different, sometimes conflicting and often questionable projects.
• Argument: God answers prayer.
  Refutation: repeated scientific testing has produced no evidence that prayer has any measurable illness-reducing effect.
• Argument: the fine tuning of the universe is highly improbable unless there is a God.
  Refutation: the notion of probability does not apply to things like universes in the same way as to things like coins.
• Argument: God is necessary to explain morality.
  Refutation: it is plausible that there may be evolutionary explanations (though not justifications) of morality.
  

I could extend this list ad nauseam.

And lo! It came to pass that my faith was completely unsupported. I did not know of any compelling argument for the existence of God, or any of the other supernatural claims of Christianity. Of course, I didn't mind that, because I didn't have any compelling arguments against, either. And I was happy to presuppose the truth of Christianity.

How did this affect my beliefs? Well, it began to disconnect my religious beliefs from my day-to-day expectations about the world. Since I was not aware of any phenomena in normal life which science was unable, in principle, to explain (so that God would be needed), I made no allowance for such phenomena. Thus, for example, if someone was ill and I prayed for them this did not increase my expectation that they would recover. This did not devalue prayer in my eyes.

What this meant was that my internal model of the world was not what I thought it was. For the purposes of normal living I was making use of a perfectly workable worldview which did not rely on the presupposition of the existence of God at all. Although this presupposition was present, and I believed it to be fundamental, all that was being supported by it was the ornate cathedral of religious doctrine which I had been slowly building over the years.

One day, there was a switch in perspective - suddenly the religious doctrine no longer counted for me as belief. It was all still conceptually present; I am still able to recall and understand much of it today. But the concepts involved no longer served as beliefs for me. The cut was relatively clean, and what was left behind was the nontheistic worldview which had already been serving me (as a substructure of my beliefs) for some time.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Self deception

What sets humans apart? One common answer is that it is our self-awareness; our sense of self. Whilst there isn't a qualitative division, this certainly seems to be something that is far more developed in humans than in other animals. So a natural question to ask is how it came to be so highly developed. There's a relatively simple story which gives one plausible answer. It may well not be right, but if it is it is rather humiliating for us. The feature which sets us apart may have been born in deception.

Here's the story:

Proto-humans began to develop a community structure which relied on intelligent communication. Some proto-humans began to build mental models of other proto-humans. This helped them to judge and more accurately predict the behaviour of others. They survived better, and this became widespread.

Some proto-humans began to meta-model - to model the modelling that was occuring in the minds of others. They survived better, and this became widespread.

In some, this meta-modelling was especially detailed with respect to the models that others had of them. This was for at least two reasons. First, it was easy for their brains to gather data about their own state and the ways it was making them behave. Second, it was these meta-models which yielded the most significant information for those doing the modelling. They survived better, and this became widespread.

Finally, some proto-humans began to make use of these meta-models in more sophisticated ways; to modify their own behaviour so that they were harder to second-guess, and even to give a misleading impression to others. In order to do this, their mental self-models became extremely detailed and detached from any specific model of the minds of others. They survived better, and this became widespread.

Does this story have a moral? If so, it isn't that deception is natural for humans and therefore morally fine. The question of whether a thing is natural (in the sense of emerging in an understandable way from the normal running of nature) is independent of the question of whether it is good. Instead, if this story is true, the moral is that we shouldn't trust our sense of self quite so much. When we rotate our inner eyeballs to look back into ourselves, it may be that the image we see is one that was born in deceit.