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.