{"id":7933,"date":"2018-06-28T09:33:24","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T14:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=7933"},"modified":"2020-02-23T21:54:06","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T03:54:06","slug":"david-moore-and-deconvert-brandon-withrow-in-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=7933","title":{"rendered":"DAVID MOORE AND DECONVERT, BRANDON WITHROW, IN CONVERSATION"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am grateful to Brandon Withrow for his willingness to engage in this conversation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

WITHROW: First, just a little about my background. I\u2019m a pastor\u2019s kid. I was raised in the church. I went to Christian schools to earn my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. I taught the history of Christianity (and other courses) at a divinity school, a seminary, and in a religious studies program at a local university. I published several books with Christian publishers. Essentially, my job and faith were intertwined. When I left Christianity, I left my seminary faculty position, which I felt was the only right thing to do. (I wrote about that at The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em><\/a> and The Guardian<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I now consider myself a secular humanist. It is my preferred moniker over \u201catheist,\u201d simply because it is about affirming something positive, rather than identifying just with the negative statement of \u201cthere is no God.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why did I leave Christianity? The short version is to say that it no longer made sense to me and I had to be honest with myself about that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are, however, any number of reasons\u2014complex and simple\u2014that cause someone to reject a faith. I believe that motivated reasoning plays a larger role in faith commitments than most of us recognize\u2014at least, I know it did with me. Part of my deconversion story begins with putting my own motivations under the microscope, to realize that when you want something badly enough you\u2019ll make all sorts of room for it, even when it no longer makes sense.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Motivated reasoning is the creation of an argument to reach a desired conclusion. This takes advantage of our unconscious biases, many of which are supplied to us by nature as short-cuts for decision-making, but which also cloud our perspective(s) and lead to blind spots. I frequently see this happening in the hurdles one might have to take to embrace the Bible\u2014at least, as it was the case for me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, for example, it is not a new thing that there are parts of the Bible that seem to contradict each other, or that its record of history that doesn\u2019t connect with what we know, or that descriptions of the universe that don\u2019t represent the scientific evidence, etc. Ancient Christians recognized some of these difficulties and the list of difficulties for a modern Christian is even larger now than it was in the early Church. Many have seen these as being reason enough to part with the Bible entirely.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even the responses to these problems related to the Bible run along a spectrum and aren\u2019t necessarily new.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One response might be an inerrantist approach, rejecting the validity of scientific or historical facts out of a deep love and devotion to Scripture. A flawed Bible, after all, would not be inspired by a perfect God, according to this type of view. Others might say that the Bible speaks according to the language and understanding of the day\u2014likened to baby talk\u2014a concept not rare among ancient Christians (e.g., Origen). God, in other words, is incarnational in his approach to humanity, communicating within our flawed limitations on science, history, and morality at the time of composition.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Others might say that the Bible is not so much divinely inspired in the details, as it is in the \u201chow to live\u201d category, or even that the Bible is just one record (among many) of humans seeking God or the transcendent (like the Vedas or Quran), and therefore contains errors that are expected from ancient human beings. And in all of these approaches, when the details don\u2019t line up\u2014when the Bible doesn\u2019t seem to make sense\u2014theologians might employ a final appeal to \u201cmystery.\u201d In other words, it might be said that since God is bigger than all of us, so be humble and submit to mystery when things don\u2019t make sense.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In all these approaches, and every shade between, readers craft responses to the Bible that enable them to keep it as divine or sacred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I believe these responses to difficulties with the Bible are essentially genuine responses, and not consciously trying to overlook the issues or be deceptive. I don\u2019t deny that those who use them have a genuine feeling that the problem has been resolved through re-entrenchment or an adjustment to one\u2019s epistemology, or just \u201ca better theology\u201d\u2014which I now see as translating as \u201ca theology that they feel good about.\u201d But, in all of this, I don\u2019t question their sincerity in trying to be theologically creative. I don\u2019t do this because I know that I was sincerely seeking understanding when I found inerrancy no longer satisfying and when mystery appeared to be a handy solution.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, I think that we do get in our own way. Having a creative solution is not the same as having the right or a better perspective. When we are faced with conclusions that do not match the evidence we\u2019re faced with, we find ourselves in cognitive dissonance, and the only way to move forward is to have dissonance reduction. And that reduction comes through creative theological thinking, which isn\u2019t necessarily about discarding the bad ideas, but finding a way to live with them by reframing the problem as needing a better theology.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

And this is where we need to ask ourselves\u2014where I asked myself\u2014how<\/em> are we doing that? What is the motivated reasoning driving our conclusions? Cognitive biases\u2014like confirmation and disconfirmation bias, or bias blind spot\u2014allow us to avoid an inevitable conclusion we find uncomfortable. But this isn\u2019t a process that announces itself; we don\u2019t usually know it\u2019s happening.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For my story, I found that for every hole I stumbled on in the Bible, and every difficulty I had with how the writer\u2019s treat ethical\/moral issues related to human rights (e.g., slaves and women, for example), I looked for a new way to understand it so I wouldn\u2019t have to leave the Bible for good. I rotated my definition of what it means for the Bible to be God\u2019s revelation, making it a moving target.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After all, maybe the Bible feels like such a human book because God was just speaking in the language of the day or maybe it isn\u2019t God speaking, but humans seeking, etc., and now it needs to be reimagined within a modern context.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One has to eventually ask (I think) the question: at what point, after fixing every potential problem only to discover a new one, am I willing to say that the Bible isn\u2019t what I think it is? What if this book only made sense of my world because I found theological ways to help it along? I wondered why do we keep making exceptions for the Bible.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a day, for example, when humans discovered Mercury\u2019s retrograde orbit and they had to craft any number of reasons for it. Given geocentrism, it made little sense to see a planet go backwards in the sky. People frequently saw that deviant behavior as an omen, believing that when in retrograde, bad things were going to happen here on Earth. Of course, now<\/em> we know that retrograde is the result of an optical illusion<\/a>. Mercury doesn\u2019t actually change direction.<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the original reason for retrograde\u2014its very foundation\u2014as demonstrably just an optical illusion, surely that meant that astrologers would give up the idea of bad luck attached to it, right? No. As one astrologer put it, retrograde may not be a \u201cscientific fact,\u201d but it is a metaphor and an \u201castrological fact\u201d (which is not a thing). There is, therefore, a spiritual retrograde\u2014dissonance resolved.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And I know that there are any number of evangelicals who would argue that there is no reason to accept astrology, and especially this idea of retrograde, and that if the facts do not back it up, then the idea should die. I would agree with that. And yet, this is where I think similar exceptions are made for the Bible.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Bible may regularly miss the mark on scientific and historical evidence and human rights, and Christians may (like I did) regularly change their approach to reading and interpreting it. But when all of the evidence points to a human book\u2014even though an interesting one\u2014the desire to keep it divine and sacred means (as it did for me) finding a new way to talk around the difficulties.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I find that many Christians may not give the same leeway to other ideas or faiths which face similar difficulties. For many, a critical view of the Quran or other sacred texts would lead to seeing it only as a human book and rejecting it. But if the Bible has similar flaws, should it be given an exemption just because it\u2019s a beloved Christian text?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I eventually came to see this as bias blind spot on my part and ended my own exemptions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I get why one\u2019s love for the Bible as holy may not see this as I do, so I\u2019m not surprised if there are immediate theological responses to this perspective. I get it because I was once there. Over time, I noticed that I moved from faith seeking understanding to faith seeking rationalization and dissonance reduction. If my take is one in which the Bible is eventually indiscernible from a human text, maybe Ockham\u2019s razor entails that it is just that. Given this sort of thing, I came to the conclusion that it was no longer for me. It was a long process, but an inevitable one on my part.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MOORE: My own confidence in the reliability of Scripture is due to many things.\u00a0 Space here does not permit me to enumerate them, but let me mention one thing that may be helpful.\u00a0 Lesslie Newbigin wrote a terrific book called Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship<\/em>.\u00a0 In it he describes how so-called liberal and so-called conservative Christians look to the Enlightenment understanding of truth in determining how confident one can be about the Christian faith.\u00a0 Liberals think that there is no way you can have a high degree of confidence in the Bible\u2019s reliability, so therefore conclude that the Christian faith has little rational basis.\u00a0 Conservative Christians tend to think it is fairly \u201cobvious\u201d that the claims of the faith are true, and so conclude that you can have a high degree of confidence in the Bible\u2019s reliability.\u00a0 According to Newbigin, and I would agree, both have missed the reality of \u201cfaith seeking understanding.\u201d\u00a0 Christians who have come from the conservative side of things can be unwittingly set up for doubts when they begin to realize that there are challenging and difficult things to understand.\u00a0 As one who has experienced heart-rending doubts I gain my footing by knowing that God already made it clear that not all would be clear (Deut. 29:29: Isa. 55:8,9: II Cor. 13:12: II Pet. 3:16).\u00a0 My earlier quest for certitude was a fool\u2019s errand.<\/strong><\/p>\n

WITHROW:\u00a0 There are any number of other discussions one can have about what constitutes as evidence for the Bible as divine or for Christianity as the one true religion. As one person once put it to me, \u201cJesus changes lives and that\u2019s how I know he\u2019s God.\u201d I believe that many things Jesus teaches are potentially life changing. For example, loving one\u2019s enemies may help avoid war. I also know Christians who became very different people after their conversions, but I don\u2019t think this is necessarily evidence of the truthfulness of one\u2019s faith over another\u2019s.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are those who became Buddhists or Muslims and found relief from violence or alcoholism or any number of problems. If change for the better is evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity, it would have to be so for these faiths too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t see this sort of thing as necessarily consistent evidence. I\u2019ve known many Christians who were also terrible people and who hold terrible views. Presumably, these bad actors would be contrary evidence, though what I normally see as a response to these situations is the \u201cnot a true Christian,\u201d claim or \u201cGod is not finished with me yet.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So what I\u2019ve seen is that sometimes people who are struggling to be better individuals find what they need to motivate them to better behavior, whether it is through Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, secularity, or group therapy. And I see bad actors as frequently converting to faith to find a divine sanction on their ideas or as an opportunity for power. There is a spectrum between, as, for example, where decent people under the influence of bad actors can perform bad actions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, as the Bible looks and appears human to me in what it says, the behavior of others within a faith is also very human\u2014that is, people are frequently following what they are already inclined to do. If Christianity were a pharmaceutical, therefore, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d see enough evidence of a higher spiritual transformation to take it over other options. But if religion is a human construct, I expect it to have good and bad ideas; I expect it to attract people of all motivations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I should add something here. People have asked me if someone \u201cdid something bad to me\u201d to push me to reject the faith? I recognize that good ideas can have bad people attached to them. Brilliant people have also been known to be horrid people. So, it is not a case of \u201cI\u2019m hurt, therefore I\u2019m leaving,\u201d but rather what does this behavior tell me about humanity and the real draw of religion. It is to say that when I see how people behave in a faith, I just see it as reflective of being human regardless of which world religion one belongs to, where people find the tools they need for whatever conscious or unconscious motivation they have, good or bad.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MOORE: What constitutes bona fide change can be a bit slippery.\u00a0 How much change needs to occur for it to count?\u00a0 Much more challenging is how can we assess someone\u2019s motives for change?\u00a0 I\u2019ve known some people who made significant changes for the better without any religious motivation.\u00a0 \u00a0I\u2019ve also met many who said their lives were dramatically changed by Jesus. \u00a0I\u2019ve also seen changes in my own life that I am quite confident could not come from sheer dint of will.\u00a0 I\u2019m quite aware how weak my will is.\u00a0 As to the former, I will briefly mention former drug addicts who deeply fell in love with the Jesus revealed in the gospels.\u00a0 In fact, many of these drug addicts did not believe in Jesus before going into rehab, but became attracted to the ways Jesus treated the marginalized.\u00a0 Later, many of them embraced Jesus\u2019s claims to be true.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Downplaying or dismissing sinful behavior is clearly wrong.\u00a0 However, the perversion of a truth does not make the truth any less true.\u00a0 Richard Bauckham has described how Christianity has unique, built in resources to correct abuse.\u00a0 Christianity has a founder whose own self-sacrifice and cries against injustice point His followers in the direction they should go.\u00a0 Granted, some who call on Christ do not follow well, but that would not undermine the truthfulness of the Christian faith.<\/strong><\/p>\n

WITHROW:\u00a0 I\u2019ve also been asked, if someone did not accept Christianity, couldn\u2019t they still accept the idea of God or embrace another religion? Yes, they could, and regularly do. I also considered other faiths and approaches.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But\u2014and it is really too big to explain it all here\u2014I landed on the idea that the religious drive is a human default provided by our evolutionary story. I think there is a growing case made for this among (religious and non-religious) cognitive scientists studying religion, though I recognize that\u2014unlike the evidence behind general relativity, for example\u2014there is significantly more work to be done in that area and there are experimental limitations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because I find the argument compelling enough that religion is an evolutionary byproduct, and because I haven\u2019t seen real evidence for a divine being, I\u2019ve decided to move on from the idea of a God. That is not to say I wouldn\u2019t be open to evidence, but that I have not found a convincing case.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lastly\u2014and I can\u2019t put too fine a point on this\u2014I\u2019m not of the opinion that someone in a faith is somehow less intelligent than a nonbeliever, or that bias infects only the religious, or that believers are automatically bad people. There are many secular humanists, like myself, who work with people of faith in shared efforts to bring social change to our communities. I would rather have a good Christian as a friend than a terrible atheist, and vice versa.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So when I endeavor to understand religion, I am frequently seeking an understanding of human nature and what it does for us as a species. We are a complicated, wonderful, and terrible species. We are also an immensely creative species, and religion is an impressive example of that.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

MOORE: Appeals to \u201cscience\u201d need clarification since scientific discoveries are hardly static.\u00a0 Thomas Kuhn described it well in his seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em>.\u00a0 Furthermore, science is not devoid of faith.\u00a0 Michael Polanyi has well described this dynamic.\u00a0 Why does a scientist go with a certain hunch or not in conducting her experiment?\u00a0 Why do certain scientists continue to believe certain things when the evidence remains inconclusive?\u00a0 Science involves both faith and reason, just as the Christian faith entails both.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pascal said there are two excesses: \u201cto exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.\u201d\u00a0 In similar fashion, Chesterton added, \u201cThe poet [think of less \u201crational\u201d more imaginative types] only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician [Mr. or Mrs. Rationalist] who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits\u2026The madman is not the person who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who lost everything except his reason.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Several years back I corresponded with the well-known New Testament scholar and deconvert, Bart Ehrman. He graciously exchanged several emails with me. My first note to him posed this question:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hi Bart, I recently saw your latest book [Misquoting Jesus<\/em>] and had a question that continues to nag. You well know that scholars like Gerald Hawthorne [one of Bart\u2019s teachers at Wheaton] and Bruce Metzger [Bart\u2019s main teacher at Princeton for Ph.D. studies] are familiar with the same manuscripts, history of transmission, etc. as you. But they come to very different conclusions. I am curious as to how you would explain this phenomenon. Thanks so much for you time! Dave<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bart wrote this in response:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I guess it\u2019s rooted in different religious proclivities. I think it\u2019s not a matter of\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 knowledge, but of what one makes of the knowledge.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBart [Ehrman] was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the answers<\/em>,” added Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, and a friend of three decades. “When he found out they were lying to him, he just didn’t want anything to do with it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen too many bail on Christianity because they concluded that honestly bringing their struggles to God was antithetical to having integrity in living out one\u2019s faith. \u00a0I believe otherwise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks Brandon!\u00a0 Though our conversation is just a starter, I greatly appreciate your willingness to have this exchange.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am grateful to Brandon Withrow for his willingness to engage in this conversation. WITHROW: First, just a little about my background. I\u2019m a pastor\u2019s kid. I was raised in the church. I went to Christian schools to earn my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. I taught the history of Christianity (and other courses) at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,162,72,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-deconversion","category-faith","category-worldview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7933"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7937,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7933\/revisions\/7937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}