The biggest lesson my parents taught me was the love of truth. They were Christian missionaries, in the business of convincing other people to change their most fundamental beliefs about the world. They offered the one true Truth that stood above all others. There is such a thing as absolute reality. It’s worth knowing, even worth dying for. It’s also possible to be wrong about the universe. That’s why people have to change their beliefs when they learn something better. All this left a deep impression on me. I want to know things as they actually are, no matter how inconvenient the truth may be.
We had the World Book Encyclopedia on our shelf, and I spent many long afternoons browsing it. (The Internet hadn’t been invented yet.) One thing that frustrated me was how uncertain scientists were about their conclusions. Everything was just a theory. I dreamed of an encyclopedia that contained only things we were 100% sure about. I expected it would be a lot thinner than the World Book.
My sense of uncertainty grew as a teenager. The seeds of all that scientific thought started to take root. What if the universe were older than 6,000 years? What if life actually did evolve? It would be a disaster, of course, for my fragile evangelical beliefs.
I tried reading apologetics books by the greats, like Josh McDowell. Nothing did more to destroy my faith than “Evidence That Demands a Verdict”. It was all just a bunch of opinions by big shots. I couldn’t help but think, if that’s the best we got, then there’s no substance to this faith.
At the same time I wanted a relationship with God. A real relationship, where God talked with me and I could feel his love. Love-hunger gnawed at me, thanks to awakening hormones. Not that I confused God with a girl, just that all those powerful feelings are connected inside. But God didn’t talk to me. I felt absolutely nothing, ever, not matter how much I prayed or tried to get his attention. I could imagine what God might think about or say to me, but I could never fully convert those into a separate being inside my head.
For a while I thought God was telling me to fast. I dreaded that “voice”, but I wanted to be obedient. I skipped meals, sometimes entire days. All it did was make me hungry (and the skinniest I’ve ever been, before or since). I never felt any love from God.
Have you ever heard that miracles happen on the mission field? (They don’t happen at home, of course, because Western church-goers are spiritually deficient somehow: not enough faith, too rich, whatever.) One time a baby was born with severe encephalitis. Our church went all-out praying for that child. My dad put everything on the line, really taking a public risk.
And the baby died. If there ever were a time for God to show his reality, that was it, but he declined to do so. In my life, God has declined all such opportunities. I don’t accept the notion that miracles happen somewhere else, because I lived in that magical other place. It’s no different than right here.
I learned at an early age my own capacity for unreality. When I was about 6, we spent a year back in “the States”. We had a cabin in the Ozarks. I played with my cousin on a sawn-off-truck-bed trailer, imagining it was a rocket that would fly to the other side of the lake. We had to put rocks in it for fuel. But no matter how many rocks we put in, no matter how hard I believed, it never flew.
I also had an imaginary friend named “Wendy”. I told my cousin that she could see Wendy by looking though this kaleidoscope. She couldn’t understand why it didn’t work for her. Part of me knew this was all just a game, but I was so intense at pretending that it seemed perfectly real to her.
Many years later I told a fireside story during a camp out (Mirror of the Soul). Some of the young people came afterward and asked me if it actually happened. That surprised me, as the content was clearly impossible in the real world. Maybe I have the gift of Storyteller, like my father.
Thanks to my parents’ influence, I thought I wanted to go into the ministry. I earned a bachelor’s degree in pastoral ministries, finishing in a record 3 years. When I did the final internship, the supervising pastor had enough sense to give me permission not to continue on that path. I rebooted my life and started studying for a computer science degree at a 100% genuine secular university. It took over a decade and several more universities for me to complete a PhD in AI.
I spent years “struggling with faith”, pouring enormous amounts of emotional energy into convincing myself to believe. The process of publishing peer-reviewed journal articles gradually infected me with some expectations of any idea worthy of belief. If Christianity is the ultimate Truth, it should stand up to the most rigorous possible examination.
The study of AI gave me new ways of understanding the nature of belief itself. It’s not black-or-white, all-or-nothing. Belief is better expressed as a probability, and it can be distributed over multiple different options. This framework allowed me to embrace uncertainty as an expression of my actual state of knowledge.
I can assign belief to propositions based on the amount evidence available for them. I am no longer in the business of propping up ideas. They must stand or fall on their own merits. This has brought me incredible peace. Not that everything is great. I’m still just a tiny bit afraid of being tortured for all eternity for having the wrong set of ideas at my moment of death. On the other hand, I have no hope of anything beyond this life. Compared to the agony I was in before, trying to make myself believe things without justification, this is bliss.
I’ve never really stopped believing in God. Rather, my probability weights have shifted over time. It used to be that I believed 99% in God and 1% in materialism. As the years went by, filled with zero evidence for God but a relentless stream of evidence for materialism, the weights shifted so now it is about 1% God and 99% materialism. They could shift the other way with some solid evidence.
AI shows how limited we are. We can observe only a tiny fraction of the universe (POMDP, HMM, Kalman Filters, etc.). It also explains how different people come to different beliefs. Your input stream is necessarily different from mine, because you are physically separate from me. I’m willing to accept that some people have experiences that convince them of the reality of God.
However, I suspect that more than 90% of people who call themselves believers are not really in that state. Perhaps I’m merely projecting my own experiences on others. I suspect that most people are just forcing themselves to believe, thanks to all those same horrible control mechanisms that kept me in bondage for so long.
Maybe that’s why the most vocal Christians I know are also the most hateful. At some point in your life, you either let go of uncertain beliefs or you fully embrace them. If part of you still doubts, then the effort to embrace those beliefs makes you a drowning person clinging to a millstone. You go down with it—and hate yourself for doing so. But since you can’t acknowledge that, you build all kinds of defense mechanisms. The pain and anger coming from that closed-off place in your soul turns into bitter attacks on anything or anyone who threatens the belief.
What kept me enslaved to belief for so long? Obviously, fear of Hell is a big one. It’s not something you can verify, but boy are you screwed if you end up there. Don’t take any chances. Another chain was the fear of what my parents or close friends would think of me. If you reject the Truth, it’s because you’re a bad person. You never were one of us to begin with.
Christians may use reason to move you away from another belief, but once you’re in, you are taught to distrust your own mind. Reason is broken, a part of this evil world. Instead, the Christian method of belief is authority. Anyone who dares elevate their own reason above authority is arrogant and sinful. And of course, no one wants to be rejected for such antisocial attitudes.