Key moments in losing my Christian faith

• Existential crisis at ten years old where I worried that life on earth was bad, life in hell would be bad, and life in heaven would be bad too. I resolved this by concluding that life in heaven could not be bad. But this did plant the idea in my head that life could be fundamentally bad, i.e., that being born could be deeply unlucky. So my pessimistic traits were there from the beginning.
• Existential crisis at 12 years old when I realized that I wanted Christianity to be true. I wanted God to exist more than anything, and my greatest desire was to be with God (a desire that kept with me my whole life). My greatest fear was that God did not exist and that death was the end. The crisis came from this epiphany: if there was one thing I learned from my parents telling me no over and over again, as all parents do to their children, it’s that there is no connection whatsoever between reality and what I want. If anything, my wanting God and heaven to be real made it more likely that they weren’t.
• Ironically, this epiphany occurred on the day I came home from a spiritual retreat. But perhaps it’s not so ironic. Christianity teaches that the world is a certain way (God is in control, God loves us, etc), and then you come home and see that the world doesn’t work that way.
• The new atheist movement launched around this time in 2007. I’m on the internet, shocked at the certainty these folks have that Christianity is false. This combined with my own questioning leads to searching for answers.
• I was able to answer the questions that came to me, bolstering my faith. Is this the best atheism can do, I wondered. (The answer was no. But I didn’t know that yet.)
• But at 16 I became depressed that I couldn’t articulate my own beliefs, and even less defend them, nor could I penetrate the absolute certainty that non-Christians seemed to have against Christianity.
• I imagined taking on the worldview that the typical atheist seems to have. It seemed to lead to pessimism and nihilism, which I thought was self-defeating. The absurdity of life without God was to me an ace in the hole for Christians. I asked my parents for the book Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig. I was delighted to find the chapter in there about the absurdity of life without God. This sealed my confidence that the problem of absurdity was our trump card against atheists.
• Problems began to arise in my life. I prayed to God to no avail. The more depressed and desperate I became, the more I needed Christianity to be true. Ironically, the folks for whom it should be the most obvious that a loving God doesn’t exist are often the strongest believers. That’s because they need it to be true or else their suffering isn’t worth it.
• The avalanche of books defending Christianity didn’t make things any simpler. Christianity, it turns out, has an impressive intellectual history. The new atheists kept shooting themselves in the foot by failing to engage with it. They made themselves look bad. Being a truth seeker is difficult enough that both sides have their share of failures.
• By this point Christians will be searching for keywords they can use to ascertain whether I was a genuine Christian. Yes, I prayed, went to church, read the Bible, walked with God, fell in love with Jesus and the gospel, was in awe of his words, said the sinner’s prayer, was convicted of sin, repented, experienced forgiveness of sin, had profound experiences of love from God, felt the presence of God, felt the joy of hope & the “peace that surpasses all understanding”, was baptized, regenerated, Holy Spirit, all of it. To reference Romans 10:9, I confessed with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and believed in my heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. I wrote songs and poems that flowed organically from my faith.
• But it’s not true. None of it. It was around 2021, 2022, at 26 / 27 years old that I finally was ready to let go.
• There was no watershed moment; just the accumulation of trying and failing to prove that Christianity is true.
• I remember as a teenager other kids at church went on mission trips. I felt guilty for not going. But I didn’t know how anyone could share the gospel with any confidence until the questions atheists brought up were answered. It frustrated me that Christians around me seemed oblivious to the challenges to Christianity.
• At around 14 I wanted there to be a Bible study where we take a single word like “grace”, “faith”, or “salvation”, and do a study on that word. It frustrated me that Christians were happy to use all these words without knowing what they meant.
• At 19 I attended a Bible study. The topic of prayer came up, and I asked the following question: Does prayer change the mind of God? If yes, does God’s mind need changing? If not, then why pray?
• Later I discovered decent theological answers to the question: The Christian could downplay the role of petitionary prayer over other kinds of prayer, such as praying to God for conviction and forgiveness of sin. (This doesn’t really work though, as Jesus said ask and you shall receive.) You could also say that God takes prayers into account when deciding between two equally good states of affairs to actualize. In that case, prayers don’t exactly change God’s mind, but they do give God an additional reason to select the path that ends up answering your prayers. So if God is at a tie between two paths, your prayer could break that tie, as now your happiness gives God a reason for actualizing one path over the other. (This doesn’t work either though, as God is apparently quite content in letting people go unhappy. Not to mention the fact that there has never been a clear case of someone’s prayer making the difference.) 
• Looking back, the situation was very funny. I was enthusiastic and very much expecting a lively dialogue to follow. But there was only awkward silence. I was not praised for asking a good question. I was ostracized. I was shocked at the anti-intellectualism of these Christians. William Lane Craig is right in saying that Christians are largely in “intellectual neutral”, though I think the situation is even worse. Christians are not genuine truth seekers. Though, most humans are not genuine truth seekers, so Christians aren’t exactly special in that regard. I do not say this is in a judgmental way. No one is at fault; it’s just the way things are.
• Here we see the anti-social nature of philosophy. We cannot separate Christianity as a belief system from Christianity as a tribe. By asking a question I was challenging the belief system (though, in my mind at the time, I was simply exploring truth). By challenging the belief system, I was upsetting the social order. That's why I was ostracized. For me it's about truth, but for others it's about other things, like fitting in.
• Around that same time, in my college English class the professor asked us what it means to be a university, and what it means to be a student. Then he asked us what Harvard’s motto was. He wrote it on the board: Veritas. He was trying to get us to realize, it seems to me, that universities are bastions of truth; people from all over the world gather to test their worldviews against each other. To be a student is to be someone who puts their worldview on the line. Truth is a battlefield in this way, where there is danger and the risk of your deepest sense of self turning out to be false. At least, this is an idealized view of what it means to be a university. I’m not sure how alive that ideal is these days.
• The seeds of intellectual virtue had been planted. I was a fledgling truth seeker, and even my novice abilities were beyond that of the members of my church.
• In March 2019 I read Graham Oppy’s “Why I am not a Christian” essay. This marked a turning point where I was becoming more open to considering the falsity of Christianity, and I was more willing to read “the other side”. I discovered the intellectual virtues, and I especially saw the importance of intellectual bravery, which involves engaging in arguments against your worldview. From then on I decided to accumulate the best arguments against Christianity. If Christianity survives such an analysis, then it’s a strong worldview worthy of a well-informed and rational person. If it doesn’t, then I will have been disabused of a false worldview.
• In 2020 I rekindled my relationship with God. In part this was thanks to Josh Rasmussen’s 2019 book How Reason Can Lead to God. Though, ironically, and only half-jokingly, I remarked to myself that this book was the strongest argument against Christianity I had ever seen. That’s because of how the argument from arbitrary limits seemed to clash with the Trinity, but Rasmussen has addressed that problem in interviews. Mostly, this rekindling was emotional.
• This rekindling was dampened by the debate between Joe Schmid and Randal Rauser in July 2020. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68FxtG49ngY&t=1s) It was a devil’s advocate debate where Randal Rauser, the Christian, argued on behalf of atheism, and Joe Schmid, an agnostic, argued on behalf of God’s existence better than any Christian could. My Christianity predicted that people like Joe Schmid—well-informed, virtuous non-Christians—could not exist.
• That year I started going to church again and joined a Bible study. But this only lasted roughly half a year. It was very painful to go from the level of philosophy I was reading in my spare time to the kindergarten level of discussion in the Bible study.
• At that time I made some key observations: 1) I saw how well evolution explained church and religion; 2) I saw how tribal mechanisms that applied to religious social contexts equally applied to secular social contexts like that of my non-religious office job; 3) I saw how much people’s worldviews are determined by social influences; 4) I saw how much people’s worldviews are determined by material realities (how independent you are, how wealthy you are, how healthy you are, etc.). This calls for a unifying theory that explains tribal mechanisms, group think, social pressures, echo chambers, and so on, and evolution clearly gives us the framework to do this.
• I completely changed my mind on the absurdity of life without God. In 2019 I had the opportunity to take a philosophy of religion class, where I wrote a paper trying to demonstrate the irrationality of living a nihilistic life. The argument didn’t work. It entailed that all humans prior to the Bible were supposed to throw themselves off cliffs in despair, and that was clearly an absurd conclusion. Christians ask: If everything ends at death, and all paths lead to the same destination, then what difference does anything make? I realized that not only is there a difference between pain and happiness, but this difference is certain. I am certain that suffering is bad and that flourishing is good. The real experiences real people really have—that’s the difference. What we do in the here and now will either succeed or fail to maximize moments of flourishing for ourselves and others. It’s perfectly rational to live for the maximization of flourishing. Not only is this what we ought to do, but this is what we do do anyway! Indeed, even Christians live this way. Christians live to maximize flourishing like everyone else. That’s what heaven is—a place of perfect flourishing for all persons. The point is that Christians spend their time the same as everyone else: With friends, with family, with work, with hobbies, with projects they consider meaningful. (Note: Christians do not spend their time doing anything supernatural, like hanging out with angels or performing miracles. If only!) 
• I changed my mind about morality. Since high school, I thought morality was grounded in rationality somehow. But I also believed in divine command theory. The Euthyphro dilemma (And William Lane Craig’s poor responses to it) convinced me that divine command theory doesn’t make sense. First, I changed my mind that morality wasn’t dependent on God directly, but indirectly. Morality is grounded in more basic normative principles, such as principles of logic and rationality. These necessary truths are in turn grounded in God, who is the necessary foundation of reality. So morality was still indirectly dependent on God. But then I changed my mind about God being the best explanation of the necessary foundation. And so now I think God is not needed for moral facts (as Dr. Craig would argue), for moral knowledge (As Dr. Dustin Crummett would argue), or for moral motivation (as Dr. Anne Jeffrey would argue). God is not needed for morality at all. Indeed, I saw how Christian beliefs can impede moral progress, both individually and collectively.
• At one point I tried searching the Bible for affirmations of intellectual virtues. If the Bible had that, then that would be most impressive. But I didn’t find much. There is the extolling of wisdom in the wisdom literature, and truth itself is prized as valuable in various places. I was prepared to give an argument from virtue in favor of Christianity, but I ended up creating an argument from virtue against Christianity, much in line with the “meager moral fruits” argument. These, plus many more arguments besides, contributed to my eventual loss of faith.
• By the time 2022 / 2023 rolled around, the challenges to Christian belief, the explanatory power of naturalism, the failure of Christians to be genuine truth seekers, the failure of Christians to transcend biological tribal factors, and so on, all coincided and I could no longer hold on.
• Losing my deepest sense of self was not easy. My faith died a slow, agonizing death. C.S. Lewis called himself the most reluctant convert in England; I suppose I was the most reluctant deconvert in America.
• Now I’m pursuing philosophy full time with the goal of building a comprehensive case against Christianity and in favor of naturalism. It’s not enough to tear down worldviews; you must build a better alternative. Only then can real progress be made. So there is much work to do.