Not enough faith to be an atheist

In that moment, hiding in the dark, not knowing if I would get out alive, I prayed to a God I hitherto didn't believe existed. I said "If you get me out of this I promise I will behave myself"

From a young age I had questions. Not the 'why is the sky blue' type questions. Serious questions. At a young age I was asking about whether there was a God and if he existed then how that would change things. I mean, if God really existed then it would be worthwhile praying because he's big enough and powerful enough to do stuff. By the age of ten or eleven I figured that if I ever became prime minister I would bring together all the top experts, scientists and leaders from the world of religion and philosophy and we'd launch a huge project to answer this burning question.

I'm pretty sure most of us have asked those kinds of questions at some point. It's only natural. Perhaps you made your mind up at an early age where you stood or maybe like so many others it's still a bit of a mystery. In my case I thought I had it pretty much figured out by the age of 12 {and saved the country a lot of wasted time and money into the bargain!}. It intrigued me how, if God was real, he could neither be seen or heard. How can you believe in something {or someone} without evidence? The one huge sticking point for me was existence. Stuff just doesn't get there by itself so someone must have made it right? Well by that age I had started hearing about evolutionary theory at school. Not that I was now a fully qualified anthropologist {I didn't know how to spell the word, never mind tell you what one was} but I simply trusted that these people knew what they were talking about, so yes, you could say my atheism was, in fact, an act of faith. Even if it was faith in science.

Y'know, I even recall the very moment and place it happened. I was kicking a ball around the local park at the time. My mind drifted onto this 'big issue' and I just put two and two together. It was as if the lights came on. Right then I looked up at the big empty sky above me and took in just how empty it was. I stared up with the thought that there was no-one there and at that moment came a feeling of being truly alone. It was slightly scary and I felt a little vulnerable to be honest but I just stood there and said to myself "So that's what it feels like when there is no God." and I just rationally accepted it.

Now I know that I have a lot of friends who read my stories here and many of them are Christians and at this point you might be feeling just a little bit uncomfortable. You might be wondering where I am going with all this. Well, I'm just being honest. This is what happened and to tell the truth, over the years I have spoken to so many people who are atheists and their experience is often very similar. Many of my atheist friends and acquaintances see religion as mere faith. Something they 'just believe'. That just wasn't good enough for me.

My 'eureka' moment. The question of origins was the one missing link for me. Once I had that one figured out then the idea of God became obsolete.

My new found faith in science and reason brought with it a confidence that soon morphed into arrogance. Someone I knew came from a religious family. They were part of a fringe group that didn't believe Christians should celebrate Christmas. Amused by this and determined to wind them up I got a friend to write out a rather blunt and mocking Christmas card. Although the son of these parents was not particularly religious himself I took great delight in saying things that were deliberately designed to cause religious offence. I went out of my way to have a go at him every chance I could and I did it by being as sexually explicit as possible just to show how much contempt I had for religious morality. It wasn't enough to be right. In my juvenile worldview I considered it a service to humiliate such people out of their 'superstition' {although, if I may show more objectivity here than I used to, I have to admit I did it primarily because I got a kick out putting other people down.

I recall another occasion which was around my 18th birthday. A workmate arranged to pick me up from my house so we could go into town and help me with an application for I.D which would give me access to pubs, bars and nightclubs. I was up for this. This was like a right of passage into manhood so I was looking forward to getting this sorted out. I heard a knock at the door and, expecting it to be my friend, opened it only to find a young lady standing there. In a matter of seconds it became apparent that she represented some Christian group and that she was very nervous. She asked me what I believed. I stood there for a moment and decided I would make her squirm as she tried to initiate a conversation about God. There was no particular deep debate. I just wanted to make her as uncomfortable and ridiculous as possible. As that was going on, my friend turned up in his car so the conversation, if you can call it that, ended. He wanted to know who the girl was {He thought it was a girlfriend I had on the quiet}. Frankly I just wasn't interested in talking about her {or her 'imaginary friend'}. I had more important priorities like getting my I.D sorted out so I could go out, party and get drunk.

So, to recap, I had decided to follow evidence rather than what I could not see {although this was a faith in science rather than science itself}, There was that 'eureka moment' in the park where it all became clear to me and I accepted the idea that we were all alone in this world. As well as that, I had gotten into the habit of ridiculing religious people including this lady who was knocking on people's doors talking to them about God. Little did I know at the time that all these things would come back to kick me right up the 'padded area'. But before I get into all that I should share with you one of the added benefits a found of being an atheist. I found that I could play fast and loose with the concept of right and wrong.

"Let's see now. You trash the environment, start wars against people you don't know and develop a weapons capacity that can blow us all to kingdom come. Hmmm, I think the word you're looking for is 'DEvolution.'"

The traditional concepts of religious morality such as sexual purity, avoiding foul language, doing good etc were things I accepted were true when I was younger but, if I'm honest, I didn't really like. They were inconvenient to me and one of the bonuses of there being no God is that right and wrong are subjective. They are merely a matter of opinion. You have your view and I have mine and who is to say your view is better than mine. One thing is for sure, I won't be giving an account at the end of my life for how I live so if you want to get drunk, lie, get laid and do all those things that are forbidden in the bible then my mindset was 'go for it'. And that's exactly what I did. It was easy to me. It came naturally. For me, doing all those things the bible calls 'sin' was like going down a mountain on a sledge. It took zero effort and the ride was awesome! Admittedly stopping would be a problem but I had no intention of stopping anyway. Why would I want to stop?

Religion is a fairytale for those afraid of the dark - Stephen Hawking

Atheism is a fairytale for those afraid of the light - Prof. John Lennox

So, fast forward to a certain night when a known violent criminal who had previous convictions came after me. By this age I was involved in a lot of stuff I shouldn't have been. I was getting more and more involved in everything from petty crime to acts of violence. I was a very angry young man and I was making some dangerous enemies. One night one of them caught up with me.

He was absolutely intent on killing me. I'm still not sure how I managed to get away. I ran through numerous gardens in the pitch dark, getting scratched up on thorns and found a place to hide in among some bushes and waited. Had he seen where I had gone? Was he searching around the area right now? All I knew is that a guy with a history of handling guns was absolutely intent on taking me out.

I'd had run ins with the wrong people before and somehow I'd come through it. This time I had pushed it too far. We lived too close to each other. Surely he knew where I lived.

So, cowering in the dark and the cold and after racking my brains to think of a way out I did something I never thought I would do. I prayed. Not knowing if I would get out alive, I spoke to a God I hitherto didn't believe existed. I said "I f you get me out of this I promise I will behave myself" Well, to cut a long story short, I did get out of it and I completely forgot about that prayer and went back to my old ways. It seems, however, that someone was listening and he was going to hold me to what I had promised.

On the night of December 11th 1993 I was invited to an event I attended that turned out to be run by Christians. That night I heard the message of the gospel for the first time and It really was as if God himself was looking right through me. He could see everything I had ever done and what was worse, he could see everything I had ever thought and imagined {and my thoughts were far darker than my actions}.

That night I took another step of faith. This time in the opposite direction to the one I had taken at age 12. I turned to Jesus. The very thing I would have ridiculed others for. At that very moment I felt something as if it were being slowly physically being lifted from me. I have no idea what it was. That's when certain things really began to change. I had no idea about what I had let myself in for and no-one explained it to me but I was about to find out.

The first thing I noticed which I thought was quite strange was my old propensity and love for profanity had gone. I suddenly became aware that I was not swearing any more. I thought this is strange in a really good way. I felt good about it. I had no idea what was going on but something had changed.

There is a myth that we should live our entire lives on evidence alone. Given that none of us knows anything near to everything we are left in a place where we go from the solid ground of what we know and take a necessary leap of faith. In my case I had simply done so on two occasions and in two different directions.

I began to notice other things as well. There was a real sense of peace I didn't have before. I had no idea why I felt that way but where beforehand I felt anxiety and fear, I now had this sense of peace about me. To be honest I was fine with how I felt before. I just accepted that as normal but out of the blue it changed. It was so unusual and overwhelmingly good that I couldn't ignore it. It was almost too good to be true. So I said to myself, I'm going to sleep and if this feeling is still with me in the morning I know that I know this is true. It was.

The third thing I found was a joy that wasn't there before. I was genuinely happy. More than happy in fact. I went through the next day in what I could well describe as a happy bubble. I had absolutely no idea what I was to expect to happen. It was only months later that I read in the bible that what is called righteousness, peace and Joy are part of the Christian experience. I remember some guy at work trying to convince me I had been brainwashed which just struck me as clutching at straws. I mean to be brainwashed you have to be under the repeated influence of other people. Nothing of the kind happened. This was all a complete surprise to me.

Hey buddy. Aren't you forgetting about something? I thought we were family?

All this leaves one big question hanging and that is the big question of evolution and how that fits with belief in God. Everything happened so suddenly that I didn't sit down and figure that one out first. It was only later I began to try to work out how to square that circle as it were.

There is a lot I could say on that subject {and far too much to fit into a 5 minute testimony} but I will say a few words about that at the end. Suffice to say I am struck by how little I really knew and how much there was to learn. You could say my level of knowledge in this area was inversely proportioned to the size of my ego.

I want to finish this particular story, however, with what struck me as a series of remarkable co-incidences {or 'God incidences' as I now call them}. Do you recall what I described as happening earlier on? Well a few things transpires after my conversion that showed me someone was indeed watching everything I said and did and wanted to teach me a few things. Let me explain.

There was that eureka moment where I looked up in the sky and it all seemed so empty. Compare that with the other moment where I felt God looking right through me. To me it is as if God answered my unbelief in the most appropriate way. There was the sense of emptiness and being alone when I decided there was no God. Compare that to the very real sense of joy and peace on the night I became a Christian. Then there was the deliberate throwing off of traditional moral values. That was easy for me. I found it was what I naturally wanted to do. Compare that to what happened almost immediately after my conversion. Now I found something within me that naturally wanted to do the right thing and actually enjoyed it. Before, doing wrong was like going down a snowy slope on a sledge. Little effort, increasing momentum and great fun. Now I found something else within me. Some of those old desires were gone and and, in their place, was a desire to do good.

But that's not the main thing. Do you remember that girl I told you about. The one that nervously stood on my doorstep and tried to tell me about God. I made a point of making her squirm. Well, just two weeks after my conversion someone in the church invited me onto what they called an 'outreach'. I really didn't have much idea of what that entailed. When we got there, they paired us off into groups of two and our job was to go from house to house with some tracts to give out and tell people about God. By the time I knew about this we were on a housing estate and there was no way out of it. I was paired with a lady who had never done this before and was very nervous. I couldn't believe it! I thought I would just tag along while she did the talking but no, we had to take it in turns. To tell you the truth I all but wet myself. I was petrified, seriously I felt like I was dying inside. What's more, while she summoned the courage to knock on people's doors and talk to them I just handed them the tract and ended the conversation there. In nearly ten years of being on outreaches of various kinds I think I've only been instructed to go door knocking on about three of them. So there I was at 18, trying to humiliate a nervous woman who had the temerity to knock on my door and there I was, almost as soon as I became a Christian, having to do what she did and bottling it while a nervous young woman watched and then showed me how it was done. Seriously, I think God has a way of getting a point across. If I was arrogant before then that took a lot of the wind out of my over inflated sails.

There was another 'God incidence'. Do you remember me telling you about that guy that used to hang around with us and I took every opportunity to humiliate him because he came from a religious family. Not only that but I was deliberately sexually explicit to cause as much embarrassment to him as possible. Well, just a few weeks after my conversion I was working through an agency. They sent me to a factory in another town and one of the guys there recognised me and called me over. It turns out this guy had seen me on an outreach and decided to make it his personal responsibility to utterly humiliate me. I took months of hassle and abuse from this guy, a lot of it deliberately offensive. He seemed to be obsessed about the virgin Mary and how she was really a whore. Not just a whore but a **** **** whore. This went on for a number of months. He even continued it in the agency minibus that picked us up every day. He was not satisfied with running me down he took particular satisfaction in humiliating me in front of all the other workers. It was just like what I had done to that guy those few years back.

Feeling sheepish - Pride certainly came before a fall in my case. Perhaps I would have done well to heed the words,"The very attitude that shipwrecks one's own objectivity is the refusal to question it" "

There are several ironies of all this. Perhaps the greatest of these is that that since I have become a Christian I have read so much from Darwin's 'The Origin of Species' and read and heard the views of people such as Professor Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Being on both sides of the fence has taught me some important lessons, not least the importance of humility and listening to views I disagree with. It's also given me the chance to understand much more clearly many of the misconceptions and assumptions we make about Christians and their beliefs. One of the greatest discoveries I made was how much more there was to learn compared to what I already thought I knew. I assumed that people bought into a religion because they were ignorant and that faith was 'blind' {something akin to superstition}. What I eventually discovered was a faith that has 2,000 years of intellectual writings and a mass of historical evidence in it's defence. That was something I and many of the atheists I have spoken to were completely oblivious to.

I have also learned that there is a lot of faith in reason and often a lot of reason in faith. People sometimes talk about a 'leap of faith'. We all take that leap at some point. My first time it was a giant leap into the dark. The second time was a step into the light.

Ultimately, my mind goes back to that cold dark night where I spend hours shivering in a bush hiding from a guy who was out to kill me. That night I prayed to a God who up to that point I didn't believe existed, saying "If you get me out of this I promise I'll behave myself" As it turned out God pursued me to hold me to my side of the bargain. I'm actually so glad he did.

Steve Johnson

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Not enough faith to be an atheist

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