Why do people stop believing?

Why do people stop believing?

Paul Chamberlain:  But your question, why do they leave? There are a number of patterns you begin to see. Some of them are just maybe old-fashioned ones: personal disappointment with Christians, the church, God Himself. Some people tell these stories, they're fairly deep. Maybe they've had a personal failure, in some cases coupled with the difficulty of finding acceptance later, and they feel like they're being now treated differently. People now doubt them, treat them like maybe some damaged goods, and this is all part of a complex, and it's just been sending them in a bit of a different direction.

In some cases, I know there's simply what I would have to call unrealistic expectations from God, from the Christian faith. Maybe the teaching they received was not properly balanced. As one man said who had been a pastor, now he said, "I stopped believing in God altogether, because I ran out of excuses for God." As a pastor, he believed and he taught others that God would answer their prayers, and protect them and others from harm, and give him wisdom and strength, and provide an abundance of all the things he needed. "All those kinds of things," he said. He says, "Over time, there were just too many disappointments. I found the same things were happening to me as were happening to everybody else, other friends who were non-believers." He says, "So then I began making excuses." He called these "the fine point" of his theology.

And anyway, as time went on, it really made me think, what are we teaching in our churches? Is our teaching balanced? Are we over-promising on God's behalf? Are we putting God in a position where unless He delivers on our premises on His behalf, then we're leading people to have, to entertain these doubts of His good character, and of His existence, and it really made me question a lot of things, but that's what ...

Of course, in addition to that, there's intellectual difficulties certain people have and a whole variety of these things, but some of them are pretty difficult, the way they put them, and we have to work on those very carefully. But one really the key reason, I experienced this when I have involved in an atheist convention myself. I was debating one of the people there as the convention opened up, and as this convention got closer, people would ask me, different Christian friends,, and non-Christian friends as well: "Why would atheists come together? What do they have to celebrate? Nothingness?" And this would draw quite a laugh, you know? I said, "Well, let me find out when I get there."

Well, in no time at all, when I got there, I found a huge number of the people there were not merely atheists, but they were ex-something or other, ex-Southern Baptists, ex-Mormons, ex-Catholics, something like that. They were there to celebrate their new-found freedom. There seemed to be a real desire on their part to think freely, free from all restrictions, and as far as they were concerned, Christians value and follow the evidence. They say they do, but at the end of the day, their views must conform to the Bible, and if you want to be free to think for yourself, you've got to throw it all off, and they get out and they start these organizations like Free Thought Society, and Project Reason, the Center for Inquiry, and things like that.

This seems to be something that really resonates in this community. They've freed themselves from the shackles of religion, and you hear this again and again and again. It really has made me think about this, that it raised the question: does Christianity do that? What is our response to that? Because it's a huge underlying motive I've found.

Sean McDowell: I'm curious how you balance the relational and kind of the truth aspect. What I mean by that is, often I hear apologists say, "Kids leave the faith because they don't have answers."

Paul Chamberlain: Right.

Sean McDowell: But then I also read a big study coming out of Fuller Theological Seminary, by Kara Powell, and they cited hundreds of students. They said, "Kids who walked away from their faith didn't have a genuine experience of grace." And it seems to me that it's both. How do you balance that relational side as well as the truth apologetics side?

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah. Boy, I'll tell you, that is such a good question, Sean, and it comes up in my courses all the time. You know what? You just work at that. Sometimes, I get more help from my students, who are ... I teach graduate-level students, so they bring a lot of experience to the classroom, but they will tell me, and I just affirm that every time. You've got to ask a lot of questions. The biggest question you have to ask is, "Why?"

I always encourage them, when you meet someone who walked away from the faith, the first question if you can get into their lives and earn the right to ask this question, "Why did you leave? What exactly were you rejecting when you walked away? Was it a teaching, or was it the God who loves you, or was it something about the church, or why did you leave?" Because this has to be balanced because we can go off and give a really long intellectual answer to somebody for whom that is not even the issue.

Maybe they need someone to care. Maybe they need someone to introduce, teach them a little more about what the grace of God really could mean in their lives. I mean, you just ... This balance is really critical. It's a little bit like a course when we encounter with somebody who suffered a very difficult experience from the people in their life. We need to ask, "Does this person need an intellectual response, or do they need a very caring, loving, kind response? What do they need here?" Depends where we're at. This is something, we need the wisdom of Solomon to do this carefully, but we need to pray for that.

Sean McDowell: I love what you said in terms of finding out what the real issue is. I wrote a blog a while ago saying, "Answering the question behind the question," ... because normally if you ask them about why they left the faith, they'll give intellectual reasons, but I'm really skeptical that that's really what it is, so how do you get to the heart of the issue, and do people even really understand why they stopped believing in the first place?

Paul Chamberlain: Well, you know what? Those are all really hard questions in there, that we can't get anywhere without having some good, deep conversations if people are willing to allow us. But when you say there's going to be an answer behind the stated one, I think that's often the case, and here's the interesting thing.

I have some students often saying, "Well, that person told me. They gave me a reason, but I didn't believe them. I think that's just a smokescreen." So, my question is, "Okay, then what did you do then? What happened then?" And often, they just leave it at that. My response to them, all the time, is, "Well, if you're right about that, if there really is something back behind then, well then, what is that? Because there's something that has driven them away, whatever that may be."

So, if we could somehow get back and say, "Well, if this really isn't it, could there be something more?" But how do you get back there? Because the risk we actually run here is if the person gives us the stated reason, whatever that may be, and we immediately try to get past it and say, "Well, I don't think that's the real reason. I think there's probably something else going on." I actually saw that done once in a conversation that was a part of the group of us, and the person who had walked away from the faith was really deeply offended by that. His response was, "Oh, I see. So, nothing could be wrong with your view. You're just telling me that I didn't look hard enough, or I didn't think hard enough. How do you know how hard I thought? How do you know how hard I looked?" He said, "I just find that offensive."

I thought, well, we need to be very wise in how we go about this. I learned from that experience. I still think there may be something back behind there, but sometimes you have to deal with the issue they give and then you're able to say, "You know, that really isn't your issue, is it? Isn't there something deeper going on here?" You have to earn the right to ask those kinds of questions, I think, but I do think that's where we now need to try to get to.

Scott Rae: Paul, in your book, you used the term that you describe, what you call "the changing face of atheism"... that atheism, as it's presenting itself today, does so differently than it did a generation ago. How has that changed?

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah. Well, you know, that's such a great question. That's why I devoted a chapter to this, as you saw in there. It's something that as I came across in a particular debate I was in with a person who had been a Christian before, and I mean, it came down to, there are two or three steps going on here.

First of all, I began to realize, right off the bat, this was where I first encountered this directly, was a shifting of the burden of proof fully over to the theist. Of course, that's not really new. That's been around for a little while, but then what I began to realize ... In other words, the atheist has no case to make. The case of the burden of proof is purely on the theist to make his or her case.

But then, of course, you go the next step. The atheist, or some atheists, have gone the next step by finding sophisticated ways of making that case, the case of the burden of proof belongs entirely to the theist. So now, rather than giving any arguments to try to show that even atheism is true, it's often conceded up front, this can't even be done. You spend your whole time giving the arguments to try to show that there is no burden of proof on the atheist at all. Then you come up with some fairly ingenious ways of making that case.

Here's how one happened in my case. After the person made this case on and on, and I kind of pressed him as best I could, "Can you give us any reasons for thinking atheism is true?" I couldn't get even a single one. We were about 20, 30, 40 minutes into the debate by that time. Then we had the cross-examination, so I simply said, "Look it, can I just confirm here or clarify with you? Are you telling us the burden of proof is always and only on the person making the positive truth claim, namely, the theist here?" I was really precise in how I said it. I'd thought he would actually back off a little, but he said, "Yes, that's what I'm saying."

I said, "Can I give you an example of a negative claim, and you tell me whether you think there's any burden of proof on the person making that claim?" So I said, "My negative claim is this: the Holocaust did not happen." Then the person said this back to me. He says, "Well if I say I believe the Holocaust did not happen, I would have a burden of proof." He's backing off along that claim, but then he said, "But if I merely say, 'I don't believe the Holocaust did happen,' then I have no burden of proof because I'm not claiming anything. I just don't believe. You're the one who does believe something. I don't believe something."

Then we have a little bit of a change in how atheism is even being presented, and that's what complicates things, the shifting of the burden of proof, and a little bit of changing of the definition of atheism, actually blurring it with agnosticism. 

As I began to realize, when I share that with my students, they said, right off the bat, "Well, that's just a game. We can play that game too. We could just say, 'We just don't believe there is no God, so there's no burden of proof on us. It's on you, the atheists because now you do believe there is no God.'" And everybody had a bit of a laugh about it, and it's kind of a silly game on that one level.

But the issue becomes a little deeper, and I think we have to really learn how to track with this. I think we have to really be pressed upon here and say, "When you say you believe, you just don't believe there is a God. Do you also not believe there is no God? In other words, you just don't believe either way? You don't believe there is a God, or you don't believe there's not a God? Because if the answer to that is 'Yes,' then this is just old-fashioned agnosticism." But on the other hand, if the person does believe there is not a God, then they're back to the original statement, which even they have admitted requires a burden of proof.

That's the kind of the thinking I had to do to work it through, but I really found it can be very confusing, it can be quite frustrating, but the point is, if it's allowed to be successful, it shifts the entire way the discussion is handled, because now the atheist has really nothing to do but just sit back and listen to what the arguments for the theists, and just say, "I don't find those convincing," and fall back into this default position, which is atheism, but then atheism is never really defined as well to obviously making no claim. It's very much blurred with agnosticism, and that's what I found going on, and that's why I found the debating to be much more a job of trying to clarify concepts and then finally bringing out the fact that you're giving no reasons to believe atheism is true.

I'm not sure, that's a little bit complex, but that's what I've encountered.

Sean McDowell: Paul, I'm curious if you can comment on this. I've been blogging two or three times a week for almost three years-

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah, okay.

Sean McDowell: ... say, 300 or 400 blogs. One of the top five, maybe even higher than that, is a blog I called, Why Do Kids Leave The Faith? Don't Forget Bad Theology. I made the point that in all of my experience, when I talk with somebody, at the heart of it, I find some misunderstanding about the faith, that God enjoys just judging people, that God just wants to send somebody to hell, that it's this harsh, vindictive God, or some broken theology. Is that true in your experience? What do you think about that?

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah. Well, yes, I think that's very true. Maybe not in every case, but I think it certainly is true in some cases because when you read about why people have left, they come up with these pictures of God, these presentations of God, usually something about God, that is just ... I'm reading it, and I'm scratching my head and saying, "That is not the God that I see in the Bible. Where did we get this notion of God?" Or something about, as I mentioned before, the expectations that we should have, coming from the Bible, about what God will do, or the right thinking about prayer, or the right thinking about faith, or what we should expect God will do?

I'm thinking to myself, wow, this is just a case where we need some much more clear and accurate teaching from the Bible about what the faith really is, because that's where I get back to this question, why exactly did you leave? What exactly were you rejecting? I'm always hoping we can get to the bottom of it, and if there's something about a misconception about God, I'd like to see if we could get at it by asking that question.

I'm not sure if that fits with your experience or not, Sean.

Sean McDowell: Yeah, it definitely does.

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah, yeah, because it's a real issue, and it means that we need to be ready to clarify the best we can, and that's why I always say, "If you want to do good apologetics, you've also got to do some theology. You've got to have a working knowledge of the Bible, and some basic theology, because a big part of apologetics is clarifying what Christianity really does and does not teach."

I found right from the beginning, I want to have people share some things about what Jesus said, or what Jesus did, and I said, "Are you sure Jesus said that? Are you sure Paul said that? What exactly did Paul say? What exactly did it say back in Genesis?" Or whatever, and get back there, and by clarifying it, we are often able to give an answer right there. But of course, you can't do that without some knowledge of the Bible and some knowledge of theology. That's why you have to have both.

Scott Rae: Paul, one of the things that come out in the book, but I think is particularly helpful, you spent a lot of time on it, and that's on the reliability of the New Testament.

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah, right. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott Rae: It sounds like that one of the major intellectual reasons why people leave their faith has to do with their belief in the reliability of the New Testament being undermined. I know that's a big complex subject, but if you could summarize this, what's the case that you would make for why we should trust that the New Testament portrayal of Jesus and the resurrection is really accurate?

Paul Chamberlain: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, for sure. Well, I mean, there's so much to say about that, Scott, but it's a great point. It's a great question, and I had no idea I'd be putting that much effort into it in the book when I started writing it, but as I came across more and more things, I realized, we just have to do it.

But I tell you what really was key for me. It was critical for me, even in my own personal thinking as I wrote, that I began to realize that a lot of people today wonder, do we have the correct books in the New Testament, to begin with? The ones that are there, what do we do with the ... when we see differences, discrepancies, or what people sometimes charge as outright contradictions? Are we supposed to believe this one or that one? And it goes on and on with questions like that. What about the textual variants we have, the differences in the manuscripts upon which the New Testament is based on? These are questions that really cut to the foundation, because it means that if we really don't have good answers on these, we're not even really sure what Jesus said or what he did, how can we follow him if we don't really know who he was or what he said or what he did?

I found, as I began to read further, that I was so encouraged by the rigor that the early Christians used, I really have to take my hat off to these folks, that the rigor they used when they ruled on which books were to be considered authoritative. They set out their criteria, really two major ones, as far as I could tell: the books had to be early, and had to have an apostolic connection. There was some other pretty good material written there, but when they didn't meet that criterion, those two criteria, they were ruled out. They were sometimes considered helpful books, but they were not allowed for the public readings or the authoritative books, and ultimately making it into the canon of scripture.

You saw these criteria coming through in various ways. When people would write spurious books, like say the gospel of Peter, they would attach the names of one of these, because the word was out that that's how you got your book to be taken as authoritative. You met those two criteria. The church, of course, was there again, very, very rigorous in deciding which ones were really, really, went back to the earliest apostles. I found that to be very, very helpful because it answers a lot of questions about whether we can trust the books we have there.

Then when it came to things like the contradictions in the Bible, well, I found there I was deeply encouraged by that study as well because I found when you read the four gospels, you find the core events are in full agreement. The big main core events, they're all there. There's really no dispute about those. You find some differences in details, which is exactly what you would expect by four independent witnesses that all had good access to the information, and you even find some very good plausible harmonizations.

People like Craig Blomberg, who you both would know, have done some excellent work on this, and others as well, and so, as I looked at it, I thought, these texts, I have great confidence in these four texts, these four gospels, to give us reliable information about Jesus. From there, it's just a matter of what you will do, then, with that information.

There is, of course, much more than you could say, but these are all core, and I just bring these up again and again and again to people and share it with people, and that in my view, we are a very fortunate and blessed people to have these four independent gospels written by people who were close to the scene, right at hand, had access. It looked like they were willing to write the truth, the whole truth, even if it was embarrassing to them at times because that's all in there as well.

I'm not sure there's more we could say, but those are the things that were really cored to me, Scott.

Sean McDowell: That's great. Thanks for including this in your book, Making A Case For The New Testament. Let me ask you two last questions-

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah. Sure.

Sean McDowell: ... and you're going to have to give me your quick Twitter response to these.

Paul Chamberlain: Yup. Oh, okay.

Sean McDowell: What encouragement would you give to somebody who's listening who finds themselves having it feel like they're moving towards stop believing, finding faith difficult? What quick encouragement would you give to that person?

Paul Chamberlain: I would say, "Make sure that you sit down and you make a little note, a little list to yourself. What are the reasons I might leave? What are they? One, two three. And then pursue those into the ground. If there's an intellectual objection, get the best, most thoughtful Christian responses. If it's another objection, get the best responses you can, and dig, pursue those to the ground. Do not walk away without getting the best responses you can do whatever your reasons for leaving might be."

That would be my very quick, quick Twitter response to that.

Sean McDowell: That's wonderful. I just got an email from somebody who had studied apologetics seven to eight years and said, "Studying this in depth, I finally started to believe," so I love that advice.

Paul Chamberlain: Wow. Wow.

Sean McDowell: Last, if people have relationships with, say, a pastor, or with a son or daughter, or a friend, who is stopping to believe, what encouragement would you give to them in that relationship?

Paul Chamberlain: Yeah. That has really gotten me, that very question. There again I would say, "Please find another person who's a Christian leader. Sit down and at least share it with them, and let them frame it for you. Let them give their ... to share their perspective on what's going on here because that must be shattering, earth-shattering for some people, to watch your own leader, your own pastor, turn away. But to sit down with another very helpful Christian leader, but at the same time, pray to God and say, 'What's going on here, God? Can you please give me some peace of mind and some assurance and some confidence?' Because we do have that promise from the New Testament that we will get that, that His Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, so let's not downplay that, but sit down with another Christian leader, and let them help you frame and understand what's happened here."

Sean McDowell: Paul, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for your research in your recent book, Why People Stop Believing. Thanks for defending so much of the New Testament and making that a portion of it, I find that pivotal today, and also, for the balance you've brought between the kind of the emotional side, relational side, and truth, so thanks for coming on.

Paul Chamberlain: Well, thanks to both of you, Sean and Scott, and keep up your very good work there. It's been a pleasure to be with you gentlemen today.

Sean McDowell: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. To learn more about us and today's guest, Paul Chamberlain, and to find more episodes, go to Biola.edu/thinkbiblically. That's Biola.edu/thinkbiblically. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us a rating on your podcast app and share it with a friend. Thanks for listening, and remember, think biblically about everything.