Zoe's Spiritual Deconstruction - Part Two: Monkeys

I'd like to remind you to read the Intro and Part One before reading this post. The Intro in particular will explain who the heck Rhett and Link are, because I will be referring to them occasionally throughout this process.

Also, since we're getting to the "doubting God exists" part - which is a very sensitive and triggering subject for some people - I'd like to remind you that this is my story, not yours. I'm not here to convince anyone of anything. I'm not here to "lead people astray". I am merely sharing. Perhaps you can challenge yourself to experience my story without fear in your heart. Listening with fear is not truly listening.

I believe I was about 7 years old when I experienced my first "wait a minute ... how do we know God exists?" moment.

It was weird. I don't know how it came to mind; it was just there all of a sudden, and it rocked my tiny world. After being born, my reality was taught to me and God was always a part of it. The Earth is round; this is the colour green; 'moo' is what a cow says; this is what peanut butter tastes like; God is real.

The Sun can burn your skin; the sky is the colour blue; try a lemon for the first time; this is how to write your name; we go to Heaven when we die.

Look both ways when crossing the street; vegetables keep you healthy; plants breathe like us; two plus two is four; space travel is a thing; Jesus died for your sins.

It was true, it was fact, it was a given, and then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly my mind strayed too far, wondered too much, asked the wrong questions.

Somehow, a neighbor of ours who was highly evangelical found out that I was having doubts and gave my mom a book that supposedly cured her own daughter of her spiritual doubts. The only thing I remember about the book is that Mom never read it to me, and I checked it out once but the pictures were so dull that I lost interest.

I didn't really get a solid answer to "how do we KNOW God exists". I got the "we don't KNOW, we have faith" answer, which was confusing and unsatisfying. I also got the "A world without God is scary" answer. That answer became the answer I would give others when they doubted. "I need to know there's something bigger than myself, something that created me with a purpose; because the world is too big and scary without that."

I don't remember what quelled my questioning at age 7, but I do know that it was quelled and I coasted through life free of doubts for a long time after. I had experiences that, in my mind, could only have happened because of God. Most of all, the more I learned about nature the more I became convinced that there had to be a higher power behind all of this. All of the intricacies of life couldn't exist by accident. There was so much purpose in everything around me; everything in nature had its place; everything had the brushstrokes of an artist or the calculations of a mathematician or the genius of an inventor. There had to be someone behind all this - someone bigger, better, and stronger than all of us.

For the record - and I'm skipping ahead here - I still think this to a degree. I am not an atheist (sigh of relief from a certain demographic). For me it's impossible to look at the universe and not see divine order; not to see a creation rather than an accident. I don't see chaos, nonsense, and coincidence. Those things exist, but even they have their place in a bigger picture. The more I learn about nature, biology, and space, the more convinced I am that there is something or someone behind it all.

To me, believing in nothing feels too small-minded. It's too limited. Kind of like how not believing in aliens feels too limited.

But to get back to growing up. I think I'll start with the topic of evolution.

I know - just like Rhett said, I'm making the job of certain evangelists easy. I'm proving their points for them. "When you doubt, when you spend time with atheists, when you show curiosity for other religions, when you learn about evolution, when you turn to science, when you make friends with gay people, when you get tattoos, you'll start turning away from Christianity."

Well, I'm here to tell you that in my case it's true! The more I learned about the world, the more I became uncomfortable with my religion. I'll do my best to explain why.

Evolution. The first time I was faced with the "theory" was, surprisingly, in Sunday school. Again, I was very young. At this time my reality was that Adam and Eve were real people and that the book of Genesis was actual history. The concept of evolving had never been explained to me. It had never occurred to me that Biblical stories could be myths instead of facts.

A boy started attending our church with his family, and he was in Sunday school. He annoyed me because he was essentially my opposite - loud, obnoxious, know-it-all, rude, and undisciplined. He constantly questioned authority (literally and figuratively) and sought to trigger anyone he could.

I was quiet, polite, and sensitive. The teacher's pet type. The always respect your elders type. The everything adults say is true type. The don't rock the boat type.

This boy was flipping the boat over.

An interaction that will forever live in my memory occurred when the Sunday school teacher was telling the Creation Story. The boy interrupted with, "God didn't create us. He didn't create anything because he's not real. We started out as monkeys."

I laughed in his face, as did the other kids."Suuure," I said. I had never heard anything more ridiculous.

The Sunday school teachers confirmed my suspicions that he was wrong.

My mocking questions for him were things like, "Then why aren't monkeys still turning into people?" and "Then who made the monkeys?"

I thought he was making shit up. He liked to say "God isn't real" as much as possible during church just to get a reaction. I regret to say it worked on me.

I'd say, "How do you know he doesn't exist?" and of course he'd respond with, "How do you know he does exist?" and I didn't know what to do with that.

Then my homeschool co-op group went to the Museum of Nature one afternoon. I came across the classic depiction of an ape evolving into a human. I scoffed. I laughed. I thought it was ridiculous. (One thing to point out is that due to the way the boy described it, I thought it was a literal transformation from monkey to person. Like, one second they're a monkey and the next they're a man. A magic spell, basically. I didn't understand the concept of evolution.)

Other kids in the group made me feel dumb for scoffing at the picture. It surprised me - surely the boy at Sunday school was the only person who thought this was true? How could anyone believe something so ridiculous? I didn't see the irony then.

What was all the more shocking was when my Mom - a leader of the co-op group - didn't react how I reacted. She basically explained that some people believe in evolution.

I now thought that evolution was a thing non-Christians believed, as a way to explain how the universe came to be without God. It sounded desperate to me, but it also made sense - of course there were people out there who didn't believe God existed, so of course they'd have to come up with their own story of how the universe was created.

Unfortunately, it didn't change how I viewed or treated the boy at church. He was a non-believer and spewing his non-Christian views in church seemed disrespectful to me. I wondered why he was even there and he said he had no choice, his parents wanted to come and he had to come with them.

Fast forward some years, and my family was sitting around the dinner table eating together as we did most nights. My parents were having a conversation while my brother and I were lost in our own worlds. What snapped me back to reality was my mom saying, "it's not like Adam and Eve were real people", or something along those lines.

Holy moly. The shock! The betrayal!

I kid. But seriously, I was floored. "What?!" I shrieked. They were very amused. "The Creation Story is like a parable to explain in simple terms how the world was made," they explained.

I knew what parables were. Jesus used them all the time - fictional stories to explain a bigger truth. My parents explained that stories like these would've been widely used by the Jewish people; that most of the stories in the Bible were taught generation to generation through word of mouth before they were written down and compiled into the book we know now.

My emotions upon hearing this new truth? Anger. Confusion. Sadness.

Anger? Because I hadn't been told this until that moment. For years I'd been led to believe that the Creation Story was factual, and here I was scoffing at the boy in church who was trying to show me the truth. Because my parents said it like it was a fact everybody knew, like I should've figured it out myself; obviously Adam and Eve weren't real. Obviously most of the Bible isn't factual.

Confusion? Because adults were supposed to have all the answers, but the adults in my life had conflicting ones. Why would my parents say the Bible wasn't factual, when the adults in Sunday school would teach the opposite? What was I supposed to believe?

Sadness? Because Adam and Eve were important to me and now they were gone. The Creation Story had given me purpose and now it was false. The certainty I'd had in how we came to be was shattered. The majesty that a god could create all of this in just 6 days had been a lie.

Of course, there was also the hurt ego. All this time I'd been telling people something that wasn't true, and the boy at Sunday school must've thought I was the biggest idiot.

Naturally, a sea of questions overwhelmed my brain, so I asked them. My parents explained evolution to me. They explained the age of the Earth. They explained how the dinosaurs fit in (that had always been a sticking point for me - because if the Creation Story was real, but humans and dinosaurs never coexisted, then how could dinosaurs be real? And dinosaurs were definitely real. So what gives?). They explained how there was never a flood that covered the entire planet. They explained how God and evolution could exist together. Etc, etc.

I learned more and more over the years as I not only started to ask more questions, but I delved deeper into science. Even though several Christians in my life warned me that science could make you stray from God, I found that science only made God bigger. I found that the timeline of the Big Bang and everything that followed actually fit the simpler Creation Story remarkably well.

So passed my next phase of combining both God and science, the Bible and evolution. Strangely, combining the two made much more sense.

My parents were evolving in their faith and their world view as well. They taught me not to be afraid of asking questions. They taught me to be curious. They taught me that science wasn't evil. They said, "If God didn't want us to explore and ask tough questions, why give us a massive, complex universe to live in?"

My personal evolution caused me to have thoughts like,

"The Bible constantly tells us not be afraid, so why are Christians some of the most fearful people I've ever met?"

and

 "If God is real, then he will be real no matter what questions we ask, what tests we perform, where we explore, or how hard we poke"

and

"If Christians are so sure that God is real, that the Bible is real, and that the Gospel is real - then why are they so scared of doubts, questions, science, curiosity, etc.? Why do they feel their faith is threatened so easily? Surely if you need to defend your religion so vehemently, there's a deeper problem?"

and

"Why does Christianity teach me that I have certainty, and why do Christians say they KNOW God exists, they KNOW where they're going when they die, when we actually don't have solid, tangible, quantifiable proof that God or Heaven exists?"

And that last thought is where I will pick up in Part Three.