My story of deconstruction: Rethinking where we came from

When deconstructing your faith, you might not need to go all the way back to the beginning like I have. It’s true that many people just burn down their entire belief system, embrace atheism, and never look back. While I felt like an atheist for a while, I didn’t think I’d want to stay that way. Everything I’d built my life on was now in question, and I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t just trading one system of belief for another.

I went back to the very beginning: “Why even ask if there is a ‘god’? Why would we even consider that?”

Now, I am NO scientist. I do not have an overall, high-level understanding of science, but I try to do the best I can to think through stuff. I do my research from objective sources and try really hard to figure things out. So, I jotted down some of my own basic thoughts about why I would even consider the existence of a “god”-type being.

• how was this earth created?
• why is there an intricate order to the otherwise chaotic universe? If chaos is the natural state of things (If all things trend towards disorder) why is our world more ordered than we would think?
• you cannot create something from nothing (is this true?); so, where did the first something come from? and, if nothing comes from nothing, then how was “god” created?
  • a completely random, spontaneous creation/burst of energy (where did that energy originate?)
  • ‘god’ = energy outside of time & space that has always existed?

If there is a “god” energy outside of time and space, what can we know about it from the universe? It seems we can assume an “intelligence” of sorts because things in our universe make sense. There is an inter-relationship between everything. There seems to be an overall order, we can infer “laws” that nature seems to follow. There is an unnatural ability to predict nature, patterns, behaviors. Our understanding of science says that the world should not follow laws, should tend towards chaos, not towards order. So, if earth was created by random, spontaneous bursts of energy, it shouldn’t have resulted in such a neat, orderly, perfectly performing, able to sustain a radical diversity of life kind of world, should it?

I feel confident in saying that, right now, we cannot be 100% certain how the universe/world was created. We cannot be 100% whether there is an intelligent energy in existence or not.

Now, I do not not consider myself an “intelligent design” proponent in the sense that I think it is equivalent to science and should be taught in schools and all that. Basically, I was just trying to move away from a “God created the world in 7 days” story and think for myself about what I really could believe.

After hours and hours down the rabbit hole that is origin of life research and theories, I finally decided that I simply cannot believe that all of this ridiculous, wildly abundant, spectacular, crazy, adapted life we have on earth is the random result of some spontaneous cesspool formation. To me, believing that it IS requires just as much faith – if not more? – than believing in an intelligent “energy” or “god” of some sort.

I spent several weeks trying to think my way through this. Ultimately, it brought me to a place where I perhaps relate more to agnostics than to Christians: I cannot rule out the possibility of intelligent design/energy/”God,” but neither can I confidently say that I know anything conclusive about It.

This new idea left me feeling pretty uncomfortable and heretical for a while, until I came across a little 14th-century book called “The Cloud of Unknowing” which was written by a Christian mystic and related their experience of “unknowing” God. Suddenly, I saw a new way opening before me – was it possible to “unknow” God and let go of so many unhealthy and harmful religious beliefs and yet remain a Christian?

Turns out, there is.