From Agnosticism to Atheism

Hey everyone,

For those of you who didn’t see my previous video, “From Christianity to Agnosticism,” you might want to check that out if you’re curious about how I began to doubt my religious upbringing from the age about 11 to the age of 16 or 17. I had a lot of questions during those years, but comparatively few answers and very little independent life experience. Had you spoken with me about my reasoning then, I would probably have come off as fairly immature and unable to hold my own in a debate on faith, let alone construct a strong argument either for or against belief.

So in this video, I’ll discuss the thought processes and experiences that took me from agnosticism to atheism.

My previous video left off at the point where I first became comfortable with the idea of agnosticism, at around the age of 16 or 17, when I was still a student in a Catholic high school. In that school, I made some friends who had also come from Christian backgrounds but had come to identify themselves as agnostic. Our conversations weren’t deep, but mainly we just stuck together to criticize our school administrators who blatantly used religion at every chance they got, especially to fundraise. I had one religion teacher my senior year whom I routinely questioned about Catholicism, but I wasn’t impressed by the caliber of her answers. I still had to attend Sunday mass every week without fail, so rather than having to sit with my parents and being forced to sit, kneel, stand, and respond, I joined the choir, tuned out during mass, and got some service hours to boot.

Anyway, fast forward about a year to when I started college in a different state. I was living away from home for the first time and was no longer surrounded my weekly church, religious schooling during the weekdays, and an insulated community of people devout in only Catholicism. There were Christian clubs on campus, as well as Muslim club, a Hindu club, a Jewish club, and a secular students’ club, but I never really got involved with any of those. Most students at my college seemed pretty religiously apathetic, though their backgrounds and ethnicities were very diverse. Over the years, I became friends with some Catholics, other Christians, a few Hindus, a few Buddhists, a Muslim girl, and quite a few people who didn’t align themselves with any faith. I did not engage in religious debates – although I did have friendly, non-confrontational discussions with a few friends – mostly I was interested in learning about other peoples’ belief systems and cultures, since I had grown up with very little exposure to any culture besides my own.

Mainly I went to college with the goal of studying, and since science had been the most intriguing subject to me in my last few years of high school, I came to college and began coursework toward a biochemistry degree. I found the science curriculum at my school to be fascinating, thought-provoking, and also quite challenging. I also did biochemistry-related research all four years of undergrad. Through my upper level science courses and hands-on research experience, I developed a deeper understanding of how living organisms function, how they have evolved and continue to evolve, and the hows and whys behind what scientists and researchers study. I developed an appreciation for the use of science to better the world, whether it’s through the development of effective sanitation, waste disposable methods, and agricultural pesticides, many of them natural, that help keep pathogens out of the water and food supply, the use of industrial fermentation of a genetically altered strains of bacteria to cleanly and efficiently produce chemicals on a large scale, the study of natural antibiotic products from the Actinomyces genus that can be modified to counter growing cadres of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or the in-depth molecular studies on human disease that aim to find viable treatment options and potential cures. And yes, I even appreciate the science behind paternity tests shown on every “Who the baby daddy?”-themed episode of Maury and other trashy talk shows, even though the exposed baby daddies probably don’t.

Anyway, through further study, I became literate in the language of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, an excellent barometer for what the scientific community uses to present its working hypotheses and findings, all liable to be disproven should evidence to the contrary arise and pass through peer review and peer research. It was in peer-reviewed scientific journals that I learned the most about evolution, through phylogeny and comparative studies in journals like Nature, Science, Animal Behaviour, and TREE. Through studying physical, organic, and biochemistry, I began to see how the molecular properties of carbon, with its ability to form four bonds to complete its valence shell and become stable, with the presence of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and some metals and minerals, could have, over billions of years, formed living things from non-living things (abiogenesis). Studying and reading journal articles on biochemistry and medicinal chemistry, as well as my research experience studying cancer, gave me an understanding of how molecular-scale processes from DNA replication to protein folding to intra- and inter-cellular transport, are so finely regulated and conserved across organisms, that the tiniest change - a single point mutation or codon shift, inborn or acquired over time, in certain regions of our 3.4 billion base pair genome – has the potential to lead to devastating diseases. All of this was quite significant in my path toward atheism, because while science cannot offer 100%-verified explanations of how life started on earth and how simple cells became more complex, science at least posits theories backed up by years of independently-acquired, repeatable, reputable findings that address these issues.

And for any religious people who are ready to start typing in your comment boxes now that science became my new religion or that science has brainwashed me, that’s not the case. While I do plan to have a career in science and medicine, and science has helped me develop a pragmatic way of looking at the world, science doesn’t rule over me, consume my thoughts, or control most everyday aspects of my life, like shopping at the mall or grocery store, socializing with friends and family, or driving around my neighborhood. I don’t worship science; I don’t regard science as having all the right answers to all of our burning questions; and I don’t instantly believe every scientific claim I hear on the news or in popular science articles unless said claims withstand academic rigor over time. I view science as a very useful tool for probing and understanding the natural world and bettering the quality of life of humans and other living beings, and that’s it.

So within a week of turning 20, I moved into an apartment by myself, where I had some time to reevaluate my worldview after the people I’d known for the past few years, the academic work I’d done, and my own personal growth, which is still ongoing. I spent hours on the internet every week researching religious beliefs, Christianity in particular, and information on non-belief, as well as watching debates between religious people and atheists on the topic of the existence of a god. I now saw the arguments for the existence of the Christian god as pretty weak, appealing to emotion, guilt, and fear rather than reason and intellectualism. Proponents of the creationist movement touted the same tired bits of data in support of their belief of a young earth, data that for obvious reasons would never be published in any reputable peer-reviewed geology or biology journal, and when I did correspond with a few creationists online, I found them extremely unwilling to even consider data besides their own. Intelligent design was just as loony, just as agenda-backed, and just as purposefully ignorant of scientific progress in the last 150 years as its daddy, creationism. And not to insult the intelligent Christians and other religious folks out there, but none of the people I saw actively evangelizing on Youtube and other venues could offer a convincing argument for the existence of their god, let alone provide any shred of convincing, testable evidence for the truth of any of their beliefs in the natural realm. All arguments I heard – Paschal’s wager, the first cause, etc. – seemed to prey on emotions like fear and guilt, and many catered toward ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Other less aggressive folks , such as my parents, stressed the importance of faith, ‘believing without seeing,’ and they seemed comfortable and confident in the religion they’d been born into or chosen, but in general I found that they lacked open-mindedness to genuinely consider others’ beliefs and put their own to the same scrutiny that they often would use to dismiss ideas besides their own.

On the other hand, I had also been listening to what atheists and agnostics had to say, both on Youtube and other sites, and while I was turned off by the folks who would swear multiple times in every sentence, attempt to flush various holy books down the toilet, and insult the characters and perceived intellectual capacities of religious folks, I was impressed by atheists who were able to clearly articulate their positions in a rational manner that made sense to me and didn’t hinge on blind faith and appeals to emotion. I found deconversion stories fascinating, and through listening to former believers, I began to realize how for some, their faith, their denomination’s interpretation of the bible, and the moralizing attitudes of their churches and families imposed psychological suffering on them, preventing these individuals from being who they were, pursuing their goals, and living and thinking without fear. So ultimately I came to the realization that though agnosticism was a decent intellectual position for a period in my life of neither believing in nor rejecting religion, specifically Christianity, I had now shifted to a position where I no longer had any reason to believe that any human cultures’ religious beliefs had intellectual or rational merit, and until such merit would be convincingly and rigorously demonstrated, my position was lack of belief in said claims. That occurred two years ago this month, so in a span of 3 to 4 years, I went from a stance of agnosticism to one of atheism. A lot has changed in the past 2 years as well – maybe I’ll go ahead and make this series a 3-parter and talk about my experiences and growth while maintaining an atheistic worldview.

That’s it for now; thanks for watching, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments.