A Couple Thoughts on Ryan Bell’s Journey

Ryan Bell was a Seventh-day Adventist pastor. He took the last year to explore the worldview of atheism. This exploration was not just an intellectual voyage through atheists' writings but a journey in which he did not pray, read the Bible, refer to God as the cause of things, or hope that God might intervene and change his own or someone else’s circumstances. After a year, he came to a place where he is no longer a believer. He notes that even after coming to this place that at his core he has not changed at all. He still desires justice in the world and works for an organization that assists the homeless. You can read more about him here. A dear friend asked for my thoughts about his journey. So, I reviewed some of the blogs he wrote while on his journey, and here are my thoughts.

Something for Me to Consider

Ryan confesses that his non-theistic lifestyle was not practically different from his theistic lifestyle at all:

I was never a world-class pray-er. I was never successful at having an hour long ‘quiet time’ as I was taught to do. I did read my Bible and pray, sporadically, but I was never a consistent pray-er. For years I have struggled to understand the purpose of prayer. I am not ignorant of the various explanations of prayer’s purpose. It’s just that none of them ever made much sense to me.

At the beginning of his journey, he set out not to engage in theistic practices, and here he admits that before his journey he struggled with them. Then, I think he writes his most insightful piece:

As a pastor I read and studied my Bible as a professional commitment, to prepare sermons and Bible studies, but I rarely read the Bible devotionally and for my own inspiration, in part because so much of it isn’t inspiring at all. I haven’t attended a church consistently since March so not much changed in that department in the past month either. In short, my life has more or less continued as it has in the recent past. This is revealing for a couple of reasons.

First, it demonstrates something that I have suspected about myself and other Christians I know—many of us have for a long time been functional atheists. We may confess an intellectual assent to belief in a divine being and have a well thought out theology but very few of us live as though this God exists and is an active agent in the world.

Secondly, it demonstrates, at least to me, that the difference God makes is to a great degree, a kind of life insurance policy…a modern day form of Pascal’s wager in which believers hedge their bets against the possibility that there is a God who may send them to hell if they don’t believe.

Christian believers should evaluate their faith on at least those two points. Is there a practical difference between my life and someone who does not profess to believe what I believe? Although I believe being saved from future punishment through faith in Christ is true, it is not the sole burden of the Bible. The Christian message includes that we are saved from the darkness of skepticism, from weakness of will, and from sin, here and now. As a Christian, I believe God is with me always. Do I live differently because of that?

Something for Ryan and Non-Theists to Consider

Some Christians allege that Ryan and non-theists like him lack a moral compass. I disagree. Ryan and all non-theists are moral people. In fact, I think Ryan has done and will do more good than most Christians will ever intend to do. He seems to care deeply for those less fortunate and disenfranchised. He even shares his agitation with William Lane Craig’s response to how Ryan would survive his journey morally and ethically. Craig said:

I wonder what is Bell going to do? Is he going to also during this year quit working for peace and justice? Is he going to now no longer be concerned about the treatment of women – those issues that got him into trouble with his church? Just what does he think the consequences of atheism really are? Which ones is he going to try on? If he really comes to accept the view that atheism leads to the kind of moral nihilism that our other friend did, Bell is going to really have a disastrous year.

How ever Ryan perceived Craig’s response, Ryan and non-theists have something to consider. Having read Craig’s popular book, “Reasonable Faith,” he never argues that Ryan cannot be a moral person, but, given non-theism, morals are subjective, not objective. If morals are subjective, they are ultimately opinions, and relative, meaning they could change. If morals are objective, they are true and unchanging regardless of any person’s, nation’s, race’s, or age’s opinion. This is an important difference. One I would offer to Ryan’s question, “So now what difference does God make?”

If atheism is true, morality arose by man's evolutionary need for survival. Evolution has determined that co-operative and even sacrificial behavior to be advantageous in the struggle for survival. This entails that morality is not objective. As Michael Ruse writes:

The position of the modern evolutionist…is that humans have an awareness of morality…because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth…Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "Love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves…Nevertheless,...such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction,…and any deeper meaning is illusory.

Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), 262, 268-289.

On this view, morality becomes ultimately meaningless. Murder, rape, racism, and slavery are nothing more than matters of opinion. There is no objective difference between Hitler and Mother Teresa. One followed a set of rules more preferable to the world than the other did. Maybe in another time and another place, history might regard it the opposite way. I do not think Ryan Bell believes this. I think Ryan Bell lives as if morals are objective. I believe each human being is created in the image of God. Each is a moral, spiritual being. Morals are objective and necessary expressions of God’s loving and just nature. We hate evil because He hates evil. We love because He first loved us.

In Ryan’s blog on January 5, 2014, he shared a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:

These serious, excellent, upright, deeply sensitive people who are still Christian from the very heart: they owe it to themselves to try for once the experiment of living for some length of time without Christianity; they owe it to their faith in this way for once to sojourn ‘in the wilderness’ — if only to win for themselves the right to a voice on the question whether Christianity is necessary.

A year later, I would like to share another quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

"How shall we comfort ourselves the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early…"

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Gay Science." In The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by W. Kaufmann, (New York: Viking, 1954), 95.