f2PointEight

A Belief Without Burden

My earlier essays explored why I no longer see Christianity as morally coherent and why, despite its claims to be a spiritual family, it repeatedly fails to generate the community it promises. But these questions, important as they are, rest upon a deeper one. Before we can ask whether Christianity is good or whether it forms community, we must first ask whether it is true. That is where the foundations of my former faith eroded, not in my feelings toward Christianity, nor in my experience within it, but in the very claims it makes about reality.

This is not an argument born of bitterness or defiance. It is the product of study, introspection, and struggle. It is the result of applying the same standards of reasoning to Christianity that we apply to every other domain of human knowledge. Ultimately, what led me away from the tradition was not a desire for a different world but a refusal to deny the one we inhabit.

This final installment is an attempt to articulate, as clearly as I can, why I no longer believe Christianity describes objective reality.

I hesitated for a long time to write this. Part of that hesitation came from a misplaced sense of charity. I thought this was the one area Christians simply could not engage with in good faith. I assumed that challenging the intellectual foundations of their belief would be received as an attack rather than an intreat to dialogue. But I see now that avoiding this topic was a mistake. Because after presenting careful arguments about Christianity’s moral failures and its inability to sustain genuine community, every reply, whether from friends, mentors, or family, returned to the same point. Nothing addressed the substance of my critique. Everything circled back to a single assertion: “But it’s true.”

And that is the problem.

Once someone insists that Christianity is true by definition, every other question becomes irrelevant. The ethical contradictions do not matter, the historical problems do not matter, the harm it causes does not matter, the structural incapacity of the church to form meaningful community does not matter. Truth becomes a trump card that nullifies all other concerns.

This is why the arguments I’ve raised, about faith’s anti-intellectual tendencies, its closed epistemology, its self-preserving circularity, its capacity to harm, and its failure to meaningfully transform people remain untouched. Christianity’s psychological immune system responds to criticism not with engagement, but with retreat. Retreat into doctrine, retreat into revelation, retreat into the unexamined certainty that the belief is true because it must be true.

This is not intellectual engagement, it is a defence mechanism.

When truth is assumed rather than demonstrated, any challenge becomes a threat to identity rather than an invitation to reflection. And when the truth-claim becomes immovable, it allows the believer to sidestep the consequences of their faith entirely. After all, if Christianity is true in the cosmic sense, then its moral failures are merely imperfections in human practice. If it is true, then its harm is an unfortunate by-product of human sin. If it is true, then its inability to foster real community is our fault, not the system’s.

The truth-claim functions as insulation, protecting the religion not from criticism, but from accountability.

Recognising this is what finally convinced me that the question of Christianity’s truth cannot be the topic I shy away from. It is the centre of gravity around which every conversation bends. And once that truth-claim is exposed as unsupported, unfalsifiable, or incoherent, the rest of Christianity’s self-justifications collapse under their own weight.

Thou Shalt Have Other Gods Before Me

Faith once provided me with structure, meaning, and identity. Yet beneath that framework was a crucial assumption, that the Bible is inerrant and univocal. Not merely inspiring, not merely meaningful, but a single, coherent, divinely overseen narrative revealing ultimate truth.

The first cracks appeared when I encountered biblical scholarship that did not begin with theological conclusions but with linguistic, historical, and archaeological evidence. I discovered that the Bible was not a monologue from heaven but a library of texts written over a millennia by different authors with different agendas, theological perspectives, cultural contexts, and political aims.

The earliest Israelites were not monotheists in any modern sense. The God later presented in Judaism as the sole, eternal deity did not begin that way. Yahweh emerged in the south of the Levant as a regional god, one among many. He was depicted as a storm-warrior deity whose sphere overlapped with that of Baal, the already-entrenched Canaanite storm god. Archaeology, early inscriptions, and even traces preserved within the Hebrew Bible point to a period in which Yahweh and Baal were not opposites but competitors, each with their own priesthood, mythology, and political champions.

The famous confrontation on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal distils this ancient rivalry into a single dramatised moment, but its very existence betrays the reality behind the story. It is a theological propaganda piece, a narrative designed to demonstrate not just divine power but divine supremacy in a world where supremacy was not assumed. If Yahweh had always been understood as the only god, there would be no need for fire-from-heaven contests, no need for polemical denunciations of Baal worship, and no need for sweeping reforms centuries later that demanded the destruction of every competing shrine. You do not wage war against gods you believe do not exist. You wage war against rivals.

Yahweh was not merely a rival to Baal, he appears to have usurped Baal’s place within the religious landscape of ancient Israel. The biblical writers present the two as irreconcilable opposites, yet the deeper literary and archaeological evidence shows a far more uncomfortable truth, that the stories and roles later attributed to Yahweh were once the domain of Baal.

Centuries before the composition of the Genesis narratives, Ugaritic texts from the city of Ugarit describe Baal as the son of El, the supreme god of the pantheon. Baal is depicted as a storm-warrior deity who establishes order by defeating a serpentine sea monster, the chaos creature Lotan (Leviathan). This mythic pattern, in which a young storm god battles the waters of chaos to secure the stability of creation, is a well-attested Near Eastern motif. In the Ugaritic corpus, it is Baal, not Yahweh, who slays the sea serpent, subdues the primordial waters, and brings fertility to the land.

But when we arrive at the biblical creation story, this mythic structure reappears, only now Yahweh occupies Baal’s role. The opening of Genesis describes Yahweh taming the chaotic deep (tehom), a word linguistically related to Tiamat, the primordial sea goddess of Mesopotamian lore. Later poetic texts explicitly place Yahweh in combat with sea monsters, Yam, Rahab, and Leviathan, the very foes Baal confronts in the Ugaritic epics. Rather than emerging from a vacuum, the Genesis narrative appears to rework older Canaanite mythology, replacing Baal with Yahweh as the divine champion who imposes order upon chaos.

This pattern of replacement extends beyond cosmology and into Israel’s collective memory. Many stories, songs, and sacred landscapes initially associated with Baal were later absorbed into Yahweh’s domain. Several biblical locations, Baʿal-Hermon, Baʿal-Gad, Baʿal-Peor, bear Baal’s name, revealing territories in which he was once the dominant deity. Over time, these sites were reinterpreted, renamed, or recontextualised as Yahwistic centres. Even attributes central to Baal, the cloud-rider epithet, control of storms, and agricultural fertility, are eventually ascribed to Yahweh in the Psalms and the prophetic books.

The resulting picture is not one of two gods who always existed in static contrast, but of one god gradually eclipsing and absorbing the other. Yahweh emerges as a deity who inherits Baal’s titles, appropriates his mythology, and claims his sacred spaces. What the later biblical writers portray as a theological triumph is, in historical terms, a cultural succession. Yahweh becomes the dominant god of Israel not by virtue of timeless monotheism, but through a long process of syncretism, competition, and eventual ideological rewriting.

What often gets lost is that this rivalry, so central to the biblical narrative, was likely of little consequence to ordinary Israelites. The competition between Yahweh and Baal was primarily a concern of courts, priesthoods, and elites whose political fortunes were tied to the prestige of their patron deity. For the average farmer or herder, daily survival mattered far more than theological purity. Rainfall, harvests, fertility of land and livestock, these were the things that sustained life. Whether those blessings were attributed to Baal or Yahweh likely shifted with political winds, local tradition, or whichever priest happened to hold influence in a given region.

In this light, the religious “struggle” portrayed in the scriptures becomes far less a grassroots awakening to divine truth and far more a top-down effort to centralise authority. It reveals a world where beliefs were fluid, where divine allegiance was pragmatic rather than doctrinal, and where the theological narratives preserved in the Bible reflect the eventual winners of a centuries-long process of religious consolidation rather than a legitimate history of the Israelites. The implications are profound, because not only does this undermine the idea of an unbroken monotheistic heritage, it exposes the degree to which later religious identity was constructed, deliberately shaped, enforced, and retroactively projected over a far more complex and pluralistic past.

Not only did Yahweh usurp Baal, over time, he was eventually conflated with El, the older chief god of the Canaanite pantheon. The process by which Yahweh became the sole deity of Israel was gradual and political. It reflected the consolidation of national identity, not divine revelation. Realising this forced a stark shift, the Bible’s depiction of God was not a coherent timeline of divine self-disclosure but an anthology of evolving human ideas. Each era reshaped God in its own image, militaristic tribes envisioned him as a territorial warrior, monarchies imagined him as a royal patron, exiles portrayed him as universal judge, and post-exilic communities declared him the only deity who exists.

Once this evolution became visible, the illusion of univocality collapsed. The Bible is not a single voice. It is a chorus of competing voices, each responding to the needs of its time. This realisation changed everything for me. The question ceased to be, “Why does God seem different in different parts of the Bible?” and became instead, “Why should we assume these competing visions describe anything beyond the human imagination?”

Religions arise from human needs and evolve with human societies. They respond to fear, uncertainty, hope, and power. They are shaped by geography, politics, cultural exchange, and existential anxiety. Through this process, an unmistakable insight takes shape, one that accords with history, anthropology, and comparative religion.

This pattern, a fingerprint of divine evolution, is not limited to the conceptualisation of deity in the Bible. It manifests in a visible imprint on civilisations throughout history wrestling with their identity.

Across the world and throughout history, we see the same phenomenon. Cultures based on trade develop tolerant polytheism. Cultures built around strict authority develop authoritarian gods. Nomadic or vulnerable societies envision volatile, punitive deities. Agrarian societies imagine cooperative, benevolent ones. The pattern is too consistent to ignore. Humans generate gods that reflect themselves.

This is why I now relate to Christianity as a human expression of meaning rather than a revelation of truth.

Out of Egypt, I Brought You

One of the defining narratives of Christianity, and the Jewish tradition from which it emerged, is the Exodus story. It presents God as a liberator, miracle-worker, and covenant-maker. It provides the foundation for the doctrines of salvation that Christianity later reinterprets through the figure of Jesus.

Yet everything we know from archaeology and Egyptian history tells us the Exodus did not happen.

There is no evidence of millions of Israelites migrating through the Sinai Peninsula, no temporary encampments, no material culture out of place, no mass graves, and no trace of the enormous logistical footprint such a population would inevitably leave behind. Likewise, Egypt’s meticulously preserved records, which document everything from grain tallies to labour rotations, make no mention of plagues, no country-wide devastation, no sudden disappearance of an enslaved population, and no crisis of national survival. And the Canaanite cities supposedly razed by Joshua show no widespread destruction corresponding to biblical chronology. Many of them were either uninhabited at the time or persisted without interruption.

But even aside from the absence of evidence, the internal logic of the Exodus story collapses under scrutiny.

The departure of “about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children” (Ex. 12:37) would imply a population of two million people or more. The overnight loss of a labour force that large, in a highly stratified, labour-dependent economy, would have been an extinction-level event for ancient Egypt. This wasn’t a world of automation, industrialised production, or diversified global trade networks. It was a land where agriculture, monumental construction, and basic survival depended on human labour in staggering quantities. Removing two million workers from the system in a single moment would not merely inconvenience the state, it would annihilate it.

Every element of Egypt’s economy would have collapsed simultaneously. Irrigation systems, which required constant labour to dig, dredge, and maintain, would have failed within months, causing catastrophic crop loss. Harvesting and transportation of grain, the backbone of Egyptian wealth and taxation, would have become impossible. Construction projects, already labour-intensive, would grind to a halt, not gradually, but immediately. Military readiness would have collapsed entirely, an army cannot function without the surplus produced by its labourers or the logistical support of a stable economy. Trade networks that relied on predictable production and taxation would implode as Egypt could no longer meet its obligations or maintain routes.

And even more apocalyptic is the final plague, the death of every firstborn male. In an ancient society where inheritance, priestly lines, political succession, and skilled craftwork often passed from father to firstborn son, such an event would have been shattering.

The death of every firstborn male would mean collapse of dynastic continuity, the royal succession would be thrown into chaos, requiring immediate political realignment. Loss of trained specialists, scribes, artisans, priests, and administrators who were firstborn sons raised to inherit their father’s roles. Breakdown of household structure, in a society where lineage determined economic stability and legal standing. There would have been national mourning and religious crisis on an unprecedented scale.

Egypt would not have simply been wounded, it would have been plunged into generational instability. The ripple effects would be visible in archaeology for decades. Abandoned cities, disrupted burial practices, evidence of famine, shifts in material culture, emergency construction, or sudden population decline. Yet none of this appears. The archaeological and textual record remains completely unchanged through the period the Exodus is claimed to have occurred. Egypt continues into the following dynasties with administrative continuity, stable population numbers, ongoing building projects, and uninterrupted political power.

The absence of evidence is not the problem. The absence of consequences is.

A catastrophe of the biblical magnitude would have left unmistakable traces in every domain. Economic, social, political, demographic, and archaeological. Instead, what the evidence shows is a region functioning exactly as it always had, with no sign whatsoever of the societal trauma the Exodus narratives describe. The implication is unavoidable. The biblical account is not a historical record but a later national origin story, one powerful enough to shape a people’s identity, yet entirely out of step with the material reality of the ancient world. It is a theological expression of hope written in the 6th to 5th centuries BCE, during and after the Babylonian exile, and by a people trying to make sense of displacement and empire.

This matters. Because if Christianity’s foundational narrative depends on earlier foundations that themselves lack historical grounding, then the Christian story, Jesus as the new Moses, the new deliverer, the fulfilment of prophecy, rests on theological reinterpretation of fiction, not revelation.

From Rome to Athens to the Aztec Empire, great civilisations have always anchored themselves in stories of divine origins. Rome traced its beginnings to Remus and Romulus, twin sons of a god and a virgin, nursed by a she-wolf and destined to raise a city upon seven hills. Athens looked to the rivalry between Athena and Poseidon, a mythic contest that sanctified the land and its patron goddess. The Mexica people believed that Tenochtitlan (the site of modern-day Mexico City) was founded according to a prophecy delivered by Huitzilopochtli, the god of sun and war. The Greeks told of Cadmus, a Phoenician prince who followed a trail of omens, slew a dragon, and sowed its teeth into the earth to bring forth the first warriors of Thebes. These stories differ in culture and detail, but they reveal a common pattern. Every people crafts a grand origin to explain their place in the world. The Exodus story is no exception. Like all founding myths, it offers meaning, identity, and divine legitimacy, but it belongs to the realm of mythmaking, not history.

History Is Written by the Victor

Another piece of the puzzle that reshaped my understanding of the Bible’s origins was the realisation that some of its most “spiritual” developments were, quite plainly, political. The reforms of King Josiah, once taught to me as a glorious return to purity and truth, emerged as a case study in how religion can function as a tool of centralisation and legitimacy.

Josiah ruled during a period of geopolitical vulnerability. The northern kingdom had already fallen to Assyria. Sennacherib’s brutal campaign left destruction across the region, including the dismantling or decommissioning of many northern sanctuaries and local shrines. These were not mere “pagan high places,” as I was once told, they were legitimate worship sites for Yahweh, Asherah, Baal and other deities used for generations, fully accepted under earlier religious practice. Israelite religion had historically been monolatrous, not monotheistic. El may have been the chief god, but no one claimed he was the only god who existed. In fact, the biblical text is replete with representations of El’s offspring, affectionately termed the Sons of God and later reimagined as angels. Exodus chapter 20, often referred to as the 10 Commandments, begins with Yahweh introducing himself to the people by clarifying specifically which god he is, the one who liberated them from Egypt. Yahweh continues further by commanding the people not to place divine images of other gods before him because he is a jealous god.

When the northern cultic sites were destroyed, it left a vacuum, a religious landscape fragmented and disoriented. Josiah saw an opportunity. By declaring that the only acceptable place to worship as the temple in Jerusalem, and Yahweh as the only god to whom the people should give devotion, he effectively placed all religious authority under royal control. Priests across the nation lost their roles, and their lives. Regional shrines lost their legitimacy. Worship became inseparable from the monarchy.

To justify this sweeping consolidation, a new narrative was needed, one that portrayed centralisation not as innovation, but as restoration. This is where the Deuteronomist enters the picture. The “book of the law” conveniently “found” in the temple during Josiah’s reign (a suspiciously opportune moment) contained exactly the theological justification required for Josiah’s political project. It condemned regional worship sites, elevated Jerusalem as the divinely chosen centre, and promised national blessing for those who followed this centralised system.

But the Deuteronomist’s influence did not end with that single text. The editors and redactors responsible for Deuteronomy also reshaped large swathes of Israel’s earlier history. What had once been normal, culturally appropriate forms of worship, local altars to other deities, multiple priesthoods, regional shrines, were now reinterpreted as evidence of rebellion, faithlessness, and idolatry. Kings who had tolerated or participated in these longstanding practices were retroactively condemned as apostates. Periods when Israel prospered while engaging in decentralised worship were rewritten to suggest they were living under the shadow of divine displeasure.

In other words, a religious system that had always allowed polycentric worship was rewritten to appear as though it had always been wrong. The theological narrative was adjusted to legitimise a new centralised order.

This revelation shook me profoundly. It meant that part of the biblical story is not divine revelation at all, but royal propaganda. It is history written by the winners, by those whose political fortunes were bound to a newly unified cult and a priesthood loyal to Jerusalem’s throne. And this meant, again, that what I had been taught to see as timeless truth was, in fact, the product of human agendas.

The God of the Bible did not change His mind. The authors changed theirs.

This process, political upheaval, theological rebranding, redaction, and reinterpretation revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, just how human the formation of Scripture really was. What I once received as sacred history came into sharp focus as the evolution of a nation’s self-understanding in the wake of their shared trauma and political expediency shaped by the ambitions of kings and the pens of priests.

Historical and archaeological evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the Israelites did not arrive in Canaan as a conquering army under divine mandate, but instead emerged gradually from within the existing Canaanite population. Settlement patterns in the highlands during the Late Bronze and early Iron Age show a slow, organic increase in small agrarian villages rather than the aftermath of violent invasion. The material culture of these early Israelite sites, pottery styles, architectural forms, agricultural practices, matches Canaanite norms almost exactly, with no sign of an intrusive foreign group. Even the earliest Israelite religious practices reflect Canaanite origins. Yahweh was worshipped alongside El, Asherah, and Baal, and the symbols, cultic objects, and sacred spaces of early Israel are indistinguishable from those of their neighbours. Rather than displacing a foreign culture, the Israelites were themselves Canaanites who gradually developed a distinct identity, shaped not by military conquest but by internal social, economic, and religious evolution.

Immanuel, God With Us

The New Testament presents two independent narratives of Jesus’ birth, one in Matthew, one in Luke. These accounts differ in major details, genealogies, locations, timelines, characters, and purposes. Scholars have long observed that they are theologically motivated stories, not eyewitness reports.

More importantly, they fit a familiar ancient pattern.

Throughout antiquity, miraculous birth stories were told about figures regarded as significant: kings, philosophers, heroes, demigods. They served to signal importance, not to record history. The virgin birth narratives of Matthew and Luke arose in a world saturated with symbolic tales of extraordinary origins, from the births of Augustus and Alexander the Great to mythological figures whose conceptions were marked by divine intervention.

One of the most revealing examples of how the New Testament reshapes older Jewish texts to fit a new theological agenda appears in the opening chapter of Matthew. Seeking to establish Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14, insisting that the birth of Jesus fulfils an ancient prophecy: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel,” meaning “God with us.”

For many Christians, this is taken as airtight evidence of divine orchestration, an oracle uttered centuries earlier, now perfectly realised in Jesus’ miraculous birth. But this argument collapses the moment one reads Isaiah in its historical and linguistic context.

First, the Hebrew text of Isaiah does not say “virgin.” The word used is ‘almah’, meaning young woman of marriageable age, not ‘betulah’, the Hebrew word that unambiguously means virgin. Matthew, relying heavily on the Greek Septuagint, a translation already one step removed from the Hebrew, imports the Greek word parthenos (“virgin”) into his narrative. But this is not fidelity to prophecy, it is creative reinterpretation designed to legitimise a theological claim.

Second, Isaiah’s oracle was never intended as a messianic prediction stretching seven centuries into the future. The prophecy concerns a very specific political crisis in the 8th century BCE, during the Syro-Ephraimite War. Isaiah speaks to King Ahaz of Judah, assuring him that the coalition threatening Jerusalem will fail. As a sign of this imminent deliverance, a young woman, known to both speaker and listener, will conceive and give birth. Before the child grows old enough to “know right from wrong,” the invading kings will be defeated. The text then records this fulfilment happening within Isaiah’s own narrative. The child is born. He is named. And the people proclaim him “Immanuel.”

Some scholars suggest the child was Isaiah’s own son, others argue he may have been a royal heir. But the point remains, the prophecy was fulfilled in Isaiah’s own lifetime. Nothing in the text remotely requires a deferred fulfilment centuries later, tied to a Galilean preacher under Roman occupation.

Matthew’s reinterpretation only works when Isaiah is severed from his historical moment, his language mistranslated, and his prophecy transplanted into a new theological framework that neither Isaiah nor his original audience would have recognised. The virgin birth becomes mythic theology, not fulfilled prediction.

And this, for me, was the beginning of recognising a larger pattern, where stories about Jesus were shaped less by eyewitness memory and more by the creative theological needs of early Christian communities.

Recognising this did not immediately destroy my faith, but it removed one of the central claims of Christianity’s supernatural uniqueness. If these stories are iterative rather than revelatory, human imitations rather than divine disclosure, then Christianity loses its privileged claim that its narratives must be taken as literal truth.

The Bible, I discovered, does not record the miraculous. It records the human imagination interpreting significance.

Jesus Christ, The Myth, The Legend

My reconsideration of Jesus’ divinity did not begin with hostility or cynicism. It began with the recognition that early Christianity was not a unified movement proclaiming a single, consistent understanding of who Jesus was. It was, as the surviving texts overwhelmingly show, a fragmented ecosystem of competing interpretations, rival theologies, and contradictory accounts.

When Christians today speak of “heresies,” they are simply repeating the judgement of those factions that seized theological control. As I wrote before, I’d argue it’s more likely a case of the victor writing the history.

Groups like the Ebionites, Marcionites, Valentinians, Adoptionists, Docetists, and countless others held radically different views based on the limited texts available to them. Marcion’s version of Luke, arguably earlier than the canonical one, was condemned as heretical. Paul’s letters repeatedly chastise churches for developing divergent beliefs the moment he left town. Orthodoxy was not original, it was constructed, negotiated, enforced, and finally codified. What we call “Christian doctrine” is simply the position that triumphed in these doctrinal battles and was later reinforced through creeds, councils, and imperial endorsement.

Against that backdrop, the claim that Jesus was God incarnate becomes historically fragile. It is not the unanimous testimony of those closest to him, it is a theological conclusion formulated decades later, refined over centuries, and protected by ecclesiastical authority.

Then there is the resurrection, arguably the central claim of Christianity. Yet we have no access to the event itself, only to stories written long after the fact, shaped by the conviction that the shame of crucifixion must be overcome. Crucifixion was a public humiliation, a statement of Roman power. We know Jesus was executed. We know the disciples suffered a great disappointment because that’s not how they expected his story to end. And for the earliest followers, this knowledge would have been devastating.

People grieving a charismatic figure often have visionary experiences. These encounters feel real to those who experience them, but they do not constitute evidence that the deceased are objectively alive again. Paul, the earliest New Testament writer we have, describes his resurrection encounter not as a physical meeting with a walking, talking Jesus, but as a mystical encounter of blinding light and a voice. Compare this with the later Gospels: Mark, in its earliest form, ends with an empty tomb and frightened women, but no post-resurrection appearances. Matthew adds earthquakes, guards, conspiracies, and meetings with Jesus. Luke escalates further with multiple appearances, a physically embodied Jesus, and a public ascension. And John delivers the most dramatic narratives, doubting Thomas touching wounds, breakfast on the beach, extended conversations.

There is a clear developmental trajectory. The further from the event, the more extravagant the story. Legend expands, details accumulate, theology matures, and the Jesus who was executed as a failed messianic claimant becomes, over time, a cosmic saviour who commands the elements and conquers death. To say “they made it up” is too simplistic. They likely wrote what they believed. But belief is not evidence. Faith is not history. And the evolution of the resurrection narratives strongly suggests a process of mythologisation rather than reportage.

And then there is a striking silence. No independent records of the resurrection, no Roman documentation of a missing body, no external attestations within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses. Meanwhile, we do have well-documented mass apparitions of Mary seen by tens of thousands of people, more verifiable, more recent, and still not accepted by many Protestants. If these are dismissed as psychological or sociological phenomena, consistency demands that we evaluate Christian resurrection claims in the same light.

What finally broke the last hold of belief for me was not a single argument but the accumulation of many. That Yahweh and El were originally separate deities. That monotheism emerged gradually in the Persian period. That Josiah’s reforms and Deuteronomistic redactions were political, not divine. That much of Israel’s early history is revisionist mythology. That the Bible is neither inerrant nor univocal. That the dualistic cosmic battle between good and evil was likely imported into Israelite religion from Zoroastrianism. That the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 conflict and were likely never intended to be understsood as literal history. That archaeology does not support the patriarchs, the Exodus, or the conquest. That ancient texts often evolved, merged, or borrowed from earlier myths. That our scientific understanding of life and the cosmos contradicts literalist readings of scripture.

At some point, the weight of evidence becomes impossible to ignore. What collapses is not faith in God as an abstract idea, but faith in the specific claim that a first-century apocalyptic preacher was the eternal creator of the universe in human form.

If Jesus was not God, and did not rise bodily from the dead, then Christianity’s central claim is not true.

I did not reject this lightly. I did not walk away in anger. I spent more than two decades trying to understand, affirm, and deepen my relationship with God. But the pursuit of truth requires following evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads away from the answers you hoped to find. I did not stop believing because I wanted to. I stopped because I no longer knew how to believe something that collapsed under the very scrutiny I once applied to strengthen it.

An Unknowable God

One of the most persistent arguments I encountered, both from others and from my own past self, was the appeal to personal experience. Testimonies, visions, answered prayers, moments of clarity, these are presented as evidence of divine action. But personal experience on its own cannot function as a reliable indicator of objective reality. It can reveal psychological significance but not external truth.

Humans misinterpret coincidences. We imagine patterns. We dream vividly. We hallucinate. We embellish. We forget. We see what we hope to see. And we interpret experiences through the lens of the beliefs we already hold. Religious traditions around the world offer profound personal experiences. Marian apparitions, encounters with deceased relatives, near-death experiences of heaven or hell, visions induced by meditation, fasting, or psychedelics all carry profound meaning for the individual. Yet Christians do not accept these experiences as evidence for contradictory religious claims.

This is confirmation bias. Experiences that affirm the belief system are “true,” while those that contradict it are “Satanic deception” or psychological error.

If we apply the same standard consistently, personal experience cannot establish the truth of Christianity, or any religion.

Meaning is not evidence.

However, if Christians choose to hold experience as equal to truth, I will offer my own for consideration.

I spent years asking God for evidence. I prayed, fasted, and searched for Him with sincerity and desperation. During the darkest moments, imprisoned within my own thoughts, I pleaded for clarity. The answer I received was always the same. Silence.

“You just need more faith” was the counsel from my fellow Christians. But faith is not evidence, and silence is not communication. A God who wants to be known does not hide behind conditions. A God who desires relationship does not remain indistinguishable from imagination, coincidence, or emotional need.

And so, there are only three possibilities as I see it. Either God exists but does not engage with humanity. God exists but cannot be known. Or God does not exist at all.

The first two are forms of deism. Neither aligns with Christianity, which insists that God desires a personal and intimate relationship with humanity. He reveals Himself in unmistakable ways and intervenes for the benefit of His chosen.

A silent God is not the Christian God.

If the only experiences available to believers are internal, unverifiable, and dependent on pre-existing belief, then the simplest explanation is not divine hiddenness, it is human projection.

An Unintelligent Designer

At some point, I realised something important. The world does not look like a world created and micromanaged by the Christian God. It looks like a world shaped by natural processes, contingency, and chance. If one were designing a universe with human life as its central purpose, this is almost certainly not the universe one would create.

Consider evolution. It produces increasing complexity, not because it aims toward a goal, but because random mutations filtered by environmental pressure accumulate over vast stretches of time. This is not a ladder climbing toward consciousness, morality, or meaning; it is a branching tree whose direction is dictated by circumstance. The process is indifferent. Organisms do not survive because they are “designed,” but because the traits they randomly possess happen to work in the environment they were born into. Complexity, therefore, is not evidence of intention. It is simply what happens when selection acts on variation for billions of years. Complexity is descriptive, not prescriptive.

The history of life on Earth further exposes the absence of any guiding hand. The Great Oxidation Event, one of the most severe mass extinction events in the planet’s history, nearly extinguished all life on Earth but eventually enabled larger life forms to thrive. Later, the Chicxulub asteroid ended the reign of the dinosaurs through blind cosmic chance, opening ecological space for mammals. If such cataclysms were part of a divine plan, they are indistinguishable from accidents. If they were accidents, they are exactly what we would expect from an unguided universe. A world designed with humanity in mind would not rely on mass extinction events as essential steps in its development.

Fine-tuning arguments fare no better. They assume that the universe is improbable because it permits life, as though life were somehow the reference point against which probability must be measured. But this is a philosophical sleight of hand. Life adapts to the universe, not the other way around. We observe a universe compatible with our existence because, if it were not, we would not be here to observe it. This is not profound, it is tautological. The fact that the constants allow for chemistry says nothing about purpose. It only says that in universes where chemistry is impossible, observers do not arise to ask questions about fine-tuning.

And beyond our planetary bubble, the universe is unspeakably inhospitable. More than 99.999999999% of it is lethal – an expanse of vacuum, radiation, and frozen wastelands. Out of hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of planets, we inhabit one small, fragile world, and even it tries to kill us constantly through disease, natural disasters, cosmic debris, and the slow march of entropy. If life is the central aim of creation, then creation is shockingly inefficient. If life is an emergent byproduct of chemistry and physics, then the universe looks exactly as it should.

After decades of searching, we have found no signs of life elsewhere, not because life is central to the universe, but because life may be the rare outcome of a rare planet under rare conditions. The universe behaves like a place where life is incidental, not intended.

This is not the universe of a deity who crafted reality with humanity in mind. It is the universe predicted by naturalistic processes, messy, vast, mostly empty, largely hostile, and occasionally capable of producing beings who search for meaning.

In response to these claims of science, the Christian often retreats to the exclamation, “I do not see that in my Bible, therefore it cannot be true.”

Another common response to scientific evidence is to diminish the authority of science itself and assert that “science doesn’t know everything,” as though the admission of epistemic humility somehow undermines the scientific method. But this argument misunderstands what science is. Science does not claim omniscience, its strength lies precisely in its willingness to revise its conclusions when confronted with better evidence. It is a method, not a dogma, an epistemology built on testability, falsifiability, and the humility to admit when it is wrong.

By contrast, religious claims are insulated from revision, upheld not through evidence but through commitment. Invoking the limits of science does not expand the credibility of faith, it merely highlights that faith lacks the mechanisms science uses to correct error. Likewise, the assertion that God exists “outside of science” and is therefore exempt from empirical scrutiny is not a meaningful defence. It is an unfalsifiable claim. If a being interacts with the physical world, produces effects within it, responds to prayer, performs miracles, or intervenes in history, then those interactions are, by definition, part of the natural order, and should, in principle, be detectable.

To place God outside of science is not a meaningful philosophical position, it is a strategic retreat, an attempt to shield a claim from evidential evaluation by relocating it to a realm where no test can be applied and no conclusion can be falsified. A claim that cannot, even in principle, be tested or observed tells us nothing about the world. It tells us only that the believer has placed the object of belief beyond the reach of reason by fiat.

This not a method for discovering truth. It is a decision to make one’s beliefs immune to the very methods that reveal truth about anything else in our reality. When confronted with a universe indifferent to human life, with biological processes that require no designer, with geological and cosmic events that unfold without intention, the reflex is not to revise the belief, but to reinterpret the world until it fits the narrative. But a worldview that must continually be defended from reality reveals more about human psychology than it does about the structure of the cosmos.

God Is Not Dead

What changed everything was not the discovery of new information but the abandonment of a rule I had been taught inside the church. To decide in advance what the evidence is allowed to show, and more importantly, what it is not. This posture, subtle, often unspoken, keeps believers from even imagining the possibility that Christianity might not be true.

Once that barrier fell, the world became intelligible. The Bible’s development made sense as cultural evolution. The absence of divine action made sense as non-existence. The silence of God made sense as silence. The diversity of religious experience made sense as human psychology. The structure of the universe made sense as naturalistic.

The mysteries were not mysterious, they were simply inaccessible behind a wall of theological presuppositions.

When I allowed the evidence to say what it actually said, the conclusions unfolded with clarity. Recognising this does not strip life of meaning. It simply frees us to seek truth on terms defined by evidence, not dogma.

Rejecting Christianity as true does not require rejecting its values or the meaning people derive from it. Religion is the codification of meaning. It is humanity reaching upward, not a divine being reaching down. It offers symbols, metaphors, narratives, and communities. These can still be appreciated even if they do not describe objective reality. There is beauty in the human search for transcendence. There is value in ritual, tradition, and shared moral aspiration. I do not deny these things. I simply no longer mistake them for divine revelation.

Christianity, like all religions, is a human creation. It can still inspire good. It can still guide. But it should not be treated as a map of reality when it is, at best, a map of the human heart.

I do not believe Christianity is true because the evidence does not justify its claims.

The Bible is not an inerrant revelation but a human anthology. Its central stories, the Exodus, a prophesied virgin birth, a messianic resurrection, lack historical grounding. Its descriptions of God evolve with human cultures, not divine communication. Its personal experiences reflect psychology, not objective reality. The universe does not resemble one designed for us or governed by a personal deity. God’s silence is indistinguishable from non-existence.

This is not atheism rooted in rebellion but in honesty. If God is real and desires to be known, then He has all the power necessary to make Himself clear. A truth that hides behind ambiguity is not truth. A God indistinguishable from imagination is not a God we can meaningfully claim to know. And so, the most honest conclusion, until better evidence appears, is that Christianity is not a revelation but a creation. A human attempt to understand a complex world, rich in meaning but devoid of supernatural intervention.

For the Christians reading this, we may disagree about the truth of your religion, but there is one point on which I believe we can find common ground. If Christianity is to continue to matter, if it is to remain a positive force in shaping lives and societies, then it must become better than it is. Better in its ethics. Better in its humility. Better in how it approaches truth, evidence, and the world it claims to explain.

For me, the question of Christianity’s truth has already been settled. Not by anger, nor by some private moral failing, nor by disappointment with individuals, but by evidence, by trusted scholarship, by the cumulative weight of history, science, and the observable world. I once avoided explaining this openly, not because I lacked reasons, but because destabilising the faith of people I care about was never my aim. My intention was to hold up a mirror, to point toward the many ways Christianity fails to be what it proclaims itself to be, and the ways those failures harm not only its adherents but the society it seeks to influence.

But honesty requires consistency. If Christianity depends on claims that cannot withstand scrutiny, if its moral authority relies on narratives that history does not support, if its epistemology is structured to protect belief rather than pursue truth, then confronting these realities is not an attack, it is clarity.

Stepping outside the frame of Christian doctrine does not empty life of meaning. It does not leave a void where purpose once stood. Instead, it allows meaning to be grounded in reality as it is, not as ancient authors imagined it. It frees us to seek truth on terms defined by evidence rather than dogma, curiosity rather than fear, and intellectual integrity rather than inherited certainty.

If anything enduring emerges from that freedom, it will not be the collapse of meaning, but its reconstruction. Honest, human, and rooted in the world we actually inhabit.

Nietzsche declared that God is dead. But perhaps the truth is far simpler… Perhaps He never existed to begin with.