Faith Lost and Faith Found

Why do some people lose their faith, while other people find it?

It’s not because of differences in intelligence or education. Atheists and theists are often equally smart and educated. Orthodox Jewish Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder and Evangelical Christian geneticist Francis Collins are at least as smart and well-educated as British atheist biologist Richard Dawkins.

What makes the difference? We might get a clue from looking at examples of people who lost their faith, and others who found it.

One person who lost his faith was Solomon Schimmel, one of our professors at Hebrew College. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, believing:

“… that God has literally authored and revealed a ‘sacred scripture’ that is inerrant and infallible, and that this ‘sacred scripture’ is absolutely authoritative for all of humankind.”¹

Even as a boy of 13, Schimmel was uneasy about the idea of God choosing the Jewish people. When he went to university, encountered critical Biblical scholarship, and studied skeptics such as the philosopher David Hume, his shaky edifice of belief fell apart:

“In a flash, the traditional viewpoint and all of the apologetic defenses of it that I had constructed over the years appeared untenable and indefensible on rational grounds. The alternatives, existentially bleak as they appeared to be (and maybe are), were so much more convincing. The experience was emotionally wrenching, because it removed the meaning structure of my life.²

Schimmel was angry at teachers who he felt had misled him, and at the unethical behavior of some leaders at his yeshiva. He worried about how his Orthodox family and friends would react to his loss of faith.

Of course, Jews aren’t the only people who lose their faith. Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, lost his faith in Evangelical Christianity for similar reasons. Like Schimmel, he grew up believing in the literal truth of the Bible, even memorizing some books of the New Testament. But as a university student, he struggled with nagging doubts:

“My strong commitment to the Bible began to wane the more I studied it. I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words, the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives …”³

Also like Schimmel, Ehrman suffered from his loss of faith:

“I left [Christianity] kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe.”⁴

What about people who went in the other direction — from unbelief to belief? I’m one of those people, but a more eminent example is world-famous Talmudist Adin Steinsaltz, the famous Jewish philosopher and Talmudist. Raised in a secular family, he was agnostic, studying science and mathematics — all just like me. He planned to be a physicist. He found his Jewish faith “when he began to doubt his own doubts:”

“My move was prompted by a basic lack of belief in the tenets of the secular world in which I lived … [to understand] the world instead of following the general view. I felt the need to think for myself.”⁵

Thinking for himself led Steinsaltz to the realization that there was more to the world than scientific knowledge:

“You want to see the glory of God, something tangible, and the text says, all these things are ephemeral and incidental. The highest point you can reach is the absolute void, the emptiness, the stillness. From there comes a voice … You perceive it standing against the Infinite.”⁶

Great Expectations

Because Schimmel and Ehrman grew up with a literalist reading of the Bible, they didn’t wonder if “God gave the Torah to Moses” was true in the same way as “Joe gave the book to Sarah.” And when they eventually started to wonder, their doubts were devastating. They lost their faith.

However, Steinsaltz and I both knew from the start that if “God gave the Torah to Moses” was true, it was true in a different way from ordinary empirical beliefs like “Joe gave the book to Sarah.” We knew that to find its truth, we had to look outside our normal scientific world.

Both Schimmel and Ehrman demanded too much of their faith. They wanted religious beliefs to be true in an ordinary, empirical way.

Steinsaltz realized, just as I did, that the empirical world did not explain itself and that there had to be more. But he also realized that the “more” was transcendent, incomprehensible by our normal concepts, and without specific empirical implications. He realized that religious beliefs were true in a way different from that of empirical beliefs.