Why do people leave the faith & how should Christians respond? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 3

Welcome to the GotQuestions podcast. This is episode 3. I've got a special guest with us today, a good friend of mine, Jonathan McClatchy. He is a professor at Sattler College and also a student at Southern Evangelical Seminary, but also a little over a decade ago, Jonathan served as one of our first interns here at GotQuestions.

He wrote a bunch of articles for us and I can say honestly he's one of the most intelligent people I know. One of my most humbling moments was playing chess against Jonathan and having him beat me easily without even looking at the chessboard, so that's still a very fond memory.

So.

Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Jay. It's great to be here. And.

Even better, he's got a nice Scottish accent, so it'll give you something fun to listen to. So Jonathan, I've been following you lately and I've seen you having a lot of conversations with Christians who've left the faith, who are struggling with faith, and so that's the primary thing I wanted to talk to you about this morning.

Why People Leave the Christian Faith

So what, in your experience, is the main reason that people who previously proclaimed themselves to be Christians decide to.

Leave the Christian faith? Well, I wouldn't say that there's a main reason per se. There's a whole consilience of reasons that can cause someone to leave the faith. It's not simply a one-size-fits-all type of scenario, but there are some recurring themes or recurring patterns that we observe when we talk to people who have left the faith or are considering leaving the faith and have real doubts concerning the veracity of the gospel.

And there's a there's a number of common intellectual pitfalls that I think can lead people to unnecessarily or prematurely conclude that Christianity is in fact false, and that leads to people leaving the faith.

One of those is the need for cognitive closure, which is a condition where many people, in order to be satisfied or content in their worldview, need an answer, a satisfactory answer, to all questions that could be raised in objection to that worldview.

And so in the absence of completely satisfying answers to every question that could be asked, they feel that they cannot be intellectually honest and yet retain their worldview to which they previously subscribed.

And I would argue that that there's no shame for a Christian to have unanswered questions. I think that one can rationally maintain that Christianity is true, even in the presence of unanswered questions.

The question is not are there unanswered questions or unanswered objections to the message of the gospel. Rather, the question ought to be, are there more numerous and more substantive objections to believing the gospel to be true or not believing it to be true?

And in my assessment, there are far more numerous and far more substantive objections to disbelieving the gospel than there are to, in fact, believing the gospel. So I think that's a major issue. So for instance, it's okay to say that we don't have a fully satisfactory answer to the problem of evil.

God knows things that we don't. But there are also confirmatory reasons that tend to support and corroborate the veracity of the Christian faith. And so the argument that I would present is that on balance, the evidence trends towards the truth of Christianity rather than against it.

Another issue that tends to get people tangled up is a failure to distinguish between objections that carry high stakes and objections that carry low stakes. So an objection that carries high stakes would be something like an objection to the historicity of Jesus or an objection to the resurrection.

If those propositions are false, then Christianity also is false. And that would be an objection that carries high stakes. Whereas there are also objections that carry low stakes. So for instance, issues that Christians can legitimately disagree over.

For example, an objection to or an ethical concern that could be raised to the doctrine of eternal conscious torment as a concept of hell, which is a traditional Christian view, although there are theologians, most notably perhaps John Stott, who would subscribe to an annihilationist view or sometimes known as a conditionalist view of hell, which I think is a defensible view, at least from scripture.

And so a moral objection to eternal conscious torment, in my opinion, if it goes through, at best should cause one to consider an alternative theological system, such as annihilationism, rather than giving up Christianity in total.

Another example is the age of the earth. Many people are raised in very conservative churches that basically insist that unless you think that the earth is 6000 years old, then you cannot be a consistent Christian or that Christianity is not going to commit you to thinking that the earth is 6000 years old.

And so when they go to college and university and discover evidence that actually the earth is much older than 6000 years old, because they've been taught to wed those two propositions, Christianity and the age of the earth, instead of just revising their interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, they give up Christianity in total.

And so that's another example of failing to distinguish between the objection of high stakes and the objection of low stakes, instead of simply shifting or tweaking their theology, they give up their Christian faith.

Another issue that often leads to deconversion is faulty epistemology. And epistemology, for listeners who are not so acquainted with philosophy, is basically the branch of philosophy that deals with how we acquire knowledge, how do we reliably acquire true beliefs about the world.

And the way that I would understand evidence is, when I'm trying to measure how strong a piece of evidence is, I want to know how probable is this piece of evidence given that my hypothesis is true? And how probable is this same piece of evidence given that my hypothesis is false?

And to the extent that that piece of evidence is more probable given my hypothesis is true, or to the extent that that ratio is top-heavy, but is more probable given the truth of the hypothesis than given the falsity of the hypothesis, that's how strong that particular piece of evidence is.

And often I find that people have this false conception of evidence that in order to be evidence for a proposition, it needs to carry the day, as it were, on its own. It needs to be able to fully support and fully justify the conclusion.

And that's simply incorrect. A piece of evidence can raise the probability of a proposition being true without by itself being sufficient to justify that proposition. And another misconception that people make about evidence is that if you have a single, if you have any evidence going against Christianity, or if you admit the presence of evidence going against Christianity, then that itself is a justification for rejection of Christianity.

But that's just not the way evidence works. I mean, all scientific theories have anomalous data and data that doesn't quite fit the paradigm. And it's quite legitimate to interpret that anomalous data within the parameters of the paradigm, provided that it's a well supported thesis or a well supported paradigm.

And so it's contrary to common conception, it's not actually always bad practice to invoke ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses to explain a piece of data that doesn't quite comport with your paradigm. It's only bad practice if you fail to admit that your overall thesis has taken a probabilistic hit.

And so evidence that goes, it's okay to admit that there's evidence going against Christianity, and I think there is, so long as you have sufficient confirming evidence that is adequate to overcome or overwhelm that disconfirming evidence.

And I would maintain also that there is. I think that, and the way that the positive case for Christianity works is not in terms of a single piece of spectacular or extraordinary evidence that all by itself confirms Christianity, but rather it's a whole cumulative case from multiple pieces of mutually corroborating evidence that supports Christianity when taken cumulatively or holistically.

And so I think some of these epistemological nuances are quite important to bear in mind. And finally, another issue that I often encounter is unmet expectations, where people have been told that to be a Christian means that they have this inner witness of the Holy Spirit that by itself authenticates the veracity of Christianity, and they should have this fuzzy feeling or some sort of experiential encounter with God that is in itself veridical or truth-attesting.

And many Christians, including myself, don't have that sort of immediate veridical inner witness experience. And so it's similar to, in some certain charismatic churches, where people are told that unless you can speak in tongues, you're not a real Christian.

And I think that's quite dangerous because it sets up false expectations and often leads to people abandoning the Christian faith. So there's a few of the top reasons, I think, which conspire to resulting in apostasy.

Responding to Deconversion with Compassion and Care

Yeah. So I've, in my experience at GotQuestions, probably the most common we get is people who will abandon the faith or have strong doubts about the faith due to an issue that Christians have been answering adequately for thousands of years.

Just recently we had someone come to us and say, I can't believe in God anymore because in the Old Testament the prophet Elisha called down God to curse the little children who had made fun of him for being bald, and God sent bears to maul these little kids.

And that's such a, one, a tragic misunderstanding of what's actually occurring in that passage. But it's things like that that, you know, you're not the first person to discover this in the Bible. You're not the first person to bring this up.

It's something that concerns you. So the fact that this person was assuming, well, Christians don't have an answer for this, therefore I'm gonna leave the Christian faith on such a topic that, one, we do have multiple answers for, but then also it's not a, I mean, it's a, the way she was understanding it was tragic, but it's in itself does not raise to the level of an issue that would cause you to completely abandon the faith.

It does have multiple positive arguments for. So it's things like that that can be really frustrating. It's like, why, one, are you allowing this to cause you to question the validity of your entire faith?

But two, why are you just assuming that there's no answer for this when there.

Clearly are? Yeah, absolutely. And I think oftentimes people will, I hear people allege certain contradictions in, say, the gospel accounts. And that is, and for many people, a single demonstrable contradiction or discrepancy is itself sufficient to reject the Christian faith.

And I would reject that sort of epistemology because we know from plenty cases of eyewitness testimony that you find legitimate variations in eyewitness memory. To take a modern example, the Titanic sank just a little over 109 years ago on April 14, 1912, and there were eyewitness reports, some of which said the Titanic went down in one piece, and some of which said the Titanic broke in two.

But we don't conclude from that that the Titanic didn't go down, or even that these eyewitness reports are not substantially trustworthy. So there's what I call an epistemic asymmetry, such that the positive confirmatory evidences for the reliability, the substantial trustworthiness of the Gospels and Acts, are piece for piece of greater epistemic or evidential weight than the equivalent counter evidences.

Because when we calibrate our expectations of what eyewitness testimony looks like, and we find in both ancient and modern cases of eyewitness testimony, that there are discrepancies. We can then infer that eyewitness testimony actually predicts that you'll find certain variations in eyewitness memory, and so when you actually find variations in eyewitness memory in the Gospel accounts, it can be taken as strong disconfirming evidence that these accounts are not printed in substantially reliable eyewitness testimony.

But when we look at the positive confirmatory evidences, that is unexpected in untrustworthy testimony that's not printed in the testimony of eyewitnesses, and therefore we have this evidential asymmetry, if you will.

I'll take another example of that sort of evidential asymmetry when we're dealing with the topic of predictive prophecy. Very specific fulfilled prophecy is, I would argue, of greater evidential weight than apparently unfulfilled prophecy.

So if you have an improbable fulfillment, then you have a very top-heavy base factor where you've got this likelihood ratio where that evidence is much more probable given the hypothesis and given the falsehood of the hypothesis.

Whereas when it comes to apparently unfulfilled prophecy, and I've written a detailed article where I examine this, very often there's a plausible alternative interpretation of the text, and so it provides less evidence that's disconfirmatory of Scripture than the specific fulfilled instances of prophecy provide in confirmation of Scripture.

So some of these nuances in terms of epistemology I.

Think are important to keep in mind. Yeah, exactly. It's amazing to both see the tremendous amount of evidence there is for the Christian faith and to draw comfort from that, but ultimately to also recognize that the Christian faith is a faith, is ultimately, even in Hebrews 11, we accept God's existence by faith.

So to require overwhelming evidence that can't be disproven, that's beyond the scope of what even the Bible claims for Christianity. So it's a good reminder that faith is required, but that doesn't mean faith is not a blind leap in the dark.

Faith is a small step into a well-lit room where hundreds of millions of people are already standing, so it's difficult to keep in mind. Yeah, I would argue that faith is.

Proportional to the amount of evidence you have. So the more evidence I have that Christianity is true, the more inclined I am to exercise faith in that to which I have intellectually assented. And as you said, faith is not a blind faith.

It's often said that Hebrews 11 1 claims that faith is blind, which says that faith is a substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, or the conviction of things unseen. The problem with that interpretation is that if you look at the context carefully in Hebrews 11, it's saying that faith is trusting God for this future, as yet unrealized promises in view of his past faithfulness.

So it's actually in view of the evidence that we look forward at God's promises that haven't yet been fulfilled. In the same way that when a man gets married, he trusts his spouse to perform her wedding vows, not because he's seen her perform her wedding vows, as there is yet unseen, because she hasn't had a chance to fulfill them yet.

But nonetheless, he trusts that she will perform them in view of his past experience of her historical faithfulness. And so likewise, we trust God with his future promises because of his fulfillment of past promises.

So it's based on evidence, and that indeed is the connotation of the Greek word pistes, which means faith that is trusting in that to which you've already intellectually assented. And I would argue that in the biblical sense, so it's.

Based on good reasons and evidence. Absolutely. So let's jump to the follow-up question. So when someone we know, someone we love, someone we followed, who claimed to be a Christian, departs from the faith, what should be our response?

Both our response to that person, but then also our response inwardly. When someone was maybe instrumental in helping us grow as Christians departs from the faith, how does that impact us personally? Sure.

How Christians Should Respond When Someone Leaves the Faith

So.

First of all, I would argue that we should respond to someone that leaves the faith with compassion. We should try to empathize with their situation, because a lot of these people legitimately, they were very passionate as Christians that left the faith, and they underwent immense trauma, and sometimes they ended up with depression as a result, and had to go through therapy.

So a lot of these people have gone through a really difficult time, and although I think that they made that decision on the basis of either incomplete information or irrationally, nonetheless we have to take seriously the fact that these are people that have gone through a lot of difficulty, and often depression and immense anxiety in leaving the faith.

And so I think it's important to show empathy. I also think it's important to resist the temptation to unload all the information at once, right? So this is something that I sometimes struggle with. Someone says they left the faith, and they give what is, to my mind, quite a bad reason for their loss of faith, and I want to just dump all this information on them to refute their argument.

And I think that that can be perceived as drinking from a firehose almost, and they're not ready for so much information all at once. So be sure to give information slowly and over a long period of time, more like a drip than a firehose.

And also, of course, pray for them is another important thing, because we actually are instructed in Scripture to be praying people, and so it's important, I think, to pray. I think that apart from the grace of God, we are all blind, and so there's no ground, I think, for Christian arrogance.

We shouldn't look down on people who are less enlightened than we are, because apart from the grace of God, then we also would be not enlightened, and so we need to pray. One thing I'd also say is that we should resist saying to someone that announces that they've left the faith that they were never a true Christian.

This is something that I often encounter Christians saying to former Christians that you were never a true Christian. And this is highly offensive, understandably, to ex-Christians, because, as I said, many of them were very passionate in their Christian faith, and they went through immense depression and anxiety coming out of Christianity, and so it shuts down productive dialogue.

And I understand that among many Christians, and this is also my own reading of Scripture, that if someone leaves the faith, then that raises questions as to whether they truly knew Christ, in the sense that whether they were ever saved.

And my reading of Scripture is that if someone is truly in Christ, then they will remain firm and persevere to the end. However, I think it's important to distinguish between what I would call a Christian in the soteriological sense, soteriology is a study of in Christian theology, and a Christian in the propositional ascent sense, right?

So, obviously, someone that doesn't believe Christianity is true is going to reject that anyone's a Christian in the soteriological sense, because they don't believe in real salvation. So no one has a relationship with Christ at all, according to a non-Christian, because Christ doesn't exist.

So I think it's important to draw that distinction between a Christian in the theological, soteriological sense, and a Christian in the propositional ascent sense. And I think that it's insensitive to say that someone wasn't a true Christian, and that we should refrain from saying that, because it leads to confusion, and as I said, it shuts down productive dialogue.

So, I'd also ask people who describe themselves as former Christians, what were the key issues? I always want to understand what were the key issues that led people out of the Christian faith, and I think that it could even be advisable for you to take notes on what they are saying, to show that you really want to understand.

You're not just listening in order to respond, but you're listening carefully, you're doing more listening than talking, and you're really trying to understand what it was that led them out of the Christian faith.

And you might have responses to those, or you might not. If you don't, then that's fine. Just say, that's really interesting points you've made there, let me go and look into those and research those, and then I'll get back to you with a response that's much better than trying to wing it on a topic that you don't know very well.

So, if you do know, if you do have a response at hand, then you can give that response, but doing so reasonably and with generalism and respect, as First Peter says. So, yeah, that's, I think, how I would advise one response to someone that announces that they have left the.

Faith. And then for us personally, when we're impacted emotionally by seeing someone that we love and respect to parts of faith, what's the key point that we can take away to reassure us in our own faith?

So, I think that we should not be impacted just because someone has left the faith, because Christianity is true irrespective of who believes it and what people do with it. It's true because there's good reasons to believe it to be true, there's good evidence, and so I would advise people to get themselves grounded on the public evidence for Christianity.

And when someone tells me that they've left the Christian faith, I'm less interested in who it is that's left, I'm more interested in why they left, what their reasons were. And so I think it's important to find out what their reasons are and to subject them to scrutiny, do the research, dig into the claims that they've made, and come to a verdict for yourself.

I think that a lot of times people get so hung up on particular objections, which are difficult, such as the problem of evil or the problem of divine hiddenness, but because they're not grounded on the positive confirming reasons, they miss the forest for the trees and miss the avalanche of positive confirmatory reasons that tends to support and corroborate the veracity of the Christian faith.

So I think it's important to be well grounded on those so that you can view tender evidence in the context of the big picture.

Closing Encouragement and Show Sign-Off

Well that's excellent, Jonathan, so thank you for sharing all that. Like I said, I've been reading some of your interactions with people who have departed from the Christian faith and I found them very encouraging and just powerful to see how you've interacted with them, and it's a great lesson for all of us.

So Jonathan, thank you for joining us on the show. For those who may not know Jonathan well, we will have links to his website and some of the ways that you can follow him on both our podcast page, which is podcast .gotquestions .org, and also on our YouTube channel in the description field there will be links to Jonathan's material there as well.

So again, thank you for joining us. This has been the Got Questions podcast with Jonathan McClatchy. Got questions? The Bible has answers. We'll help you find them.