“I’m not a Christian because I Met a Defeater.”
A former doubt can become a cornerstone of faith if it is dealt with well. | Deconversion Series
When you ask people who have left Christianity why they left, you hear diverse answers. The reasons for leaving Christianity are as numerous as the individuals who leave it. But you will hear common refrains, trends in the experiences of those who have deconverted.
Many of those common refrains can be summed up as “I met a defeater.”
What Is a Defeater?
A defeater is an idea that blocks belief in another idea. If belief A is true, then belief B must be false. Thus B is defeated by A. Defeaters are aptly named; they can break beliefs if the defeater becomes more plausible than the belief it is arrayed against.
Defeaters can be macro-scale and writ as large as a culture’s prerogatives, as in the case of background secularism of the modern West (“Science has eliminated the need to resort to God to explain things, thus there is no longer a need for religion”). Or they can be micro-scale and personal (“My father was a Christian and lived a terrible life. I could never be like him.”)
Each culture, time, and place has its own defeaters—things that seem so self-evident and irrefutable that they cancel anything within Christianity that disagrees with them. Defeaters are often limited to a geographical range; what seems true in one place is disregarded in another. Or to put it the other way round, what is objectionable about Christianity in one place is held in high esteem in another. That being said, there are defeaters that are held in common broadly in the West.
Here are just a few:
“The idea that there is one true religion is exclusive and false.”
“The Bible is unreliable and full of errors.”
“Christianity makes people close-minded and exclusivistic.”
“Christian politics are almost always on the wrong side of history.”
“The Christian God can’t be real because there is so much evil in the world.”
“Science has disproved religion.”
“The church has been responsible for so much injustice and oppression throughout the centuries that its message cannot be true.”
“Human morality has outgrown the Bible.”
“Belief in God requires rationally incoherent leaps of faith. You have to shut off your mind to be a Christian.”
Together these ideas form a platform on which an objector to Christianity can stand and see their objection more broadly understood. Defeaters that gain wide plausibility affect a culture’s background paradigms. They are both a result of the ideas a culture accepts about reality and they further energize those ideas.
That is not to say that every defeater will have equal weight for every individual. A question that makes one person lose sleep at night, might roll off of another with a shrug. An answer that sends one person’s faith spiraling into a season of deconstruction, might only make another person’s faith stronger. However, when a defeater becomes real for an individual—when it begins to grapple like a wrestler with the plausibility of Christianity itself—it has to be taken seriously.
You Can’t Ignore Defeaters
When defeaters rise inside oneself or one’s community, it can be scary. Many people find it easier to ignore the questions provoked by defeaters in hopes that they will go away. This can take the form of blunt answers doled out by one’s Christian community like a club to the head. It can take the form of pressure to “just have more faith” in the face of questions that aren’t given adequate answers. Or it can be any of the other myriad tools the human community has of suppression and conformity.
But defeaters rarely go away on their own.
If someone encounters a defeater and does not find satisfactory answers to the questions it provokes, a faultline can open inside their mind, a seam in their faith. Defeaters deferred can cause a plausibility crisis if enough pressure builds along that faultline and doesn’t find release. Like an earthquake, the slippage that eventually occurs along the fault can release huge amounts of energy. When that happens, defeaters that have been ignored, suppressed, and pasted over can return with a vengeance.
Dealing With Defeaters
Too often the church doesn’t deal with defeaters well. Some forms of Evangelicalism especially can commit the error of acting rationalistically when a defeater shows itself—the “Read This Book And Call Me In The Morning” strategy. That line of thinking is not without its own internal logic. After all, defeaters often surface as questions. It follows, then, that if the right rational answer is found to the question, the defeater will go away. Right?
Yes and no.
Sometimes a concrete, propositional answer is what is needed. We are rational creatures and we rely on our reason to help us navigate life. But we can’t reduce the task of dealing with defeaters to only the rational realm. People are more complex than that.
Our motivations and intuitions do not always conform to the laws of reason because we are not only rational beings. To be a human is to be emotional, moral, embodied, social, spiritual, cultural, embedded into a time and place, and a host of other characteristics. Defeaters can hit us on any or all of these levels and have to be addressed holistically if they are to be addressed squarely.
People Are Complex… So Are Our Questions
One simple reason for this is that we are bad at knowing what is going on inside ourselves.
Hurt can surface as anger. Anger can surface as confusion. Resistance to an idea, community, lifestyle, activity can be embedded inside us as the result of unremembered trauma. Humans are much more complex than we seem to be and our tangles can be stubbornly enduring. So can our questions.
Sometimes when dealing with a defeater, it tips over and becomes something else. Defeaters that appear to be purely rational sometimes turn out to be the rational tip of the iceberg whose true weight comes from moral or emotional issues deep beneath the surface. In the same way that icebergs tip and roll as they melt, sometimes the roots of our defeaters are exposed as we deal with them honestly. We may find ourselves surprised at what rises to the surface.
Similarly, solutions to the problems posed by defeaters often come from surprising quarters. A moral defeater might be put to rest by the right idea. A rational defeater might be answered by a profound emotional experience. A personal defeater, for example, “My dad was a pastor and living with him was like living with a tyrant,” may not need an answer, per se, but the experience of deep exposure to a healthy community.
Doubts Can Be Defeated Too
Defeaters are usually understood as things that cut against Christianity, but in reality, they cut both ways. Doubts have defeaters too—ideas or experiences that speak in favor of the Christian view of reality that can stabilize and protect one’s faith.
For instance, if you have experienced kindness, wisdom, and patience in a relationship with a Christian, the idea that all Christians are narrow-minded, simplistic fundamentalists will have to overcome the previous positive experiences in order to seem plausible.
Or, to take another example, if you have experienced the rational coherence of the Christian worldview and have been helped by the answers found inside of it, the idea that religious faith is somehow at odds with rational thought will have more difficulty gaining a hearing.
Defeaters Can Make Faith Stronger
Similarly, encountering a defeater can serve to strengthen one’s faith if it is dealt with properly.
A former doubt can become a foundation for greater faith if a plausible way of reconciling the defeater with the Christian faith is found.
If one encounters the idea that the Bible is unreliable and full of errors and then finds coherent answers to many of the seeming contradictions, the exchange can deepen one’s faith in the reliability of the Bible.
Or imagine a person who is taught that Christianity only has superficial, oversimplified answers to the questions raised by suffering, and then finds, as Christians have for millennia, that there are massive resources within Christianity that shelter her when real pain comes. The degree that she feeds on the sustenance Christianity offers sufferers is the degree that a former defeater can become the new foundation for real faith.
If Christianity actually does describe reality, we should not be afraid to break it with our questions. In fact, we ought to riddle it with questions, to wring from it answers that match the way the world really is. Rationality used this way is a tool of faith, not its opposite. Even doubts confronted honestly can be instruments of faith.
Every Defeater Is Really a Series of Alternative Beliefs
Tim Keller has done a lot of work examining and responding to individual defeaters as well as thinking about the meta-process of how we engage with them. As I write this, I find my thoughts keep going back to things that he has said and written, so forgive me for another Keller quote:
“Every doubt is really a series of alternate beliefs… Doubters must learn to look at the faith hidden in their reasoning… You cannot doubt belief A except from a position of faith in belief B.”
To say “I don’t believe that” is really to say “I do believe something which excludes that.” I don't believe you were at the grocery store because I saw your car at home. I don’t believe it is 3:00 because my watch tells me it is quarter to four. I don’t believe in the Christian God because a good God would never make a world like this.
Whether we are aware of it or not, defeaters often have other ideas floating underneath them and propping them up. To affirm the defeater is also to affirm these other ideas.
To illustrate this reality, let’s go back to our list of modern Western defeaters and think about what other beliefs might be tacitly holding them up.
“The idea that there is one true religion is exclusive and false.”
Implicit Belief: “Western notions of exclusivity and pluralism should be the standard by which all others are judged.” Just to note, can you detect any self-defeating inconsistency here?
“The Bible is unreliable and full of errors.”
Implicit Beliefs: “I know enough about the Bible to determine that it is unreliable and full of errors.” “People who believe the Bible are less informed or intelligent than I am.”
“Christianity makes people close-minded and exclusivistic.”
Implicit Belief: “It is always better to be open-minded and inclusivistic except with people we find to be close-minded and exclusivistic.”
“Christian politics are almost always on the wrong side of history.”
Implicit Beliefs: “The views of my tribe are on the right side of history.” “I am able to clearly see what the right side of history is.”
“The Christian God can’t be real because there is so much evil in the world.”
Implicit Belief: “I know enough to be the judge of how God should have handled evil.”
“Science has disproved religion.”
Implicit Beliefs: “Realities that science cannot currently detect, do not exist.” “Science should be the sole source of knowledge about life and the universe.” “Science is reliable.”
“The church has been responsible for so much injustice and oppression throughout the centuries that its message cannot be true.”
Implicit Belief: “The church’s message has no internal coherency for why it might fall short of its own standards.” “Evil in the church’s history renders good in the church’s history moot.”
“Human morality has outgrown the Bible.”
Implicit Belief: “Modern morality is better than ancient morality.” “No one in the future will look at my morality as regressive, primitive, and culturally-conditioned.”
“Belief in God requires rationally incoherent leaps of faith. You have to shut off your mind to be a Christian.”
Implicit Belief: “It is rationally coherent to expect that true knowledge would require no faith.” [Note: See Lesslie Newbigin’s Proper Confidence.] “Christians do not have as much intellectual integrity as I do.”
Doubting Your Doubts
Keller goes on to say, “The only way to doubt Christianity fairly is to find the alternate belief under each doubt and then to ask yourself what reason you have for believing in it… In fairness, you must doubt your doubts.”
So in the midst of your struggle with your defeaters, make a list of your questions and try to state them as beliefs that are in conflict with other beliefs. Then scrutinize both sides. What beliefs seem strong? Weak? What are the areas where you have to take a leap of faith? Where have you adopted wholesale and uncritically a dominant belief from the group you are in, be it your family, your professors, or the zeitgeist. To have integrity, you must doubt all your beliefs, even the ones that initially present themselves in the form of doubts.
Live With the Questions
The best advice I have found when a question becomes real and important but a satisfying answer is not immediately found comes from one poet’s advice to another poet. In Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live some distant day into the answer.”
What would it mean to “love the questions themselves” when it comes to your defeaters?
It might mean that you need to put the questions down for a while. That isn’t to say that you need to put them away forever, only that it might be wise to wait and learn and live and love as you continue to search for the answers. There might be things you need to go read, conversations you need to have, people you need to meet, long, cold walks in the woods you haven’t had yet, prayers you haven’t yet had the words to lift to your creator. But you may find the words one day.
It is possible to do the heavy-lifting of dealing with your doubts and questions and remain inside the Christian community and plausibility structures in the meantime. Dealing with doubts doesn’t mean you need to deconstruct your faith. That is the thing about deconstruction—it tips easily over into demolition. It doesn’t always leave you with much to live in, and, as Rilke reminds us, the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live some distant day into the answer.
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)