Losing Faith in Faith

"So...you're an agnostic then," she said trying to understand.

"Not to get too wonky her, 'gnostic' and 'ag-nostic' are claims about what we know. 'Gnosis' means knowledge so 'agnostic' simply means not knowing. Theism is the claim that some god or gods exist. Soft atheism, my 'brand', is the rejection of those claims. Theism is belief. A-theism is the absence of any belief, not the 'knowledge' that no such being exists. So to get really technical, I suppose I'm an agnostic atheist."

"I'm...I'm very confused," Ryan told him.

Bryce smiled politely making sure not to sound condescending as he tried to explain.

"That's because you're 'inside the bubble' looking out. If we could spend a couple of hours working through definitions and some of the misconceptions theists have about atheism, it would make more sense. And we could also discuss why I stopped believing in claims God exists or that He 'hears and answers our prayers'."

Bryce smiled and said, "Although after sharing that with you, I've probably just turned into some kind of horrible demon with horns and a tail in your eyes, making me the last person you'd ever want to talk to about such things."

Ryan had to admit that's pretty much exactly what she thought about all atheists. They were loud, angry, fire-breathing God-haters who railed against the Bible, prayer in school, and supported things like evolution and science. Ryan, of course, believed in 'real' science, and real science was anything that was supported by God's Word. But she didn't accept those things that were contrary to it as they were wrong, plain and simple. Evolution was one of those things.

As she was thinking Bryce said, "I really am the same old me. I believe in honesty, hard work, helping others, being true to my word, and raising my daughter to believe in those things, too."

When she didn't respond, Bryce went back to filling out the forms until she finally spoke.

"I don't think you're a bad person, Bryce. I'm just having a hard time accepting that you're an..."

"Atheist?" he said with a smile.

"Well, yes. I mean, you're not at all what I think of when that term comes to mind."

"I think many Christians would rather learn their children are serial killers than atheists," he told her. "At least a serial killer can repent and be saved, right?"

Ryan smiled politely at his attempt at humor but didn't reply. Nothing more was said until he finished with the forms. He put them back in the folder in the order she gave them to him and said, "Okay. All finished."

When she took the folder from him, he asked, "Are you having second thoughts about watching Annabelle?"

Ryan glanced down at the pretty little girl and said, "Oh, no. Not at all. I never blame a child for..."

She realized what she was saying and stopped in mid-sentence.

"The sins of the parents?" Bryce offered with a smile.

Ryan looked away nervously before replying.

"I just need a little time to think all this through, okay?" she said.

"Sure. I understand. And as I said, I'm not out to 'de-convert' anyone. I never bring this subject up unless someone asks me, and when they do, I just politely share my views and let it go."

Ryan realized that was exactly the opposite of what she thought of where atheists were concerned. Her impression was that they spent their time doing just that, and doing it with a lot of anger and hatred because they were angry at God. She was having as much trouble wrapping her head around this 'disconnect' as she was her own concerns she'd not even mentioned yet. Then again, why would she if all Bryce could offer was something negative?

"So you're okay with me dropping her off tomorrow?" Bryce asked just to be sure.

"Um...yes. Yes, of course."

She knelt down and smiled at Annabelle and said, "We do lots of fun things here and I think you're going to really enjoy it!"

Ryan stopped smiling and looked at Bryce.

"I never thought to mention that we ask a blessing when we have lunch or a snack. Is that okay?"

Bryce laughed politely and said, "Sure. I honestly don't have any issue with religion in general. Now when it gets to stoning people or lopping off heads, that's a different story. But if a high school in Alabama wants to pray before a football game, I'm perfectly fine with that. If a city wants to put a Nativity Scene in the town square, it doesn't bother me at all. So that'll be just fine."

Ryan stood back up and said, "You're really challenging a lot of my beliefs about atheists, Bryce."

He smiled then told her, "You know, so far at least, we haven't talked about any of your beliefs, Ryan. I'd like to though, if you're still willing. And as far as the perceptions you have about us..."

He leaned closer and whispered, "Evil, fire-breathing atheists—they're probably not true except where the most vocal, hardcore, so-called 'new atheists' are concerned. Folks like Richard Dawkins, for instance."

Ryan had heard that name but didn't really know who Dawkins was. She couldn't help but laugh even though doing so made her uncomfortable as though she was somehow giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy'.

"So there are different kinds of atheists?" she asked now utterly confused.

"There are. I won't go into it now, but the two general categories are hard and soft. I'm in the soft camp."

Not sure why she said it, Ryan told him, "Nothing about you looks soft, Bryce."

She was immediately embarrassed for having said it, but his body was hard and muscular, and as um...hard...as she tried not to notice, she couldn't help it.

She tried to recover by quickly adding, "Anyway, whatever it is you believe now, I think you've grown up to be a very...decent...young man, and you have the sweetest little girl ever."

"I love her more than life itself," he said as he pulled his daughter close.

"You ready to leave yet, sweetie pie?" he asked her.

Still too shy to speak, Annabelle only nodded her head as she looked at Ryan.

"Okay, well, I'll see you both tomorrow then," Ryan said after walking them to the door.

Before he left, Bryce said, "I really would like to talk with you sometime, Ryan."

"Oh, well, I don't know about that, Bryce," she told him as second thoughts filled her brain.

She took one more look at Annabelle then said, "Let me think about that for a while, okay?"

"Sure. No pressure. And it doesn't need to be about faith or religion. I'd just enjoy spending time with you. I mean, now that you're single again."

"You mean as in...a date or something?" Ryan said with deep incredulity.

"I'm afraid you're much too young and handsome to be that desperate," she said, finally smiling again.

"That's very kind of you to say, but finding the right kind of woman isn't easy."

"Well, I'm much too old to be 'the right kind' of anything for someone your age," she told him politely.

"If you say so," he said pleasantly with a smile. "It really was great seeing you again, Ryan."

"You too, Bryce," she said as she wondered whether or not it really had been nice or whether perhaps somehow Satan was using this ex-believer as an emissary to lure her away from the Truth.

As she closed the door she couldn't help but wonder if perhaps her impressions about atheists were justified. If Bryce was typical of other atheists, then maybe she was being overly harsh. Then again, it was very difficult to see any atheist as anything but a 'child of hell' working against the God she loved and who loved her her.

"The God who loves me so much he won't answer my prayers," she said with a quiet sigh before picking up the file on Annabelle and getting ready to process it.

The following morning both she and Bryce were so concerned they'd offended the other, they verbally stepped on one another trying to apologize immediately after saying hello.

"I hope you know I wasn't trying to attack your faith," he told her first.

"No. Not at all. I was worried you left thinking I was angry or somehow disappointed in you. If you did, I can assure you that wasn't the case."

Bryce smiled thens said, "I'm glad you told me that. The last thing I'd want to do is have some kind of unspoken tension between us."

"I agree," Ryan said, very relieved they'd gotten this out of the way upfront.

"So is everything okay with the paperwork?" he asked.

"Oh, sure. Yes, everything is just fine."

She knelt down again and smiled at Annabelle and asked her if she'd like to go play.

When she clutched her daddy's leg even harder, Bryce picked her up and said, "Come on, sweetie. Let's go say 'hi' to some of the other children."

Ryan led them into the living room where four other kids were already playing. Two were older, one was younger, but one little girl appeared to be Annabelle's age. Ryan asked her to come over to her and the little girl smiled and did so immediately.

"April? This is Annabelle. She's new and doesn't have any friends."

The little girl looked at Annabelle and said, "I'll be your friend."

"Would you like to play with April, honey?" Bryce asked.

"Okay," Annabelle said very quietly as he let her down.

April took her hand and said, "Come on. You can color with me."

And just like that, Annabelle felt at home as the two girls shared a box of crayons and a coloring book.

"How many children do you care for?" Bryce asked her.

"Since I use my home, six is the maximum allowed. And even that was difficult to get approved. I had no idea how much red tape was involved to watch children."

Bryce laughed and said, "I don't even want to ask. I know the safety of children is paramount, but I'm sure there are rules on top of regulations on top of laws on top of...well, you know what I mean."

Ryan smiled and said, "Oh, do I ever. But I love caring for them so it was more than worth all the hassle."

Bryce didn't smile when he heard her use the word 'hassle'. His parents had picked it up when he was a little older than Annabelle and still used it on occasion.

"Well, if everything's in order, I need to get to work," Bryce said.

"Everything's just fine," she assured him.

"Again, thank you, Ryan. From the bottom of my heart. I had a lot of anxiety about putting my baby in daycare, but when I heard you were watching children, I was praying..."

He stopped talking as soon as he realized what he'd said and to whom he'd said it.

Ryan got it, too, and laughed.

"Let me try that again," Bryce said after laughing, as well. "What I was trying to say was I had a lot of anxiety about leaving her with a stranger. Even a licensed, certified, bonded, Tom-Mix-Spy-Ring caregiver."

He smiled again when Ryan laughed at his silliness which was a cover the very real concerns he had about trusting his little girl to anyone he didn't know.

"I can't believe you've heard of Tom Mix. That was even before my time," Ryan told him, still smiling happily.

"I heard my grandfather mention him for the first time when I was maybe nine or ten. All I know about him is what I learned doing a quick Google search. I heard someone in college use the 'spy ring' thing and I guess I thought it sounded witty."

Bryce paused then said with a very straight face, "Well, maybe half...witty."

Ryan laughed again, and as she did Bryce was taken with just how beautiful she still was. He knew time changed people, but he just couldn't wrap his mind around how her husband could have ever left her for anyone. But he also knew there were two sides to every story, and perhaps there was more to it than just growing bored with the same woman; even one as attractive as Ryan.

"I had no idea you had such a good sense of humor," Ryan said as they walked back to her front door.

"Oh, I'm full of 'em," he said.

He smiled at her then told her, "I'm sharp, you see, because I always have razor soup for breakfast."

Ryan gave him a look, tilted her head as in, 'I can't believe you just said that', then started laughing again.

"Yeah, my act needs a little work, huh?" he told her, knowing how bad that one was.

"Maybe just a little," she agreed.

"Well, thank you again, Ryan," he said.

"It's my pleasure. Oh. What time do you get off work?" she asked.

"Oh, right. I'm teaching middle school so I should be here before five every day. We can leave at 4 o'clock, but I know I'll have papers to grade and lesson plans to work on so it'll be be at least 4:30 before I get away."

"That's fine. I can keep the kids until six for no additional charge. If you're ever going to be later than that, just call, okay? I won't charge you extra."

He thanked her yet again, and as he was about to leave she said, "Bryce?"

He turned around and said, "Yes?"

"I have to confess I couldn't stop thinking about the things you said yesterday."

He could tell she wanted to say more so he stood there and waited.

"I was wondering if we might be able to discuss them a little more at some point."

He smiled pleasantly then said, "Sure. I'd like that. Just let me know what's convenient for you, okay?"

She smiled back and said, "All right. I'll let you know when you come to pick up Annabelle later today."

"I'll look forward to it," he told her as he looked to see if she had anything else to say. When she didn't he told her goodbye and headed out for his first day as a teacher.

It was actually a planning day as students wouldn't be coming to school for another week. So he had five working days plus the weekend to get his classroom and initial lesson plans together, although he'd be meeting with parents during the school's open house on Wednesday evening.

Teaching wasn't something he'd ever planned on doing, but with a degree in liberal arts from a Christian college, and his former dreams of being a pastor or a missionary long gone, he had to find something he could do to support his daughter. His time in Renton had been pleasant, he loved the cooler weather there, so that plus a sense of nostalgia led him to move all the way back across country to start over.

He then took the teaching certification exam which gave him a temporary, three-year teaching certificate. He'd only be able to continue teaching after that if he finished a handful of required college-level classes the state required for permanent certification.

Middle school had been his last choice, but evidently, it was also the last choice of a lot of other teachers. Finding a job at a high school had proven impossible, and the requirements for teaching elementary school were too much for him to meet without going back to school full-time for at least a year. He needed money in the worst way, and this was the best job he could find and still be home every night and weekend for his daughter.

Bryce had been married for just over a year, and Annabelle was barely two months old, when the only woman he'd ever loved had been taken from him in a freak accident that still made him shudder every time he thought of it.

His wife, Tanya, had been walking home from work on campus where they were both seniors in college and both worked part time to make ends meet.

There was scaffolding along the side of a building that was being renovated, but like everyone else, she walked right on by it as workers did their thing up above. One of them was working on a window ledge when a piece of metal pipe slipped out of his hands and to his horror, slid off the scaffolding toward the sidewalk below.

He hollered down as loudly as he could, and according to an eyewitness, Tanya looked up just as one end of the pipe struck her in the forehead. She died instantly as the metal object shattered her skull and entered her...

He still couldn't say it. He had trouble even believing it. And that had been the beginning of his doubts. His pastor and many others had done their best to assure him her death was somehow part of God's greater plan and not some unbelievably rare event that was nothing but a matter of timing and chance.

"He must have needed her more than we did," one of those people told him as he sat there during her memorial service holding their baby girl who would never know her mother.

No answer made any sense. The only thing that did was a phrase that came to him in the middle of the night after laying there for hours yet again trying to understand.

"Shit happens."

He'd heard people say it many times before, but it wasn't something he would ever say. And yet, as he lay there, he thought about it for the first time. A lot. And when he did, it seemed so perfectly clear that it boiled down to nothing more than being at that exact place at exactly the right time. Or rather, exactly the wrong time. God had had nothing to do with it.

And that thought was the crack in the dam that opened a floodgate of other concerns as Bryce, for the first time in his life, began asking questions about things he'd taken for granted and accepted by faith for as long as he could remember.

At the time, even though he'd been consumed with grief, he had the presence of mind to make sure the grief wasn't making decisions for him—especially one as important as his faith. He did his best to set his heartache aside as he began reading and searching even as he set out to find something to which he could anchor his faith—other than faith.

He spent a good year reading every article and book he could find on topics like Intelligent Design, abiogenesis (how life arose without the aid of a Designer), evolution, epistemology (the study of how people come to know things), as well as every YouTube debate or lecture he could find on those or any related subjects.

It took a full six months to really understand the primary issues, and another six to fully understand them. Therefore, he knew he wasn't going to be able to pour all of that information into Ryan's brain in couple of hours or even a couple of days. She would have to search this out for herself, and either reconfirm her faith or, like him, abandon it. Reconfirming meant the possibility of moving 'laterally' to a new denomination, which, to Bryce, made no sense, as he had long ago concluded that all religion was manmade. And yet that was a very distinct possibility. Ryan might conclude God does exist, but the fundamentalist take on things is wrong. Perhaps the 'Reformed Church' would make more sense to her or even what he'd called 'cults' like the Seventh-day Adventists, the Mormons, or the Jehovah's Witnesses.

During his search, which, all told, lasted roughly two years, all told, Bryce had come to understand that the reason his prayers didn't seem to get answered was there was no one 'up there' listening. He'd confirmed that suspicion by examining every scientific study done on the efficacy of prayer, all of which concluded that prayers were 'answered' at the same rate as pure, random chance.

The most interesting discovery in that part of his journey was learning that prayer actually turned out to be harmful in some cases. When people in these studies who were ill knew they were being prayed for, that often made them less likely to get well. Otherwise, praying or not praying was a statistical wash. He'd gone a step further and read all of the responses to those studies from Christian leaders who found them 'distressing' or 'disturbing' or 'outright lies from the devil himself'. And yet their answers sounded even less credible than they had when his doubts first arose.

By the end of that time, he felt as certain as he could that there was no evidence whatsoever for the existence of God. All that existed were claims and assertions that He did. Even the Bible, he came to understand, was itself, a claim. And claims were not evidence let alone proof of anything.

In the end, he also realized something else that was extremely important. It was impossible to 'prove' God didn't exist. It was like trying to prove one had never beaten one's spouse when he hadn't. There simply was no way to prove the non-existence of a negative (something that doesn't exist.)