God Must Be a Master Planner

By doubtfulagnostic ~

For the first 15 years of my life, I was a devout Christian, mainly due to my dozens of insanely religious relatives. It wasn't until my zoology class in high school that I really began to think. My whole life, I was taught that evolution was blatantly wrong, the entire universe was 6000 years old, etc. But when I was confronted with the mountains (literally) of evidence against that viewpoint, I was astounded. As a lover of chemistry, I understood the concept of a half-life fairly well and it began to occur to me that if there was the correct amount of carbon in the lower layers of the Grand Canyon to suggest that it was billions of years old, then obviously God made it that way for a reason that, as a human, I wasn't qualified to understand (this was the extent of my brainwashing). Then it was pointed out to me that the fossils of the least complex organisms were ever so coincidentally also at the bottom layers of rock formations and the most complex were at the top. Still, I trusted my God. Who was I to doubt His existence based on something he clearly did for a reason? But wait...if there was the correct amount of carbon in those fossils to suggest billions of years, that would mean that God had put the fossils there at creation and they had never actually lived. Huh? God just put fossils in mountains for the hell of it? Well again, I trust His power over my own.

But I also have ALWAYS been fascinated by the insane size and mystery of the universe. I would watch countless documentaries and science shows about the universe, always making sure to skip the portion where they lie to me and tell me that it was 14 billion years old and expanded from a single point. I knew that was just the Devil lying to me. But when I actually began to learn about it in school and the evidence for it that was literally all around me, at roughly the same time I heard about the pointless fossils God had created, I began to despair. Ordinarily I would just accept my lack of knowledge compared to God and move on, but when I actually formed it all into one coherent thought, I actually began laughing.

"So God created the universe 6000 years ago, but he set every single thing in motion flying away from a central location at the exact speed, determinable by the laws of physics he created, that would lead humanity to think it was 14 billion years old. Then, when he created the Earth, he just made it seem 4 billion years old, and put less complex fossils (of things that never lived) at the bottom of mountains with less carbon and more complex fossils (also of things that never actually lived) at the top. Not just in mountains though. He created a LOT of fossils for things that never lived...in similar locations...with progressively less carbon...and if I were to put pictures of them in a flip book, I could see the progress in each species...either I've been wrong my entire life or God is just an INCREDIBLE planner with very detailed, seemingly arbitrary plans. What the fuck?"

Now, to truly understand how I felt at that moment, you should understand something. I have always been very, very smart, and very, very narcissistic. The realization that I had looked like a fucking moron for years whenever I would try to argue against things that are so obvious made me furious on a level I can never explain. My scientific de-conversion was complete and I was about to start my final descent into the agnostic (leaning towards atheist) that I am today.