I was quite religious when I was young. I considered myself to be a missionary, and I would often ask people if they had been saved. I was very into the Bible, reading it and learning the stories. I had an aunt who was a Jehovah’s Witness, and she gave me some of The Watchtower materials. I read them as though they were part of mainstream Christianity.
As a child, I was quiet and reserved. I was the kid in the corner, unsure of myself. I always liked people, but I also often didn’t take a date to the dance. I wasn’t popular, at least I didn’t think so. I liked to sit in my room and learn music. I didn’t think that anyone was paying attention to me.
Religion was very ingrained in me. In my youth, at family gatherings, I would say the prayer. Everyone said that I would be a preacher, a pastor. In a black family, that’s the same as being a doctor or lawyer.
Going into high school, I was still religious, but I began to have some doubts. I couldn’t quite make sense of the seemingly impossible stories of the Bible, like the one about Jonah and the whale. I rationalized that the reason that I couldn’t understand the mysteries of the Bible was because I was young and didn’t know enough at that point, that I would figure out its mysteries later in my life.
The biggest reason that I was so religious growing up was because I believed that morality was inherent in religion. If I wanted to be a good person, if I wanted to meet a good woman, then I believed that I needed to go to church and ask Jesus or God to show me how to do that. My religiosity wasn’t so much the result of the content of what I read in the Bible as much as it was related to the implication of how I would be viewed in my community, how I was going to present myself as a positive person to my family and friends.
I’ve always found significant differences between black churches and most other American churches. In black communities, religion is less about following the actual words of the Bible and more about an individual’s relationship with and interpretation of God. Damn near of all the music directors in black churches are flamboyantly gay, but nobody says anything because the emphasis within the church community is on their personal walk with the Lord.
Two high school classes, one about the history of Christianity and the other on the world’s religions, were hugely influential on me. I began to learn about the contradictions in the Bible, which led me to start asking questions. Additionally, before taking these classes, I hadn’t realized the very real differences between other religions. I had known about Muslims, but I had thought that they prayed to God and to Jesus in a different way than Christians. I didn’t know that many of the claims made by different religions are mutually exclusive. I found it very interesting that the number of people from other religions outnumbered the number of people from my own faith. I thought, “Well, there can’t be that many bad people out there. How do non-Christians stay good people while not following Jesus?” That set me off on a path asking questions about the relationship between morality and religion. I began to see that the two don’t necessarily go together hand-in-hand. I started to realize that the Good Book was a good book because it said it was a good book.
After I began to explore the Bible, I learned that there are things in it that I hadn’t been taught as a child, instructions from God that people would now find abhorrent. I remember reading that the punishment for homosexuality is death. I couldn’t adopt that belief because I had wonderful gay friends. I began to think that perhaps Jesus was revolutionary when it came to defying authority, being nice to those who didn’t have material wealth, not forgetting about the little guy. I thought that maybe he was a figure like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.
Perhaps more than religious ideology, my faith in God hinged on the belief that humans are here on Earth because something intentionally created us. That seemed like common sense to me. Then, I took my first evolutionary biology class. Because I had grown up in faith schools, this was the first time that I was introduced to the concept of evolution. I had taken all of the biology, physics, and chemistry classes at my high school, and evolution wasn’t mentioned once. My first evolutionary biology class explained how life can evolve naturally, without a divine hand. That, looking back, was the true death blow to my faith. For a while, I hung on to an amorphous idea of a God or a higher being, but toward my junior year of college, I realized that I was an atheist.
My evolutionary biology professor at the University of Maryland-College Park would say, “If you can find something that proves evolution wrong, please bring it to me because I need that in order to be a good scientist.” That method of reasoning — demanding evidence for beliefs — had so much of an impact on me that I decided to make a career as a scientist. The scientific method invites people to have an adult discussion; it is an invitation for open dialogue. As I was being taught science in college, I didn’t feel as though I needed to resist its methodology because science wasn’t taught as an us-versus-you game. The focus was on having a discussion to determine the theory or idea that best explains what’s going on in the world. Because I was approached in such a professional way, I didn’t instantly resist the challenge to my preconceptions and religious ideas. Nobody was trying to fight me, which is why I was so open to new possibilities. Now, as a secularist, I feel that that approach is extremely important in reaching out to creationists and believers in intelligent design.
Evolution has become such a tremendous unifier of knowledge for me. I was raised in a pretty great family, in a great neighborhood. I have not experienced a whole lot of craziness in my life. I was a very happy child and a very happy teenager. My father did pass away a couple of months before I went to college, but I understand that death is a part of life. The concept of evolution was able to explain why so many bad things happen to great people; religious ideas and theories couldn’t. I thank Catholics for teaching me about the suffering in the world; my archdiocese in Washington was very active with the poor, so I got a lot of first-hand contact with how hard life is for so many people. But the suffering of innocents is not a minor detail that religions should be able to brush under the carpet. In truth, the reason for suffering is due to the fact that there’s no one at the wheel of the universe. In a very real way, evolution — and its revelation that we’re all literally family — has increased my empathy.
A lot of people believe that evolution took place long ago in some far-distant past. That’s true, but it is important to understand that evolution happens all the time. There now exists a bacterium that has evolved to be able to digest nylon, a material that has existed for only 75 years. This particular species of bacteria has evolved a way to survive on nylon because bacteria can multiply at high rates, with many mutations occurring from one generation to the next. That evolutionary adaptation, seen here in bacteria, is a central mantra of biology and is crucial for developing new and effective medicine. When a doctor, for example, tells his or her patient to continue to take antibiotics, that instruction is given because bacteria can evolve resistance to drugs. That’s all part of the evolutionary process, and understanding that process is vital for decreasing human suffering.
As I became a budding scientist in college, I began to look at the existence of God scientifically in order to see whether the existence of a God could stand on its own weight. If the idea were correct, I reasoned, then that fact wouldn’t need me to believe in it in order for it to be true, like gravity. Ideas that become scientific facts make accurate predictions about the world around us. The Bible’s predictions, I found, were often wrong, and when their inaccuracies were discovered, people were very often instructed to ignore those inaccuracies under the guise of faith.