A Megachurch Pastor's Eight Reasons for Leaving the Faith and Where They Go Wrong

Kevin Harris: Bill, a former megachurch pastor has announced that he is now an agnostic atheist. And in the video that we’ll look at is his list of eight reasons he is no longer a Christian. Dr. Todd Phillips attended Southwest Baptist Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Princeton Theological Seminary – took some courses there. He was a teaching pastor at Lake Point Church, which is in the Dallas area. About two years ago he claims to have become an agnostic atheist. There’s nothing new in these eight reasons. You’ve dealt with every one of them, but I always look for something new, a new wrinkle, and what are often common reasons people lose their faith. So we’ll take a look at it. It’s tempting to delve into a person’s psychology when it comes to these radical deconstruction stories, but we often don’t really know what’s going on in a person’s heart and mind that leads to their loss of faith. So we have to deal with both heart and mind, and it can be difficult to know which takes priority with each individual. Any guidelines that you can suggest?

Dr. Craig: I think that we should exercise a hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to the ostensible reasons that someone gives for losing his faith. You see, being able to provide such reasons can be a way of justifying one’s apostasy. It would look really bad, wouldn’t it, if somebody said, “Well, I was into pornography” or “I was having an affair with a woman in my church” or “my marriage had gone bad.” But – ah! – if you can provide intellectual reasons for your lapse, then you command the respect of others. Now, of course, as you say, we don’t know all of the personal factors that go into such a defection from the faith.

Kevin Harris: Let’s go through the list and get your comments. Here’s Todd’s first reason for leaving the faith.

Todd Phillips: People ask me all the time why I stopped believing in Christianity and what caused me to lose my faith. Hey, I’m Dr. Todd Phillips. I’m a scholar of the Bible and a former megachurch pastor here in the United States. I used to preach in some of the largest churches in the country, and now I’m an agnostic atheist. Now, what you’re about to see are the eight biggest reasons I no longer believe Christianity is true. But they’re not the only reasons. And no single one of them ended my faith overnight. It was a cumulative weight of all of them over about 10 years. So the first three deal with belief itself: why people believe the religions that they believe, why a god who supposedly wants a relationship with us remains hidden, and whether belief is even something that we can choose.

What if I told you that religious belief is shaped almost entirely by geography? Here’s how I discovered this truth and why it caused me at least in part to step away from Christianity. This was really a massive hurdle for me as a pastor, and it’s something thinkers like Alex O’Connor, you should check him out, they talk about this a lot. It really breaks down into, I’d say, three uncomfortable realities. The first one is this kind of idea of the lottery of birth. Your GPS coordinates at your birth are the single greatest predictor of your religious identity. And the numbers are crazy. If you’re in the US, 70% of people are Christian. But if you were born in Pakistan, 96% chance you’d be Muslim. None of us chose our starting line. And yet it almost entirely determines what we perceive as eternal truth.

Kevin Harris: Most of your students are going to know this as basically the genetic fallacy, Bill. But there’s still an emotional problem that he says stokes his empathy. So there’s the intellectual and the emotional aspect.

Dr. Craig: This is supposed to be an argument against the truth of any particular religion, not just Christianity. It points out that people’s religious beliefs are culturally relative. For example, if you’d been born in Pakistan, you would likely be a Muslim, but if you’d been born in Ireland, you’d more likely have been, at least nominally, a Catholic, and therefore none of these particular religious beliefs can be true. Now, as you say, this argument seems to be a textbook example of the genetic fallacy. That is the fallacy of trying to invalidate a view by showing how a person came to hold that view. And such a move is obviously fallacious. For example, if you had been born in ancient Greece, then you would likely have believed that the sun orbits the earth. But does that mean that your belief that the earth goes around the sun is therefore false or unjustified? Well, obviously not.

Not only this, but the argument turns out to be a double-edged sword. For if Todd had been born in Pakistan, then he would likely have been a religious particularist. So by his own argument, his own view is false. His agnosticism or atheism is just the accidental result of his being born in late 20th-century politically correct Western society. So the argument is self-defeating.

Now, look, there are important questions concerning how God judges people who are raised in non-Christian societies. But this argument, as Todd has stated it, is not it.

Kevin Harris: Here’s reason number two. It’s got a little bit of relation to the first.

Todd Phillips: And the second is what I call the sincere seeker problem. I used to think about this a lot. If someone in Thailand is just as humble, just as prayerful, just as desperate for truth as someone in Texas, but they arrive at a totally different absolute truth, does it make sense to say one is right and the other’s just lost? I don’t think so. It started to feel like they weren’t seeking a different god from my perspective. They were just living in a different ecosystem. If a truth is actually universal, it shouldn’t look like a regional dialect, right? An all-loving, all-powerful, universal God wouldn’t design a system where your eternal destiny is almost entirely determined by which border you happen to be inside of. And for me, once I saw that, once I saw that my faith was mostly based on geography, I just couldn’t unsee it. It moved me from a place of real certainty in my faith to a place finally of kind of honest empathy for the billions of people who are just as sincere as I once was.

Kevin Harris: I know you have plenty to say on that, Bill. A question I have is: Does this assume that God sometimes neglects a genuinely sincere seeker? And how does one know whether a person is sincere or a seeker?

Dr. Craig: There are some confusions here. Truth is unrelated to the sincerity of the person believing it. You can sincerely believe a falsehood. So the question is, is Christianity true? The real problem that is lurking beneath the surface here is the old question about the fate of the unevangelized. How will God judge people who are raised in different societies where they do not have the benefit of Christianity?

Well, the Bible addresses that question. It distinguishes between God’s general revelation in nature and conscience and his special revelation in Christ and the Bible. And it says that all persons everywhere can know from nature and conscience that there is an eternal, powerful creator of the universe and an absolute moral lawgiver. And if people will respond affirmatively to that general revelation in nature and conscience with repentance and faith, then the benefits of Christ’s atoning death can be applied to them even if they’ve never heard of Christ. So on the biblical view, I think salvation is universally accessible.

Kevin Harris: Next up, reason number three, and it’s an oldie but a goodie.

Todd Phillips: Another reason I stopped believing in the Christian God is the issue of divine hiddenness. When you look at the narrative of the Bible, God supposedly establishes this clear precedent of making himself known in very clear, objective ways, like burning bushes, pillars of fire. He walks with Adam and Eve in the garden. Eventually, he comes to Earth, supposedly as Jesus, to perform undeniable miracles to prove who he is. Right? If those stories are true, then they prove one thing. That God is fully capable of providing objective physical evidence of his existence without overriding our ability to choose him.

A common argument I used to preach, and I certainly hear from Christians all the time, to explain why God’s actually silent today is that a direct revelation would somehow force us to believe and destroy our free will. But I just cannot tell you – that logic doesn’t really hold up at any level. Knowing someone exists is not the same as being forced to love or even to follow them. Even in the biblical story, Satan has absolute objective knowledge that God existed and he still chooses to rebel. So free will all over the place. If knowledge were the same as coercion, that rebellion wouldn’t have been possible.

The reality is that an all-knowing God, from my perspective, would clearly know exactly what every single person on the planet would require to be convinced that he exists. He would know, for example, exactly what I need to see and know and understand and exactly what I would need to get from him to believe he’s there. And yet he hasn’t done that. If he’s all-powerful, he could provide that evidence right now. If a relationship with God is the most important thing in all existence, it just doesn’t make sense that he’d remain hidden behind a veil of 2,000-year-old texts and subjective feelings. And that’s really what it comes down to.

Kevin Harris: Is he saying anything new about divine hiddenness that you haven’t heard, Bill?

Dr. Craig: No. In fact, Todd actually highlights several truths that undo his argument. First, he says, “Knowing someone exists is not the same as loving or following him.” Right! God’s goal is not to get people to believe that he exists, to add another item to their ontological inventory of things. Rather, God’s goal is to have a love relationship with him. In a world in which God’s existence is as plain as the nose on your face, there’s no guarantee that more people would freely come to love and know him than do in the actual world. And Todd’s own example of Old Testament miracles like the burning bush, the pillar of fire and smoke in the desert, and so forth proves this point. Israel had manifest evidence that God exists and believed that God exists. But did that produce lasting heart change in the people? Not at all. Israel fell into apostasy with tiresome repetitiveness. So getting people simply to believe in God’s existence is not enough. God wants to build a love relationship with people, and just getting them to believe that he exists is insufficient.

Second, Todd says, “An all-knowing God would know exactly what would be required for every person to freely believe that he exists.” Yes. But God might know that no matter how much evidence God provided a person, that person would not come to freely love and know God. So God is under no obligation to provide more evidence of his existence if he knew that it wouldn’t do any good.

Thirdly, Todd says, “God is able to provide objective evidence of his existence.” Yes, of course, and he has done so. God is the best explanation of why anything at all exists rather than just nothing. God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe at a point in the finite past. God is the best explanation of the uncanny applicability of mathematics to physical phenomena. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for embodied conscious life. God is the best explanation for the objectivity of moral values and duties in the world. And the very possibility of God’s existence implies that God exists.

Moreover, God has also given historical evidence for the person of Jesus, raising Jesus from the dead in ratification of his radical personal claims to be the absolute revelation of God. Moreover, there is the witness of the Holy Spirit that is given to every human being, convicting him of sin and drawing him to God. So God is not hidden as Todd supposes. In fact, God has provided objective evidence of his existence. If God exists, what greater evidence would you require than the origin of the universe out of nothing? The fine-tuning of the universe, the objectivity of moral values and duties, the resurrection of Jesus. This is evidence that is clearly sufficient for rational belief in God.

Kevin Harris: I want to play another little clip for you, Bill. I just ran across this video from a young atheist asking pretty much the same question. Check out this excerpt.

Speaker 1: Hi, guys. I’m sure you know this about me, but one of my biggest issues with Christianity is that it is never, ever, ever consistent. Never, ever. If I ask Christians a question, I get so many answers that are so conflicting with each other, it’s not even funny. This is what I did recently on TikTok, where I asked people, “If God presented himself to me, if he proved to me that he was real, why does that take away my free will?” Because a lot of Christians tell me, “Well, the entire reason God can’t show himself to you is because it would take away your free will.” Well, I think that is bull crap for the reason that in no other scenario that I can think of does gaining information take away your free will. In what world does giving somebody information make their free will go away? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Kevin Harris: If these YouTube videos are any indication, then there’s an epidemic of this free will argument for why God is hidden. Do we need to quit saying this, encourage people not to say it, or say it in a more accurate way perhaps?

Dr. Craig: I find it heartbreaking to see a video like this. It’s just so tragic. The fact that Christians give inconsistent answers to questions no more shows that Christianity is false than the fact that atheists give inconsistent answers to questions show that atheism is false. As for her point, giving a person more information certainly can take away his free will. For example, can you freely believe that you do not have a heart and that your blood does not circulate? Can you freely believe that Donald Trump is not the president of the United States? Many philosophers think, in fact, that we have no freedom to choose what to believe. That our beliefs are compelled by the evidence that we have. Now, I don’t agree with that, but it certainly shows that her assumption that information cannot take away free will is certainly false.

Now, as I said earlier, even if God provided evidence of his existence that was compelling so that everyone believed that God exists, we still have to choose whether to love and worship him. And in this respect, divine hiddenness may actually stoke a person’s desire for God to prompt him to seek after God. And paradoxically, that may actually be more effective in bringing him to love and worship God than simply providing compelling evidence.

Kevin Harris: Let’s get to Todd’s next reason that he left Christianity. Here’s reason number four.

Todd Phillips: If God wrote a book, I would expect it to sound more like God wrote it. And I don’t honestly mean that as a cheap shot. I used to believe the Bible came from God, and I preached it that way. I built my life around it. I preached that others should trust it and obey it and build their eternity and lives around it. But if this book really comes from an all-knowing, perfectly good, all-loving God, why does it sound exactly like the ancient world that it came from? I mean, really, why does it contain laws condoning, endorsing slavery instead of just saying slavery is wrong? Just don’t do it. God has no problem saying murder is wrong and lying is wrong and stealing is wrong. Why does it treat women in ways most of us, I would like to say all of us, would never defend today? Why does it prescribe death for breaking the Sabbath? Why does it contain so much violence that later on Christians have to explain away and soften and contextualize and defend?

And look, I understand the Christian answer. I gave the Christian answer from the pulpit for two decades. I knew how to talk about context and progressive revelation and ancient culture and God meeting people where they were. I knew all the ways to make the Bible sound like it made sense. But that answer only worked because I started with a conclusion that the Bible was perfect and couldn’t be wrong. Because if ordinary people can take a look at this Bible and just look at parts of it and immediately say that shouldn’t be in there, then we should all ask why a perfect God put it in there in the first place.

Kevin Harris: Well, you could offer answers for each one of those objections, Bill, like slavery in the ancient world, for example. But is there an overarching answer to his problem with the Bible being human as he puts it?

Dr. Craig: Yeah. I think that the overarching point is that the truth of Christianity doesn’t stand or fall on the doctrine of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. It stands or falls on the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus. And there are tons of Christian theologians who accept the fundamental truth of Christianity but who do not believe in biblical inspiration and inerrancy. They would agree with Todd that the Bible is the human product testifying to what God has done. So this is not a good reason to abandon Christianity, to think that God does not exist and Jesus did not rise from the dead.

Kevin Harris: Here’s reason number five. Check it out.

Todd Phillips: There isn’t one Christianity. There are thousands of Christianities. The Baptists think they have the correct version. The Catholics think they do. The Calvinists think they do. The Pentecostals are certain that they do. The progressive Christians, they think so. And they all point to the same Bible.

So I decided to do a simple thought experiment. Let’s just take eight major Christian doctrines and use extremely conservative numbers for how many major views exist in each one. So baptism, two views. Communion, three views. Salvation, two. Can salvation be lost? Two views. Predestination and free will, three views. Hell, three. End times, three. Biblical inspiration, three views.

Now, multiply those together. Don’t add, multiply. The result is 1,944 possible combinations of Christian belief. And remember, I intentionally grouped many views together and ignored dozens of other doctrines that Christians still disagree on, like creation, women in ministry, spiritual gifts, church authority, LGBTQ inclusion, atonement theories, divorce and remarriage, and many others. Once you add just a handful of those, the possible combinations explode into the millions. Millions.

So, when someone tells you that’s not true Christianity, I hear that all the time. What they usually mean is that’s not my Christianity. The question isn’t whether Christians interpret the Bible differently. They all clearly do. The question is why a supposedly clear message from a perfect God produces thousands of denominations, thousands of interpretations, and nearly 2,000 possible combinations from just eight major doctrines alone. And listen, if you’re deconstructing because you couldn’t make all of that make sense, you are not the problem. You were handed a Bible that Christians have never agreed how to read. Then told the message was clear.

Kevin Harris: Why are there so many denominations? That’s what we often hear. What about this apparent lack of unity, Bill?

Dr. Craig: In the first place, it’s illegitimate to simply multiply all these alternatives together because these different views tend to cluster in groups or schools of thought. And that’s why you do not have millions of denominations and millions of views. But the overall or more important point here is that the clarity of Scripture has to do with its central message of salvation, not with all of these secondary doctrines that Todd mentions, like baptism and communion and end times and so forth. There is a solid core of Christian beliefs that are affirmed by Catholics, Orthodox, Coptics, and Protestants. Things like the existence of God, the deity and humanity of Christ, the death and resurrection of Jesus, salvation through faith in Christ, and so on. This is what C. S. Lewis called mere Christianity. And the question is, is something like mere Christianity true? And I think there is good evidence to believe that it is.

Kevin Harris: All right, here’s reason number six. Check this out.

Todd Phillips: The evangelical gospel has an Adam and Eve problem. Original sin only works if Adam and Eve were real historical people. And I don’t think they were because if Adam and Eve weren’t real people, then there was no historical fall of man. And if there was no historical fall of man, then one of the central pieces of evangelical Christianity just collapses.

Now, I know people in the Christian community will say, “Hey, people still sin.” And of course, people do harmful, selfish, cruel things. And that’s not the point. The point is original sin. The point is the idea that humanity inherited guilt and corruption, death, and a broken relationship with God because the first human beings, Adam and Eve, just disobeyed God in a real garden. At least that’s the story.

But if Adam and Eve aren’t historical people, then there wasn’t a single, first couple who brought sin into the world. There was no moment when human nature fell. There was no curse that suddenly entered creation because two people just ate from a tree. And that creates a massive problem for the version of evangelical Christianity I preached for more than 20 years.

Because the story that I preached was simple. God created the world and it was good. Adam and Eve sinned. Humanity fell. Sin entered the world. We inherited guilt and separation from God from Adam and Eve. And then Jesus came as a solution for Adam’s fall. That was it.

But if Adam isn’t historical, and I don’t think he is, then what exactly did Jesus come to undo? Did he come to undo a metaphor? Did he come to undo a symbol, an ancient origin story?

Look, I know there are versions of Christianity and other theories of atonement and why Jesus came other than what I give or what I used to talk about for the reason Jesus came. And that’s fine. But evangelical Christianity, especially the version built around substitutionary atonement, this isn’t a small issue. No historical Adam means no historical fall. No historical fall means no inherited guilt. And no inherited guilt means no original sin. And if your gospel depends on Jesus dying to fix what Adam broke, then the entire structure falls.

Kevin Harris: Wow. He must have thought you wouldn’t see this video, Bill. We’ve got historical Adam and the atonement in that clip.

Dr. Craig: Notice that it’s just Todd’s opinion that there was not a founding pair from whom the human race descended. He has to just assume, I suppose, that that’s somehow ruled out by contemporary science. But in fact, the existence of a founding pair is perfectly compatible with the evidence of modern science just so long as we locate them deep in the prehistoric past, earlier than 500,000 years ago.

As for the atonement, Todd is just wrong when he says that the message of the gospel is that Christ died to undo original sin. I would challenge him to find that anywhere in the Bible. What the Bible teaches is that all persons are sinners and that Christ died to pay the penalty for our sin. So I myself do not believe in the doctrine of original sin, that we inherit original guilt from Adam. And therefore do not think that the purpose of the atonement was to undo original sin. I think Todd here has simply got his theology wrong.

Kevin Harris: Okay, we have two more reasons to look at. Here’s Todd’s seventh reason.

Todd Phillips: Unnecessary suffering is one of the reasons I no longer believe in the Christian God. Every worldview has to account for suffering in some way. And I get that. Christians often explain much of it through free will. In other words, human beings harm each other. We have the free will to do that. So war, abuse, and cruelty, those all flow from human choices, and that explains why those things happen.

But that’s not the suffering that continued to press on me. It’s leukemia in a four-year-old. That’s not the result of someone’s moral decision. Genetic disorders aren’t chosen. Earthquakes aren’t acts of rebellion by humans. Parasites that blind children aren’t caused by human freedom. The predator-prey reality of nature and the extinction of most species on the planet happened long before humans ever showed up.

Christian theology says God is all-powerful. He’s all-knowing. He’s all-loving. And if that’s true, then suffering that serves no clear purpose raises a lot of questions for me. And I’m not asking why suffering exists at all. I’m asking why there’s so much suffering that appears just unnecessary or gratuitous. Suffering that doesn’t build character. It doesn’t arise from moral choices and doesn’t seem required for any greater good.

For years I said that God had reasons beyond our understanding. I would say his ways are not our ways. His thoughts are higher than ours. I said those things and accepted them for a really long time. But eventually I had to admit that when I placed the attributes of God next to the world as it actually is, they just didn’t fit together. I could keep affirming both, but I couldn’t make them fit together. And that’s why I no longer believe.

Kevin Harris: Okay. Not just the problem of evil, but the problem of gratuitous suffering. Bill?

Dr. Craig: Well, there’s no doubt that this is emotionally very difficult. But the problem for Todd here is proving that the suffering in the world really is gratuitous. That puts a burden of proof on the shoulders of the atheist that no one has been able to sustain. I think that it’s not at all improbable, not in the least, that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil, that the optimal number of persons would come freely to know God and embrace his salvation. Todd, to carry his argument, would have to show that there’s another possible world feasible for God which involves less evil and suffering than the actual world but with a more optimal balance between saved and lost. But how could he possibly prove such a thing? It’s pure speculation.

Kevin Harris: Finally, reason number eight.

Todd Phillips: One of the foundational bricks to fall that caused the math of my faith to kind of stop mathing, I guess you’d call it. It was the realization that an all-loving God and the concept of hell literally cannot exist in the same reality. It just can’t.

Look, I know the traditional counterargument. I preached it. People will say, “Well, God is all-knowing, so he knew I’d sin, for example. And because he’s all-loving, he sent Jesus to die and provide a way out of sin and out of hell. And they’ll say he used his power, being all-powerful, to defeat death through Jesus. And so we wouldn’t have to go to hell.”

But that actually from my perspective now makes the problem worse. It ignores the fact that God is the actual architect of the entire system. If God’s all-powerful and all-knowing, he’s the one that decided that the consequences for decades of sin, just a few decades of our lives, no matter how many sins we have and human mistakes, the consequence of that should be eternal conscious torture.

He didn’t just find hell out there one day existing and then try to save us from it because he’s loving. He’s the one that created hell as the default destination because of our sin nature. I mean, he could have chosen any other consequence. Literally, he could have chosen rehabilitation or like a timeout or even just a, I don’t know, non-existence, annihilation. That would have been better than hell.

But instead, he designed a system of never-ending torture and then asked for praise from us because supposedly he provided a loophole to escape the very nightmare that he built in the first place. That’s not a rescue mission. It’s like a hostage situation.

Realizing that hell was a tool of control for me rather than kind of a logical necessity was one of the big bricks to fall in my deconstruction.

Kevin Harris: Déjà vu. Bill, we just did the Hellgate podcast. Notice that he said torture twice when it comes to hell. Bill?

Dr. Craig: What is strange about this is that Todd apparently thinks that God just made up what the punishment for sin should be. I quote, “He could have chosen any other consequence.” End quote. But I don’t think any Christian believes that. Rather, hell is an essential expression of God’s holiness and retributive justice. The sin of repudiating God is a sin of infinite gravity which therefore deserves an everlasting punishment. Moreover, by repudiating God, people freely and irrevocably separate themselves from him forever. So Todd really needs to rethink this one.

Kevin Harris: As we wrap up today, Bill, I want to thank you for your patience and giving answers to the same questions that keep making the rounds. It’s part of your work in ministry and your life. There are a lot of YouTube videos out there making these objections, same objections. Do you have some thoughts for not only Todd, but anyone who’s dealing with these eight questions and even more?

Dr. Craig: Yes. Did you notice that one of the things missing from these clips is any consideration whatsoever of the positive reasons to believe that Christianity is true? Every worldview, including atheism, will face difficult questions. And these are all good and difficult questions. But if one has a solid positive case for the truth of the Christian faith, then one can live successfully with difficult questions.

And as I explained earlier in this podcast, I think that there is good objective evidence in support of the central truth claims of the Christian worldview, that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead in authentication of his claims to be the absolute revelation of God. So what’s missing from this video is any consideration of those positive reasons for being a Christian and a consideration only of the difficult questions that Christians face.