The two reasons I left Christianity

I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but it had to do with logic and science

The “logical” structure of the Holy Trinity, Wikimedia.

I grew up Catholic in Rome, Italy. And I left the Church during my teenage years. More than forty years later I’m still thinking about how exactly that happened.

First of all, it was not an instantaneous de-conversion. It took several years. The first hint that I remember was when I told my mother—who was mildly upset by this—that I would not go through confirmation, the sacrament that follows first communion. I had done first communion a couple of years later than usual in order to wait for my brother to be old enough, so we could go through it together.

So we did. He was ahead of me in the line that led to the priest, his communion wafer, and the wine. Real wine, because this is Italy and Catholicism. None of that unfermented grape juice that is given out by many Protestant denominations.

I saw my brother taking the wafer, drinking the wine, moving on… and then pivoting back to the end of the line! Later I asked him why he went for a second round. He said the wine was good, so he wanted another sip. I can happily report that to this day he does not suffer from any form of alcoholism.

Since confirmation is understood as the sealing of the covenant that is created by baptism, my refusal to proceed was a rather big deal. For all effective purposes, I had left the Church. Ironically, confirmation is supposed to be administered when a child reaches the age of reason. I guess my reason had developed in a different direction from the one expected by my priest. Confirmation is also the time when the Holy Ghost comes in and strengthens your faith. But I felt neither Spirit not any strengthening.

St. Michael the Archangel Parish, Findlay, Ohio. Eucharistic stained glass window depicting bread and wine. Image from Wikimedia.

That said, complete rejection and the realization that—gasp!—I was an atheist took several more years. (I never did have patience for the wimpy position known as agnosticism, sorry.) The immediate causes were multiple and mutually reinforcing. My initial, intuitive skepticism about religion in general and Catholicism in particular began to be reinforced during my third year of high school (out of five, one more of what students do in the US). That’s when Enrica Chiaromonte, my philosophy and history teacher, began to nurture in me what eventually became a lifelong love of wisdom, not to mention my second academic career (after evolutionary biology).

Enrica herself was a Marxist atheist, but I didn’t follow her all the way—Marxism has always seemed to me the leftist equivalent of Catholicism. To be fair, she was not out to proselytize among her students, but all it took was a compelling exposure to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, & co. and the deed was done.

The most clear recollection of detaching myself from Christianity (I know the word is not synonymous with Catholicism, but for me it was, at the time) was reading Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. Russell had quickly become one of my youth idols, after I had picked up by chance his autobiography in a moment of boredom at my father’s house. (He never read it.)

The book was originally a lecture, delivered by Bertie—as we aficionados call him—in 1927 at the South London Branch of the National Secular Society. In it, Russell defines the core of Christianity as the belief in a creator God and the notion that Jesus was the supreme moral role model.

While acknowledging that people usually accept Christianity on the basis of their emotional needs, or simply because they grew up in a Christian family (in my case, both), he also points out that it is Catholic dogma that those tenets can be defended on the basis of reason alone. He therefore accepts that premise and proceeds to challenge both points on the basis of reason.

And here I got myself some popcorn (metaphorically speaking) and eagerly continued to read. This is not the place for a full account of Russell’s arguments, but some highlights are worth the pixels. After rejecting the First Cause argument and the argument from Natural Law, because they are respectively unsupported bu logic and science, Bertie helps himself to the Greco-Roman tradition and mentions Plato’s Euthyphro as establishing the notion that morality cannot possibly come from god even if god actually existed. In that dialogue, Socrates presents Euthyphro with his famous dilemma: either what is moral is whatever god arbitrarily says or god is himself moral because he is following some kind of external standard. The first case leads immediately to moral relativism. The second one means that we can reason our way to morality without need of god as a middleman.

Regarding Jesus, Russell acknowledges the morality of part of what he said and did, like the injunctions to turn the other cheek and to help the poor. But it is evident from the Gospels themselves that Jesus is hardly without moral faults, for instance in frequent invocations of the punishments of Hell (which Russell, rightly, believes to be an immoral concept), in the episode in which he curses the fig tree, and in the episode of the Gadarene swine—where he “exorcises” a “demon.” In the end, Jesus is unfavorably compared by Russell to human sages like Socrates and Buddha.

All in all, Bertie concludes that Christianity has mostly gotten in the way of moral progress, and that only reason and science can save us from irrational fears concerning the afterlife.

Bertie on 28 November 1957, image from Wikimedia.

Which brings me to the two Catholic notions that finally and definitively broke the camel’s back in the case of my faith: transubstantiation and the Trinity.

The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that transubstantiation is “the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of the Blood of Christ.” Such change is allegedly brought about (very mysteriously) by the action of the Holy Ghost.

However, and here’s the big problem for me, “the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the ‘eucharistic species,’ remain unaltered. … The signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding, the Body and Blood of Christ.”

In other words: when I take wafer and wine they are really the flesh and blood of Christ, although they look and taste as, well, ordinary unleavened bread and wine. This, obviously, makes no sense at all. Empirically speaking, a substance is either bread or flesh, either wine or blood. Scientifically speaking, it can’t be both. And it is particularly suspicious that such miracle—which, I remind you, happens every time a Catholic takes communion, anywhere in the world—is entirely undetectable by our senses.

You see, if my priest had said that transubstantiation is about a metaphorical transformation, whereby the wafer and wine stand in the flesh and the blood, I would have been okay. But I asked explicitly, and the response was unequivocal: somehow (ah, the mysteries of faith!), what tastes to you like bread and wine during the administration of the sacrament really are flesh and blood. Baloney, I said, and I was thereby already with one foot out of the Catholic door.

The second foot followed shortly thereafter, when I confronted my priest with a second puzzle: the Trinity. This, as is well known, is the notion that God somehow exists in three co-equal, co-eternal, consubstantial divine persons: the Father, the Son, and the above mentioned Holy Ghost. Another way to put this is that there are three persons but one (divine) substance.

This notion is so bizarre that, historically, even a number of Christian groups and theologians have rejected it. And, strictly speaking, it is not found in the New Testament, though it was formulated by the early Christians to make some sort of sense of the notion that an allegedly monotheistic religion could worship a god who had a son, as if he were Zeus from the Greek tradition.

The Holy Ghost is a fascinating character here, reminiscent of similar concepts (like the Spirit of God) from the Jewish tradition. Whatever it is, it’s what got Mary pregnant with Jesus. Interestingly, the word in Koine Greek is pneuma (“breath”), the same used by the Stoics to indicate the active substance that animates the universe.

Be that as it may, my immediate thought when I was talking to my priest was that the notion of Trinity utterly violates the principle of non-contradiction, which is one of the three fundamental laws of logic [1]: either A or ~A (notA), but not both. Either one or three, but not both.

The upshot is that—in my teenage mind—Catholicism was in sharp conflict with the only two reliable sources of knowledge we have: transubstantiation is unscientific, and the Trinity is illogical. I walked out and never looked back.

Now, of course I am aware that plenty of theologians have tried to articulate counter-arguments against Russell and the sort of immediate objections I raised to my priest. But even decades later, and with a PhD in science and one in philosophy under my belly, I still find such counters wholly unsatisfying, obvious examples of ideologically motivated rationalizations, desperate attempts to square a circle that simply cannot be squared.

Why not simply admit that the whole metaphysical construction of Christianity—and, by fairly straightforward extension, of both the Judaism that preceded it and the Islam that followed it—is untenable in the light of reason and evidence? Because that would lead billions of people without desperately needed answers to their existential questions. Welcome to philosophy, my friends. It’s much less comforting and secure, but boy is it a lot more fun!

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[1] The three laws of classical logic are: (i) The law of identity, according to which A = A; (ii) The principle of non-contradiction, whereby A or ~A; and (iii) The law of the excluded middle, which says that a proposition is either true or false, with no intermediate possibility.