I Just Know (That I Don’t Know)

Reckoning with the Illusion of Certainty and the Courage to Question Everything

I was a Christian for the first twenty-five to thirty years of my life (because letting go of something so long and deeply held is a process, not a fleeting moment of profundity). I said the things. I believed the things. I had the knee-jerk responses, the buzzwords, the convenient answers, and the get-out-of-jail-free cards. All of it. And I meant it. Every word.

When someone challenged me, I had my defaults ready. God is mysterious. Who are you to question Him? The Bible is the truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the Father but through Him. I could rattle these off without thinking, and that was sort of the point. You weren't supposed to think too hard. You were supposed to trust.

And I did. Until I couldn't.

It wasn't one thing that broke it. It was a series of things over years, accumulating quietly until the weight of them became impossible to ignore.

It started with a breakup. Not because the breakup was theologically significant, but because the pain cracked open a door I hadn't known was shut. I was angry at God. And that anger, as much as I didn't want it, made me sensitive to something I'd been ignoring my whole life. An inherent unfairness in how the world seemed to work. Pain does that. It strips away the comfortable abstractions and makes you look at things as they actually are. Once you start noticing unfairness, it's hard to stop.

Then there was the call center. I took a job in a diverse workplace with all kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life. There were quite a few gay people there, and they turned out to be some of the best people I've ever known. Genuinely kind, warm, generous people who really cared about others. They treated me well even knowing I was this very Christian guy, and they never once disrespected me for it. They didn't try to contradict everything I believed or pick fights. They didn't mock me. They were just people who wanted love, like anybody.

And something shifted in me that I couldn't undo. I knew, I just knew, that I couldn't see God sending them to hell. These were beautiful people. They were better than most of the Christians I'd ever known. The idea that they'd be punished mercilessly, forever, for who they loved, while some of the cruelest, most judgmental, most hypocritical people I'd encountered in church got a pass because they said the right words and checked the right boxes. It was absurd. Something was deeply wrong with the math.

There were friends, too. One in particular who'd also grown up in the faith but was much sharper than me intellectually. Maybe ten steps ahead. He started asking me questions nobody had ever asked me and making me think in ways nobody had ever made me think. He wasn't trying to destroy my faith. He was just ahead of me in examining his own. Another friend had become an atheist and asked really good questions, even though I didn't come to the same conclusions he did. Between them, they pulled me along. Not by telling me what to believe, but by showing me I hadn't actually examined what I already believed.

And then there were the small moments in passing that added up. One in particular sticks with me. I spent years writing in coffee shops, anywhere from two to four hours a day, and in that process I was privy to a great deal of people watching. One afternoon there was a father talking with his very young son, who was asking questions that were quite beyond his years. It was during an election cycle, probably Obama's first run.

And this man was calmly and thoughtfully explaining to his son why he felt the way he did about certain things. He was espousing kindness, essentially. Love and compassion. And I was struck at how different it was from what I was used to. This man was clearly liberal, clearly not religious in any traditional sense, and he was everything that Christians claim to be but so often aren't. The genuine article. Not the performance of family values but the actual living of them. It broke something in me, this deeply programmed image that Christians are the moral, family-oriented people who raise their children right, and that everyone else is living some sinful, reckless life. This man was a quiet, intelligent, loving father teaching his kid about empathy.

As I was leaving, I told him something like, "I'm glad someone is teaching their kids right." He seemed almost nervous, like he wasn't sure if I was an upset conservative speaking with a subtle, begrudging sarcasm who didn't like what I'd overheard. I wasn't. I meant it.

Not all Christian parents are bad, of course. My own, differences aside, are truly wonderful. But this man was a living refutation of the caricatures so many Christians paint of anyone outside their group, especially anyone with the word "liberal" attached to them. Because American Christianity has become more political than spiritual, and it has conflated the two irrespective of how contradictory they actually are.

And there were books. Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz cracked something open in me that I didn't fully understand at the time. David Dark's The Sacredness of Questioning Everything gave me permission to do exactly what the title says. Permission I didn't even know I needed. That book said, in essence, that questioning is not the enemy of faith. It is the responsibility of anyone who claims to care about truth.

And then there was Bart Ehrman. His work proved to me that I didn't know what I thought I knew. That the things I'd been told were airtight weren't even close. That the history was messier, the manuscripts more complicated, the transmission of these texts more fraught with human error and agenda than anyone in my church had ever let on. The certainty I'd been given was manufactured. And once you see that, you can't go back to pretending it was solid.

All of this accumulated over years. The holes kept getting punched. And eventually, I was standing in a structure with so many holes it couldn't hold anything anymore.

I recently watched an episode of Diary of a CEO featuring Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist and historian who studies ancient biblical manuscripts. He was being treated as though he were saying something profound. The host seemed to be genuinely reconsidering things. The comments section was full of people responding as though they were hearing something revelatory. I kept waiting for the revelation. It never came.

Huff is a good communicator. He's smooth, well-spoken, and he has a compelling personal story about being paralyzed as a child and then walking again a month later. But his arguments are the same ones Christian apologists have been recycling for fifty years. Manuscript preservation. Early eyewitness testimony. The "why would the disciples die for a lie" argument. None of it is new. And none of it addresses the actual problems. He was doing what apologetics always does, answering the easy questions eloquently while pretending the hard ones don't exist. He's selling the comfort, not the case.

And the hard questions, the ones that actually matter, just sit there untouched.

The entire Christian framework rests on a premise that collapses under basic scrutiny. The Fall. The claim is that God created humanity perfect, with free will, and intended for that perfection to continue. Adam and Eve rebelled, sin entered the world, and now all of humanity is broken and in need of redemption.

But think about what that actually requires to be true. How many humans were going to exist? Billions. Over how many generations? Thousands upon thousands. Across what range of circumstances, environments, and neurological wiring? An almost infinite spectrum. And all of them were going to have genuine free will, the real, actual ability to choose freely? Then perfection was never possible. Not even close. You cannot have billions of autonomous minds with genuine freedom of choice and expect flawless behavior. It's not a risk. It's a certainty. It's baked into the design. Because this is what consciousness actually is. We're aware enough to know we're going to die, intelligent enough to imagine infinite possibilities and consequences, but not wise enough to navigate them cleanly. That's not a fall from grace. That's just what it is to be a self-aware animal with abstract thought.

So either God didn't know it would fail, which means He's not omniscient. Or He couldn't prevent it, which means He's not omnipotent. Or He knew it would fail, set it up anyway, and then got angry at humans for doing exactly what the system guaranteed they would do.

That's not justice. That's entrapment.

And the response to this guaranteed failure? Anger. Not at Himself for designing a system destined to break. At us. And then He required violence, a blood sacrifice, to satisfy that anger before He could forgive. But a being of pure love doesn't need someone tortured and killed before it can let go of a grudge it created the conditions for in the first place. Think about it in terms of parental love, since Christians love the Father metaphor. No loving parent, no matter how angry, no matter how disappointed, would sentence their child to eternal torture. For anything. Yet Christians believe an infinitely loving God does exactly this to billions of people. Not for atrocities. For not believing the right thing. For being born in the wrong place. For hearing the message and not being convinced.

(I'll grant that hell itself is contested even among biblical scholars. There are serious academics who argue the original texts were describing nothing like the eternal fiery punishment most Christians imagine, and I find that compelling. But most Christians still preach hell as commonly understood. They use it as a warning and a weapon. So the critique stands.)

And here's the thing Christians don't say enough. What they're calling forgiveness isn't actually forgiveness. It's a transaction. If Jesus had to die in order for God to forgive humanity, then God didn't forgive anything. He collected payment. Real forgiveness is free. A parent forgives a child without demanding that someone else suffer first. That's what grace actually looks like. What Christianity describes is a blood debt, not grace. Which makes sense historically. Ancient peoples sacrificed animals to appease gods they feared, to manage anxiety about forces they couldn't control. That's how their world worked. You killed something valuable to pay a debt to the divine. Christianity inherited that entire sacrificial apparatus and retrofitted it onto Jesus. Bronze Age problem-solving dressed up in theology.

But it gets worse. Because Christians themselves have already proven that God doesn't actually need the sacrifice.

I used to ask what I thought was a challenging question. What about all the people who never heard about Jesus? The ones born in remote places, or who died before missionaries arrived, or who simply never had access to the gospel? Are they going to hell?

The answer was always some version of this. Don't worry about them. God won't hold them accountable for what they never had the chance to hear. They'll get a free pass. He'll forgive them.

And I accepted that for years before I realized what it actually meant.

If God can forgive people who never heard the gospel, with no sacrifice, no belief, no acceptance of Jesus required, then the sacrifice was never necessary. God is already forgiving people without it. He's capable of it. He's doing it. The blood payment is arbitrary. It only applies to people who happened to have access to the information. So the crucifixion isn't a cosmic necessity. It's a penalty for knowing too much. You're punished not for sin, but for having heard the story and not buying it.

That single contradiction dismantles the entire atonement theology. Either forgiveness requires sacrifice or it doesn't. Christians say it doesn't. For some people. Which means it doesn't, period. God just proved He's capable of forgiving without a sacrifice. The rest is theater.

I spotted this as a kid with basic logic. The fact that the entire theology requires mental gymnastics to get around it should tell you something about whether the framework actually holds.

And then there's the broader absurdity of the salvation lottery. An omniscient God knowingly created a world where your eternal fate depends largely on where you're born. Arizona to Christian parents? Good odds. Morocco to Muslim parents? Ninety-nine percent chance you're Muslim, which means, according to Christianity, you're headed to hell. Your salvation hinges on cultural accident. On geography. On which parents conceived you and which stories they told you as a child. A God who actually wanted everyone saved would make truth self-evident, universally accessible, impossible to miss. Instead we get thousands of competing religions, each claiming exclusive truth, each certain the others are damned. And Christianity alone has over forty thousand denominations that can't agree on what the correct beliefs even are. If the people inside the system can't settle on the truth, how is anyone outside it supposed to figure it out? And why would a loving God stake eternal consequences on a puzzle He made unsolvable?

When you press Christians hard enough on any of this, when the logical walls close in and there's nowhere left to go, the final move is always the same.

I just know.

I know in my heart. I know in my spirit. The Holy Spirit has revealed it to me, deep within me, in a way that I can't deny. And He can do that for you, too. You just have to believe first, and then it will be supernaturally revealed to you in a way you cannot refuse.

I used to say this. I said it for decades. And I meant it. I really felt it. It was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, and I played it every time the questions got too hard.

It's also the ultimate conversation-stopper, because you can't argue with someone's personal inner experience. It's unfalsifiable. There's no counterargument to "God told me." It exists outside logic, outside evidence, outside discussion. And that's exactly why it gets deployed when the logic fails.

The problem is that every religion's adherents say the exact same thing. Muslims just know. Hindus just know. Mormons just know. Everyone who's deeply committed to a faith tradition has had some version of this inner confirmation, and they're all pointing at different, mutually exclusive truths. They can't all be right. But they all feel exactly the same level of certainty.

I still feel something. I do. I still feel like there's a loving God, something transcendent and real beyond what I can see and prove. I haven't lost that. But I can no longer pretend to know the specifics. I can't attribute it to any particular deity or claim I understand the internal mechanics of how it all works. The honest position is that I only know that I don't know. And neither does anyone else, no matter how strongly they feel otherwise.

I want to be clear about something. This essay is not an attack on Christians. I lived inside that system for most of my life. I understand why people believe, and I don't think most of them are being dishonest. They just haven't been challenged to examine these contradictions, and many who did would still choose to believe, because their relationship with God is deeply real and emotional to them. That's valid. Two things can be true. The faith can genuinely help people find meaning, community, and moral grounding. And the logical framework can be fundamentally broken. Both of those are real.

But the damage, and there is damage, comes when certainty gets weaponized. Slavery was defended with scripture. Discrimination is still defended with scripture. Legislation gets written based on theological convictions that can't be proven, imposed on people who don't share them. Wars have been fought, people have been tortured, entire populations subjugated, all in the name of a certainty that doesn't actually exist. And that certainty is protected by the "I just know" wall, which makes it immune to scrutiny, immune to challenge, immune to reason. That's where real harm lives.

If we could collectively arrive at one honest admission, that we don't actually know, everything changes. Not because people have to abandon their faith. Believe whatever you want. Worship however you want. Find meaning and community and purpose in whatever tradition speaks to you. But we have to stop pretending that any of us have the evidence required to impose our beliefs on others. We don't. None of us do.

And I realize how this might sound. I just spent an entire essay tearing down certainty, and now here I am telling you how we should live. So let me be careful, because I don't get to play the card I just took away from everyone else. I can't prove that empathy is the right foundation for a society. Nobody can prove something like that. But I'm not claiming revelation, and I'm not asking anyone to stake eternity on it. When I say nobody should be homeless, nobody should go hungry, everyone deserves healthcare and education and dignity and safety, those are bets we can actually watch play out. We can see what happens when people are fed and housed and cared for, and we can see what happens when they aren't. And if I turn out to be wrong about kindness, the damage is a world that was too kind to people. I can live with that risk. It's not the same as threatening someone with hell.

We have eight billion people on this planet, each one a universe of thought and experience. We're never all going to be on the same page about God or the afterlife or the nature of reality. Forty thousand denominations within a single faith tradition proves it's impossible even among people who agree on the broad strokes. But we don't need to agree on any of that to take care of each other, refuse to harm each other, keep our beliefs out of each other's laws, and build systems that ensure everyone's wellbeing. Different cultures will arrive at different solutions, and that's fine. But the foundation, empathy, cooperation, mutual care, that can be shared. Not because God commanded it, but because it's the best bet we have.

Some of the teachings attributed to Jesus are genuinely beautiful. Radical compassion, care for the marginalized, skepticism of wealth and power, forgiveness of enemies. Those ideas stand on their own merit. They don't need resurrection narratives or cosmic redemption arcs or threats of eternal suffering to matter. I still honor them.

And if there was ever one good thing I cherish from those years, it's community. There are truly beautiful people you can meet inside a church. People I'll never forget. Some of them are even the sort of problematic Christians I've been describing here, and my memories of them, just like family, are no less fond. I miss some of them. One in particular, a roommate I had for a few years, I still consider an important friend in my life story, even though we haven't been close for about twenty years now. A missionary living with his wife and kids in Thailand. One of the funniest people I've ever known, and also one of the most reasonable. He's just as disgusted by Trump and Trumpism as any leftist I'm aware of. The love comes first with him. He's the genuine article. He truly loves and lives for the real Christ. Those people exist. I know because I lived among them.

What I can't do anymore is pretend that the framework holding it all together makes logical sense. It doesn't. The Fall requires an impossible starting condition. The atonement contradicts its own definition of forgiveness. God's own people have proven He can forgive without it. The salvation system punishes people for accidents of birth. And the final defense, I just know, is something every religion claims and none can prove.

I didn't arrive at these conclusions because I wanted to. I loved my faith. I loved the community. I loved the comfort of certainty. But the certainty was manufactured, and once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.

And I think the world gets better when we admit that. Not worse. Better. Because once we stop fighting over things we can't prove, we can start cooperating on things we can.