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. 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 literal best people I've ever known. Total sweethearts. 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. And I couldn't unsee it.

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 who didn't like what I'd overheard. I wasn't. I meant it. Not all Christian parents are bad, of course. But this man was a living refutation of the false caricatures that 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. It has conflated its politics with its faith, irrespective of how contradictory the two 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 was philosophically very important for me because it 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, who'd already described himself as open-minded and questioning, seemed to be genuinely reconsidering things. The audience response was similar. 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 comparison of Gospel sources to other ancient biographies. The "why would the disciples die for a lie" argument. None of it is new. None of it is particularly rigorous. And none of it addresses the actual problems.

What struck me wasn't that he was wrong about everything. Some of his historical observations are fair. But he was doing what apologetics always does. Answering the easy questions eloquently while pretending the hard ones don't exist. The meaning crisis angle was probably his freshest material, and even that amounts to this. Materialism leaves people empty, therefore Christianity. Which is a non-sequitur. Lots of things fill meaning voids. Community, art, philosophy, relationships. All of those work without requiring the resurrection to be historically factual. He's selling the comfort, not the case.
And the hard questions, the ones that actually matter, sit there untouched.

The entire Christian framework rests on a premise that collapses under basic logical 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, psychological profiles, 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 across infinite generations with genuine freedom of choice and expect flawless behavior. It is mathematically, structurally impossible. The sheer diversity of human consciousness, the different ways brains are wired, the different circumstances people are born into, the different relational dynamics and pressures and knowledge gaps and fears and desires that exist across that massive ocean of human experience, guarantees imperfection. It's not a risk. It's a certainty. It's baked into the design.

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. We have all of these psychological complications that come with having achieved this level of intellect. The paranoia that seeps in from all the things we don't truly know or understand, the competing desires, the capacity for self-deception. That's not a fall from grace. That's the inherent structure of being 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. For breaking exactly the way He knew we would. And then He required violence, a blood sacrifice, to satisfy that anger before He could forgive.

This is where the whole thing falls apart for me.

If the essence of God is pure love and holiness and beauty, that is not a being that would require violence in order to be satisfied. Violence as a prerequisite for forgiveness contradicts the very nature of the being they're describing. 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. That doesn't seem like the spirit or the nature of that kind of being. It doesn't match.

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 allow their child to suffer endlessly and horrifically because the child did something wrong. A child could do almost anything, and a loving parent still wouldn't sentence them to eternal torture. Yet Christians believe an infinitely loving God does exactly this to billions of people, not for atrocities, but for not believing the right thing. For being born in the wrong place. For never hearing the message. For hearing it and not being convinced.

Now, I'll acknowledge that hell itself is a contested claim even among biblical scholars. There are serious academics who argue that the original texts weren't describing anything like the eternal fiery punishment that most Christians imagine. That the references were to Gehenna, a real place, and that the language was likely parabolic, a way of communicating something rather than a literal description of an afterlife destination. I've been aware of this for a long time and I find it compelling. But the reality is that most Christians still believe in hell as we commonly understand it. They preach it. They use it as a warning and a weapon. So the critique still stands, because this is what the vast majority of Christians are actually teaching and living by.

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. It's letting something go without requiring anything in return. 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. That's exactly the cultural framework it emerged from. Ancient peoples sacrificed animals to appease gods they feared, to manage anxiety about forces they couldn't control. That's what the culture was for a very long time. Christianity inherited that entire sacrificial apparatus and retrofitted it onto Jesus. They came up with this whole sacrificial lamb narrative because that's what they knew. That's how their world worked. You killed something valuable to pay a debt to the divine. Once you step outside the cultural inheritance and look at it from the bigger picture, the mechanism is transparent. It's 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.

When I was growing up, 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 creates a system where your eternal fate depends largely on where you're born. Born in Arizona to Christian parents? Good odds. Born in Morocco to Muslim parents? Ninety-nine percent chance you're Muslim, which means, according to Christianity, you're headed to hell. Born in rural India? Hindu. Same destination.

Your salvation hinges on cultural accident. On geography. On which parents conceived you and which stories they told you as a child. An all-knowing, all-loving God set this up knowing full well that the vast majority of humans who ever lived would never encounter the "correct" message in a form they could meaningfully evaluate. And the punishment for this cosmic bad luck is eternal suffering.

That's not a loving system. That's a rigged game where most of humanity loses by design. An omniscient God who actually wanted everyone saved would make truth self-evident, universally accessible, impossible to miss. Instead, we get thousands of competing religions, each one claiming exclusive truth, each one certain the others are damned.

And Christianity alone has over forty thousand denominations, all disagreeing with each other on what the "correct" beliefs even are. If the people inside the system can't agree on what the truth is, 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. I can't say I know the ultimate truth and that anyone who disagrees is destined for eternal punishment.

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. And this is where it actually matters. Not in theological debate, but in how we live together.

I want to be clear about something. This essay is not an attack on Christians. I'm not trying to convert anyone away from their faith. I've been where they are. 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 examined these contradictions deeply, and honestly, most people haven't been challenged to. And if they had examined them, many would probably still choose to believe, because their relationship with God is deeply real and emotional to them. That's valid. I have no desire to take that from anyone.
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 have been 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.

And the net effect concerns me. I look at the fruit of the tree, and the world doesn't seem all that better off because of these beliefs. Not entirely, of course. Nothing is black and white. There is good that comes from faith. There are lives genuinely improved, communities genuinely strengthened. But the history of organized religion is also a history of extraordinary violence, oppression, and cruelty, all justified by an unearned certainty about things nobody can actually prove.

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 hardcore evidence required to impose our beliefs on others. We don't. None of us do. And once we admit that, we can stop fighting about things we can't prove and start cooperating on things we can.
Because there are things we can agree on. Not metaphysical things. Not theological things. Tangible things. Provable things. Mutually beneficial things. Love is better than hate. Kindness is better than cruelty. Nobody should be homeless. Nobody should go hungry. Everyone deserves healthcare and education and dignity and safety. These aren't complicated ideas. They don't require supernatural revelation. They're just obvious.

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. That's completely impossible. Forty thousand denominations within Christianity alone proves it's impossible even within a single faith tradition. But we don't need to agree on all of that to build something better. We just need to agree on the basics. Take care of each other, don't harm each other, don't legislate our beliefs over one another, and build systems that ensure everyone's wellbeing.

Different cultures will still arrive at slightly different solutions. They're not all going to look the same. And that's fine. But the foundation, empathy, cooperation, mutual care, that can be shared. That can be universal. Not because God commanded it, but because it's obviously, provably the right way to live together.

I don't hate Christianity. I don't hate Christians. 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. They're just good ideas about how to treat people. And I still honor them.

If there was ever one good thing that 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. But my memories of them, just like family, are no less fond. I miss some of them. I hope they're all doing well. 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. He's a missionary living with his wife and kids in Bangkok, Thailand. I respect him. He is a good man. One of the funniest people I've ever known. And he's also one of the most reasonable. He's just as disgusted by Trump and Trumpism as any leftist I'm aware of. He's the genuine article, in that the love comes first. He's an exception who 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 theological framework holding those ideas together makes logical sense. It doesn't. The premise fails. 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 read the right books or studied the right philosophers, though some of them helped along the way. I arrived at them mostly by thinking honestly about what I'd been told my whole life and discovering, piece by piece, that it doesn't hold up. Not because I wanted it to fail. I didn't. 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.