Thoughts on Ryan Bell's Year Without God

I recently ran across a post (which has since been deleted), wondering what people thought of Ryan Bell, the former Seventh Day Adventist pastor who just finished a "year without God". (Hemant Mehta has a decent overview of the whole thing here.) At the end of his year, he concluded that there really wasn't enough evidence for him to believe that God exists -- which led the author of the post to observe that...

"I've long wondered if he's been an atheist all along and the experiment was just his was of telling his family/friends."

Personally, I rather doubt it. This is one of those areas where the Christian language/perception of "choosing" beliefs becomes, I think, extremely misleading. Beliefs aren't, as a general thing, something we choose; they're conclusions we reach, based on our experiences and the information we gather. Most former believers (at least, the ones I know, including myself) go through a process somewhat like this -- something makes you doubt or question the things you've long expected; you start exploring, looking for answers or alternatives; and, maybe, the answers you find just don't work for you, or make sense to you; and you let go of your old beliefs. It doesn't have to end that way, of course; plenty of people go through much the same process, and find answers that do work for them, and return with their faith strengthened; other find new answers, and return with their faith changed.

Where Ryan Bell differs is that he undertook his exploration in an *intensely* public fashion and explicitly labeled it as "trying on atheism" -- an approach which gave the whole thing an uncomfortable whiff of Publicity Stunt (at least for me, and I presume you as well). But while I think he definitely started as someone who had reached a point where his old beliefs weren't working for him, I don't *think* the whole thing was scripted or that the "ending" (insofar as you can have such a thing, where people are concerned) was a foregone conclusion.

It's hard to tell, of course, when I'm talking about somebody I don't know, and whom I'm only observing at a distance; but I think his exploration was, well, genuinely exploring. I think the publicity-seeking was a separate issue.

I could easily be wrong, of course; I do have a tendency to extend the benefit of the doubt too far. Certainly, one of the comments in his NPR interview ("I don’t think that God exists. I think that makes the most sense of the evidence that I have and my experience. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the most interesting thing about me.") seems a little odd, given that he's clearly put some real effort into making himself publicly known for questioning his faith.