A Fortunate Collapse

How One Man’s Desperate Doubt Project Led to Fearless Faith

Devin Squeri froze in his closet, gripped with terror. At age forty-nine and a half, it had suddenly hit him that he was getting older and would eventually die. Thoughts of a dreadful vortex of nothingness stretched out before him, and he was powerless to prevent succumbing to it. Every tick of the clock reinforced the futility of fighting against the inevitable.

It’s not that Devin was an atheist. No, he was a long-time church member, a regular usher, in fact, on aisle three at his church’s 10:30 service. But he was not the man of steadfast faith he appeared to be. Sometimes he would get emotional during a worship service, but that was not for joy or love for God but from agony. He desperately wanted the peace that was supposed to come with faith, but his soul was wracked with doubts. To all appearances, everyone else was rock solid in their faith. Why was he alone plagued by relentless doubts?

For 30 years, he had lived in a tenuous relationship with the faith, holding back questions that had begun percolating in adolescence. Is Christianity all a sham? When we die, do we and our loved ones dissolve into the cold, meaningless void? Is all of reality reducible to physical matter and energy? Does God even exist?

Unasked Questions

Devin saw no way out of this crisis of faith. He’d grown up in a nominally Catholic family and learned the basics of the New Testament, Bible stories, and catechism. But in practice, it was all long on ritual and short on scriptural teaching. More important, at least for him, it was utterly devoid of reasons to believe any of it was true. The Bible was put forth as an authority unto itself and beyond question. When he was in fourth grade, his brother advised him to answer every question with “because God loves you.” That “worked” for a while, but it also led him to see religious education as shallow, little more than memorizing platitudes.

By his mid-teens, he started to wonder about basic questions. How can we know that the Bible is true and authoritative in the first place? You can’t just say the Bible is true because the Bible claims it’s true—even as a teen, he knew that logic didn’t work. Whether it was real or only his perception, the taboo on asking hard questions gave way to a kind of unspoken agreement: the church would sign off on his being a member of the flock in good standing, and in return he wouldn’t look too deeply under the covers.

But the unasked questions never went away. His doubts were mostly scientific in nature, starting with the conflict between materialism vs. the biblical worldview, but there was also the conflict between the claims of evolutionary biology and Genesis and the question of whether there existed evidence to support the reliability of the Bible. Devin went on to earn degrees in physics and math, disciplines in which things are quantifiable and measurable, matters in which a certain amount of evidence is required to justify and sustain belief. The assumptions of the secular world said that the Bible had certainly been mythicized and could not be taken seriously. Optimistically, it was a well-meaning collection of fables pushing a moral narrative. Pessimistically, it was a man-made method of control for the masses. What was the truth, and where could it be found?

The seemingly irreconcilable clash of worldviews simmered along the periphery of day-to-day life for years. He sought help in his home church, but to no avail. Then he sought help from four more local churches. None were equipped to engage with his questions. Worse, no one even seemed to think that the questions could be engaged from an intellectual or worldview standpoint. When you ask about the reliability of the Bible, answers that quote Scripture miss the mark. One pastor counseled him to pray with his wife for 40 days; another suggested he “decide to believe,” and still a third said, “You can’t understand the mysteries of God.” All were well-meaning, but the encounters only reinforced his mounting suspicion that the Christian worldview offered no answers beyond appeals to authority and mystery.

To make matters worse, Devin felt tremendous guilt. On one hand, who was he to question God? But on the other hand, if the whole thing is a sham, it was high time to stop being a dupe and face the bleak truth: life is meaningless and death is the end—but the thought of that kept him bound in a state of terror.

Standing in his closet on the verge of panic, Devin made a courageous decision. He would face the fear. He was all but certain Christianity was a house of cards poised to collapse under scrutiny, but he would give a hearing to the reasons for and against it and accept the result.

The Doubt Project

The internet is a mixed blessing—rich in sound apologetics and also rife with confident, self-appointed experts out to deconstruct the faith. He spent the better part of the next two years reading, listening to podcasts, watching videos, and attending gatherings where various views were presented. The first few months were taken up with what he would later call “mental flailing.” He would read or hear something new; then in the process of checking it out, a new rabbit trail would branch off in three more directions to the point where he was ricocheting from one resource to another but making no progress in understanding.

One night, in the midst of another spin session, he stumbled upon “proof” that Christianity was a made-up religion because Jesus was a Jewish rehash of the Zoroastrian deity Mithras. The purported similarities were striking: Mithras had been born on December 25 of a virgin surrounded by shepherds. He’d had 12 companions or disciples; had performed miracles, including raising someone from the dead; had been called the Way, the Truth, and Light, as well as the Good Shepherd; had died as a sacrifice for others and risen after three days.

Devin sat at his computer in a cold sweat. If Jesus is a copycat Mithras, then it was all over. Christianity is false. But instead of succumbing to the panic, he took a breath and decided to research the story. Who was this Mithras? What he found was illuminating. Mithras had not been born of a virgin but had emerged from a rock. Mithras did not have 12 disciples, but there had been a pictograph of him surrounded by the 12 signs of the zodiac. He had not raised anyone from the dead, nor did he sacrifice himself to bring world peace. But he did once fight a bull.

What? That’s how you’re tying this together? Devin was furious, and the moment turned out to be pivotal, as he later reflected in The Doubt Project: A Crisis of Faith, the Battles, and the Answers, his first-person account of his journey toward solidified faith:

I was fully prepared for mental anguish as I walked this path, but I was not prepared for ludicrous conspiracy theories given as legitimate objections. I had mistakenly assumed that questions were raised by kindred spirits seeking truth, not from agenda-driven people wielding secularist hammers desperately seeking a nail.

As he ferreted out the story of Mithras, one by one, the purported similarities toppled like lightweight bowling pins. It turned out that there had been some borrowing of details, but it had been the pagans who had appropriated Christian symbols and applied them to Mithras, not the other way around. The part about shepherds, for example, first appeared in Mithraism about 100 years after the Gospels had been written.

Going Methodological

At this point, Devin started applying basic principles of logic to the quest—look at the arguments, look at the evidence, poke for holes in each side, and see which claims hold water. He started writing things down, beginning with his areas of doubt. He identified and examined his own biases. While he conceded that he wanted Christianity to be true, he also recognized that he had uncritically accepted some materialistic premises, such as “Christianity and science are incompatible,” “supernatural events don’t really happen,” and “enlightened, intelligent people are atheists.”

He knew how to work a problem, and as he started organizing his thoughts on paper, the questions became problems to be worked. Complex concepts could be broken down into smaller, digestible parts and worked through piece by piece. As new questions arose, instead of allowing himself to be whipped into another frenzy, he simply added the item to a list and kept working the overall project.

Three Types of Doubt

Devin writes about three types of doubt: intellectual, emotional, and volitional. As his project bore on, he became aware that he had strains of all three. In many ways the intellectual doubts were the easiest to address, and many were laid to rest as he found satisfying answers to questions through good apologetics resources. The emotional doubt was more complex. For Devin, it stemmed from fear that Christianity was false and the implication that life ends in nothingness. But that fear began to subside as he became more assured intellectually. Volitional doubt is a matter of the will—a situation in which one does not want Christianity to be true. Often it stems from a desire, conscious or unconscious, to preserve a lifestyle contrary to the moral demands of the faith, but in Devin’s case, it came from a different place:

In a sneaky twist, it was my ego and not a lifestyle choice that was the root of my volitional doubt. Being the master of my domain and in full control of my life was preferable to having to submit to God. Understanding the magnitude of God’s work, such as in things like the fine-tuning of the universe, helped me realize God’s majesty.

The fine-tuning argument puts forth the precisely calibrated laws of chemistry and physics as evidence for an intelligent designer. For a math and science geek like Devin, the data can be jaw-dropping.

Gaining Heaven

After what he calls “a grueling two-year battle,” Devin began to find some clarity. As he systematically worked through his intellectual questions from multiple angles, the lines of evidence he discovered began to have a synergistic effect on the emotional doubt and, eventually, his will.

But the collapse was nearly all-consuming. He neglected the software company he’d founded in his twenties, and it eventually folded. He also lost some relationships, but he credits his wife Paige with faithfully shouldering immense burdens while he hacked his way through his personal existential jungle. While he still mourns the loss of his company, he says the spiritual collapse was the best thing that ever happened to him: “Without it, I would have continued in a lukewarm, distant relationship with God, never confronting the questions that kept me at arm’s length and frankly, never truly believing.… It’s worth losing the riches of the world to gain the kingdom of heaven.”