Before I had the strength to call myself an atheist, I called myself an agnostic, and for a time before that, I was internally redefining what the word "god" could mean so I wouldn't have to call myself either. I wandered into pantheism and panentheism, stretching the definition of the word "god" across the universe, preserving the possibility that something divine was still out there, even if the version I'd grown up with had already lost its legs.
That is what calling myself an agnostic looked like in practice.
It was a way of keeping the door open because the original claim had already failed, and I wasn't quite ready to get rid of the category entirely. Upon doing a bit of reflecting, it was quite obvious what I was doing: holding on to god concepts, trying to keep the word from slipping out of my hands by redefining what the word held.
I looked around at our shared existence on earth, saw every person and creature as a piece of the divine, and decided that life itself was the closest thing to what "god" could still mean. It allowed me to keep the ethical core of my faith: the secularized Jesus model where treating each other with love was the highest expression of this distributed divinity.
But eventually, the "god" I was describing had no divine agency, no will, neither mind nor thoughts, and no capacity to act. I had preserved the word by stripping away everything the word was originally supposed to mean. The category I was protecting had become indistinguishable from atheism plus vocabulary.
"God" became the word I was using for the interconnected fact of existence, but the interconnected fact of existence doesn't need the word "god" for its description. Still, I tried to pacify the framework I inherited, instead of referring to nothing at all.
Agnosticism assumes the question is still open; at least, that's what I used to think. But the question is open only in the way a door is open when it's been lying off its hinges for a century. Like, sure technically, nothing is stopping you from walking through, but the frame can no longer hold anything.
There were two patterns that showed me the door was down. One is what happens when the specific claims of ancient texts collide with modern empirical knowledge. The other is what happens in real time when a believer is pressed to defend those claims in a conversation.
For most of my life, I read Psalm 121 as beautiful, abstract poetry: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth; and it was always the KJV because it gave some flair that modern English can't quite capture.
the version of psalm 121 I grew up with
In many Black church traditions, this verse is a survival text for a people navigating constant oppression. The metaphorical reading makes sense: it's a way to keep your head high, to look past the immediate brutality of the world, and to find the strength to continue surviving in spite of it all. You look up, away from your earthly troubles, toward the abstract, omnipresent divine, and the hills were a metaphor for transcendence.
It wasn't until I started engaging with the text's historical context that the metaphor collapsed into geography, which was a little more interesting. The psalmist wasn't using the hills as a metaphorical substitution for a "spiritual state of mind."
Well, why not?
Because in the context of the ancient Near East, deities were tied to high places. This is why altars were built on mountains; the gods were physically closer up there.
You lifted your eyes to the hills because, cosmologically speaking, that is literally where the help was located. The poetry wasn't a metaphor papered over the cosmology.
The cosmology was the poetry.
the actual cosmos
Modern defenses of the Bible obscure this. We are told time and time again that the ancient writers were making theological claims, not scientific ones, and that reading their descriptions of the physical world literally is an embarrassing modern mistake.
But this is nothing more than a rescue operation, applied backward with the knowledge we have today. When you let the ancient writers speak for themselves, treating them as sincere, coherent, and fully embedded in their own time, they are remarkably clear about the shape of their universe.
In their world, the earth was flat and held fast on physical pillars. Above it sat the firmament, a solid, hammered-out dome that held back a literal cosmic ocean (see Genesis 1:6). When it rained, the "windows of heaven" (yes, heaven was in the sky) were physically opened. Beneath the earth was Sheol, a spatial, geographic underworld. When Psalm 29 describes Yahweh enthroned above the flood, it means enthroned on the firmament itself, an actual place above an actual ocean.
They built their physical environment to match the cosmos they believed in. The ancient Israelites placed a massive bronze basin called "the Sea" in the temple courtyard to represent the cosmic waters held back by Yahweh. When the book of Joshua records the sun standing still, it assumes without needing to argue the obvious (I mean, it's obvious to us today that we revolve around the sun not the other way around).
But this was their cosmology, and they believed these things, and they built their religion around them.
It was a standard view all across the ancient Near East. The Babylonians also envisioned a similar universe partitioned by a solid dome; so, too, did the Canaanites have their own variants of the cosmic waters, and the Egyptians shared the core features of a flat, bordered earth.
If the biblical texts contained a "divinely revealed truth" about the physical world, it didn't add anything empirical to the region's existing knowledge. The revelation either wasn't about the physical world at all, or it was the exact same incorrect picture their neighbors already held.
the collision
And then, human beings mapped the universe.
When telescopes allowed for us to look closely at the sky, there was no solid dome to be found; when we made it out to orbit, there was no water above us either; when we tracked the planets, we found a heliocentric reality that made Joshua's "stationary sun" impossible; and when we mapped the interior of the earth, there was no Sheol, just rock, pressure, and heat.
The empirical claims no longer held up, and this is when the metaphor defense arrived.
The firmament became "ancient phenomenological language," heaven became "a spiritual dimension beyond the physical," and Sheol (hell) became "a state of spiritual separation from God."
In the face of new information, this is what humans do; it's what we've always done. If we have to choose between our story or the new information, more times than not we'll choose the story and either absorb the new info somehow or just outright reject it.
This isn't even specific to the Hebrew Bible. The Quran describes "seven physical, stacked layers of heaven." When astrophysics found a vacuum instead, the seven heavens became "spiritual allegories" and when the places were mapped and the cosmology no longer held up, the retreat was the same.
A god that doesn't live anywhere specific isn't the god the texts were talking about.
Science updates when the evidence does, and that is the mechanism that makes the method work. But a revelation from a source that sees all of time shouldn't need updating at all.
the backward rule
If you look closely, the interpretive rule is written backward from the outcome.
There is no standard within these texts themselves for what counts as a "metaphor" and what counts as a literal fact. The standard is simply whether the claim survives modern scrutiny. If a biblical claim contradicts astrophysics or geology, it was always a metaphor, and the reader is foolish for even thinking otherwise. If a claim doesn't contradict science, it is defended as literal history.
But we know this is nothing more than damage control.
If the deity described in these texts is everlasting, omniscient, and actively revealing himself to his followers, then the cosmology in the text is the cosmology he let stand. He didn't bother telling his prophets the earth was round, nor correct the firmament, nor mention that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth.
He did, however, care deeply about foreskins.
The ancient writers were not stupid. They built a theology that matched their reality using the best tools they had at the time, but modern apologists cannot let them be wrong about the physical world, because if the physical claims fail, the spiritual claims take a hit to their authority.
The metaphor defense is a fact about the modern defender's discomfort: a perpetual translation exercise that slides an unfalsifiable substitute into place under the original name to protect the Bible from the very things it actually says.
the retreat
That's the retreat that happens across centuries, inside the texts. The other kind happens in conversation, in real time. I've been on both sides of it.
A little while ago, I was on threads going back-and-forth with someone who wanted to defend intelligent design. He was a genuinely good-faith believer, and he started with a specific claim about the physical world: the universe is exceptionally complex and ordered, therefore it must be the product of a great intelligence.
I pressed on the physical world. I pointed out that over 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. If evolution is an intelligently designed system, it's one that relies on mass die-offs, parasitism, and a brutal predator-prey arms race.
In the face of the extinction record, he pivoted. Every reply introduced a new framework: reincarnation, spiral dynamics, chakras, Maslow. When I asked him to return to the core issue of what makes "love" the right word for a process of mass extinction, he offered this definition:
"Love is a verb, an action. It's an expanditory [sic] force... When things don't function well we have to destroy or correct it to continue to build. We learn as we go. Love to me = evolution. Love is a refining fire... Because of our choices evolution must sometimes need destruction phases."
To protect the idea of a loving designer from our planet's fossil record, he had to redefine love to include the violent destruction of whatever isn't functioning.
When a word covers an outcome and the exact opposite of that outcome, it stops meaning anything at all, functioning only as the label you've given to whatever happens. He then followed with a defense about energetic souls returning to form, but at that point, I stopped pressing.
Again, he was a sincere believer doing his best to hold his position, but apologetics cannot survive closed questions. When you keep asking what specifically makes a word apply or what would make a claim false, you eventually back the conversation into a place where the only moves left are reframing and abstraction.
I had seen enough of the pattern to know the next exchange would just be more of the same, so I declined to continue because I had already exhausted what the conversation could give me.
the word survives
That exchange is simply how apologetics works.
No god concept, not even one, as described and as interacting with our shared reality, survives scrutiny. Every time a specific claim of divine intervention or intelligent design is tested against the same tools we use for everything else (historical evidence, textual analysis, empirical observation), it fails.
And when the claim fails, the deity gets redefined.
When the claim of an "ordered universe" meets the reality of the extinction record, the claim gets a little smaller, a little less specific, and a little more abstract. The word ends up surviving the gauntlet, but in order to survive, the actual content of the word to be completely gutted.
The problem with the retreat to abstraction is that unfalsifiability cuts both ways. A claim that rules nothing out (a "love" that encompasses both creation and mass destruction, a "god" that cannot be tested or observed) still describes something: the believer's framework, their meaning-making, their imagination, their felt sense of the universe and their position in it. But those are facts about the believer, not facts about a god.
The word survives the substitution, but the agent doesn't. And at that point, you're not even describing a god anymore, but you are describing your refusal to let go of the word.
real effects, false cause
The word continues to do work even after it stops referring to anything.
Religious belief changes lives, and I have no problem conceding that fully. Believing you have been handed a divine purpose can inspire people to do tremendous good. Some folks rely on a faith system to stay sober, to survive trauma, or to serve the marginalized.
But the utility itself has no bearing on truth.
Imagine a parent who hears that their child is trapped under a car. They run outside, filled with adrenaline, and actually manage to lift the bumper. The physiological response is absolutely real; it happened.
But if it turns out the child was never under the car at all, if the inciting panic was a false alarm, the parent's response doesn't retroactively make the initial statement true. The belief produced a real-world effect, but the belief itself was false.
And as much grace as I give, this also cuts both ways, because the same psychological mechanism that inspires selfless charity can also drive people to burn heretics at the stake, shun their queer children, and fly planes into buildings. When you bypass reality, the resulting actions, whether beautiful or horrific, are untethered.
A belief's power to motivate is a fact about human psychology, entirely separate from the physics of the cosmos.
the word and the referent
A concept can do emotional labor without pointing to anything outside of the speaker's imagination. The idea, itself, that "God is love" can reshape a person's life, heal their wounds, and dictate their ethics without there actually being a loving consciousness governing the universe.
The phrase remains genuinely meaningful without failing its definition.
When apologetics argues that because faith changes lives, God must be real, it conflates the internal mechanics of human psychology with the external architecture of reality.
The believer's transformation is real (again, I have no problem conceding this), but the referent (the external agent allegedly causing the transformation) is still the unresolved question.
The word "god" holds the weight of millennia of human hope. But when the defining characteristics of that god are pushed further and further into abstraction to protect them from being tested, the word stops referring to an external, interactive agent, or anything at all.
agnostic about what
Agnosticism is the right posture toward a claim like "there is microbial life on Europa" because that is a live claim still awaiting evidence, and the data is currently inconclusive.
But agnosticism is the wrong stance toward a claim that has already collapsed under the weight of its own defenses. The historical claims about the physical world have been falsified by the mapping of the actual cosmos, and the conversational defenses have redefined the deity until the concept includes its own opposite.
What is there left to be agnostic about?
Atheism gets treated as the arrogant position: a declaration of certainty that no gods exist anywhere. In the context of the religion I actually left, atheism isn't quite the bold claim. To me, it's the more honest one.
Atheism is taking the theist's own redefinitions seriously.
When a believer defends their faith by stripping their god of every single measurable, testable, interactive quality, whether by turning the physical firmament into a spiritual metaphor or by turning a loving designer into a synonym for mass extinction, the atheist is the person who listens carefully, nods, and says: yep, I agree. What you are describing is indistinguishable from something that is not there.
And the retreat to this abstraction is a small concession that the original target is already gone.
after the asterisk
So why does agnosticism stick around? What makes so many of us prefer to carry the label long after the substance of the belief has evaporated?
I, honestly, think it's a form of politeness, a lingering loyalty, almost like a final tithe paid to the tradition that raised us. We grant the god concept the permanent benefit of the doubt, treating it as a legitimate hypothesis long after it has been redefined into a holy ghost.
We keep the word on life support because letting it flatline almost feels like a betrayal.
Agnosticism, for me specifically, was nothing more than unfinished deconstruction. It was the part of leaving that hadn't let itself land.
If what you end up with after translation is something the original writers wouldn't recognize, you haven't kept the Bible, nor have you kept God. You've only kept the vocabulary.
Identifying as an atheist isn't about claiming to possess cosmic certainty. It is the recognition that the word has been protected, but the thing it was protecting is already long gone. It's an acknowledgment that there is nothing left on the monitor.
It's the realization that I don't have to carry the burden of the word anymore, because the concept collapsed under its own weight.
I was finally allowed to just let it go.