Show notes
Raised to think critically, Jordan Monge began to question her own atheism at Harvard University when she was intellectually challenged to investigate the grounding of her worldview. Resources recommended from this episode: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Liar, Lunatic, Lord argument) (https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Lewis-Signature-Classic-2016-04-07/dp/B0161T0VVQ/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=C.S.+Lewis%2C+Mere+Christianity&qid=1605194057&sr=8-4) Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to someone who’s been an atheist and has also been a Christian. Through listening to their story, we listen to both perspectives from someone who has thought and lived on the other side. There’s something inside of us that we all seem to know, that is undeniable, and more than that, unavoidable. There’s that something that reminds us that our thoughts and our actions are sometimes good and sometimes not so good. If we take God off the table to find our moral freedom to determine what is good for ourselves, that comes with a cost. With atheism, there is no real good or bad, no real right or wrong. Those are merely feelings we socially construct to survive in life. The moral choice, then, becomes an oxymoron. There is no real choice. There is no real chooser. According to Richard Dawkins, we are just DNA dancing to its music. Nothing done or said is inherently bad, so there is no moral culpability. If we can’t even control our own thoughts or actions and they’re determined for us, there is no moral responsibility, but it begs the question, why are we constantly judging ourselves and others if good and bad are not real moral issues, but rather it just is the way that it is? Why do we complain about something we think is bad in the world, in others, and in ourselves, if things just are the way they are? If we accept a godless reality, we also deny the reality of our own dignity, our free choices, the things that make us human. We give up any real standards of good or evil. That was the dilemma confronting today’s podcast guest. A very intelligent, thoughtful atheist, Jordan Monge also held to a strong moral understanding of herself and the world. The problem was she didn’t have a way to make sense of her own moral judgments within her own atheistic worldview. How did she resolve this problem? I hope you’ll come along with me to see. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jordan. It’s great to have you today. Thanks for hosting me. I’m excited to be chatting with you. As we’re getting started, so the listener can have a sense of who you are, Jordan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and maybe where you live. A little bit about your family. Yeah. So I’m originally from Irvine, California, and I graduated and went to Harvard University, where I studied philosophy, and after that, I worked for a couple of years, and then I pursued my Master’s in Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, which I completed a couple of years ago, and I finished it right before I became a mom, so I’m married now, and I have a 2-year-old daughter and I have a little 3-week-old here with me right now, so if you hear any noises in the background, you might hear him chime in just a little bit, and my husband and I, now we live in northern California, so that’s where we’re currently based, and I split my time between taking care of our two small children, and I do some tutoring on the side as well. Wonderful, wonderful. Well thank you that you’re here with us and that your new little baby is, too. Wow. Just appreciate you taking time out as a new mom. I know that’s not easy. It’s a nice mental break. Ah, yes, yes. Yes. As a mom, although I’m long past that season, I’m now an empty nester. I’m in a very different season, but I appreciate those days a long time ago and welcome those little noises if they do occur. So let’s get started with your story. you said you’re from Irvine, California. Why don’t you take us back to when you were a little girl and the context in which you grew up, perhaps your family and your community. Where did you grow up and was there any sense of God or religion or faith in your world? So my grandparents were Christian and Catholic, but my parents themselves didn’t hold any faith, so my mom just didn’t believe in God or in the Bible, but she’s not quite as adamant about it. My dad is actually a philosophy professor. He teaches at a couple of the community colleges in Orange County, California, and he has a very strong sense of what he believes and why, and his joke is that his parents sent him to 14 years of Catholic school and it was so good that he realized it was all false. That the education was so good. But he, from a young age, had questioned what they were teaching him in his Catholic school, and so, when I was growing up, my dad was actually getting his master’s in philosophy from UC Irvine, and so I would go with him to classes and I would sit in the back of the classes that he was teaching, and I continued to do that through elementary school, and so I was familiar with a lot of the arguments for and against God. And my parents felt very firmly that they didn’t want to raise me to be an atheist. They wanted to raise me to question things and to come to my own beliefs and perspective. But what’s sort of interesting about that is, from a young age, you pick up things differently being raised in an environment where your parents don’t believe, so one of the stories that my parents told me about happened when I was just four years old, actually. And we were at a party, and my mom came out to hear me arguing with one of the other little girls, and she didn’t catch the whole conversation, but the other little girl was six, and I was four, and she just heard me say, “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” Oh, my word! At four and six years old. At four years old, yeah. So what assume she’d walked into was me kind of questioning this 6-year-old girl who was raised to be Christian, kind of noticing, “Well, if you say you believe something because the Bible says so, well why do you believe the Bible?” Right? And it would be easy to look at that and say, like, “Oh, you’re almost raised with atheist propaganda,” or raised in that way, but I think kids at that age, we always ask why, right? And so saying, “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” is just a way of saying, “Well, why do you believe in the Bible,” and of course, the 6-year-old girl didn’t really have the best answer, and I wasn’t compelled. And what I found with a lot of Christians, even now, talking to them as adults, often they’ll have circular reasoning for why they believe in the Bible, when it comes to, like, “Well, I believe in the Bible because I think that God wrote it,” and it’s like, “Well, why do you believe in God?” “Well, it talks about him in the Bible,” and you’re like, “That is a circular argument.” Right. And so I think it’s very natural for kids, even at a young age, to start questioning, and I think, in the classical tradition, seven is considered the age of reason, and maybe having a philosophy professor as a father, you learn to reason a little bit younger. Yes, yes, I would imagine so. I can’t imagine what your dinner conversations must have been like. I’m sure he fostered that inquisitive nature in you. Obviously, it was a very natural thing if you’re talking about it at a birthday party, you know, if you’re asking questions. It was just part of who you were and I’m sure the way that you thought. Yeah! And that you were trained to think logically. And my parents always, they very firmly, they always tried to answer when I asked the question, “Why?” And I think a lot of parents feel challenged by questions, and my parents just were never that way, and they always tried to encourage me in asking questions, and I think that’s sort of the funny thing I’ve discovered as I’ve gone through adult life and gone through a couple of different types of jobs, and I realize that’s probably my greatest strength is asking the right questions. Yes. And so I think that’s something that, even though my husband and I raised our children differently with respect to what we believe, that spirit of questioning is something that I still believe in very strongly and I think should be encouraged in children, because the beautiful thing about Christianity is that, if you dig deeply enough, you start to find answers. But that first-level questioning that happens as a child—sometimes you don’t get good answers to that, so I remember the next thing I think about in my childhood, when I think about my relationship with God, my great grandfather passed away when I was six years old, and because they were Catholic, they had a Funeral Mass, and I remember going to see him at the wake, and there were prayer cards, and I cringe now. I kind of treated them like Pokemon cards, like I wanted to collect them all. Dad was like, “You can only get more cards like these if somebody passes away,” like, “You don’t want that to happen, right?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s true.” But then afterwards, the prayer cards did talk about God, and so it’s funny. My parents, they never said, “Don’t pray,” or something like that, but I remember, after he passed away, I went home, and I started praying to God. And I kind of hid it because—again, they never said, “Don’t do this,” but I kind of sensed that they wouldn’t be behind it, you know? And so I kind of secretly started praying to myself before I went to bed. And after about three weeks of praying, I kind of thought about it, and I realized my grandfather had lived a long and decent life and passed away—actually, you know, I was six. I don’t even remember how old he was, but to me, he seemed ancient. And his body had started to deteriorate, so I realized… I thought, “If we lived forever, we would just get older and older and more decrepit, and that wouldn’t really be good, either, so there is kind of a natural time where we need to pass,” like it’s not a bad thing. And when I realized that, it sort of felt silly to ask God to stop that or to extend the life. It felt like, “Well, you should just accept that that’s the natural way that things go,” in that sense, the idea of God kind of lost His power. You don’t really need Him to overcome death, per say. At least that’s how I thought about it at six. And so that was kind of the last time, until I really was seriously considering conversion, that I had ever prayed, after the passing of my great grandfather. Yes. That’s an interesting example because it does, I think, demonstrate your intuitiveness, your wisdom, and your maturity, really, at age six, to have that kind of conception to look at the logical outworking of your prayer and what it would mean to live for a long time in this physical body. That’s quite—it shows how bright you were, I think, at that time. In certain respects, yeah. I think also it shows sort of a lack of imagination as well, that perhaps there could be some type of eternal life better than what we would ask for or imagine. Right. So, looking back, I can see, but I think that’s sort of—we all go through levels of questioning, and a lot of people think that questioning is the mature phase, and I think of questioning as the sophomoric phase. Like you’ve progressed past your freshman, and now you’re starting to question things, but after you question, you have to rebuild your own framework and decide what you believe. Because it’s always easy to be tearing down other people’s things. At some point, you have to start constructing your own belief system. And so I did start doing that as I got older, and when I was 12 or 13, I remember there was a big debate about whether the words “under God” should be taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance, and since I was an atheist, I said, “Yeah, I shouldn’t be made to say ‘under God,'” so I stopped saying “under God” when I did the Pledge of Allegiance and things like that. And it ended up being in our school newspaper in middle school. There was a debate section, and I didn’t actually write the article. I had another kid write it, and I edited it, but I ended up getting kind of into a fight of sorts with the—an argument, not a physical fist fight or something—with some of the boys in my class, and one of them actually threatened to come to my house and to shoot all of the atheists. Oh my! Okay. Yeah. So definitely an example of Christian charity. Yeah, I was going to say that’s not an example of Christian love for sure! Yeah. Yeah. So it was sort of a curiosity in that sense, because a lot of the people around me had been raised going to church or at least believing in God, and so there was some hostility there, and of course, I think I told my teacher, and they took care of it, and it wasn’t an actual… It’s funny, I wonder, 20 years later, if it would’ve been taking more seriously, him threatening something with a gun, than it was back then, but it was resolved reasonably well, but that sort of galvanized me a bit, and in high school, I would get into some arguments with friends, and actually, at one point, I brought a Bible to school with Post-it Notes in it where I had flagged the different contradictions, and I said, “What do you make of this?” And of course none of my particularly great answers because it wasn’t something that they had really studied or devoted themselves to, even if they were themselves religious or deeply religious. And so I went through high school—being an atheist was a pretty significant part of my identity, and I was always open to debate. In fact, some of them tried to debate me about creationism, and I even went and I found a book written by a creationist, and I read through the whole thing. I said, “I’ll debate you. I’ll give you a fair shot as I think about this.” And at the end of the day, I read it, and I just didn’t find it academically compelling, in terms of its arguments. And so then I ended up leaving and going to Harvard, and it was only when I went to Harvard that I finally met somebody who could start answering some of the questions that I was asking. So you really were pushing back. You were pushing back against Christianity but also, in a sense, were you justifying your own atheism in any regard? I know at a young age you were thinking logically about logical conclusions of the outworking of your worldview. Through high school, I know, because you were galvanized kind of against religion, and for good reason, really, were you looking more closely at your own atheism in terms of its own grounding? Like you said a minute ago, where it’s easy to kind of tear but it’s harder to build up or formulate your own belief system. I imagine, with your father being a philosophy professor—did you have these kind of discussions with him about what is atheism really? What does it mean to be an atheist? What are the logical implications of this worldview? For different things. Yeah. So we talked about it a little bit, and like I said, I would go with him to his classes, where he would review the different arguments for and against God, and he always had a lot of books that I would peek into and things like that. For me, I think the central sort of philosophical question that I had was less about God per se but more like what does it mean to be a good person? And what is morality? And that was the real sort of focus that I had in high school, trying to figure that out. And I was actually quite upset by it. I remember I read some of Ayn Rand’s work, and I found a lot of her material appealing in the sense that I had a strong belief that there was an objective right and wrong, but then I really felt that her philosophy didn’t hold together particularly well, and I was quite disturbed by this, and in school, we had to read…
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