Adventist to atheist

 I did not begin my religious life by weighing arguments. I entered it by inheritance.

When I was seven or eight years old, my parents began taking us to a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church. Around the same time, some genuinely kind colporteurs sold my parents a collection of Bible-themed books—Uncle Arthur stories and similar material that framed faith as warm, moral, and trustworthy. Soon after, we attended a George Vandeman evangelistic series, ostensibly billed as an exploration of the wonders of the universe. It opened with striking images of stars and galaxies—cosmic awe carefully cultivated—before moving almost seamlessly to the conclusion: therefore, God.

I grew up entirely inside a young‑earth creationist framework. This was not a belief I later adopted; it was the intellectual atmosphere I breathed. Genesis was literal, the flood explained geology, and doubt was framed not as curiosity but as danger. I was baptised at sixteen. Adventism felt coherent, purposeful, and morally serious. In time, I trained as a nurse at Sydney Adventist Hospital. Far from moderating my beliefs, I became more fundamentalist in outlook. I leaned in.

After graduating, I worked at a small SDA hospital in Warburton. During this period I became particularly enthusiastic about the church’s health message and about Ellen G. White. I read widely and earnestly through her writings, taking seriously the claim that she functioned as a modern prophet. The Spirit of Prophecy was not an optional accessory in Adventism; it was structural.

Then came the Desmond Ford and Walter Rea material. What unsettled me was not simply that Ellen White had drawn from earlier authors—honest influence could have been acknowledged and discussed—but that material presented by the church as the result of divine visions (“I was shown…”) turned out to be nearly identical to existing sources. The problem was not inspiration; it was misrepresentation. Prophetic authority had been asserted where dependence and editing better explained the facts.

My confidence in the Spirit of Prophecy collapsed. More importantly, my trust in the church’s honesty collapsed with it. I could not continue attending a church that I believed was lying about its own foundations. Around 1983 I stepped away from institutional Adventism. Yet belief itself did not vanish. For the next twenty‑six years, until roughly 2009, I remained a young‑earth creationist Christian—minus Ellen White. In practical terms, I accepted about 26 of the church’s 28 fundamental beliefs.

I described this position as “Bible‑only.” In practice, however, it was Bible‑only as interpreted through a residual Adventist framework. Ellen White was gone, but many of the conclusions she had helped cement remained. The Sabbath, literal Genesis, and a tightly bounded view of doctrine still felt not merely plausible, but self‑evident. I had removed a prophet, not the interpretive lens.

From 1995 to 2002, I worked in Saudi Arabia. I am not sure this directly caused later changes in belief, but it undeniably altered my vantage point. I lived in a deeply pious religious society—Muslim rather than Christian. Most people I encountered were decent, kind, and ordinary. Yet I never regarded the Qur’an as divinely inspired, and I was not impressed by the small but real presence of religious fanatics. Religion, experienced from the outside, became comparative rather than assumed.

In September 2001, while travelling to a medical conference, I was in New York. I saw the first tower already smoking and then directly witnessed the impact of the second plane. I was too shocked to process it. After checking in at Newark Airport, we were told to evacuate and I was stranded in New Jersey for several days. As information emerged, it became clear this was terrorism. Over dinner in Niagara Falls, I said to others that I suspected Saudi‑linked extremists—bin Laden, the Taliban. This was not guesswork: while working in Saudi Arabia, a local had previously told me that the Taliban had large plans to strike America, though they did not know how or when. We had even treated Taliban members as patients.

I did not conclude from this that religion was false. I stored the data. Absolute certainty, I noted, could become lethal.

I was aware of the so‑called “New Atheists,” but I knew they were wrong. In 2008, I decided I should understand their arguments properly in order to refute them. I began with Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I felt guilty reading it. On the train, I hid it inside a false book cover so as not to advertise what I was doing.

The book did not change my beliefs. It did something more dangerous: it opened the door to questions. I tried to critique it, to find clear errors that would allow me to dismiss it entirely. I could not do so with confidence. What followed was an intense year‑long reading frenzy—around one hundred books, cover to cover—both for and against belief: apologetics, science, theology, and philosophy.

Curiously, the scientific material on evolution did not move me. A sufficiently powerful God could do anything. Within a young‑earth framework, scientists could simply be wrong: dinosaurs could have existed and drowned in Noah’s flood. Omnipotence functioned as an all‑purpose patch.

It was philosophy that began to generate real doubt. Questions about divine honesty and moral coherence pressed in. Why would an honest God mislead us about the nature of reality? How could an all‑good God drown innocent people? These were not emotional objections but moral ones. The problem was not explanatory power; it was ethical credibility.

The movement away from belief was mostly a slow burn, punctuated by a few key moments. The God Delusion cracked the door. Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great produced a moment I still remember vividly: I physically put the book down, for the first time seriously entertaining the possibility that God might not exist at all.

Roughly a year later, and many books later, I was on a plane about to leave Melbourne for Sydney for a medical conference. As I had done on perhaps a hundred previous flights, I was about to pray silently. I could not. Speaking to someone—or something—that probably was not there felt wrong. Somewhere between take‑off and being airborne, I realised that I was now an atheist. The recognition was frightening. Significant inner turmoil followed.

After that, I remained open—agnostic atheist, for the pedants—and continued reading both for and against belief at roughly the same pace for the next decade. I briefly considered attending the Melbourne‑based Global Atheist Convention, but it did not feel right. They were not my people. The Christians were. Belief had changed before belonging did.

Eventually, I processed the fact that although I was no longer a Christian myself, my social and cultural gravity had not yet caught up. By 2012, I attended the Global Atheist Convention, and at that point wild horses could not have kept me away. I became openly—and at times loudly—atheist.

With time, that intensity softened. I now see progressive theists less as opponents and more as allies on shared, issue‑driven concerns. I did not lose faith because I wanted fewer constraints, but because honesty eventually mattered more than belonging. The journey from Adventism to atheism was not a rejection of meaning, morality, or community, but a refusal to continue asserting certainty where none was warranted.

I no longer believe in God. But I remain interested in how belief functions—for good and for harm—and in working alongside anyone, theist or not, who is willing to ground their convictions in evidence, compassion, and intellectual humility.