It was hard to be in Morocco without constantly thinking of the Bible, and all the Biblical stories from my childhood. This is probably because so many cinematic biblical dramas have been filmed here over the years, or at the very least, have relied heavily on the Moroccan aesthetic for their set design. So, I figured this photo I took at sunset in the High Atlas Mountains, with all these dramatic, otherworldly clouds, was as good a place as any for me to discuss....atheism.

Yep, it's your lucky day! I'm finally ready to mansplain atheism and agnosticism to you.

I have nothing against atheists. In fact, I briefly believed myself to be one. But for me it turned out that atheism was simply the gateway drug to agnosticism, it was just an airport rather than a destination.

Atheism is where you start when you realize that organized religion is problematic and doesn’t have the same appeal to you that it does for most other people. However, it's a little too far in the opposite direction. To claim there is no God and you somehow know this to be true— that seems just as close minded and unprovable as the faith-based religions I was trying to get away from.

I liken atheism to being at an airport, but you don’t have a ticket to anywhere. You just get to watch all the other people take off on their philosophical journeys, watch other people follow various teachings and religions, wherever they might lead... but you yourself are stuck, and get to go nowhere. No adventurous exploration for you! You’re closed off to possibilities, to experimentation, you’re stuck at the airport.

And who wants to be stuck at an airport?

I am too filled with curiosity and wonderment, and too constantly intrigued by what other people believe, to stay confined behind such a suffocating premise as atheism.

Besides. I can no more prove that God doesn’t exist than a religious fanatic can prove that their God does.

And yet, if push came to shove, and I was forced to choose either God or no God, I would always vote in favor of the latter. Why? Because if you decide there is a God, that’s only the beginning: now you have to decide who or what that God is.

And to me, every God seems just as made up and preposterous as the next.

I was raised Christian and even attended Christian school for many, many, years of my life, but when I first went to study overseas, one of the first epiphanies I had was that what I’d been taught to call “mythology” by my Christian teachers for all those years, was actually just another civilization’s religion. I had been taught that our Christian beliefs were real, while other peoples’ beliefs were fake, that our Christianity was a religion, while what other people believed was mere mythology.

I vividly remember one of my teachers at Dallas Christian School having quite a laugh with us about how silly the ancient Greeks were for thinking that Zeus threw lighting bolts, only to come back later that very same day and tell us in 7th period Bible class the story of how our God got mad and turned a lady into a pillar of salt.

He did this with a totally straight face, and when I confronted him, he claimed to be unable to see the contradiction. What I found even more maddening, was that none of the other students seemed to be bothered by this duplicity either! Was I the only one that could see how our Christian religion was no different from Greek mythology, and certainly just as ridiculous and laughable?

While studying in Italy, I found that there were even people in that very study abroad program with me— other college kids my age, and ones that seemed so smart to me in all other regards— that couldn’t see the similarities between their Christian religions and the Roman gods of antiquity that we were learning about.

“Can’t you see that your God is just as capriccios, magical, and made up as the ones here in this pantheon?” I’d ask. The response was always some version of, “I can’t help it, Ryan, that’s just what I believe.”

Ugh. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It’s maddening!

When I hear about people fighting over religion, and which faction is ultimately “right,” I have never been able to see how that is any different from when I hear people arguing about which cinematic universe is better, Marvel or DC.

Well of course, no one is “right,” or “wrong,” in either discussion, it just comes down to which one you happen to prefer. It’s very frustrating that many people can’t or won’t allow themselves to see it this way. The major difference of course, is that the comic book arguments end in snarky online comments and maybe some wounded egos, and the religious arguments in bombs and wars and terrorism and bloodshed.

With all these strong anti-religious feelings that I have, by now I bet you’re wondering what could have possibly made me want to ever leave the airport of atheism and finally board that agnostic plane? Well, it was the most compelling argument for the existence of a God that I had ever heard, and it remains the most compelling to this day. It is what I call the Watchmaker Theory, and even though it was born out of philosophy and goes by many other, loftier, more academic names, I am going to tell it my own words, the way that it was first explained to me.

Put very simply, if you were to break open a watch (and for the sake of this experiment, go ahead and picture a gorgeous, antique, old-timey watch) and look inside of it, at all the complex, interlocking gears and cranks, all turning with such purpose and synchronicity, would you ever be so foolish as to think that such a machine happened by accident? That it just materialized into being without a design or a designer? Do not all signs point to the idea that the watch was the product of a Creator? Does not the very existence of the watch imply the existence of a watchMAKER?

Obviously, by now you can probably see where this is going, but ride it out with me anyway.

Our world, and by extension, The Universe, is certainly every bit as complicated and intricately purposeful as a watch, with exponentially more moving parts and an infinite number of complexities. Therefore, just like with the watch, why would we ever believe that it happened by happenstance? Why would we not look at the precision and complexity of the world around us, and assume the existence of a Creator?

When I heard that argument and looked at the world in that way, suddenly atheism seemed just as silly as religion, and certainly just as obtuse. Ever since, I have been open to the possibility that some one or some thing contrived our world and everything in it. We may never know who or what that being is, but I am at least open to the possibility that such a being could exist, I'm open to the idea of a Creator.

To me, I have also just summed up for you a very simplified explanation of what it means to be agnostic. It just means that you are open to possibilities, and that until something is proven, nothing is off the table.

Agnosticism is the willingness to leave the airport and get on a plane, even if you are uncertain exactly where that plane is going or how far that journey might take you.

I know one thing though— it’s headed in a complexly different direction than atheism.

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Click HERE to read about how God and an alcoholic created the Corona Virus together.