I was chatting with an old friend from high school last night. Neither of us are still in the church, but when I told him that I’m an atheist his response was, “Wow, you went from one extreme to the other.”

My response was simple. I studied theology for five years. Unless you go through the whole process with your head in the sand, you will see all the holes in Christian theology. If anything I’m surprised anybody makes it through a seminary education with their faith intact.

The last time we’d talked I was in college. I had lots of doubts, but for the most part I kept those to myself. To someone who doesn’t know the long process that went into it, the years of struggling with doubt and the search for meaning and understanding after losing faith, it can seem like it had been a binary switch.

In my study I did not reject Adventist doctrine, I rejected the foundational core of Christianity. Once I had gained a basic understanding of natural selection I no longer needed a god of the gaps and within six months of leaving the seminary I was an atheist.