Illuminating Insight: My Long Journey Through Faith Deconstruction

Denial, anger, bargaining, and the slow rebuilding of belief

Mar 22, 2026

A Grief Illuminated

A friend and I were sitting over coffee, talking about the deconstruction of faith. At one point he asked a simple question: Does deconstruction always destroy faith?

I used to believe that questioning my faith would eventually destroy it. My own journey suggests a different answer.

For some, deconstruction ends in the collapse of belief. For others, it becomes the beginning of reconstruction, a deeper, more thoughtful faith.

Deconstruction is rarely quick or easy. In my case, it took nearly a lifetime.

It is a slow, sometimes painful process of examining what we believe and why—gathering information, evaluating ideas, and wrestling with tensions that do not resolve easily.

As last week’s Book Portrait noted, the tools of critical thinking are essential. In my own life, reading and wise mentors became part of the intellectual and spiritual pathway that guided a lifelong journey of questioning and discovery.

But this journey is not only intellectual or spiritual; it is also emotional. Deconstruction often involves grief, the grief of letting go of familiar beliefs or realizing how much we once accepted without question.

Psychologists sometimes describe grief through the cycle known as DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These stages do not unfold neatly or only once. They recur as we process loss and change.

My effort to reconcile what I learned about the natural world with my Christian faith unfolded through that cycle on a lifelong scale.

I share this journey not because it is unique, but because many others walk similar paths. The source of grief may differ, but the process is often the same. I hope illuminating that process offers understanding and perhaps hope to those in the midst of it.

Here is how that journey unfolded.

Denial (1951-1969)

I was raised in a conservative Christian community where the Bible was the final authority for life, read as literal history and science. As a young person, I accepted without question a young earth and the Genesis creation account as a straightforward description of how the world began. I did not know other interpretations existed.

As I grew into a curious teenager and began studying chemistry and physics, questions surfaced. I was fortunate to have parents who encouraged curiosity and independent thinking.

I still remember the first time a physics experiment surprised me. My father, my high school physics teacher, had us perform the double-slit experiment, showing that light behaves as both a wave and a particle. The results did not match what my intuition expected.

It was a brief moment, but it left a lasting impression: the world does not always behave the way we assume.

Years later, that realization grew into a larger struggle between what I had been taught about creation and what I was learning about the natural world.

My parents could not answer every question, but their example in valuing learning, humility, curiosity, and honesty gave me a foundation for the journey ahead.

Still, when I encountered evidence that the universe might be billions of years old, my instinct was denial. I had been taught that evolution was “only a theory,” easily dismissed as a secular explanation. My faith felt too certain, too complete, to make room for those ideas.

Anger (1970-1990)

When I began my undergraduate studies in Computer Science, I was surrounded by ideas that challenged both my worldview and my understanding of the natural world. My physics courses opened deeper, more rigorous ways of thinking about the universe.

Generations of scientists had devoted their lives to studying the natural world, and their findings pointed to a universe billions of years old. Within that framework, a young earth became difficult to sustain.

As I accepted this, my emotions shifted from denial to anger. I felt a growing frustration, almost a sense of betrayal, that the version of reality I had inherited might not be true.

At the same time, I found myself facing an unsettling question: if the scientific account of the universe was accurate, where did that leave the Bible? And conversely, if the Bible was mistaken about the natural world, could it still be trusted? For a while, I couldn’t imagine how these two ways of understanding reality could ever be brought together.

The next stage resembled what psychologists call bargaining—the search for a compromise that allows both worlds to remain intact.

Bargaining (1990-1999)

Although I never studied biology formally until my graduate work in 2010, I became fascinated by the study of life and the growing evidence for evolution. That fascination deepened when I discovered that the machinery of life can be understood in computational terms: DNA and proteins as sequences of information.

Around the same time, the Human Genome Project was underway, and I read extensively about efforts to decode the human genome.

Yet the complexity of this biological world unsettled me. I struggled to accept that the beauty and organization of life could arise entirely through natural processes. My instincts told me something more must be involved.

In trying to hold these tensions together, I found the Intelligent Design movement, which accepted deep geological time and limited forms of evolution, and offered a workable compromise. The bargain that some biological complexities required direct divine intervention allowed me to accept much of the scientific evidence while preserving a clear role for God in the story of life.

For a time, that felt satisfying.

Depression (2000-2006)

Over time, it became clear that Intelligent Design could not answer the questions it claimed to solve. As biology advanced, many of its “mysteries” found natural explanations. The movement lost credibility, not only in the scientific community but among many thoughtful people of faith.

This realization was deeply disappointing. The compromise I had adopted no longer held.

I turned more intensely to reading and study, searching for a more coherent understanding, hoping that deeper exploration might relieve my depression.

Acceptance (2006-present)

During that period of discouragement, I began discovering scientists who were also Christians and had walked a similar path. They wrote about how the wonder revealed by modern science could coexist with a faithful commitment to Scripture.

Authors such as Darrel Falk and Francis Collins showed that scientific discovery could deepen, not diminish, faith.

Later, I encountered biblical scholars engaging these questions from within Scripture itself. Writers such as John H. Walton helped me see that many tensions arose from expecting the Bible to answer scientific questions it was never intended to address.

Gradually, this opened a different way of understanding creation.

If God is truly God, then God can create a universe capable of developing life through the natural processes we observe, including evolution.

I did not abandon belief in design. I moved beyond Intelligent Design as a theory and came to accept an intelligent Creator who works through the laws and processes woven into creation itself.

For the first time, I no longer felt forced to choose between intellectual honesty and faith.

Science still contains unanswered questions—the origin of life, for example—but those mysteries no longer feel threatening. Just as we accept limits to our understanding of God’s activity, we can accept limits to our understanding of creation.

Faith has always made room for mystery.

Reflection

Looking back, deconstruction was not the destruction of faith I once feared. It became a long, often painful path toward a faith that could withstand honest questions and new knowledge.

Many believers quietly walk this path, often feeling alone. For those in that place, the journey may feel uncertain, but it is not necessarily a road away from God.

“What I once feared would destroy my faith became the path by which it grew up.”

Sometimes the path through doubt and questioning is not the end of faith. Sometimes it is simply the path by which faith grows up.

Thank you for reading February’s Illuminating Insight!

New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis: Advances in the Origins Debate (John Walton 2025)
The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Ryan Burge 2023)
Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America
(Russell Moore 2023)
Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ (Scot McKnight 2024)

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