Bart Ehrman's Personal Beliefs Interview

I'm Bart Ehrman I'm identify as both a humanist and an agnostic and are you are you openly agnostic what do you mean openly do people know it or do your family know am I in the closet ha ha ha yes I'm quite openly agnostic everybody knows it so just writing books about it means you're open well if anybody reads my books they know I'm an agnostic yeah now and I find it interesting having read most of your books how you talk about that you weren't always agnostic no I started out as a evangelical Christian I got interested in biblical studies because I was a I was actually a fundamentalist and as a late teenager and that's what got me interested in the Bible but as I developed my scholarship to graduate school I realized that my beliefs about the Bible were completely wrong that the Bible is not some kind of inerrant revelation from God and so for years I turned I had become a liberal Christian I still went to church I still believed in God but I was I didn't believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God but after many years of being a liberal Christian I finally became an agnostic for reasons unrelated to my scholarship reason having to do with why they're suffering in the world if there's a god who's in control I I have for years I thought about it I read what biblical authors said I read what theologian said I read about philosopher said I got to a point where I just didn't believe it anymore and so I I just acknowledge at one point then that I'm probably an agnostic and that's what I've been for maybe 15 or 16 years sounds like it was a very gradual process it was you know when some I've heard people say that I went from being that I went from being a fundamentalist of being an agnostic because of problems in the Bible it's completely wrong it was a very long process I was a very open-minded liberal Christian for many many years and it was really this problem of suffering that ended up creating the big issue for me that led me to be to acknowledge that I'm an agnostic it's very interesting being an agnostic scholar of religion in this talk I'd like to explore what it means for me to be one I think I'll begin by explaining what I mean by what I myself mean by this term that I'm using them we all use all the time the term agnostic because over the last 18 months or so I've come to think it means something different from what I used to think so what I used to think before I was an agnostic was that agnostics and atheists were two degrees of the same thing and when I first declared myself agnostic I was amazed at how militant both agnostics and atheists can be about their terms every agnostic I met thought that atheists were simply arrogant agnostics and every atheist thought that every agnostic was simply a wimpy atheist two degrees are the same thing what someone will just say I don't know the other will admit they do know and so that was that I have come to think that in fact they are not two degrees of the same thing there are two different kinds of thing that agnosticism has to do with epistemology what you know what you know and atheism has to do with belief what you believe I actually consider myself to be both an agnostic and an atheist I'm an agnostic because if somebody says to me is there a greater power in the universe my response is how the hell would I know I don't know so I'm an agnostic if somebody were to ask me do you believe in the God of the Bible do you believe in a God who interacts with the world who intervenes in the world who answers prayer do you believe in a supernatural divine being no I don't believe it so I don't believe it so I'm an atheist but I don't know címon agnostic and since I'm a scholar I prefer to emphasize knowledge rather than belief and so I tend to identify as an agnostic has your family was there any issues with coming out to them were they very religious did that bother them that you had given up your belief when I was an evangelical Christian most of my family converted to evangelical Christianity in my wake and so uh so when I when I left the Christian fold they did not leave with me and so that they're still there wondering where I went I think it you're the evangelical agnostic I guess yes that's right I I mean the thing is I don't I don't really believe you know when I was never angelical Christian I believed in converting everybody to my point of view because I thought if you didn't agree with me you were going to roast in hell and so I was very evangelistic I'm not I'm not evangelistic as an agnostic because I altom utley don't think that I mean it certainly doesn't matter for somebody's afterlife because they're I don't believe there isn't an after isn't afterlife and so and I'm not that interested in people converting to what I think what I'm interested in is getting people to be more thoughtful about whatever they believe or don't believe and so I'm not interested in converting anybody actually you talk about in your books how many people who become ministers and learn these same facts of the Bible seem reluctant to share that with their Congress congregations why do you think that is well pastors learn the kind of material I teach in seminaries of divinity schools if they go to a mainline denominational school if they go to a fundamentalist seminary of course they don't learn this unless they learn it in order to attack it or an evangelical school wouldn't teach this kind of material but but Lutheran Episcopalian Methodist Presbyterian seminaries teach this this kind of material and yet when the people who go through those that training become pastors they tend not to tell their congregations and I think it's because they're afraid to make waves they don't think that people will be a welcoming of it they don't think people are ready for it there's some issues of job security they they want to keep their job and so they don't want to ruffle too many feathers but I think it's too bad because churches have education programs and it's a pity that people aren't getting educated there are adult education programs in most churches but adults they don't actually get educated they sit around and talk about other issues but they don't talk about the things that really most people are interested in which is what what is one think about the Bible or what does one think about theology do you think though that they may feel that this may put too many doubts in people's minds yeah possible I think you know pastors tend not to be in the business of generating doubt professors at universities that is our business as professors because our goal is to get people to thank but but pastors generally don't see that as their as their goal and so they tend to shy away from these various issues that would cause problems for people but the result is it means that they've got parishioners who really don't know anything about what scholars are saying about the material that they're most interested in which i think is a real pity

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 239,334

Rating: 4.6288943 out of 5

Keywords: Scott Burdick, FFRF, Triangle Freethought Society, Bart Ehrman, Dawkins Foundation, Agnostic, Atheist, Bart D. Ehrman (Author), Belief (Quotation Subject), Interview

Id: BeFdhyuVyzI

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Thu May 08 2014