We Agnostics and Me

Why Bill W.’s Arguments for God Still Challenge—and Inspire—My Sobriety

Each week at my Monday Night Big Book meeting, we read a chapter from the first 164 pages—plus the Roman numerals in the first three weeks—and then a story from the back on the last week.

This week was We Agnostics.

And man, it rubbed me the wrong way.

Really wrong. I got pissed. Typical alcoholic—I found myself with a fresh resentment.

Things started out fine. Bill tried to reach the scientific thinker, to help them get past their prejudices against God. He begins with this:

“The practical individual of today is a stickler for facts and results. Nevertheless, the twentieth century readily accepts theories of all kinds, provided they are firmly grounded in fact.”

I’m with you so far, Bill. Then he continues:

“We have numerous theories, for example, about electricity.”

We also have many facts. Even in the 1930s, we knew that spinning turbines produce electricity. It’s sent via high-voltage power lines to reduce energy loss and stepped down through transformers so it can be safely used in homes.

Bill continues:

“Everybody believes them without a murmur of doubt. Why this ready acceptance? Simply because it is impossible to explain what we see, feel, direct and use, without a reasonable assumption as a starting point.”

Then comes the pivot:

“The prosaic steel girder is a mass of electrons whirling around each other at incredible speed... When, however, the perfectly logical assumption is suggested that underneath the material world and life as we see it, there is an All Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence, right there our perverse streak comes to the surface and we laboriously set out to convince ourselves it isn’t so.”

Here’s where he loses me.

Bill builds a straw man. He argues for a power greater than ourselves by saying: you accept electricity and ions, but you don’t accept God. You can’t see either, but you trust one because of science.

Here’s the problem: electricity can be measured. I can touch a nine-volt battery to my tongue and feel the jolt. There’s no voltmeter for God. These are not the same kind of belief.

I’m not here to say Bill is wrong because God doesn’t exist. I just think he could have made a stronger argument. He wanted to bring the suffering alcoholic to a higher power—and in doing so, he sometimes stretched logic to get them there.

Bill was a salesman. He told parables, not history. If you’re looking for a precise historical account of early AA, you won’t find it in the Big Book. Even Ebby Thatcher said that Bill’s recollection of their famous meeting didn’t match his own. Bill bent the truth in the service of helping another alcoholic get sober.

And maybe that’s the point. Bill had a singleness of purpose: get the drunk to sobriety, by any means necessary. Maybe a little embellishment was the cost of carrying the message.

I think Bill was genuine in his faith and in his desire to help others. My issue is that sometimes it feels like an ends-justify-the-means approach to God. He jumps between reason and faith, mixing the two in ways that don’t always hold up.

Still, he gets something so right with that quote often (wrongly) attributed to Herbert Spencer:

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

I use that quote all the time. It reminds me to keep an open mind. I wish that’s where Bill had stayed focused—not on Columbus sailing off to disprove a flat Earth or on invisible electricity, but on the importance of humility and curiosity. We can’t prove God, and we can’t disprove God. The key is to find your concept of a higher power—as long as that higher power isn’t you.

I am an agnostic. I love evidence-based science. I struggle with believing what I can’t prove, and I overthink everything. My power greater than myself is service to others. If there’s something that would help someone else that I don’t want to do, that’s my cue to do it.

I try to live by Maya Angelou’s words:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I want to leave people a little lighter than I found them. That’s enough divinity for me.

Maybe belief doesn’t have to mean certainty. Maybe faith is just staying curious enough to admit you don’t know—but you’re still willing to help someone else along the way.

That’s where I find my spirituality today.

What do you think? If you have a strong belief in God, I’d love to hear how you see it. If you don’t, I want to hear from you too. I’m open to your arguments—no contempt before investigation.