One data point: I took the first few chapters of Genesis literally until age 27. I also went through college as a physics major. I’m sure I embarrassed myself i

One data point: I took the first few chapters of Genesis literally until age 27. I also went through college as a physics major. I’m sure I embarrassed myself in debates with my atheist lab partner. I loved science from when I was really young, read every book in my school library’s J523/Astronomy section, including Cosmos in 3rd grade. But I also went to church every week with my family, read through the entire Bible in middle school, and believed that my faith would crumble and I’d go to hell if I ever gave up the belief that the Bible was 100% true and literal. I also chose to keep emotional distance from non-Christian friends. They might lead me astray. I remember an exchange with my mom (who was a teacher, mostly at Lutheran schools) during a car ride when I was maybe 6 or 7. I was excitedly talking about the big bang or something, and she said “yes, but we know from the Bible that the earth is 6,000 years old, right?” “Yes,” I answered, and in that moment I believed it. I didn’t feel conflicted: the Bible must be true, so someday I’d figure out in what sense the science was true too. As I got older, I sustained this by basically hand-waving away the less intuitive explanations for an old earth. There are plenty of books out there for helping people do just that. Maybe the speed of life was different in the past. What can we really say with certainty about evolution? That kind of thing. The beginning of the end was the day I learned about dendrochronology: tree rings. They’re too simple to hand-wave away. Soon after, I lost my faith. Another huge area of cognitive dissonance: we prayed all the time, we talked about “miracles”, but I never heard any really credible evidence for one. It took some serious introspection, while still a Christian, to discern whether I actually believed in them or not.