Short answer: apologist Alycia Wood says people rarely leave over one fact. After eight years in full-time apologetics, she has heard the same nine reasons surface again and again, from religion is for non-thinkers to the problem of evil, and she has found that atheism does not actually answer the hardest of them any better. The honest move is to engage each reason directly, not to dodge it.
Why Did the Culture Shift From Just Believe to Prove It?
Wood frames the bigger trend first. The culture moved from here is a Bible, believe it, to why should I believe this, and what is actually true. Many people who grew up in church can name Jesus' disciples without hesitation but have never worked out why Christianity is true. When the real questions finally land, often in college or after a personal crisis, they discover they have no foundation under the beliefs they inherited, and they start to self-deconstruct. This is the frame for everything that follows: most people who leave were never actually arguing against a thought-through faith. They were leaving an unexamined one.
Does Science Disprove God, or Just Explain Mechanisms?
The single biggest reason Wood hears, by far, is the conviction that religion is for non-thinkers, that modern science has simply outgrown the need for God. She does not retreat from science. She marks its limits instead. Science can put a chimp in a spaceship, she says, but it cannot tell us whether we should. It explains how things work. It was never built to settle whether something is right or wrong, or what we owe each other.
Science can't determine morality.
The obvious pushback is that we should only believe what science can verify. Wood's answer is that nobody actually lives that way. You do not DNA-test your mother to confirm she is your mother, and no one calls that irrational. We hold all kinds of true beliefs without running an experiment first. Demanding scientific proof specifically for God, while accepting ordinary trust everywhere else in life, is a standard nobody applies consistently.
Doesn't the Church's History of Moral Failure, Especially Slavery, Disqualify Its Claim to Goodness?
Wood does not soften this one. The church's record on slavery has to be owned, not defended or explained away. But she presses a question back that deconstruction narratives usually skip: does atheism actually do better on morality once you remove God from the picture entirely? Every moral system rests on some source. Christians ground theirs in the unchanging character of God. Atheism's source shifts with culture and consensus, and Wood shows how a popular secular rule like reduce suffering, increase wellbeing can be bent to justify slavery or eugenics just as easily as it can be used to oppose them.
She points to the slave Bible, the edited text used to control enslaved people, as proof of where the real fault lies. The problem was the people who cut Scripture down to serve their interests, not Christianity itself, because the whole Bible read straight is exactly what drove William Wilberforce toward abolition. The same book convicted the oppressor and freed the oppressed, depending on whether it was read honestly or weaponized.
If the Church Drove the Men Out, Doesn't That Make the Case Against It Stronger?
Wood raises a less commonly discussed angle: as men leave the church, families often follow them out the door, and you cannot easily teach a child to trust a loving heavenly Father if they have never had a present earthly one. She draws on fatherlessness research from the UK and US and argues, pointedly, that a church cannot disciple the next generation effectively while functionally leaving its men out of the work.
This complicates the deconversion narrative in a useful way. Some people leave believing they are rejecting Christianity on principle, when what they actually experienced was a church that failed to model the relationships it preached about. That is a real indictment of how the church functioned. It is not, on its own, evidence that the claims of Christianity are false.
Is Christianity Just Outdated for a Modern World?
The questions Christianity claims to answer, where we came from, what gives life meaning, what makes a human being valuable, what counts as right and wrong, are not relics from an earlier age. People are still asking every one of them, including the people who think they have left religion behind. Wood's image: a painting's worth is tied to whose name is on it. Human worth, in her framing, is tied to the Creator whose name is on us.
The value of creation is tied up in its creator.
Does Leaving Over the Problem of Evil Actually Solve Anything?
This is where Wood's argument gets its sharpest edge. No answer to suffering, she insists, should ever make a person feel okay with suffering. The ache itself is appropriate and should not be argued away. But she presses the deconversion logic on its own terms: walking away from God does not make the pain disappear. It only changes what kind of universe you are suffering inside.
There's no answer to the problem of pain or suffering or evil that anybody can give you that should ever make you feel okay with pain and suffering and evil.
An atheistic universe, by its own account, does not care about anyone's pain, and an outcome-based morality built without God can struggle to call even a clear assault simply wrong in any absolute sense. Leaving Christianity over evil does not dissolve the question of evil. It just trades one answer for a colder one.
What About People Who Leave Over Problems With the Bible Itself?
Wood's counsel here is practical rather than defensive. Read difficult passages in their actual ancient context, ask why a text is addressing what it addresses, and read the whole passage instead of a single verse pulled off a meme or a Google search. And whatever specific issues remain after that honest reading, three historical claims still have to be reckoned with on their own evidence, outside the Bible entirely: Jesus lived, Jesus died, and something happened three days later that changed the trajectory of his followers.
Doesn't Religion Cause Most of the World's Violence?
Wood cites physicist Steven Weinberg's line that for good people to do evil things takes religion, then answers it directly with philosopher David Berlinski's rebuttal: poison gas, eugenics, and nuclear weapons did not come out of the Vatican. She lists twentieth-century death tolls, most of them carried out under explicitly secular regimes, and points to the Princess Alice experiments, in which children behaved more honestly when they believed someone unseen was watching. Her conclusion is that removing accountability, not removing religion, is what tends to free the worst impulses in people.
Isn't Faith Just Believing Without Evidence?
Wood points to Doubting Thomas in John 20. Jesus does not scold him for wanting proof. He gives the evidence first, put your finger here, and only then calls him to believe. New Testament faith, in her reading, is trust grounded in evidence presented, not eyes shut against it. If faith were meant to be blind, she notes dryly, Jesus got the order backward.
So What Does Atheism Actually Offer Instead?
Wood doubts anyone is truly without worship. Everyone gives themselves to something, and for many atheists, she argues, that something is science itself, treated less like a method and more like an object of devotion. Borrowing Dallas Willard's answer to why he follows Jesus, who else did you have in mind, she turns the question back on the atheist directly: what alternative is actually capable of lifting someone off a bed of despair with a living hope, rather than a coping mechanism dressed up as one?
Is There a Pattern Underneath All Nine Reasons?
Looking back across the list, a shape emerges that Wood does not always spell out directly but that holds the whole talk together. Almost none of the nine reasons are actually arguments against the existence of God. Most of them are objections to how Christians have behaved, how the Bible has been mishandled, or how the faith has been taught poorly. That distinction matters enormously. It means the realistic fix for a lot of deconversion is not a better proof of God's existence. It is better discipleship, more honest history, and Christians willing to say I don't know rather than bluffing their way through a question.
This also means the church bears real responsibility here, not just the people who leave. If someone walks away because no one ever taught them why they believe what they say they believe, that is not primarily a failure of their will or their intellect. It is a failure of discipleship that happened well before the moment they walked out the door.
Quick Answers
Has science replaced God? No. Science explains how, not whether we should, and cannot settle morality or meaning. We also hold many true beliefs, Wood notes, without scientific proof.
Where does right and wrong come from without God? Wood argues every morality needs a source. Christians root theirs in God's unchanging character; atheism's source shifts and can be bent to justify the very evils it condemns.
Is religion the cause of most wars? No. Wood points to a long list of twentieth-century atrocities, most carried out apart from religion, and argues lost accountability is the deeper cause.
Is Christian faith blind? No. In John 20, Jesus offers evidence first, then asks for belief. New Testament faith is evidence-based trust.
Does atheism solve the problem of evil? No. It removes God from the picture but leaves the suffering exactly where it was, with a colder explanation.
Is leaving the faith always an intellectual decision? No. Wood is direct that for some people it is simply the pull of the world, described in 1 John 2:16, and not a conclusion reached through careful reasoning at all.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear Alycia Wood's full session, Engaging Atheism, from the Jude 3 Project 2022 Pastors and Leaders Conference. Alycia Wood is a Christian apologist who has spent eight years in full-time apologetics ministry.