Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

by Mike McHargue

This is why belief in God is so robust in the minds of many Christians. God is not something we believe in as much as something we feel and experience—and this is why the faithful and the skeptical find it so difficult to understand one another. In the brains of atheists, God is a noun, a noun no more real than tooth fairy or unicorn. But believers have a rich neurological network that encapsulates God through feelings and experiences that are difficult to articulate with mere language.

This is one reason we think of rational people as cold, and why people often seem unreasonable when they’re angry or sad. It takes too much energy to be analytical and angry at the same time. Your brain doesn’t have the resources to pull it off.

There’s a study that says 42 percent of Americans will undergo a faith transition at some point in their lives. They’ll leave the tradition they are a part of and move on. This statistic must mean that a lot of people in churches are wearing masks. They feel alone, but, really, they aren’t. There are others wearing masks, too. Behind those disguises, they just can’t find one another. Our churches will never be healthy as long as those experiencing doubt feel they have to hide. In too many churches, the response to doubt and tough questions is shaming, passive rejection, or probes about a possible “sin problem” in the questioner. All this reaction does is push the doubting away from their faith. It has to stop. Or that 42 percent will never come back.

Rob continued. “You are here, and there is something in you that doesn’t go away even when you become an atheist. I say, let’s all celebrate that. There’s no need to define it further—our words will just screw it up. I think that God, if there is a God, doesn’t ask you for anything more than that. I really believe that God is that which we can’t stop talking about, and that God is what happens when our words fail. “Both of those things happen at the same time,” he said. “You just told me that you don’t tell anyone about your doubts, because you don’t want to hurt their faith. That’s sacred and beautiful. You’re already living a Jesus life, so let’s just celebrate that.”

If you’re a Christian who wonders what to do with someone who’s in doubt, consider these words carefully: Love and grace speak loudly. The first and best response to someone whose faith is unraveling is a hug. Apologetics aren’t helpful. Neither are Scripture references. The first thing a hurting person needs is to know they’re not alone. My path back to God was paved with grace by those who received my doubt in love.

But I’ve learned that the need for certainty is an addiction we can kick—that it’s possible to have faith, and even follow Christ, without needing to defend historical Christianity like a doctoral thesis. We can approach beliefs not as gems to be mined from the earth and protected with clenched fists, but as butterflies that land on an open hand—as gifts to enjoy but not possess.

When you experience God as being primarily angry, this experience shows up in your brain. God becomes highly associated with activity in the amygdala. You have more stress, and you anger more easily. It becomes difficult for you to forgive yourself or others, and you become fearful or angry toward those who don’t think, look, or act like you.

The Loving God affects the brain in ways that are remarkably different from the Angry God. People who focus on God’s love develop thicker, richer gray matter in their prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. This development offers them better focus, concentration, compassion, and empathy. They have lower stress levels and lower blood pressure, and it’s easier for them to forgive themselves and others. Over time, they even show less activity in the amygdala. Even more, people who believe that God is loving will eventually develop a characteristic asymmetry in the activity of their thalamus. When that happens, God’s love becomes implanted in their sense of identity, and they begin to see the world as being basically safe. This not only allows the believer to experience peace—it also elevates her capacity to take risks for the sake of others. For those who know the Loving God, the risk of being hurt in relationships is less important, because God’s love will transcend that hurt.

Over time, this focus on analytical thinking at the expense of affectionate activity reshapes the neurological image we hold of our partner. Our prefrontal cortex does its best to solve the puzzle, but in doing so it weakens the involvement of the more emotional parts of our brain that fire when we think of the one we love. In this way, you can actually recondition your brain to stop experiencing love for your partner. Is it any wonder, then, that people wake up one day and say, “I just don’t feel the love anymore”?

neurotheology treats doubt as a neurological condition and would instead encourage people to imagine any God they can accept, and then pray or meditate on that God, in order to reorient the person’s neurological image of God back toward the experiential parts of the brain.

These days, my intercessory prayers are an act of surrender—a way to voice my hopes and my hopelessness, my power to act and my powerlessness. When I pray for things I hope for, I am searching for ways I can act to make a situation better. When I pray in situations I find hopeless, I’m searching for that redemptive perspective.

the study’s main finding was that prayer and meditation are so similar in the brain that we can describe prayer as a type of meditation. And this should be encouraging, because research shows that meditation is one of the best things you can do for your brain—right up there with reading and physical exercise. Neuroscientists have found that people who pray regularly have thicker gray matter in their prefrontal cortex (that’s your brain’s CEO, responsible for focus and willpower) and their anterior cingulate cortex (the part of your brain responsible for compassion and empathy). The heightened activity in these key parts of the brain also reduces the responsiveness of the amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for fear and anger). You could almost say that consistent meditation makes you a better person—more focused, more compassionate, and less likely to be angry or frightened.

When you believe God loves you and loves others, it’s easier to take risks and to forgive people. It’s not enough to simply believe in God, because only prayer and meditation will turn that belief into a neural network that changes your outlook and behavior.

God’s perspective has to encompass space-time not as a series of moments, as we see them, but as an interconnected set of coordinates that always exists. But when I think about God in this light, I am faced with something so incomprehensible that such words as being, consciousness, and free will become nonsensical. Even discounting more mind-bending possibilities, such as the extra-spatial dimensions of string theory or the additional “universes” described in different multiverse theories, God’s perspective is so foreign to me that I can barely call it a perspective at all. But this is incredibly comforting. Because in contrast to God’s mystery, Jesus makes sense. The Christian idea of incarnation—God in the form of a human—makes this “foreign” God approachable. Jesus gives God a face, a language, and stories we can understand. If there’s one thing I’ve come to believe about the hand-wringing over atonement theory, it’s that it misses the value of Jesus Christ. The value of Jesus Christ is in our admirable but flawed attempts to understand divinity from a reference frame we can approach. It’s in a God we can know, a God who walks with us, talks with us, and can empathize with our pain.