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

by Mike McHargue

So, do I think it’s OK not to know what you believe and still be a part of the Church? Heck, yeah. In fact, I think that’s exactly what following Jesus is about.

Four in ten Americans believe that God created Earth with His own hands fewer than 10,000 years ago. Three in ten believe that the universe is billions of years old and that life developed via evolution without any intervention from any god.

Many children express interest in salvation right around the time they’re old enough to grasp this concept of eternal torment. Some of my friends remember having nightmares in which their “unsaved” friends roasted in fiery pits while they looked down from heaven’s paradise.

I was fortunate to grow up in a congregation that focused on the hope of salvation—a message that was more carrot than stick.

Seven was a big year for me. I met Jesus, who saved my soul, and computers, which saved my life.

In many ways, our pain and our way of coping with it define who we are. These experiences shape us and mold us, for better and for worse. They can compel us to help others or drive us to numb the pain in whatever way we can.

People are down on Evangelicalism these days, but even my earliest years of life showed me that Evangelical churches are great at doing a whole lot of important things. They provide community, comfort, and stability. When an active member of an Evangelical church dies, the family of the departed receives immense support during their grieving. Dealing with the influx of casseroles and baked hams delivered to the homes of the bereaved can become a logistical issue, and their grass is mowed as if by elves.

I grew up in a household that was straight out of a 1960s sitcom. Dad made the money, Mom kept the house running, and my younger sister, Melissa, and I fought over issues of great importance, such as whose turn it was to take a bath first.

I had always thought joy meant the minimization of suffering. I hated to feel bad. I’ve always had a naturally sanguine disposition, but this is at least in part because I can go to pretty unhealthy lengths to keep the boat from rocking.

It felt good to be in control again.

Don’t read that wrong. Stratton wasn’t saying that God caused my dad to have an affair. He was saying that God was going to use it anyway.

People “solve” the problem of evil in different ways. Skeptics solve it by eliminating God.

Believers, on the other hand, tend to see evil as the result of humanity’s free will.

Skeptics say that’s all rubbish, that if parents stood by in the name of free will and watched as one of their children strangled another of their children, those parents would go to prison. This is a really good point, and one for which I’ve never heard a good answer.

But reading the whole Bible didn’t help. In fact, it made things worse.

Genesis says we were formed from dust, but cosmology tells us that you don’t get dust—unless you have stars first. Without dust, you don’t have the material to make trees or humans. There were no trees in our universe before there were stars.

The Bible is perfect, inerrant, and infallible. It is free of contradictions. Genesis 1 says that God made plants, then animals, then people. Genesis 2 says that God made Adam, then plants and animals, and finally, Eve.

My stomach turned cold, and my face felt flushed as I pondered an idea that troubled me deeply: It’s one thing for the Bible to contradict science, but it’s something else entirely for the Bible to contradict itself.

Every spiritual leader I knew had told me that the Bible was without error or contradiction. My parents’ marriage depended on this core truth, as did my faith.

I looked up the opinions of several apologists, and their answers to the Genesis 1 and 2 problem were consistent: Genesis 1 is about how the world was made, while Genesis 2 is about the sixth day of creation and how God made the Garden of Eden.

His ways are not my ways. His thoughts are not my thoughts… After all, it’s right there, in the Bible. Who was I to challenge my Maker for His artistic choices? I took some time to pray and apologize to God. I asked Him to help me with my pride.

It was right there, in black and white. God ordered His people to commit genocide. The same God who “so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son” ordered soldiers to kill infants and burn innocent animals so that His chosen people could have their own land. This was not the loving God I knew. This God was terrifying and brutal. How had I missed all this before?

There was no way this book was inerrant. Forget inerrant—this book seemed downright immoral.

There was no way I could voice these kinds of objections in church. Baptists call themselves “people of the book,” and questioning the Bible’s authority is tantamount to treason.

Stratton challenged me to read a book called Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. It was written by Rob Bell, a pastor who had started a big church in Michigan.

It was like a breath of fresh air. I realized that my approach to God and His Word was static and confining, like leaving a toy in its box to display on a shelf instead of enjoying it as it was meant to be. I felt closer to God and less afraid of what I was reading in the Bible. The Bible was inspired, yes, but it was also the work of humans.

I also stopped fretting over my parents’ marriage. It wasn’t my job to fix them. It wasn’t my job to point out the sins of others. My only job was to love my mom and dad with all my heart and to offer them healing however I could.

We are a people who believe that Jesus died to save the whole world, and some of the most famous words attributed to Him command His followers to go tell the whole world about it. Our zeal to see you “saved” can be really tiring if you’re a Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, or secular American.

It’s not just that he doesn’t believe in God—Tom believes that belief in God is actually harmful.

It turns out that I’m not the first Christian who’s argued for God’s existence by talking about answered prayer. In fact, atheists have an experiment designed to challenge anyone who thinks of God in this way. They ask you to pray to a jug of milk.

How can you be confident that prayer works if there’s, literally, no scenario that could prove it to be false?

The works of Christian writers all emphasized faith. Faith is the belief in things unseen.

Belief in things unseen is one thing; belief in things without evidence is another. And this latter kind of belief has a problem: How do you know what to believe?

Have you ever noticed that Christians and atheists don’t talk to one another as much as they talk at one another?

My turmoil at reading the works of skeptics showed me that believers and unbelievers view the world in fundamentally different ways.

Most of the claims the skeptic makes will be based on measurable, physical evidence.

Believers, Christians included, accept evidence as a way to learn about the world. But they also believe you can learn about the world through revelation—that God Himself can show you truth.

That’s the rub. Christians believe that God is self-evident, and skeptics see no earthly evidence of God at all. For the few hundred years that atheists have been around in significant numbers, human society has yet to find a way to bridge this gap.

The human brain is the most intricate and mysterious arrangement of matter in the whole known universe—at least according to human brains.

Biologically speaking, human brains are also really “expensive.” Your brain can’t move, but it consumes up to 20 percent of your nutrients and 25 percent of your oxygen.

Ancient people believed that our heart and bowels were the seat of our thoughts and emotions, but today we understand that our thoughts and feelings originate and transpire in our brains.

Scientists believe that the hippocampus plays a key role in memory formation,

Although surgery successfully eliminated his seizures, Molaison no longer could form new memories.

The prefrontal cortex plays vital roles in consciousness, decision-making, and impulse control, and the damage to Mr. Gage’s prefrontal cortex had basically taken it out of the equation.

His request was granted, and doctors found a pecan-size tumor next to his amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for fear, anger, and aggression. The demons plaguing his mind turned out to be a mass of tissue pressing against the most volatile part of his brain.

You are your brain, and your brain is you. And that means spirituality and religion are rooted in the brain in the same way that thoughts and feelings are.

some neuroscientists naturally wondered if the brain also had a “God spot,” a part of the brain that’s responsible for religious experiences. Despite several published findings, no scientific consensus has been built around the idea—there doesn’t seem to be any one part of our brain responsible for God.

More-sophisticated brain-imaging technology has shown that people’s beliefs about God aren’t anything like a “spot” but instead arise from a complex network in our brains. The more someone thinks about God, prays, or has other spiritual experiences, the more developed this network becomes.

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.

Your brain is a machine of sorts that builds a model of the world by throwing away most of its sensory input. I’m about to explain this in more detail, but it has a troubling takeaway: The way you see the world is a lie. Your senses and your brain work together to produce a false narrative about reality to your consciousness—a false narrative without which you would be unable to function. You take in a truly staggering amount of sensory information, far more than you could ever process, and your brain manages this overload by tossing out anything unrelated to your survival and creating a summarized view of reality that it can read on the fly.