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

by Mike McHargue

The Gospels are a collection of stories about Peter and the other 11 disciples constantly doubting, believing the wrong thing, or entirely missing the point of what Jesus was saying. 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.

You can know God intimately while acknowledging the mystery, even the absurdity, of such a notion. You can experience the proven neurological benefits of prayer even as you contemplate how science shows prayer’s limitations. You can be part of the global body of people who follow God without turning off your brain or believing things that go against your conscience. You can read the Bible without having to brush off its ancient portrayal of science or its all-too-frequent brutality. And you can meet a risen Son of God named Jesus while wondering how such a thing could ever be true.

I spent so much time analyzing God that I didn’t have time to experience Him. Over time, this caused the feelings I had about God to fade. God was becoming nothing more than an abstract idea, and one that could easily be torn away by the thinkers’ books I was consuming. The process of losing God took months of reconditioning, but when the loss finally hit me, it felt like a heart attack: sudden and violent.

So that morning, I said these words: “God, I don’t know why I’m praying. You aren’t even real.” Two things happened immediately. First, the feeling I associated with the presence of God left me, like morning mist burned away by the heat of the sun. Second, I felt as if a trapdoor opened beneath me and I fell through it. A series of dark insights entered my mind with terrifying speed. I realized that all the people I had loved and who had died before me were gone. Forever. I’d never see them again, because the only thing waiting on the other side of death was infinite blackness and the annihilation of self. There was no heaven. There was no hell. Beyond this life, there was…nothing. Without God, life had no objective purpose. All those tough days I had pushed through, believing that I served a higher purpose—that purpose was nothing but a comforting self-delusion. My life was meaningless. So were the lives of my children and of every person who had ever lived or ever would. It didn’t matter what kind of husband or father I was, because all my hard work would be erased when the sun exploded in four or five billion years. I felt a profound grief, an inky-black darkness, as I realized there was neither mission nor redemption for humanity. The universe was indifferent to us. We were all just an accident of the self-organizing principles of physics—mere quirks of gravity, electromagnetism, and chemistry. This was it. This was the end of my search. “God, I don’t know why I’m pray...

Many Christians believe that people become atheists because they’re angry at God. My experience didn’t involve anger at all. I felt grief—a gnawing sense of loss. I felt empty and alone. God

I was the world’s least interesting secret agent—an atheist under deep cover in the Baptist church.

My first set of posts were questions about how to find meaning without God. “I don’t believe in God anymore,” I wrote. “In a lot of ways that’s freeing. I understand that I can be moral without God, and that treating others the way I wish to be treated creates a society that is better for everyone. But why does it matter? No matter what kind of husband and father I am, no matter what I do, one day our Sun will swell into a red giant and destroy Earth. “Let’s say humanity gets its act together, and our civilization spreads to other planets and then other solar systems. There’s a dozen ideas in physics about the eventual death of the universe. We’ll fall into entropic heat death, or protons will decay, or a new Big Bang will consume our observable universe as another is born. “Any of these things will erase not only my contributions to good, but everyone’s. There is no eternal significance to anything we do. This insight makes it hard for me to get out of bed in the morning or to enjoy life. My beautiful daughters are just like me—wood not yet turned into ash.”

told her that I missed God and that I wanted to believe. I told her about how I used to cry out to God and ask for a sign. Then I told her how all I got back was a deafening silence, a void that made me understand that if there was a God, that God was so distant as to be meaningless to

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.

“Somewhere within you is a longing, and if I were you, I’d try not to overanalyze it,” he began. “I might not go much more beyond the fact that you have this longing, and so far you can’t seem to find a scientific or other category to meet that longing. It’s as if, in your life you have ideas, and ‘this fits in this bucket, and this other thing fits in this other bucket,’ but you have this other thing that is real but doesn’t fit in any of your buckets. “I would call that the God bucket.” Rob looked at the ceiling for a second, his right leg bouncing up and down—either nervous or excited—as he thought about what he wanted to say. “I probably wouldn’t define it much more beyond that,” he said. “Your mind, which is obviously seriously dialed in, is probably used to mastering things. But it sounds like, in your experience, there is this thing you cannot master. It’s happening to you. You aren’t standing over it in a white lab coat, holding a clipboard. This thing somehow does something to you that’s different from anything else. It’s almost as if there is inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning—which is the stuff that kidnaps you. You know what I mean?” Easy laughter returned to the room.

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.”

“Brené Brown says that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Faith and doubt need each other. The opposite of faith is certainty,” Bradley said. “When I heard that, I realized, no wonder I was such a screwed-up Fundamentalist. But when I let the doubt just be there, my faith grew.”

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.

Have you ever prayed fervently while simultaneously wondering if anyone was hearing that prayer? Have you offered someone comfort in faith, while wondering if you believed anything you were saying? For all its bizarreness, the phenomenon of split-brain patients gives me strange comfort. Suddenly, I don’t feel so weird for identifying with both skeptical and spiritual people. There is an atheist in my brain who remains wholly incredulous about the idea of a divine being who once dwelt among us in the form of a man. There is a Christian in my brain who is indescribably and enduringly comforted by the idea and love of a supernatural Savior. I’ve stopped trying to deny, starve, or otherwise do away with either of them. I let my atheist question and examine. I let him check my motives and search for ideas that can be proven. Atheist Mike contemplates ethical issues from all angles, where right and wrong emerge not from ancient texts, but from the relation between our actions and the suffering or consent of others. Christian Mike views the world through a lens of great compassion, seeing pieces of God in all His creations. My Christian side suffers with those in pain and finds reason for hope in everyone. Against all reason, Christian Mike believes it’s never too late for redemption and that salvation is always at hand. Christian Mike wants to drop his fishing net and follow Jesus. So I let him. And Atheist Mike tags along for the ride.

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.

I told Cory about my time as an atheist and my return to a faith that felt much less defined. But I also told him about the nagging doubt that made me wonder if my experiences with God were made up. I told him how I prayed every day but wondered if I was just praying to my imagination; how singing worship songs or hymns could send me into a funk if the lyrics spoke too much of God’s actions, of His superiority to other gods, or even of Jesus’ sacrificial death. He mostly listened and asked a lot of questions, but I also remember him encouraging me to rest, because conflict like

When I lost my faith, these once-unquestioned assumptions began to seem like impossible absurdities. I couldn’t just snap my fingers and believe them again—all the challenges I’d learned as an atheist remained. So I started my search by looking at the most basic Christian claim about God: God created the universe.

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.

Trying to describe God is a lot like trying to describe falling in love, and that’s a serious problem for people who doubt that God is real. It’s also why Christian apologists have such a difficult time reaching those who don’t believe. While believers, when asked to focus on God, demonstrate a rich, elaborate neural construct, atheists presented with the same request show nothing but neurological fizzle. The unbelieving brain has no God construct, no neurological model for processing spiritual ideas and experiences in a way that feels real. This is why Bible stories and arguments for God’s existence will always sound like nonsense to a skeptic. For the unbeliever, God is truly absent from his or her brain.

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. I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but this insight was the most significant turning point in my return to God. I now knew that I had to stop trying to perfect my knowledge of God and instead shift toward activities that would help me cultivate a healthy neurological image of God—secure in the knowledge that this network would help me connect with God and live a peaceful, helpful life.

Doubt can’t be beaten with willpower. My inbox is full of missives from people who want to believe in God, but their faith is crippled by doubt. If believing in God is important to you, research says that you can start by pretending God is real, giving your brain something to work (or play!) with as you build a new neurological image of God.

56 percent of people who pray said that most or all of their prayers were answered, while 37 percent said only some of them were. But I felt the most affinity for the 14 percent of people who said, “I don’t know.”

And here, research throws a bone to intercessory prayer. Studies have shown that people who pray to God about problems in this way achieve a positive emotional effect, similar to if they’d seen a therapist. Prayer helps us grieve what we’ve lost, forgive those who’ve hurt us, and maintain a positive outlook on life. Intercessory prayer is useful and beneficial in helping people surrender to and process their emotions, and heal from trauma. But there’s yet another type of prayer to consider. Unlike traditional Christian prayer, contemplative prayer is a nonverbal experience. It’s the act of being still before God. In contemplative prayer, the goal isn’t to petition God to act, but to be in God’s presence.

People who move from primarily intercessory prayer to primarily contemplative prayer are less driven to find answers to suffering and more apt to redeem it. They stop looking for God on the other side of answered prayer and begin to find God right beside them—in this place, in the pain, in this moment. There’s good reason for this. Brain scans show that these prayers bring God near to us—indeed, as near as our own brain tissue.

Prayer is the most essential practice for cultivating a God network in human brains—even for those who doubt God’s existence. In other words, if you want to know God, prayer doesn’t come after you’ve answered every one of your nagging questions. It comes before. So I crafted an axiom to make me comfortable spending time in prayer, even on days when I’m not sure God is real: Prayer is at least a form of meditation that encourages the development of healthy brain tissue, lowers stress, and can connect us to God. Even if that is a comprehensive definition of prayer, the health and psychological benefits of prayer justify the discipline.

As with my axioms for God, this prayer axiom isn’t an attempt to prove Christian orthodoxy. It’s a life raft for people who can’t get on board with the supernatural claims about God yet still want to be close to God—a state I’m often in. That’s why the words at least are so critical. I’m not boxing anything in. I’m just stating what I can comfortably support empirically. The fact is, I’ve had many overwhelming, beautiful moments in prayer that I can’t explain with empirical evidence. I have felt God so close to me, I was sure I’d see a figure standing nearby if I opened my eyes. I’ve had moments of unfathomable insight about myself, about others, and about actions I should take in my life. And, yes, I have had moments when it seemed as if God was directly answering one of my prayers. My experience with prayer fills me with hope. A hope that somehow, when we reach out and try to commune with that great mystery we call God—well, somehow God reaches back. In prayer, I can feel the light of some higher, great, more full-of-light realm reaching out, filling me with love, and motivating me to bring as much light into this world as I can.

Through consistent meditative practice, each of us has the potential to make our brain more spiritual—even to the point of increasing the probability that we will experience something truly mystical.

Just remember, the benefits of prayer are available to you even if you don’t believe. The practice is what matters. Plenty of skeptics meditate for the mental and physical health benefits, and if feeling closer to God or confronting doubt is important to you, prayer is going to be more effective than just about anything else you can do. Prayer might not help you solve the mystery of God rationally, but it may help you encounter God.

The stillness of centering prayer is even more challenging than basic meditation, because it asks you to focus on something more abstract than a word or image. Don’t let this difficulty deter you, though. Research shows it can take weeks to get the knack of a centering prayer practice, but once the knack comes, it’s one of the surest ways to feel God’s presence.

Of course, the Bible can be a confusing book for the doubting person. If that’s you, don’t treat this exercise as a fact-finding mission. Instead, treat the Bible as inspirational literature, and see if its words can bring you insight.

Let’s say that you and I are close friends, but after an argument one night, you stole my car and drove it into a lake. This is a serious crime with a serious penalty—let’s say $10,000 in damages and three years spent in prison. Now imagine you came to me and apologized, expressing sincere regret and grief over your actions. What if I responded by telling you I could forgive you, but only if my daughter took your place in prison and paid the fine on your behalf, because I am a merciful and just friend. My mercy compels me to forgive you, but my justice demands that the crime be punished. This is the exact picture that most Christians paint of God: a God who offers no choice but to demand punishment for sins. But if a good friend of mine wrecked my car, I could simply forgive that friend without anyone’s being punished. I’m a nice guy but certainly not the embodiment of perfect love—so why can I forgive with no strings attached but God can’t?

Sadly, this is little comfort to those of us who doubt. Here’s why: Christianity isn’t built solely on the life of Christ; it’s built on his death and Resurrection.

This is the challenge I faced when I was returning to faith. Finding an understanding of God that was plausible in the face of skepticism was relatively easy, but doing the same for Jesus Christ was not. Jesus, a man who walked the earth in the first century dispensing radical teachings about God? Sure. But Jesus Christ, the reconciling member of God’s Trinity? No.

Most Christians wouldn’t be comfortable describing Jesus this way. But for me, it was a big step up from believing that Jesus was a myth. Accepting Jesus as an actual historical figure whose teachings created the largest spiritual movement in history gave me a relatively reasonable starting point for my decision to follow him. With this in mind, I wrote an axiom to set a “floor” for what I accepted about Jesus: Jesus is at least a man so connected to God that He was called the Son of God, and the largest religious movement in human history is centered around His teachings. Even if this is all Jesus is, following His teachings can promote peace, empathy, and genuine morality.

I don’t know for sure whether Jesus rose from the dead. What I do know is that there are things I’ve done that I have a hard time forgiving myself for, but I’m able to do so when I believe Jesus already forgave me. I know that the story of a man who told people to “turn the other cheek” inspires me to approach people differently and that this inspiration affects those who interact with me. From this perspective, I didn’t necessarily invite Jesus “into my heart,” as the saying goes. Instead, Jesus lives in my anterior cingulate cortex, the seat of compassion. He reduces my tendency toward selfishness, anger, and fear. He teaches me a more patient approach to life—as He’s been teaching those who follow Him for over 2,000

So I went on a mission to learn the neuroscience behind psychotherapy. It seemed such a waste of time to talk about the same thing over and over or to pay someone to cry in her office for 50 minutes a week. But it turns out that my therapist was right. Trauma leaves an impression on your brain. And when you recall traumatic events from your past, or when you experience things that remind you of them, your amygdala re-creates the fear and pain you had in those moments. Leaving my church was traumatic, and that trauma was amplified by my childhood experiences of rejection. That sentence, simple as it is, brings tears to my eyes even now as I type these words. My fierce independence, my willingness to walk away from the crowd, was merely a coping strategy I’d developed in response to being bullied. The way I played it, no one could reject me if I didn’t need them in the first place.

But therapy works because human memories, just like human brains, are impressionable. When you recall a troubling memory, you have a chance to modify the deeply emotional responses you experienced at the time of the event. This is why talking about traumatic events in a safe environment or with people who care about you has a way of diluting the trauma and training the brain to understand that the danger is over, that you can be safe.

Witness, too, our human tendency to clarify our identity with group labels. Liberals hold in common certain beliefs and values regarding human society and government, and the same is true if you call yourself a Republican, an atheist, a Christian, or even a golfer. This tendency is so powerful, it can actually cause us to unconsciously filter out and dismiss any information that contradicts our chosen group’s identity or norms. One of the reasons so much tension exists between differing social groups is that we humans have a hard time processing information that could challenge or undermine our group’s identity. This matters a lot if you’re someone who wants to believe in God but harbors serious doubts. If you truly want to believe, one of the most powerful things you can do is spend time with other people who do, letting them help imprint your brain with their experience of spirituality. People who doubt often leave the church—sometimes against their will—and end up spending less time with people who believe in God. If you want to know God, it turns out some advice my grandmother gave me mirrors what science has to say: Pray, read the Bible, and go to church!

This capacity of the group to help people form and maintain a belief in God and to experience the positive health and emotional effects thereof forms the basis of my claim about what a church can be and do and why that is good for the world: The Church is at least a global community of people who choose to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. Even if this is all the Church is, the Church is still the largest body of spiritual scholarship, community, and faith practice in the world—and this practice can improve people’s lives in real, measurable ways. Belief in God can be beneficial to people, and prayer can rewire the human brain. The largest institution in history devoted to belief in God and exercising that belief is the Church.

Prayer came next, a practice science revealed to be tremendously valuable, and once I could pray unself-consciously, it was a lot easier for me to feel like a real person of faith instead of a facsimile. Coming to terms with Jesus was more difficult, but admitting the limits of my knowledge helped me, and finding a healthy church for me sealed the deal.

This might sound strange to some people, but I was actually afraid to read the Bible. Every time I did, I felt I was losing my faith all over again. Nosing through Genesis or Jeremiah imparted God with a fairy-tale quality that I sometimes couldn’t shake for days. So I finally stopped trying. I had read the Bible so many times that I was able to keep up with most conversations about it without reading up first; I could participate in Bible-study groups without actually rereading it. My faith seemed easier to maintain if I stayed away from the Scriptures—those words were too associated with my loss of faith.

Over the last two years, I’ve learned that my problems aren’t with the Bible at all. All the anachronisms, contradictions, and similar stumbling blocks I found in its pages aren’t flaws in the Scripture. Instead, they are flaws in the assumptions I hold as I read the Bible. I had long assumed that the Bible was a single book written by a single divine hand through many men, meant to contain God’s perfect and complete revelation for humanity. That’s not entirely my fault—I was handed that lens from my earliest days on Earth. I’m not alone here. This is the way many churches teach the Bible, and it puts responsibilities on the text that are impossible to fulfill. A book authored in this “divine” way would have to be completely free from factual error or contradiction. It would have to be perfect. It must clearly communicate divine will not just for the time in which it was written but for all time to follow. This is why many atheists joke that the most powerful tool they have in making new atheists is the Bible itself. No book can meet such impossible expectations, and many believers have had their faith wrecked on a reef of biblical criticism.

When I let go of the Bible as an inerrant document and embraced it as a multi-party discussion about God, all of a sudden, I began to see a book I could appreciate on its own terms. That’s important. After all, this is the guiding document for the world’s largest religion—a faith I happen to be part of.

I’m at least as self-contradictory as the Scriptures. Some days I feel that Jesus walks beside me, and other days I feel I’m completely bonkers for buying into the Resurrection. I’ve denied Christ more than three times. But when I read the Bible, it gives me confidence that even I, with all my hang-ups, am included in the sprawling, multi-millennia story of God’s people. I no longer fear the Scriptures. I’m back to reading them every day.