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

by Mike McHargue

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. —Werner Heisenberg, theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics

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

God can’t contradict God. Either God made people on the sixth day, or He didn’t. The first two chapters of Genesis seemed to offer different answers from each other, and that wasn’t possible. 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.

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? The only thing worse was the answer proffered by apologetics: that God had a right to do with His creation as He pleased. To me, that God seemed like a sociopath.

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

Most of all, I wondered if I really needed to stay camouflaged forever. Could there be a way to admit what I believed while holding on to my family and friends? I didn’t know, so I asked the Internet. Using a website called reddit, I wrote a post that included more personal details than anything I’d posted in the past. I asked what losing my faith would mean to me, my family, and my community. I was terrified that I’d get found out by doing this, so I softened my language. Instead of telling the truth—that I was an atheist pretending to be a Christian—I said I was a Christian on the verge of atheism. That way, I would have an out in the event that someone read the thread and figured out it was by me. I didn’t have to wait long for answers. I had targeted a forum where both Christians and atheists hung out (although atheists have an overwhelming numerical advantage on reddit), and the post made it to reddit’s “front page” in a few minutes. Posts that make it to the front page get a lot of views, so I went from tens to hundreds to over a thousand replies quickly. As I read the replies, I noticed a few trends. Atheists tended to be empathetic. Many told me that if faith kept me happy, I should just keep on believing. I had expected to get a bunch of arguments against God, but what I got was shared humanity. The Christians were not as gracious, as a group. Some were very kind and helpful, but most were vicious. They told me I would burn in hell, that I was going to destroy my ...

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.

In all my years of singing in pews, I’d never heard anything so beautiful.

But that explanation can’t tell you what it’s like to be an actual father who loves his daughter, who would do anything to protect her and keep her safe. Explaining the physics, the chemistry, the biology, and the neuroscience of this moment is like projecting sheet music onto a movie screen instead of listening to the symphony. To explain the love I have for my daughter, I can’t ask the scientist for help. I need the poet or the painter. I need a song or a sonnet. Beauty can only be described with beauty—there’s no substitute.

I had become an emotional and experiential Christian who also was an intellectual atheist.