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WORK TITLE: Finding God in the Waves
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://mikemchargue.com/
CITY: Tallahassee
STATE: FL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://religionnews.com/2016/09/19/science-mike-mchargue-christians-arent-stupid-and-atheists-arent-evil/ * http://www.theoaklandpress.com/lifestyle/20160928/science-mike-mchargue-christians-arent-stupid-and-atheists-arent-evil
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PERSONAL
Married, wife’s name Jenny; children: two daughters.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, speaker, and podcast host. Frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts worldwide.
RELIGION: ChristianWRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Relevant, Storyline, BioLogos, and Washington Post.
SIDELIGHTS
Mike McHargue is the host of two podcasts, Ask Science Mike, in which he answers people’s questions about science, life, and faith, and The Liturgists Podcast, which he hosts with Michael Gungor, where they look at different topics through the lenses of science, art, and faith. The Liturgists Podcast gets more than a million downloads a month. McHargue, like many others, went through a crisis of faith when the religion he once believed in suddenly was not enough. After a mystical experience on an ocean beach, he realized that the way to find God for him was through science. In the wake of that experience, he wrote the book Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It through Science.
In an interview with Emily McFarlan Miller on the Religion News Service Web site, McHargue explained how he began to lose faith in religion: “My dad had an affair, and he was the music minister at church and my spiritual role model, really. … I told him I would lead him through a Bible study that would help him reconcile his marriage and his relationship with God, and I wanted to make sure I gave him the best answers I could, which would be God’s answers, so I started to read the Bible with a nerd’s obsession. … And that’s when it all started to come apart for me.” McHargue continued: “It was when I started to realize the Bible contradicted itself, and I began to lose confidence in the Bible’s authority, I realized it wasn’t science that was wrong about the universe, but actually the Bible.”
McHargue, in an interview with BioLogos Web site contributor Brad Kramer, said: “I’m trying to help people knock down the boundaries in their thinking that creates cognitive dissonance and fertile soil for the kind of doubt that makes people miserable. I don’t have separate categories for ‘spiritual experiences’ and ‘neuroscience,’ nor do I see any difference between church history and anthropology. These are all ways we process a reality far larger and [more] mysterious than the human brain is equipped to understand.” He continued: “I think both Christians and skeptics can learn from the doubting, because people who struggle in doubt have a sense of humility about what they know. Doubt calls into questions our most basic assumptions, and for many the road back to a haughty certainty is impossible. This humility is essential in having substantive discussions with people who disagree deeply—and I think our culture today testifies to a need for better conversations amidst disagreement.”
In a review on the Evangelicals for Social Action Web site, John Seel wrote: “A great number of Christian teens are likewise living in fear and the silenced shame of doubt. Youth groups and Christian schools breed them like rabbits. These kids have no safe place where they can express their honest confusion aloud, no safe person to hear their confession.” Seel continued: “In Finding God in the Waves … Mike McHargue has written a book for these very people, a contemporary autobiographical roadmap for the spiritual skeptic. McHargue grew up in the church, became an atheist, then later returned as a hesitant, somewhat limping follower of Jesus. The candor of his spiritual pilgrimage—which is filled with pain, humor, and insight—conveys to many who are on a similar journey that they are not alone.” Seel added: “The value of this book for those who are struggling spiritually is that you are not alone! McHargue counsels, ‘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.'” Seel concluded: “This book is a spiritual travelogue of a pilgrimage that is still unfolding. The difference between a film and life is that life doesn’t usually have a neat third act, a tidy resolution. Sometimes it’s messy all the way through; so, too, this book. McHargue has not given up his highly honed analytical mind or his childhood fundamentalist bias for left-brain thinking.”
McHargue wrote on his home page: “I help people make peace between science and their faith. Everything I do is about helping the spiritually homeless and frustrated find peace. I’m a former Baptist and a former atheist, so I really understand the tension people feel between science and God.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 11, 2016, review of Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It through Science, p. 61.
ONLINE
BioLogos, http://biologos.org/ (September 13, 2016), Brad Kramer, author interview.
Evangelicals for Social Action Web site, http://www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org/ (August 26, 2016), review of Finding God in the Waves.
Mike McHargue Home Page, http://mikemchargue.com (April 11, 2017).
Religion News Service, http://religionnews.com/ (September 19, 2016), Emily McFarlan Miller, “‘Science Mike’ McHargue: ‘Christians Aren’t Stupid, and Atheists Aren’t Evil.’”
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.
— Steve Jobs
Mike McHargue (better known as Science Mike) is an author, podcaster, and speaker who travels the world helping people understand the science of life's most profound experiences. His bestselling debut book, Finding God in the Waves, has helped thousands understand faith in the 21st century.
Mike hosts Ask Science Mike, a weekly question and answer podcast helping hundreds of thousands explore the questions they've always been afraid to ask. He cohosts The Liturgists Podcast with his friend Michael Gungor. With over a million downloads per month, The Liturgists Podcast is reshaping how the spiritually homeless and frustrated relate to God.
Mike frequently appears before sold-out audiences in New York, Chicago, and London. He's a favorite for churches, colleges, and conferences exploring the intersection of science and faith, with recent stops at The University of Georgia, Mars Hill Church (Grand Rapids), The Wild Goose Conference, and Google. Mike is a frequent contributor to RELEVANT magazine, Storyline, BioLogos, and The Washington Post. He's also a frequent guest on radio program and podcasts worldwide, including recent interviews on SiriusXM and NPR.
Mike McHargue is one of those rare voices that can speak knowledgeably and authentically about both science and faith. He's a for anyone looking to dig deeper into doubt, atheism, and how God rewires our brains. Mike's mix of honesty, humor, and affability allow him to connect with remarkably diverse audiences.
Mike lives in Tallahassee, FL with his wife Jenny and two daughters.
For Press Inquiries/Requests– contact: Megan Schumann
KIND WORDS FROM SOME FRIENDS
"Mike McHargue has established himself as one of the most thoughtful and necessary Christian voices of our time."
Rachel Held Evans, author of ‘Searching for Sunday’ and ‘A Year of Biblical Womanhood’
"Science Mike is way too funny to be as smart as he is and way too honest, touching, insightful and entertaining to be ignored. What I mean is, I resent his multiple talents. Any time he's speaking my ears perk up like a dog hearing a can opener, and yours should, too. Also, feed your dog."
Pete Holmes, Star of HBO's Crashing and host of You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes
"Mike has the uncanny ability-maybe the better word would be power-to explain and describe and articulate that something beautiful like few people I've ever heard. Mike is a rare talent, a rare voice, a rare soul."
Rob Bell, New York Times bestselling author and speaker
I help people make peace between science and their faith.
Everything I do is about helping the spiritually homeless and frustrated find peace. I'm a former Baptist and a former atheist, so I really understand the tension people feel between science and God. If you're new to my work, links to both of my podcasts and my book are below. Just click the images.
Finding God in the Waves. My story of faith losing my faith, meeting God face-to-face, and trying to make sense of it all. Available wherever books are sold. Learn more here.
Finding God in the Waves. My story of faith losing my faith, meeting God face-to-face, and trying to make sense of it all. Available wherever books are sold. Learn more here.
Ask Science Mike - I host a weekly podcast where I answer people's questions about science, faith, and life.
Ask Science Mike - I host a weekly podcast where I answer people's questions about science, faith, and life.
The Liturgists Podcast - I host a popular podcast with Michael Gungor looking at different topics through the lenses of science, art, and faith.
The Liturgists Podcast - I host a popular podcast with Michael Gungor looking at different topics through the lenses of science, art, and faith.
‘Science Mike’ McHargue: ‘Christians aren’t stupid, and atheists aren’t evil’
Mike McHargue, better known as “Science Mike,” is the author of “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science.”
Mike McHargue, better known as “Science Mike,” is the author of “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science.” Photo courtesy of Convergent Books
By Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service
POSTED: 09/28/16, 2:00 PM EDT | UPDATED: ON 09/28/2016 0 COMMENTS
Mike McHargue, better known as “Science Mike,” is the author of “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science.”
Mike McHargue, better known as “Science Mike,” is the author of “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science.” Photo courtesy of Convergent Books
Thank God for the internet.
If you believe in God, that is. Mike McHargue did; then he didn’t, and now he does again.
But on the internet McHargue — known as “Science Mike” to listeners of “The Liturgists” and “Ask Science Mike” podcasts — found community when he questioned his Southern Baptist upbringing, then the atheism he adopted. And on the internet he forged a community with others like him who can’t comfortably wear either label: Christian or atheist.
McHargue questioned Christianity when he began to doubt the authority of the Bible. But he questioned atheism, too, after having a mystical experience on a beach in California. As waves rushed toward him, and he “felt God with me, in me and through me.”
He shared his story of losing and finding faith in his new book, “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found it Again through Science.”
Q: You grew up a conservative Christian. What caused you to question those beliefs?
A: My dad had an affair, and he was the music minister at church and my spiritual role model, really. ... I told him I would lead him through a Bible study that would help him reconcile his marriage and his relationship with God, and I wanted to make sure I gave him the best answers I could, which would be God’s answers, so I started to read the Bible with a nerd’s obsession. ... And that’s when it all started to come apart for me.
It was when I started to realize the Bible contradicted itself, and I began to lose confidence in the Bible’s authority, I realized it wasn’t science that was wrong about the universe, but actually the Bible.
Q: What was the response you received when you left the church?
A: At first, I didn’t leave. I just kind of pretended. When we (his family) finally left, it’s not because we were done with church, it’s that the controversy about how my faith had changed was too much.
A lot of the atheist communities I had belonged to online, when I returned to faith, I lost my place in most of them. They viewed that as a delusional move. So that was a really lonely time — maybe too skeptical for Christians and too enamored with this word “God” for the comfort of atheists.
Q: How can Christians and atheists better support their questioning friends?
A: I think we should be less obsessed with getting everybody to agree with us. There are so many pertinent, pressing issues in our society that have nothing to do with ... whether God is real.
Once we demote our individual view of reality from prime importance only then can we learn to understand that people arrive at their beliefs for good reasons — that maybe for Christians, good, reasonable, smart people can make an informed decision they don’t believe in God without being evil. At the same time, atheists can realize it’s somewhat naive and ignorant of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to believe one has to be delusional to believe in God — even a supernatural God.
Q: At the heart of the story of your return to Christianity is this mystical experience. Is there a scientific explanation for such experiences?
A: The way I approach it is if that was just a brain state, I’m grateful for it, but if it was more than a brain state, I want to be open to whatever the source of that experience was. The way I know how to do that, and the way most humans express that openness, is through spiritual practices ... things like prayer and meditation and, indeed, participation in religious communities.
Q: You described yourself at the time you returned to faith as “an emotional and experiential Christian who also was an intellectual atheist.” Is that still how you describe yourself?
A: Sometimes I feel the best way to look at the world in a given moment is through the lens of an atheist, especially when I’m evaluating truth claims. Other times, on a beautiful day out with my family, when I want to express gratitude that I get to exist and experience this, my only way of articulating that is a prayer of thanks to a God that I believe in.
I’ve given up trying to turn the world into an equation I can solve; instead, it’s a gift I receive.
QUOTED: I’m trying to help people knock down the boundaries in their thinking that creates cognitive dissonance and fertile soil for the kind of doubt that makes people miserable. I don’t have separate categories for “spiritual experiences” and “neuroscience,” nor do I see any difference between church history and anthropology. These are all ways we process a reality far larger and mysterious that the human brain is equipped to understand.
I think both Christians and skeptics can learn from the doubting, because people who struggle in doubt have a sense of humility about what they know. Doubt calls into questions our most basic assumptions, and for many the road back to a haughty certainty is impossible. This humility is essential in having substantive discussions with people who disagree deeply–and I think our culture today testifies to a need for better conversations amidst disagreement.
Losing and Finding God Through Science: An Interview with Science Mike
September 13, 2016 | By Brad Kramer and Mike McHargue (guest author) on The Evolving Evangelical
Tags: Atheism, Books
Mike “Science Mike” McHargue is one of today’s most popular voices in the science and faith conversation, especially among Millennials on the border of faith and doubt. He’s the host of the Ask Science Mike podcast, and co-host (with Michael Gungor) of the wildly successful Liturgists podcast. His first book, Finding God in the Waves, is released today. The book narrates Mike’s journey from Christian faith to atheism, and back to Christian faith—but with a radically different perspective on what it means to follow Christ in a scientific age. I agree with Pete Enns’ assessment of the book when he calls it “the most honest, challenging, and insightful book on reclaiming a lost faith that I’ve ever read—utterly unique and unexpected.” As the interview below details, Mike’s book aims to scramble people’s categories and expectations when it comes to science and Christian faith. The end result is bewildering, in the best possible sense of that word. Mike is blazing new trails in the tired terrain of faith/science conflict, and whether you agree with him or find his views disturbing (or both), Finding God in the Waves is an important book to read.
Brad Kramer: In your story, the books of atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan dealt a sledgehammer blow to the faith of your Evangelical upbringing (in conjunction with traumatic events in your family). It almost seems, ironically, like this sort of religious upbringing made you more vulnerable to their arguments. Would you agree with this, and if so, can you explain how and why this happened?
Science Mike: I completely agree. One of the most beautiful aspects of conservative Evangelicalism is how certain it makes people feel about the nature and character of God. That approach to the Bible and theology offered me a very content life—I knew exactly what God wanted me to do. But the challenge with such a structural approach to faith is that the whole system falls down when something in your life undermines any part of your faith.
My understanding of God was robust, and had many supporting ideas: the inerrancy of the Bible, the way God answers prayer, my experiences with God, and the testimonies of others. The brilliance of modern skeptics is to take apart each component of your faith, piece-by-piece, until nothing remains. They use your certainty against you.
BK: The climax of the book involves (spoiler alert) connecting with God in the waves of the Pacific Ocean, through a very powerful mystical experience. Yet the subtitle of the book is “How I lost my faith and found it again through science.” Usually, science and mystical experiences aren’t mentioned in the same sentence. So what do you mean that you found your faith through science, and how does your experience at the ocean fit into that?
SM: For all the power of that moment, that mystical moment on the beach didn’t answer any of my questions about God. All the objections to a God who was powerful and who loved us were still at the top of my mind. That was true of the Bible as well–my objections to its authority weren’t magically resolved just because I had a profound experience.
So, in order to understand that moment I couldn’t turn to the kinds of resources I once did to understand experiences with God. Instead, I studied cosmology and biology in search of our creator. I turned to neuroscience to understand why God is so real and so profound to most people.
BK: Even among Christians who embrace mainstream science, there is a tendency to compartmentalize faith and science as separate ways of seeing the world. But one of the most striking features of your books is how it weaves crazily across the lanes of spirituality, neuroscience, sociology, and quantum physics, often without the least bit of concern about the jarring effects on the reader. Were you purposely trying to disorient people?
SM: Quite the opposite! I’m trying to help people knock down the boundaries in their thinking that creates cognitive dissonance and fertile soil for the kind of doubt that makes people miserable. I don’t have separate categories for “spiritual experiences” and “neuroscience,” nor do I see any difference between church history and anthropology. These are all ways we process a reality far larger and mysterious that the human brain is equipped to understand.
BK: Your book could almost be titled “Finding God in the Brain” for all its talk of neuroscience and faith. In fact, you reference a perspective called “neurotheology” at several points. Why the fascination with brain science in particular? Why thinking about the brain become such a helpful way for you to process your own doubts, when it’s so often used by skeptics as a way to support a materialistic view of the world?
SM: Neurotheology was a term coined by a few neuroscientists who study people of faith. I like to talk about brain science because it side steps a lot of the quagmire that is discussions of science and faith. Neurotheology doesn’t study God at all—it makes no claims about who or what God is, or even if God exists at all. Instead, the focus is on what different beliefs about God do to the brain, and how spiritual experiences change our health and behavior.
For someone like me who has wrestled with the works of atheists who say religion is bad for people and civilization, this pragmatic grounding is helpful. I have scientific backing that shows the way my faith can help me be a healthier, more helpful person.
BK: You hint in the book (and in other projects you’ve been involved in, like The New Copernicans) that the dichotomies between creation/evolution and sacred/secular that have driven the cultural perception of conflict between faith and science are being abandoned (or at least re-thought) by newer generations. Why is this happening, and does it explain the glaring omission of any detailed discussion of Genesis, evolution, or the age of the Earth in your book?
SM: Across most denominations, the church has been extremely focused on right belief, while being comparatively less engaged with how those beliefs work in the world. Churches have been so busy keeping the lights on and working for political power that the poor, the orphan, and the widow have been forgotten. Recent generations can’t stomach that. They don’t see the value in a walled-in culture when human suffering is everywhere.
For most young people, there is no debate: the Universe is old, and life appeared via evolution. And they aren’t going to engage with anyone on the subject who won’t also show up at a homeless shelter. My book is written with the basic assumption that science is correct when it speaks to issues of science, and that the Bible’s purpose was never to be a science book anyway. The Bible is meant to tell the stories of people trying to follow God.
BK: The second half of your book shifts from personal narrative to an exploration of Christian orthodoxy and practice, from the perspective of the doubter and skeptic. You put forward a number of “at least” statements that function as 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” (178). This will strike some as creating a diet version of Christianity: You get the good feelings without actually committing to orthodoxy. What’s your response to that?
SM: I think that’s a really reasonable critique. Years back, I would have shared it. But, for anyone who has ever longed for God, but felt completely foolish for that longing, my “at least” statements are meant to be a scaffold that can support a people who’s doubt is much stronger than their faith. It’s a way to help science-minded folks feel like they aren’t wasting their time in prayer.
My beliefs have actually grown more orthodox over time, but I think that’s a result of the Wesleyan approach. Orthodoxy can bloom from a seed of orthopraxy.
BK: What do Christians—particularly Evangelicals—need to understand better about doubters and skeptics? What can we learn from them?
SM: Doubters don’t doubt because they’re in rebellion. They doubt because they are committed to seeking the truth. The same is true of skeptics. My doubt came from a completely genuine attempt to seek out God’s council via the Bible. More than anything else, reading the Bible led me to become an atheist.
I think both Christians and skeptics can learn from the doubting, because people who struggle in doubt have a sense of humility about what they know. Doubt calls into questions our most basic assumptions, and for many the road back to a haughty certainty is impossible. This humility is essential in having substantive discussions with people who disagree deeply–and I think our culture today testifies to a need for better conversations amidst disagreement.
- See more at: http://biologos.org/blogs/brad-kramer-the-evolving-evangelical/losing-and-finding-god-through-science-an-interview-with-science-mike#sthash.YsNoqKnw.dpuf
Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science
Publishers Weekly.
263.28 (July 11, 2016): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science Mike McHargue. Convergent, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-101-90604-0
Having grown up a Southern Baptist, McHargue, creator of Ask Science Mike and The Liturgists Podcast, once believed that faith and science were mutually exclusive ways of understanding the world. As a child and young adult, he drew strength and authority from his Christian evangelical church community, yet privately he began to doubt the core tenets of fundamentalist Christian faith. This book chronicles his personal journey through a period of atheist rejection of religion, followed by a return to a very different type of Christian practice. Through the lens of neuroscience, McHargue makes his case for valuing religion not for its factual explanatory power but rather for its ability to give meaning to human existence. Like many personal narratives, this memoir will be most appreciated by readers who share the author's struggle to square a rational, material understanding of the universe with an irrational yearning for the transcendent. For those who have grown up in a faith tradition that does not demand the reconciliation of evolutionary science and creation stories, this volume will likely seem an unnecessary exercise. Yet for those who fear science will rob them of both God and Christian community, this work may offer much-needed hope that Christianity and science can coexist. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science." Publishers Weekly, 11 July
2016, p. 61. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915386&it=r&asid=16cf1934ccd9bb70dcafce96da21772b. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458915386
QUOTED: My dad had an affair, and he was the music minister at church and my spiritual role model, really. ... I told him I would lead him through a Bible study that would help him reconcile his marriage and his relationship with God, and I wanted to make sure I gave him the best answers I could, which would be God’s answers, so I started to read the Bible with a nerd’s obsession. ... And that’s when it all started to come apart for me.
It was when I started to realize the Bible contradicted itself, and I began to lose confidence in the Bible’s authority, I realized it wasn’t science that was wrong about the universe, but actually the Bible.
‘Science Mike’ McHargue: ‘Christians aren’t stupid, and atheists aren’t evil’
By Emily McFarlan Miller | September 19, 2016
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Mike McHargue, better known as "Science Mike," is the author of "Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science." Photo courtesy of Convergent Books
(RNS) Thank God for the internet.
If you believe in God, that is. For a time, Mike McHargue did and then he didn’t and now he does again.
But it’s on the internet where McHargue — better known as “Science Mike” to listeners of “The Liturgists” and “Ask Science Mike” podcasts — found community when he was questioning his Southern Baptist upbringing and then the atheism he had adopted. And it’s on the internet where he’s forged a community with others like him who can’t comfortably wear either label: Christian or atheist.
“My place in church community and this sense of belonging I feel now has largely come from how many people responded as I started to talk about these things openly,” he said. “But it tends to make certain Christians and atheists uncomfortable to embrace both a materialistic, empirical view of the cosmos through science as well as something more numinous through the lens of the spiritual.”
McHargue questioned Christianity when he began to doubt the authority of the Bible. But he questioned atheism, too, after he had a mystical experience as he prayed haltingly on the beach in California: The waves rushed toward him, and he said he “felt God with me, in me and through me.”
He shared his story of losing and finding faith with RNS and in his new book, “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found it Again through Science.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mike McHargue, better known as "Science Mike," is the author of "Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science." Photo courtesy of Convergent Books
Mike McHargue, better known as “Science Mike,” is the author of “Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science.” Photo courtesy of Convergent Books
You grew up a conservative Christian. What caused you to question those beliefs?
My dad had an affair, and he was the music minister at church and my spiritual role model, really. … I told him I would lead him through a Bible study that would help him reconcile his marriage and his relationship with God, and I wanted to make sure I gave him the best answers I could, which would be God’s answers, so I started to read the Bible with a nerd’s obsession. I read the whole thing in about three months, and that’s when it all started to come apart for me.
You always have been very interested in science. Had that never clashed with your faith and been an issue for you until that point?
It had never been an issue because I considered God’s authority pre-eminent and science’s knowledge provisional. … Where that came apart wasn’t actually a faith-science conflict. It was when I started to realize the Bible contradicted itself, and as I began to lose confidence in the Bible’s authority, I realized it wasn’t science that was wrong about the universe, but actually the Bible.
What was the response you received when you left the church?
At first, I didn’t leave. I just kind of played and pretended. When we (my family and I) finally left, it’s not because we thought we were done with church, it’s that the controversy about how my faith had changed was too much.
A lot of the atheist communities I had belonged to online, when I returned to faith, I lost my place in most of them. They viewed that as a delusional, unreasonable move. So that was a really lonely time — maybe too skeptical for Christians and too enamored with this word “God” for the comfort of atheists.
How do you think both Christians and atheists can better support their questioning, believing friends?
I think we should be less obsessed with getting everybody to agree with us. There are so many pertinent, pressing issues in our society that have nothing to do with our epistemology, whether God is real or not.
Once we demote our individual view of reality from such prime importance only then can we learn to understand that people arrive at their beliefs for good reasons — that maybe for Christians, good, reasonable, smart people can make an informed decision they don’t believe in God without being evil. At the same time, atheists can realize it’s somewhat naive and somewhat ignorant of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to believe one has to be delusional or not grounded in reality to believe in God — even a supernatural God. These are both reasonable positions to exist within the human experience, and neither camp can claim some superior state of enlightenment or better representation of what it means to be human.
At the heart of the story of your return to Christianity is this mystical experience. Is there a scientific explanation for such experiences, or how do you hold mysticism and science in tension?
I think it’s certainly plausible to explain mystical experience in terms of brain states, although if you’ve had one, that explanation doesn’t satisfy. There’s this part of a mystical experience where you feel like it all makes sense in a way you never have before — the kinds of questions we wrestle with about death and suffering and evil, God’s love, all those things kind of melt away in this unimaginably bright light that you feel as much as you see.
So the way I approach it is if that was just a brain state, I’m really grateful for it, but if it was more than a brain state, I want to be open to whatever the source or origin of that experience was. The way I know how to do that, and the way most humans express that openness, is through spiritual practices, and from what I’ve seen in neuroscience, that’s the best thing we’re aware of for fostering those kinds of experience — things like prayer and meditation and, indeed, participation in religious communities.
What are some of the most compelling things you’ve found in your scientific studies that point you back to God?
Probably the first thing would be how ideally suited the human brain is as a host for beliefs about God, the way belief seems to be relatively inevitable a consequence of human consciousness, and the way our brains tend to develop in healthy ways when we indulge that belief, especially in a God who is loving. Beyond that, as you learn more about cosmology and physics, particle physics or quantum physics, you find our world is at least as mysterious and beautiful and, I might even poetically say, magical as anything depicted in the sacred texts of the world’s great wisdom traditions.
You described yourself at the time you returned to faith as “an emotional and experiential Christian who also was an intellectual atheist.” Is that still how you would describe yourself, or how have your beliefs changed?
You know, Mike the Baptist and Mike the Atheist share something in common: I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to be the one who knows as much as there is to know. Where I’ve changed is I’ve realized that’s impossible. I’m not trying to get to some intellectual destination anymore. I’m trying to enjoy the ride, the journey we call life.
Sometimes I feel the best way to look at the world in a given moment is through the lens of an atheist, especially when I’m evaluating truth claims. Other times, on a beautiful day when I’m out with my family, and I want to stop and express gratitude for that moment and these people, the fact that I get to exist and experience this, my only way of articulating that is a prayer of thanks to a God that I believe in. That sounds like cognitive dissonance to a lot of people, but I call it honesty.
I’ve just given up trying to turn the world into an equation I can solve, and instead, it’s a gift I receive.
Atheists and Christians often are seen as hostile toward each other, but that doesn’t seem to have been your experience. Having been both, what do you think atheists get wrong about Christians and vice versa?
Christians aren’t stupid, and atheists aren’t evil, and I know there’s hope for better conversations or relationships between Christians and atheists because both “Ask Science Mike” and “The Liturgists” podcasts have significant representations from both groups, and when we hang out in that context, everybody gets along just fine.
I think people who have been judged a lot don’t have the emotional bandwidth to do that to people anymore, and I think that’s why our audience is so lovely. On the Island of Misfit Toys, nobody is a misfit anymore.
“Finding God in the Waves” by Mike McHargue
AUGUST 26, 2016
Viewing beliefs as “butterflies on an open hand”
Reviewed by John Seel
finding god wavesThere is no loneliness like that of the Christian who doubts. Many within the church assume that doubt is something to be ashamed of, considering it to be inconsistent with faith. And so we silence our doubts and live in fear of public shaming and communal ostracism. This reaction will turn a doubter into a skeptic.
Listen to the words of one of the world’s leading atheists about his experience in the church as a teenager:
I became exceedingly religious and consequently anxious for supposing religion to be true. For the next four years a great part of my time was spent in secret meditation upon this subject. I could not speak to anybody about it for fear of giving pain. I suffered acutely, but from the gradual loss of faith and from the necessity of silence.
So writes Bertrand Russell, who would later pen Why I Am Not a Christian, a perennial classic among college sophomores.
A great number of Christian teens are likewise living in fear and the silenced shame of doubt. Youth groups and Christian schools breed them like rabbits. These kids have no safe place where they can express their honest confusion aloud, no safe person to hear their confession.
In Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science, Mike McHargue has written a book for these very people, a contemporary autobiographical roadmap for the spiritual skeptic. McHargue grew up in the church, became an atheist, then later returned as a hesitant, somewhat limping follower of Jesus. The candor of his spiritual pilgrimage—which is filled with pain, humor, and insight—conveys to many who are on a similar journey that they are not alone.
What do you do when God dies? For a person who has grown up in the church, losing faith in God can provoke an identity crisis of mammoth proportions. There is today more widespread social support for a person coming out as gay or transgender than for a fundamentalist Christian coming out as a nonbeliever. The attitudes of others and the internal struggle itself can make this a shattering life experience.
I speak from experience. Having grown up on the mission field surrounded by professional Christians, I went off to a secular liberal arts college where I had a soul-rattling encounter with theological diversity not unlike Don Miller’s experience at Reed College as depicted in Blue Like Jazz. In a philosophy course on existentialism in my sophomore year, I read Saint Emmanuel, The Good, Martyr, a novella by Miguel de Unamuno. It is the story of a seemingly godly Spanish Catholic priest who is revered by the villagers but whom we discover, by the end of the story, does not believe in God. He uses his pious actions to cover over a multitude of intellectual doubts.
Reading this story triggered a turning point in my life—the moment when I abandoned my parents’ faith and began the process of finding my own. The existential weight of feeling the loss of God, the falseness of prayer, the meaninglessness of calling came crashing down on me in my dorm room. Loneliness doesn’t quite capture the feeling. It is an aloneness coupled with the sense of being “lost in the cosmos.” Nietzsche gets at this when he wrote, “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from the sun…?”
So reading of McHargue’s step-by-step abandonment of faith for atheism brought back many painful personal memories. Forty-four years later I still have the copy of The Existential Imagination in which Unamuno’s story is included, sitting here beside me as I write this review.
Since those days in a Texas college dorm, doubt has become culturally ubiquitous. For the modern believer faith is rightly fused with doubt. This is the experience of most thoughtful Christians, even when the church won’t acknowledge this reality. McHargue writes, “These streams of faith and doubt, religion and science, collide in our culture, creating rapids and whirlpools that rob people of their sense of meaning and purpose.” It is for these reasons that this book is a gift for the modern believer, for the spiritually frustrated, for the spiritual skeptic…in other words, for many of us.
But this book will not appeal to most orthodox believers. It is not a simplistic de-conversion/conversion story—the spiritual equivalence of boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. It’s a lot messier than that—more like boy gets girl back…but discovers he’s also got an STD.
McHargue now considers himself a Christian and is active in his church. And he remains completely realistic about his ongoing doubts and doesn’t brush over them as inconsequential or meaningless. He holds them in accepting tension. In his book he reminds us of Anne Lamott’s observation that “the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.” He cites a friend whose life was changed by the discovery that “faith and doubt need each other. 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.”
This book is complementary to Peter Enns’ The Sin of Certainty. McHargue learns “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 a gift to enjoy but not possess.”
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 a gift to enjoy but not possess.
The value of this book for those who are struggling spiritually is that you are not alone! McHargue counsels, “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.”
This book is a spiritual travelogue of a pilgrimage that is still unfolding. The difference between a film and life is that life doesn’t usually have a neat third act, a tidy resolution. Sometimes it’s messy all the way through; so, too, this book. McHargue has not given up his highly honed analytical mind or his childhood fundamentalist bias for left-brain thinking.
In the book McHargue appeals repeatedly to his strong affinity for and knowledge of neuroscience—arguably to the detriment of a whole-orbed, mystery-respecting faith. I find, in this regard, that Ian McGilchrist’s thoughts, as expressed in The Master and His Emissary, are of much value, in that he critiques the West’s overdependence on left-brain analytical thinking, at the expense of right-brain intuitive thinking. But by the end of his book even McHargue acknowledges the limits of science, concluding, “Only a poet or a painter can do the work of sharing this truest of all things. Love.” If love is the basic reality of our existence, then we will need more than science and reason to fully grasp reality. I look forward to the next chapter in McHargue’s ongoing pilgrimage, and will enjoy this book as a much-needed and valuable step in the journey.
If McHargue were a character in the storytelling contest depicted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he would win the prize. Don’t miss out.
John Seel directs the Sider Center’s New Copernican Empowerment Dialogues. He is the founder and principal of John Seel Consulting LLC, a social impact/cultural renewal consulting firm. He was formerly the director of cultural engagement for the John Templeton Foundation and associate research professor at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is an authority on reaching the millennial generation. Seel has an M.Div. from Covenant Theological Seminary and a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Maryland at College Park.