Mike McHargue Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found it Again Through Science
by Mike McHargue (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99)
Christopher Moriarty
An intense reading of the entire Bible, following a deeply traumatic incident in his life, led the Southern Baptist author Mike McHargue to a spell of atheism which lasted for two years. It ended quite abruptly when he became one of the relatively few individuals to experience a transcendental vision. In this he heard a voice speaking to him and saw an impossible tidal effect on the Californian sea shore.
While he is far from being the only believer who has written of a comparable sequence of events, Mike McHargue is different in having to hand knowledge that has become available to humanity only in recent decades.
He is also a scientist with particular skills in information technology. A talented communicator with a flair for honest and rational self-examination, his book provides both a readable digest of some key developments, in knowledge of the universe and of the human psyche, which lead to an impressive statement of the rationality of belief in the Divine.
The book follows an auto-biographical track with diversions into the Christianity of the Southern Baptists, the structure and meaning of the Bible, the immensity of the universe and the scarcely credible complexity of the human brain.
The Baptist church provided, besides its underlying worship of the Trinity and belief in the Divine authorship and infallibility of the King James Bible, a warm-hearted and caring community with an admirable reputation for charitable work both at home and in far-flung countries.
Bible-study led to the realisation – heretical to his church – that the good book is a collection of books written by human authors, edited over and over again, a book reflecting the beliefs and views of a great variety of people.
The fact that it begins with a pair of contradictory accounts of Creation and cites numerous instances of a cruel and capricious God was a major factor in the author’s turn to atheism. So the Bible led the way – but its leading was backed by the discoveries of astro-physics on the puny size and the age of the earth in relation to those of the universe.
Arguments
The human being is smaller still and yet believers claim that the Creator of this immensity takes a personal interest in the individual. The arguments in favour of atheism, supported by a number of gifted writers, won the day and the author accepted this supposedly rational belief. But his love for his church, family and community led him to conceal his loss of faith until after he had he regained it.
Physicists have known a great deal about the size and complexity of the universe for more than a century.
The revelations of human brain scans, within the past 20 or 30 years, have provided amazing insights on the growth and mechanisms of this organ. Perhaps most remarkable of all are the facts, not only of network systems, but of actual physical growth in parts of the brain resulting from a variety of psychological inputs – amongst them belief in God.
While nobody can prove the existence of a Creator with a personal interest in individual human beings, Mike McHargue certainly provides believers with a scientific basis that can be used to refute the claims of those who hold that our very existence is a result of blind chance.