The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [22]
Even more important, as a nonbeliever I realized the power that the believing paradigm has in filtering everything that happens through a religious lens. Chance, randomness, and contingencies dissolve into insignificance in the Christian worldview. Everything happens for a reason, and God has a plan for each and every one of us. When something good happens, God is rewarding us for our faith, our good works, or our love of Christ. When something bad happens, well, God works in mysterious ways, don’t you know? Who am I to doubt, question, or challenge the Almighty? This belief filter operates on every level, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from career opportunities to sports scores. I thanked God for everything, from getting me into Pepperdine (I hardly had the grades or SAT scores for admission, that’s for sure) to finding a parking place at the YMCA where I worked. In the Christian worldview there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, “a time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:2), a message rendered even into a 1960s pop tune that, when I was a believer, did not sound nearly as saccharine as it does today.
In this belief-dependent realism, even political, economic, and social events unfold by the logic of biblical end times—I had the Los Angeles Times open in my left hand and the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, or Revelation open in my right. Was the Ayatollah Khomeini the Antichrist, or was it Henry Kissinger? The four horsemen of the apocalypse were surely going to be nuclear war, overpopulation, pollution, and disease. The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948, so if we crunch the numbers correctly the second coming should be coming … very soon. When I became a nonbeliever, such political and economic events made more sense as machinations grounded in human nature and cultural history. A secular worldview led me to see that the laws of nature and the contingencies of chance unfold by their own logic along the carved channels of history largely independent of our actions and irrespective of our wishes.
In the end, though, what finally tipped my belief into skepticism was the problem of evil—if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, then why do bad things happen to good people? First, there was the intellectual consideration, where the more I thought about things such as cancer, birth defects, and accidents, the more I came to believe that God is either impotent or evil, or simply nonexistent. Second, there was an emotional consideration that I was forced to confront on the most primal of levels. I’ve never told anyone this before, but the last time I ever prayed to God was in early 1980, shortly after I decided that I no longer believed in God. What happened to bring me back one last time?
My college sweetheart, Maureen, a brilliant and beautiful Alaskan whom I met at Pepperdine and whom I was still dating, was in a horrific automobile accident in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Maureen worked for an inventory company that vanned their employees around the state during off hours; they slept supine on bench seats between jobs. The van veered off the highway and rolled several times, snapping