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

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.)