by Lee Strobel
I chuckled when I read the title of that lecture. Surely few things sound stranger to the ears of a skeptic than the idea of a divine Creator intervening in the everyday affairs of human beings.
At issue, however, is whether it’s both strange and true.4
The Interview with Michael B. Shermer, PhD
At the very instant that high school senior Michael Shermer read John 3:16—“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”—and then put his trust in Jesus as his Lord and Savior, a coyote howled outside.
“We wondered whether this was some sort of sign,” Shermer told me, a slight smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe Satan was lamenting that he had lost another soul.”
It was a Saturday night in 1971, and Shermer’s friend George, a devout Christian, led him to faith in a home in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. Maybe Shermer’s motives weren’t totally pure at the time—after all, he figured a conversion might help his odds in dating George’s sister Joyce. But it was real enough to him, a step of faith that became more solid as time went by.
Shermer recounted the story of his spiritual journey. He was leaning back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, casually reminiscing as if it all had occurred just recently. On the other hand, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, riveted and weighing each word he spoke. He had gone from being an enthusiastic follower of Jesus to becoming perhaps the world’s best-known spiritual skeptic.
“The next day, George and his family took me to a Presbyterian church in Glendale. The pastor was a real intellectual—I liked that. At the end he said, ‘If you want to be saved, come on up.’ I thought, Okay, I’ ll go up. Maybe doing it in a church would make it more official.”
“Did you come from a religious family?”
“Not at all,” he said. “My parents divorced when I was four. None of my parents or stepparents were believers. When I announced I was born again, I’m sure they thought it was a little weird. In the words of one of my siblings, I became a Jesus freak.”
“What did that involve?”
“I was into it 100 percent. I attended a Bible study at a place called The Barn, where Christian teens and young adults met every Wednesday night. It was very ’70s—somebody played the guitar, we sang about Jesus, we all had long hair and wore chains around our necks. Mine was the ichthys, the so-called Jesus fish, whose Greek letters represented ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.’ Here—I’ll show you.”
With a few keystrokes, he pulled up a photograph of him—tanned, bare-chested, and smiling—as he sat in the sunshine with his grandmother on his twenty-first birthday. There, around his neck, hung the necklace.
“For me, the Christian paradigm made sense out of everything,” he continued. “If something positive happened, it was God’s reward for my good deeds or love of Christ; if something bad happened, well, God works in mysterious ways. It was neat and tidy—everything in its place and a place for everything.”
“Did you feel like you were growing spiritually?”
“Absolutely, yeah.”
He talked of sharing his faith with family and friends—which elicited a lot of eye-rolls—and even going door to door in a sincere effort to spread the gospel. His atheist friends thought he was obnoxious, but Shermer believed if Christianity were true, he had an obligation to tell others about it, even though the experience made him uncomfortable.
“Did you feel close to God?” I asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“You felt his presence in your life?”
“In all that I did. I prayed about everything, from getting a parking space at the YMCA where I worked, to my career choice, to my girlfriend. Everything.”
“Back then, if I had tried to talk you out of your faith, how would you have responded?”
He thought for a moment. “Let me put it this way: you would not have been successful.”
Shermer enrolled at Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ institution, where he enjoyed the twice-weekly chapel services; courses on the Old and New Testaments, the life of Jesus, and the writings of C. S. Lewis; and living among like-minded Christians. His intention was to study theology.
“I wanted to be a professor of religious studies,” he said. “That way, you get the intellectual world of theology and you get tenured at a university, where you’re paid to teach and read and think. The life of the mind—that’s what attracted me.”
“What stopped you?
He chuckled. “To be a professor, I needed a PhD. And to get that, I’d have to learn Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin. Well, I could barely get through Spanish class. Foreign languages aren’t easy for me. So I switched to psychology, which interested me because I enjoyed science. Still, all the way through graduation I was a Christian.”
“And then?”
“And then . . . I slowly lost my faith.”
I straightened in my chair. “How?”
“Gradually, on my own, which I think is how it usually happens. I don’t think you reason people out of this. As the saying goes, ‘You can’t reason people out of something they didn’t reason their way into in the first place.’ I think that’s largely true. Not always, but in my case, it was.”
The Path toward Skepticism
It was during Shermer’s graduate studies in experimental psychology that he began to fall away from his faith, but actually this was the culmination of several steps that started early in his Christian experience.
Indeed, he conceded that “there were problems with my conversion from the beginning,” including mixed motives (due to his interest in his friend’s sister), his discomfort with sharing Jesus with strangers, and normal sexual urges that created intense conflict and frustration. Deep down on some level, he said he knew there were issues.5
He was confused by the response he received when he told a high school friend about his newfound faith. Shermer expected a warm embrace. Instead, when Shermer said, “I found Jesus at the Presbyterian church,” his buddy—a Jehovah’s Witness—was aghast. “Oh, no,” he exclaimed. “Wrong church!”
Said Shermer, “It made me wonder how another religion could be as thoroughly certain they had the truth as I was.”
He went to a minister to discuss theological issues: If we have free will, does this mean God is limited in knowledge or power? With a Pepperdine professor, he grappled with the problem of evil: If God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, then why do bad things happen?
“To this day, I have not heard an answer to the problem of evil that seems satisfactory,” he told me. “As with the problem of free will, most answers involve complicated twists, turns of logic, and semantic wordplay.”
At Glendale College, he encouraged his philosophy professor to read a popular Christian book that claimed biblical prophecies pointed to the imminent return of Jesus. But instead of bending his knee to Jesus, the professor sent Shermer a blistering two-page, single-spaced rebuttal to the book. To this day, Shermer still has the letter.
After his undergraduate education, he became unanchored to a community of Christians. “There was no discussion of religion at graduate school. Nobody cared about it,” he told me.
“Instead, I saw people who were happy and successful doing their own thing. Then as I studied anthropology, sociology, and social psychology, I could clearly see that religious beliefs are culturally bound. For example, if you’re born in America, you’re likely to be Christian; if you’re born in India, you’ll probably be Hindu. So how can we determine which religion is the right one? I began to lose interest in Christianity as I got more fascinated by science. Soon science became my belief system, and evolution my doctrine.”
“Was there a time when you took off your ichthys necklace?” I asked.
“Yes, after a while I felt hypocritical wearing it because I wasn’t sure I really believed this stuff anymore. I didn’t throw it down in anger. I didn’t declare th
at I was an atheist. It was just something I did quietly. Frankly, I don’t think anyone noticed or cared.”
Again he reached over to his laptop and pulled up a photo. “Here’s a picture of me from graduate school. This is when I was just coming out—see, no fish necklace.”
“What did you replace it with?”
“Later, I began wearing a gold dollar sign. At the time, I was into Atlas Shrugged. Now I don’t wear anything. I’m neutral.”
Still, that wasn’t the end of his faith experience. There would be one last attempt to connect with God. In the midst of a profound crisis, there would come a heartfelt plea for a miracle that never materialized.
The Miracle That Didn’t Happen
Sometimes tragedy reawakens faith. Pain, as C. S. Lewis observed, can be God’s megaphone to rouse the spiritually deaf.6 But what happens when instead of a miraculous answer to prayer, the tearful petitioner hears only silence from above? The miracle that doesn’t happen can be the impetus for faith to dissipate to nothing.
That’s what happened to Michael Shermer.
“My college sweetheart was named Maureen, a beautiful and wonderful young woman from Alaska. We met at Pepperdine and were still dating after I finished grad school. She worked for an inventory firm—they would drive in the middle of the night to a company and take inventory while it was closed. One night in the middle of nowhere, the van veered off the highway and rolled over several times. She didn’t have her seat belt on—and, boom, she broke her back.”
I winced. It was heartbreaking. A battered van in the darkness at the bottom of a ravine. The screams, the moans, the confusion, the sirens. Lives changed, dreams broken, futures derailed. It’s a grim and gruesome scene, but especially when the person being lifted onto a stretcher is someone you love.
“How did you hear about it?” I asked.
“She called at about five in the morning. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ She said, ‘I’m in the hospital.’ I was stunned, because she sounded pretty normal. ‘What? What happened?’ She said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t move.’”
Paralyzed from the waist down, Maureen spent six months at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. “I would visit her almost every day, riding my bike twenty-five miles or so,” Shermer said. “It was very upsetting. Why would this happen to such a wonderful young woman?”
I knew what I’d be doing if I were in that situation: as a Christian, I would be praying. But Shermer had already removed his Jesus necklace. Was there still a smidgen of faith left?
“Was there a point where you asked God to heal her?” I asked.
“I did, absolutely. It was one of those all-nighters in the emergency room. Even though I had pretty much checked out of my faith, I figured, I need to give this a shot and ask God to heal her. It wasn’t like I was putting God to a test. I just felt so bad for her that I’d try anything.”
“What was your prayer like?”
“I took a knee and bowed my head. I was as sincere as I had ever been. I asked God to overlook my doubts for the sake of Maureen, to heal her, to breathe life into her. As best I could at that moment, I believed. I wanted to believe. If there was a God who was powerful and loving, if there was any justice at all anywhere in the universe, then surely he’d help this precious, caring, compassionate young woman.”
I waited for Shermer to continue. For a moment, there was silence. Then I asked, “What happened?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
I let the word hang in the air before finally asking, “How did you react?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t very surprised. I thought, Well, there probably is no God. Stuff just happens. This is the nature of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, why not? It’s the second law of thermodynamics. That’s the way the world is.”
“Was this the final nail in the coffin of your faith?”
“Yeah, that pretty much did it. I was like, ‘Ah, the heck with it.’”
“Were you angry at God?”
“Nothing to be angry at. He’s not there. This is just what happens. The good, the bad—it’s pretty random.”
“Then you think the universe lacks any purpose,” I said, more as a statement than a question. Richard Dawkins’s well-known declaration came to mind: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”7
Said Shermer, “There is no higher purpose. It’s left to us. We must create our own purpose. That’s the only meaning we have in this universe.”
I looked down at my notes. In the margin I scribbled, “Any credible book on miracles must deal with the ones that never happen.”
Then I underlined it.
Twice.8
CHAPTER 2
The Knockdown Argument
I paused for a few moments after hearing Michael Shermer’s story of how he shed his faith. I felt its emotional punch. The mental image of Shermer pleading for God to heal his paralyzed girlfriend wouldn’t go away easily. All the more, his experience wanted me to delve deeper.
I was determined to go after the “why” question: Why is he convinced it’s illogical to believe that miracles occur? As I began down that path, I wanted to clarify Shermer’s current state of belief—and disbelief.
“How would you classify yourself?” I asked. “Are you an atheist? An agnostic?”
“I’m not a strong atheist who says, ‘I know there is no God.’ How could you know for sure? The weak atheist says, ‘I have no belief in God,’ and that’s how I live my life. When Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term agnostic in 1869, he meant God’s existence is unknowable.1 I think that’s correct. Like him, I’d say the God question is insoluble.
“But I prefer skeptic,” he continued. “I would be utterly surprised if there’s a God. And if I did encounter some super-advanced, apparently omniscient and omnipotent being, how would I know it’s not just an extraterrestrial intelligence? Given the continual advancement of science and technology, in the future humans will be so powerful and knowledgeable that they might be indistinguishable from a deity.”
Skepticism, though, is a slippery term. “Obviously, you’re not skeptical about everything,” I said. “So how do you define skeptic?”
“It’s taking a scientific approach to claims. The burden of proof should be on the claimant. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve a drug just because you say it works. The burden of proof isn’t on them; you have to prove your drug works. And it should be like that with all claims.”
I said, “You once posed the question, ‘How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true?’ You said the answer is science.2 I’m sure you don’t believe science is the only pathway to truth, but what role can science play in guiding us toward what’s real and reliable?”
“The history of science since Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century has been to overcome the cognitive biases and psychological and emotional factors that have colored other forms of knowledge—intuition, anecdotal thinking, group thinking, authoritative thinking, and so on. All these methods can be very unreliable.”
“Science isn’t flawless either,” I interjected.
“No, it’s not. But it’s the most reliable method we have. Why? Because it’s a communal process. We have peer review. We have people looking over our shoulders when experiments are done. Other labs either validate or challenge results.”
“So there are checks and balances.”
“Yes. We need those because we’re flawed. There is confirmation bias, hindsight bias, wishful thinking—all these things can influence us. You look at an oar in the water, and it looks bent. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving. The sun appears as if it’s rising. Our intuitions are often wrong. Even though there are instances of fraud and embarrassing errors in science, they’re almost always caught by other scientists.”
I asked Sherme
r whether he agreed with scientist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, an atheist who said, “It would be a close-minded scientist who would say that miracles are impossible in principle.” Coyne added that “to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources.” His conclusion: “No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards.”3
“I’d tend to agree,” Shermer replied. “I doubt if there’s something supernatural, outside of space and time, that intervenes in our world. But if there were, we would be able to measure its effects. What forces were used? And if it reaches into our environment, then it’s part of the natural world, not supernatural.”
I cocked my head. “So,” I said, “you wouldn’t foreclose investigation of seemingly miraculous events?”
“Not at all. Let’s check them out as best we can. Let’s test them. Bring on the evidence. As Coyne said, we can’t rule them out in principle, but I don’t think there’s sufficient proof of anything miraculous.”
Miracles versus Anomalies
I offered Shermer the definition of a miracle formulated by philosopher Richard L. Purtill: “A miracle is an event that is brought about by the power of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God is acting in history.”4
Shermer nodded. “Let’s go with that,” he said. “But keep in mind that people use the word miracle for a lot of other things. For example, it’s used for highly unusual events that simply make you say, ‘Wow!’ Like the American hockey team that won the Olympics against all odds back in 1980. People called it ‘the miracle on ice.’5
“So many alleged miracles are just highly improbable events like that,” he continued. “If you say the odds against something are a million to one, that event might look miraculous, but actually it would occur pretty often. When you have more than three hundred million people in the country, weird things are going to happen—just enough of them for the evening news.”