Heather Bellamy heard Mike McHargue's life story.

Mike McHargue

Mike McHargue is the host of the popular podcasts The Liturgists and Ask Science and has just released the book Finding God In The Waves; a refreshingly honest account of how he lost his faith and found it again through science. Heather Bellamy spoke with him of the impact of his father's affair, his experience of living a double life as an atheist in a Christian family and how scientific research and a mystical experience led him back to Jesus.

Heather: Could you start by telling me what life was like for you growing up?

Mike: It was good and bad. It was good and I had a good family that loved me. I found a sense of belonging at church and a greater sense of meaning in my faith. It was bad, because I was a very unpopular nerdy kid, so I dealt with a lot of bullying and a lot of ostracizing from my peer group. I never had a sense of belonging with kids my age. That kind of set the stage for my whole life: that energy between feeling like I belonged with God, but I didn't feel like I belong with my peers.

Heather: So how did faith and God help you at that time in your life with the bullying?

Mike: Kids can be cruel and I was an overweight, redheaded kid, who wore Hawaiian shirts and was passionate about science fiction. That kind of puts you at odds with kids your age. So while most children would go on the playground to enjoy time together and physical activity, I typically had to literally hide from other kids to avoid getting beat up, or made fun of.

That was a lonely, alienating experience, but because I had been taught that God was not only real, but loved me personally and listened to me, I was able to find some sense of connection by praying during recess, instead of playing. God was a friend when I had none and Jesus was someone who would listen without making fun of me and that provided a tremendous sense of emotional relief in what was otherwise a difficult school time.

Heather: How would you describe your relationship with God before you lost your faith?

Mike: Intensely personal. God was closer to me than anyone else and that started in my childhood and continued into adulthood. I centred my life and what I believed and how I behaved on my relationship with, and understanding of, God.

Heather: So what made you lose your faith?

Mike: My dad, who was a Baptist music minister, had an affair and left my mum when I was an adult, with children of my own. I didn't think that was biblical and so I started to search the Bible in order to understand how to push back, or tell dad the ways that he had fallen short of the faith.

That process of intensely scrutinising the Bible for answers actually gave me more questions and started a period of really intense research to try and find answers to problems I found in scripture. When the answers I found in biblical apologetics weren't helpful, I ultimately also started reading the writings of the sceptics and atheists and found them persuasive and compelling and over time I completely lost my faith.

Heather: Could you give me an example of one of the questions you had, where you couldn't find the answer in the Bible and how you did find it somewhere else?

Mike: Yes, we can start at the beginning with Genesis 1 & 2. They give accounts of how the universe was created and they offer a different account of events. They are pretty radically different actually and that means we don't have to talk about contradictions of science, or history, we're just taking the Bible at face value.

When I Googled to try and understand the difference and why this is happening, apologists said that Genesis 1 was about the formation of everything and Genesis 2 was about how the Garden of Eden was populated. I suppose that makes sense, but you have to wonder why the Bible doesn't explicitly say that and why it's such a confusing process for a God that is all-knowing.